http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/su ... iddle-ages
I continually find writers - Carrier is being discussed currently but actually probably everyone does it - using the term "supernatural" without realising it is an idea that did not exist in the Greek and Roman world.How did people of the medieval period explain physical phenomena, such as eclipses or the distribution of land and water on the globe? What creatures did they think they might encounter: angels, devils, witches, dogheaded people? This fascinating book explores the ways in which medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural and showing how the idea of the supernatural came to be invented in the Middle Ages.
Plato may have had hidden unseen perfect worlds but they were real, part of the universe. Only about 1100 CE was a distinction made and a second universe created - that of the supernatural, with this world being in a puppet on a string relationship to the supernatural world.
The medieval idea of the supernatural, now embedded in our thinking, is new and different. Descartes and dualism are further developments.
I think, to make sense of myth and real and the very common chimera that were invented, like sons of gods, we have to be very careful that we have not translated very different ways of thinking using current ways. This is incredibly difficult but surely any attempts to understand ancient ideas has to be clear what people actually thought and what it was impossible for them to have thought about, not importing ideas like "supernatural" to times a thousand years before they were invented.