MYTHS ARE HISTORY
1. Premise
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1. Premise: On the Global Unanimity of Myth
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The origin of myth and the religious traditions of ‘pagan’ polytheistic peoples remains tantalizingly elusive, and continues to provide one of the most intriguing problems in the study of early human history for both the sciences and the humanities. Yet despite various monumental attempts to discover their true source, no single hypothesis has been universally accepted. Some look for the solution in the common and the ordinary, while others search the excessively obscure instead.
Until the last few centuries, however, there were no theories of myth itself, for there was no discipline of myth unto itself. There was no study of myth as myth. As such, there was likewise no branch of study not suffering from the neglect of mythology. Laymen saw only quaint, sometimes instructive, stories for children. Classical poets were treated as if they had a tiresome trick of making 'allusions' which had to be looked up in dictionaries. The history of philosophy was written as if Thales had suddenly dropped out of the sky. For anthropologists, myths promised insights into the primitive mind; for psychologists, they provided a peg on which to hang various theories; and for historians, myths were deemed untrustworthy, and of very limited value. |
And yet, among the beliefs and habits of myth-making man during the late Bronze and early Iron ages, the themes of myth were remarkably common worldwide, and their all-pervasive presence in society was universally regarded with utmost seriousness.
Comparative cultural studies of the past few hundred years have demonstrated beyond question that a “mythical period” was common to all ancient nations, and that similar mythic patterns and archetypes were once found in every quarter of the globe, almost akin to a widespread array of dialects branching from the root of a single universal language. The world was full of myths of creation — and the astounding similarity and consistency between creation myths collected from widely separate geographic regions is particularly striking. |
The mythology of the world no longer seems like such “a vast confused welter of stories” as was formerly supposed. We now find an extraordinary degree of agreement, not only among nations who eventually “came to know each other by occasion of war or reason of trade” (Vico, New Science 59), but even in cases too far removed from one another to have had any influential contact at all. — And although many of these cultures have not really been compared before, the unbelievably close connections between their beliefs and fears, the shared motifs in their surreal iconographies, the close parallels which otherwise would seem very unlikely, given the sheer variety of native habitats and terrain — almost cry out for deeper investigation.
Cosmogonic themes (such as the destruction of an old world by great catastrophes of flood and fire, and the creation of a new heaven and earth) in particular had a world-wide distribution, appearing everywhere in various combinations, while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few in number and always the same. — Indeed, no human society has yet been found in which the same traits, tropes and themes were not rehearsed. All looked back to an original Paradise; all remembered a worldwide Flood; all believed in a visible but nebulous Underworld in the western night skies. No traditional mythological image or idea appears to have been unique to one single culture alone. Comparing and contrasting testimony collected from as many parts of the world as possible, from heavily populated city-states to small isolated tribes, we repeatedly retrace the same cosmogonic themes revered by every people on earth, varied only by regional characteristics, and imbued with a certain local cast and coloring. All were built from the same fund of mythological motifs, organized, interpreted, and ritualized according to local needs, differing only in temperament of expression from time to time and place to place. |
Thus we arrive at one of the most daunting ‘problems’ in the study of mythology today: If the creation myths by which peoples in the past made sense of their world were everywhere developed independently, “unknown even to their nearest neighbors” (Vico, New Science 59), how do we explain the fact that these mythic traditions were so stunningly similar?
This is not to say that there were no noticeable distinctions between the cosmovisions of different myth-making cultures; the examples we have here gathered together to examine side by side indeed present a fair amount of variety and versatility. — The problem is that, in spite of their many differences, there still remains a great deal of underlying unanimity, with many astounding similarities that cannot be so easily denied or dismissed out of hand. However dissimilar these various traditions may have been in their external forms of expression, they were clearly at one on every fundamental proposition. |