Honora Foah:

myth, weaving of the spirit     

Here is one of the reasons contemporary people don’t like to understand myth – myth is about the world, not exclusively humans. As the brilliant Robert Bringhurst, mythographer extraordinaire, says about Native American mythology,

…Native American literature—by which I mean the genuine goods: oral works in Native American languages—is never about a human-centered world. It’s about a larger world, a wild world, where humans are minor players. 

Even in mythologies in which humans have pretty big roles, myth is about forces, enormous forces, forces of nature and gods that are not under human control. It is one of the central functions of myth to remind us of just that fact. Even within what we think of as human, the stories say over and over, you have no idea, Mr Man, you have no idea what you are doing. We activate forces with no understanding of what we have invoked, what comes to life, what dies in the multi-dimensional universe of consequences.