The point about stories existing in different versions deserves elaboration. Anderson's Kith future history has two versions. We are familiar with different versions of stories in the Bible and in Greek mythology, although I do not understand a recent reference to a third Biblical creation story in Maccabees. "Everyone knows" that Venus rose from the sea foam but the prime authority Homer did not. He has Aphrodite as a daughter of Zeus. Thus, Plato, expressing philosophy through mythology, wrote that there was a heavenly and an earthly love. A Hindu in the Preston Temple told me that there are different versions of how Ganesh got his elephant's head. And so on.
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Stories existing in different versions: Roger Zelazny's *Lord of Light* has the crew of a ship that colonized a distant world adopting the names of Hindu gods, as part of controlling the majority of the colonists. (It helped that they'd acquired various mutant powers.) A woman associated with one of these new "gods" is described as being, in legend, "either his wife, his mother, his sister, his daughter, or perhaps all of these..." because the colonists telling those legends have lost track of what, if any, relation she actually was.
I believe there's a god in actual, current Hindu myth who has a similarly confused relationship with one of the principal goddesses in the stories about him.
Hi, David!
And in JRR Tolkien's THE SILMARILLION, we see him offering us another, and fascinating creation "myth." Esp. the first part, "Ainulindale." And, as a Catholic, I find Tolkien's monotheistic legends far more appealing to me than the confusing and chaotic mishmash which is what most pagan mythologies are.
Sean
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