The power of allegories

If you need to catch the attention of your audience, tell them a story. If your purpose is to really move them, don't be literal, just concentrate on the setting and paint it with pictures.
JMD

An allegory is actually a story with a meaning partially hidden that lie outside the narrative itself. It's a narration with subtext; a tale that embraces a symbolic significance underneath the literal one. A myth is actually an allegory, usually made up in part of historical events, that helps define the beliefs of people and that tend to evolve as an explanation for rituals and natural phenomena.

Supposing we say "Lisa very much wanted to open the box, but hesitated for fear of the consequences"; this is a plain statement. If we say "In Lisa's mind desire and fear contended for the mastery" we are already beginning to speak allegorically: Lisa's mind has become a battlefield in which two personified emotions are carrying a conflict. From this we can proceed to build a full-blown allegory. We can present Lisa's ambition as a princess imprisoned in a castle, which is attacked by a giant monster called Fear and defended by a knight called Desire. And we can put in as much description of the place and people as will serve to make the story exciting.

The classical world of Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes (among others) is filled with sub-meaning: Herakles' seven labours, Proserpine's abduction from Earth, Arachne's transformation into a spider, Icarus' failed flying plan ... all of them try to tell us something distant from their literal meaning. In their simplest form, they are just extended metaphors.

When Pandora, the first women on Earth, was told not the open the jar which the Gods had given her as a gift, we immediately find a parallel to the Christian allegory of Man's Fall (Eve eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge). Filled with intrigue Pandora disobeys the order and crime, sickness, pain and all illnesses are unleashed out of the pot.

This story can be read literally, or we can enrich these words by going deeper into the tale in order to find its true meaning: men have the power to chose, a freedom that can lead to eternal misfortune.

Whichever the myth you come across in a classical book, you'll find that this way of telling things is much more captivating, easy-reading and finally ... moving for every single reader.