Just Stop Looking. You'll Never Find It.

"Don't bother looking for the originals though.  You can't find the archetype, just as you can't find the pure myths.  What we have, even in our earliest recorded literature, are variants, embellishments, versions, what Frye called "displacement" of the myth.  We can never get all the way to the level of pure myth, even when a work like The Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey or The Old Man and the Sea feels 'mythic', since even those works are displacements of myth" (Foster, Interlude, pg 191).

I think Foster is incredibly accurate in stating this.  You can never fully get down to the bottom of where a myth came from or what the truth from that may be.  Most of these myths that we're still writing about today started long before the written word, anyway.  It would be impossible to track down now where and when and how these myths started. It's like when someone is trying to figure out how a very intricate lie started, or when or who started it.  By the time I goes around the circle a couple of times, it's been so mangled and added to that it sounds way too ridiculous to even be believed anymore.  Myths, I feel, can be like this as well.