The Legend - vita brevis, legeres longa ;)

The Legend by George Paul Chalmers  /oil on canvas/ - source: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/4745/legend

What are legends? They are just stories that are passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes they describe events from the past which are blown out of proportions. All legends have one thing in common. They become part of the culture and a priceless lesson for humankind.

Humans live too short to become wiser by experience - vita brevis, ars longa (life is short, art is long) as a Latin sentence says. We can paraphrase it and say: vita brevis, legeres (legends) longa.

Let's find the ideas which stand behind some of the well known myths and legends.

The legend which teaches a lesson about good and evil 

The legend of Atlantis is such a story. It shows a great island populated by moral, spiritual people who lived in a highly advanced, utopian civilization. But they became greedy, petty, and "morally bankrupt," and the gods "became angry because the people had lost their way.

The story of Atlantis was originally told by Plato in 360 B.C. However, Plato said Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his own time, and that the story had been passed down by poets and storytellers. It's the proof that from the very beginning people needed to validate what is good and what is bad regularly and legends are the nice way to imprint  this knowledge.   

The legend which brings hope

The good example is definately the Polish legend about The Sleeping Knights in the Tatras Mountains:

There is a cave over there, enormous and dark, only cressets flicker along the walls. These knights are asleep, and every ten years the oldest of them raises his head and asks the angel that watches over them:

‘Is it time?’

And all the knights raise their iron-helmeted heads, but the angel replies:

‘No. Sleep.’

So they keep sleeping.

(From Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer’s ‘Śpiący Rycerze’, published in 1914 in the volume of novellas ‘Na Skalnym Podhalu’)

Behind the legend there is the message that if the right time comes, people will get help and they won't be lonely. The mysthical sleeping knights are watching.

The legend which gives warning to those who do evil in society

The Polish legends of rusalkas show that wrongly mistreated people, usually the most vulnerable like women and children, can come back after death to take revenge on their assassins.

Rusalkas are commonly referred to as Slavic water spirits, and they are believed to inhabit the lakes and forests of Poland. They appear in the form of beautiful women who long to share the company of men. They ask these men for little things like bread, salt, and even sexual favors.

Any man who falls for a Rusalka’s tricks and seduction dies in her arms.

The legend which shows how rewarding bravery is  

It's good to look closer at some Greek mythology warriors like Hercules, Prometheus, Achilles, Jason, Odysseus. All of them were fearless and powerful. The risk they took was always profitable. 

 

P.S. We can count examples of wise legends and the messages they pass, so ... next time, you will listen to a legend, think over the lesson it teaches. Have a closer look at the heroes but also villains like Baba Jaga, for instance  ;)