Mythology Isn’t What It Used To Be
Mythology is to my mind a combination of two things, neither fictional. Firstly, mythology is often IMHO an art form trying to interpret the unknown and the unexplainable in terms of, or in a context, you can understand. So, to the ancients, UFOs became aerial and often fiery chariots or winged rocks or enormous birds; extraterrestrials were turned into ‘gods’ and fantastic creatures like the Cyclops; hybrids like the Minotaur were just the product of some sort of weird but understandable sexual relationship, in this case between Pasiphae (the wife of King Minos), and the Cretan Bull (of the sea), instead of a product of genetic engineering.
Secondly, mythology is often just the embellishment of history. I’ve stated before and I’ll state again that while Ivory Tower scholars all accept the ‘fact’ and know that all mythology is pure fiction, I start with the opposite point of view – mythology is a reflection of real events and real characters unless proven to be otherwise.
For example, there was no doubt a real ‘King’ Arthur or high chieftain called Arthur (or close variation thereof). This ‘King’ Arthur, of some sort or other, existed in the distant past, but as someone who bears just about no similarity to the mythological figure of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, and T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King” or any of Hollywood’s numerous Arthurian epics. There was no Merlin, no Lady of theLake, no Camelot, no Round Table, and no romantic triangle. These were the Arthurian embellishments. However, with respect to the real historical Arthur, there no doubt were some associated advisors, and swords, and romantic interests, and comrades, and no doubt even a table.
Say you have some ancient, but anomous, Greek Guru who’s smoking some Greek equivalent of pot. So in his drug-induced state, he sees an almighty bolt of lightning crash down killing a shepherd and a few of his flock. That just has to be the act of a ‘thunder and lightning’ deity who was for reasons unknown pretty pissed off at the poor, now deceased shepherd. So you begin to think upon what you’ve witnessed in your befuddled state you begin to conjure up that who, what, and why of things. And so you come up with this idea of a Great Spirit (let Mr. Greek Guru call him Zeus) who has to overcome all sorts of obstacles and does so because he has help from Mom and advanced technology (the lightning bolt bit) to become Master-of-the-Universe (well Earth or Greece anyway). Zeus wants to be worshiped of course, but obviously the poor shepherd failed in his duty and got zapped for his failure. Now all this Guru has got to do now is convince some thousands of fellow Greek citizens that all of this is true – he has a dead shepherd for evidence (and I’ll make a fortune in royalties from the story says the Guru). Well, that’s one explanation for the mythological and imaginary origin of Zeus.
Extrapolating from the example above, I’m pretty certain that mythological characters and often events surrounding them, if purely imaginary, have to be thought up; invented by someone who then has to convince the multitudes that he or she is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The great unwashed has got to swallow your tale hook, line and sinker without hardly any real physical evidence whatever – unlike say a hoax where a phoney artefact is produced. Unfortunately, you can’t make the character(s) you invent appear on demand to show the populace along with an “I told you so” attached for emphasis. So, does the citizenship accept your tale on faith? Or, do they tar-and-feather you as a snake-oil salesman and run you out of town?
Now say, in the days before there was a dragon mythology, you came across a fully exposed and largely intact skeletal fossil of a Mesozoic Era flying reptile; a pterodactyl or pterosaur. Having an active imagination and never having read anything about the Mesozoic Era (that literature didn’t exist back then), you conjure up the image of a brightly coloured, immortal, scaly, fire-breathing, devouring maidens out of season, beastie. And so you think up the concept of ‘dragons’ (the colour, immortality, scales, maidens and fire bit are of course embellishments on your part). However, it’s then a bit of a stretch to try and market dragon-lore as non-fiction. You can hardly claim that these newly coined pterodactyls come ‘dragons’ still exist as flesh-and-blood critters (which you haven’t seen) and convince the rest of the world (who haven’t seen them either) that these pterosaurs come ‘dragons’ populate their world in the flesh and if you’re a maiden, watch out! Someone is bound to call your bluff and tell you to “put up or shut up”. Then what are you gonna do? So, you’d better market your ‘dragon-lore as fiction, or mythology, from the get-go. Except that there wasn’t a market for fictional dragons back them so you’re between a rock and a hard place and just better off going back to the drawing board and seek your fame and fortune elsewhere.
But if dragons really existed as flesh-and-blood pseudo-pterodactyls (which were of course quite extinct when dragons ruled the skies) then lots of people will have seen them and recorded their observations – sort of like what we actually read about today. But then that’s not mythology then, is it? No one takes credit for having invented ‘dragons’, but then if dragons really existed, no one could have.
Now if dragons are really just pure mythology, and not history as really believed by people back in the good old days, then you have a case where you might want to apply a philosophy something along the lines of ‘you can fool nearly all the people nearly all of the time’. But can you? Translated, people then believed their dragons were real because they were real, and if dragons weren’t real, they wouldn’t be fooled into thinking they were real.
It’s like, but opposite to the case with kids and Santa. Despite what all their parents say; despite all the department store and street-corner Santa’s; despite all the images and the presents from Santa under the Xmas tree, kids can’t be fooled in the long term. Kids eventually come to their own realisation that when it comes to Santa, something is screwy somewhere. Our ancient ancestors, when it came to dragons, and the rest of what we call their mythology, never thought there was anything screwy anywhere.
Now I have one caveat when it comes to mythology – there’s no such thing as the supernatural – just natural (which includes advanced technology). So, if it flies (i.e. – the Navajo ‘rock with wings’; aerial chariots) its physics not magic. If there are legends of great floods, well rain happens and dams can burst and give way. If it looks and acts non-terrestrial, it probably is.
Arthur C. Clarke’s third law is often a guiding light here – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – or the supernatural.
Now our mythology is either oral and/or written down. Often perhaps a myth had a very long oral tradition before being written down. That could be because human language dates back at least 50,000 years; human writing less than 10,000 years. That could translate to a 40,000 gap between an oral legend and that legend being chiselled in stone. That’s a long time. Should it make any difference if a myth dates back 50,000 years, or is relatively brand new, co-existing with the era of human writing? Is writing required as being more credible compared to oral traditions? Is one more accurate than the other?
You might, in the days before writing, tell your grandchildren how you ran a four minute mile (it really was closer to five minutes of course – that’s your embellishment bit). Your grandkids tell their grandkids, and now it’s less than four minutes. Twenty generations later, you were obviously the fastest human alive and had obviously won lots of Olympic gold medals. Two hundred generations later you are now viewed as a winged deity like the Roman God Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks).
But post-writing; would the above embellishment be likely to happen to that extent? Say your grandkids now carve your four minute mile achievement onto the town square’s stele or in hieroglyphs on your pyramid tomb walls. Once that’s written down it’s a bit hard to embellish that fact from that point forwards. It’s now in writing; in fact, in this case, literally carved in stone.
But going back to the oral scenario, would that embellishment, from a near five minute mile (real reality) to being a winged deity ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ (in another context), really have happened? Or would perhaps this be more a case of my embellishing the likely embellishment?
In cultures that just have primarily an oral tradition, it’s vitally important that that tradition be passed on from generation to generation with utmost accuracy. Survival depends on it. How so? Well, where are your traditional enemies? You’d better get their location right and pass on that information in spot-on fashion. Where does the Sun set (or rise) when you’d better start harvesting fruit and nuts for the winter? What star patterns are overhead when the rainy season begins? When does the salmon (a food source) run the rapids? When and where do your game animal herds migrate? What, where and when do you preform those ceremonies or rituals you must observe to the letter in order not to anger your gods? Your ancestral tree had better be passed on accurately if you have any eventual claim to the throne.
Now mythologies, whether oral, written down, or a combination of both, don’t attach a postscript along the line that says “the contents of this story are fictional and for entertainment and instructional purposes only”. That’s quite the contrast to our relatively modern tall tales – our novels and short stories and even more recently, TV shows, movies and other electronic media like video games.
When explicated stated or not, authors and film/TV producers usually have some sort of disclaimer something along the lines of “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between these characters and any person alive or dead is purely a matter of coincidence.” A few modern examples illustrate how we’re not being taken for a reality ride, since there was never any doubt from the get-go that these characters and events were fictional, and deliberately so.
Steven Spielberg & George Lucas –IndianaJones and YoungIndianaJones;
Ian Fleming – James Bond and Goldfinger (along with other villains too numerous to mention);
Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Professor Moriarty among others;
Mary Shelley – Doctor Frankenstein;
J. K. Rowling – Harry Potter and friends;
Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn;
And there are of course thousands more novels and stories from “Treasure Island” to “Moby Dick” to “Gone with the Wind” to “The Raven” and on and on and on it goes. But the upshot is that you’re never in any doubt that these are make-believe.
Now many of these make-believe characters might be derived from real people, or more likely as not an amalgamation of various people the author knew, or knew of, but that amalgamation is still ultimately fictional, even if the events they feature in at times have an historical reality (like “Gone with the Wind” and the American Civil War).
Would Homer (Troy) or Plato (Atlantis) state a “this is a work of fiction” disclaimer? No, because they didn’t need to. It wasn’t fiction; it wasn’t mythology, Ivory Tower scholars opinions to the contrary be damned.
Now here’s an experiment. Pick your favourite cultural mythology (Greek; Norse; Hindu; Polynesian; whatever). List all of the mythological characters and events contained therein (you can stop after several hundred if you wish). Now, are all those characters and events the work of some secretive author(s) of pure fiction who failed to provide appropriate disclaimers, and thus have thousands of people with your level of intelligence been duped by those anomous few?
The populace of your chosen culture firmly believed in the existence of those characters, many being deities or demigods (and goddesses) and they went to extraordinary efforts to write down their history, their exploits, their relationships, often undertaking mammoth civil engineering works like raising massive hundred ton stone monuments to them, and not just one, but thousands of them.
There’s not just one huge carving of The Sphinx atGizainEgyptjust outside ofCairo, but there exists many dozens of large rock statues of the sphinx creature; ditto for other mythological characters. Many of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were devoted to mythology. I find it odd that so much time, effort and energy was devoted to fictional characters and events – unless of course they weren’t fictional.
Now if only one human culture out of many dozens on Earth had such a mythology, you could probably dismiss it as an anomaly – maybe something in their drinking water gives them hallucinations or visions that are all in the mind and thus imaginary and thus fictional. But, when every culture has those hundreds of what we moderns call mythological characters and related events and when those monuments mount into the multi tens-of-thousands, well something is screwy somewhere. Further, many of those mythologies, from many of those cultures – independent cultures separated by time and/or space – not only share common themes like gods, hybrids, giants, shape-shifters, floods, and creation stories but the nitty-gritty details are often uncannily similar.
In conclusion,Troyhas been discovered; The Trojan War confirmed; the Atlantis myth has been adequately explained as a massive exploding volcanic eruption on the MediterraneanislandofThera(Santorini) and resulting tsunami that did in the Minoan civilization onCrete. Maybe theGriffinlegend was inspired by fossils of the dinosaur Protoceratops as some have suggested, or maybe not. Maybe theGriffin, like dragons and the sphinx really existed. Thousands of mythological characters and events have yet to yield their fictional status for reality, but who’s to say truth isn’t stranger than fiction, apart from those Ivory Tower scholars that is?
Science librarian; retired.
