Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (3 page)

In telling the story of the connections between these age-old traditions and civilizations, this book is an outgrowth of
Don’t Know Much About the Bible
. In writing that book, I learned about the deep, primordial connections between the civilizations of the ancient Near East and the people who emerged as the Jews of the Old Testament. Some scholars and historians believe that the idea of the one God of the Hebrews might have been inspired by an Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten who unsuccessfully tried to replace the vast pantheon of Egyptian deities with a single sun god. Some historians believe this concept may have been adopted by the ancient Hebrews while they were in Egypt. It is a controversial and unproved idea, but there is no question that comprehending the myths and civilizations of Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia adds to an understanding of the Judeo-Christian world, which was later, similarly, influenced by the Greek and Roman worlds, in which Christianity was born, and by the world of the “pagan” people to whom the early Christian missionaries began to preach the gospel of Jesus—all of these worlds alive with myth and ancient religions.

To accomplish this, I use the techniques I have employed in all the books of the Don’t Know Much About series: questions and answers, timelines that show historical connections, “voices” of both real people and mythic sources, and stories about the “household names” of ancient myths—including Hercules, Jason, Ulysses, Romulus and Remus, as well as many more unfamiliar names from other cultures. This book also draws on a vast array of recent archaeological and scientific discoveries that have shed new light on the ancient societies that created these myths.

The chapters are organized by the various civilizations, starting with the two with the earliest known mythologies and worship systems—Egypt and Mesopotamia. The book then moves through the other major Western mythologies in rough chronological order—Greece, Rome, and Northern Europe. The major Eastern myth systems of India, China, and Japan come next, followed by chapters on the remaining areas of the world as they were opened up to Europeans: sub-Saharan Africa; the Americas; and the Pacific island areas—the last places “discovered” in the world.
*
That raises two important points. First, while this guided world-tour is an overview of the world’s principal civilizations and their myths, it is obviously not an “encyclopedic” treatment. It would be impossible to cover every myth and every god from each civilization—large and small—in a single volume such as this. Instead, this book focuses on the “need to know” approach, as do all of the other Don’t Know Much About books. This book aims to highlight, in an accessible and entertaining manner, the most significant aspects of these myths and cultures and present the “first word” on this subject, not the “last word.” An extensive bibliography lists the many resources and wide range of literature available to further explore the world of myth.

And second. This is, admittedly, a rather “Eurocentric” organization that looks at history as it progressed from a Western perspective. The chapters proceed in a rough chronology from the dawn of Western history through its gradual contacts with the rest of the world and through the impact on the West of that growing contact with these “new worlds.” Frankly, the myths of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece have a lot more to do with Western history than the myths of early China or the San people of the Kalahari Desert. That does not imply that one set of myths is superior, or that one is more “right” or “wrong”—just that I have tried to organize the book to reflect the role myth has played in our history. It is also worth noting that so many of these myths—regardless of their geographic origin—are often more alike than different, a point that will be underscored many times in this book.

In this way, I hope to provide an accessible portal into the myths and the civilizations that created them. Typically, our schools may teach a little bit about one or two of these groups, but rarely discuss them in connection with each other. What did the Greeks learn from the Egyptians? How were they different? Were the Egyptians really Africans? Did the Chinese influence the Hindus or vice versa? How did a handful of Spaniards overthrow mighty empires and convert thousands of Aztecs and Incas from their old beliefs to Catholicism? These are the sort of questions that make this book a somewhat unique addition to the vast literature of mythology.

No small task! The scope of this book is much wider than simply retelling old stories from a modern—and perhaps skeptical—perspective. Unfortunately, for most of us, learning about ancient civilizations—if we learned anything at all—wasn’t very interesting. One of the key objectives of the Don’t Know Much About series is to revisit all those subjects we should have learned about back in school but never did, because they were dull, dreary, and boring, as well as badly taught and riddled with misinformation.

But beyond that,
Don’t Know Much About Mythology
also tries to spin a thread that winds through all of my Don’t Know Much About books. The history of world myths is deeply connected to such subjects as geography, biblical history, and astronomy. And one of my goals in this series has always been to show how seeing those connections makes learning about these subjects become far more compelling.

Finally, this book and the subject of mythology touch on something deeper still. In the late nineteenth century, a generation of scholars began to view myth as part of the primal human need for a spiritual life. In a classic study of myths, called
The Golden Bough
, Sir James Frazer tried to demonstrate that every ancient society was deeply invested in a ritual of sacrifice that involved a dying and reborn god whose rebirth was essential to the society’s continuing existence.

A little later, Sigmund Freud argued that myths were part of the human subconscious, universally shared stories that reflected deeply rooted psychological conflicts—most of them sexual, in Freud’s view. Then Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple who eventually split with Freud, suggested that myths were rooted in what he called the “collective unconscious,” a shared common human experience as old as mankind itself. Jung believed that this collective unconscious was organized into basic patterns and symbols—which he called
archetypes
. Our dreams, art, religion, and, perhaps most important, our myths are all among the ways that man has expressed those archetypes. Jung also believed that all myths have certain common features—characters such as gods and heroes; themes such as love and revenge; and plots such as a battle between generations for control of a throne, or a hero’s quest—which are fundamental to our humanity.

For more than a hundred years, scholars have debated different views of the role that myths have played in the human experience. Religion, psychology, anthropology—all of these are lenses through which we can view that role. This book takes into account such approaches to mythology and raises another set of questions: Are these timeless stories simply collections of amusing tall tales from long, long ago? Did myths begin as the ancient world’s version of
The Sopranos
? Are they simply old versions of entertaining stories about sex and violence—or were they created to cement the social order with divine kings lording over the common person? Do myths reach some deeper level of human thought and experience, as many anthropologists and psychologists suggest? And finally, how do the ancient ideas found in myths speak to us today?

In his 1949 classic,
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
, Joseph Campbell wrote: “Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic magic ring of myth.”

Throughout human history, myths have provided what T. S. Eliot, a poet deeply interested in myth, called “the roots that clutch.” Exploring Campbell’s “magic ring of myth” takes
Don’t Know Much About Mythology
into territory that has been touched upon in my previous books, especially those about the Bible and the universe—the powerful connections between belief and science, the conflicts between faith and the rational world, and a deeper sense of the mysterious in human life, which are all part of man’s search for meaning.

Underpinning these books, I hope, is an idea expressed by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” How
Promethean
! (See? I told you myths live in our language.)

Over the course of the more than fifteen years that I have been writing the Don’t Know Much About series, I have discovered that people are not ignorant about subjects like history and religion by choice. On the contrary, I’ve discovered that people of all ages are eager to learn and have endless curiosity. One of the saddest things I have witnessed in these years—especially when I visit schools—is how the innate and insatiable curiosity young children have about the world gets absolutely killed by the tedium of school.

I remember so well how myths saved one little boy from that tedium. And I also believe that the story of myth is ultimately about our innate human curiosity. Like that curious newspaper boy who wanted to know what “argus” meant. Or that curious woman who wanted to know what was in the jar given to her by the gods. Or that curious pair in Eden who wanted to gain knowledge. This is what got us where we are today. The human experience is about a boy asking questions and pushing the envelope of curiosity. Across centuries of time and great distances of culture, mythology is about that common human experience and that driving curiosity about other people, the world, the heavens. Deeper than intellect alone, it’s a piece of what makes us what we are—call it soul, collective unconscious, or even superstition. I hope, if nothing else, this book will help you discover that childlike curiosity that has driven us from dark caves to the outermost edges of the universe.

Y

You may have had only a fleeting glimpse of the accident scene—maybe you saw sets of skid marks, a car upended, dazed people talking to the police. You hear an ambulance wail in the distance as a trooper or firefighter waves you past. You don’t know what happened. But you see the effects and want to explain the cause. If you are like most people, you begin to stitch together a theory of what went wrong. Almost without consciously thinking about it, you begin to manufacture a narrative of what happened.

“That driver was probably drinking.” “He had to be going too fast.” “The driver must have fallen asleep and swerved across the road.” “One car probably cut off the other.”

In other words, without any facts or much evidence, you try to create a coherent story to explain what you have seen. Maybe it is that simple: this is what makes us truly human. The innate need to explain and understand is what has gotten us to where we are today, in the early days of the twenty-first century.

Myths may have begun, in the oldest sense, as a way for humans to explain the “car wrecks” of their world—the world they could see as well as the world they could not see. Long before science envisioned a Big Bang. Long before Greek philosophers reasoned, Siddhartha Gautama sought enlightenment, or Jesus walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Long before there was a Bible or a Koran. Long before Darwin proposed natural selection. Long before we could know the age of a rock and before men walked on the moon, there were myths.

Myths explained how Earth was created, where life came from, why the stars shine at night and the seasons change. Why there was sex. Why there was evil. Why people died and where they went when they did.

In short, myths were a very human way to explain everything.

What are myths?

When people use the word “myth” today, they often have in mind something that is widely believed but untrue. Like alligators in the sewers of New York City—which is really not a myth at all but an “urban legend.” In another sense, it is now common to talk about the “myth” of the cowboys of the Old American West, and there are plenty of other so-called myths in American history—old ones that die hard and new ones being created all the time. Myths about the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, slavery, the Sixties—just about any period or movement in America’s past has been “mythologized” and layered with legend to some degree.

In bookstores today, you’ll also find a profusion of books with titles and subtitles that underscore this notion of a myth as something that is commonly believed but is not true:
The Beauty Myth
,
The Mommy Myth
,
The Myth of Excellence
. Most of these recent books with “myth” in the title tend to treat a “myth” as an old and possibly dangerous idea that needs to be debunked.

Like most words, “myth” means different things to different people, but in its most basic sense, a myth is defined as “A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the world view of a people, as by
explaining aspects of the natural world
or delineating
the psychology, customs, or ideals of society
.” (
American Heritage
, emphasis added.)

“Explaining aspects of the world”—that’s another way to say “science” or “religion,” the two principal ways people have used to explain the world.

“The psychology, customs, or ideals of a society.” That’s a large mouthful that covers just about everything else
not
covered by science and religion—but gets to the heart of what we think and believe, even if we can’t “know” it.

In the ancient world, myth had a meaning that is almost completely opposite to our modern concept of myth as an “untruth.” In the earliest days of humanity, myths existed to convey
essential truths
. They were, in a very real sense, what many people today might call
gospel
. Or as David Leeming put it in
A Dictionary of Creation Myths
, “A myth is a…projection of a…group’s sense of its sacred past and its significant relationship with the deeper powers of the surrounding world and universe. A myth is a projection of…a culture’s soul.” Ananda Coomaraswamy, a twentieth-century Indian philosopher, put it this way: “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be expressed in words.”

Viewed in this very ancient and much broader sense, myths are about what makes us tick. They are as old as humanity and as current as the news.

The word
myth
is derived from the Greek word
mythos
, for “story,” and when the Greek philosopher Plato coined the word “mythology” more than two thousand years ago, he was referring to stories that contained invented figures. In other words, the great Greek thinker conceived of myths as elaborate fiction, even if they expressed some larger “Truth.” Plato—using the voice of Socrates as his Narrator—criticized the myths as a corrupting influence, and in his ideal state, set out in
The Republic
, banned poets and their tales.

“The first thing will be to establish a censorship of writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.” He goes on to say about the stories of the gods: “These tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal;…and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.”

On the other hand, Plato himself was not above using
allegories
(a Greek word that essentially means “saying something in a different way”) as a teaching device; Plato’s own tale of Atlantis, a mythical idealized world, and his famed allegory of the Cave, in which most men are trapped in a world of illusion and ignorance, seeing only flickering shadows of reality, are inventions—stories that are meant to convey a greater eternal and universal Truth.

For thousands of years we have invented stories to tell one another and our children. But why? Myths clearly fulfill some basic function in human life. But what is that function? And was the philosopher Plato mistaken? Is mythology more than a set of elaborate fictions?

There is no question or doubt that the creation of myths and their role in everyday life is one of the most common of all human endeavors. As Homer said, “All men have need of the gods.” So, we need myths. It is clear that myths developed in the dawn of human consciousness, from the very first evidence of human culture—cave paintings, carved pieces of bone, fertility figurines, household idols, and ancient burial practices. Even the famed Neanderthal, an early species of human that was eventually overtaken and supplanted by the Cro-Magnon more than fifty thousand years ago, had burial practices that show an interest in what comes after death.

Even if myths only started out as a way to pass the time on long nights sitting around the campfire, they clearly became far more than elaborate entertainment. The people who formed the first civilizations developed myths. Over time, as their villages became cities and cities became states, the myths grew into complex, interconnected tales that formed the basis of intricate belief systems. These stories of gods and ancestors became one of the central organizing principles in these cultures, and they dictated religious rituals, the social order and customs, everyday behavior, and even the organization of entire civilizations.

It is the essential sacred, spiritual—or religious—significance in myths that fundamentally separates them from other types of very old stories, such as legends and folktales. While the mythologies of many cultures grew to include related legends and folktales, myths were usually considered sacred and absolutely true—a notion that is completely at odds with the modern concept of myth as fallacy.

Of course, the ancient myths usually were about gods or other divine beings who possessed supernatural powers. That simply makes it all the more interesting to see that many of the gods, goddesses, and heroes of myth exhibited very recognizable human characteristics in spite of these powers. The gods of every civilization seemed to be wholly subject to the same sorts of whims and emotions—love and jealousy, anger and envy—experienced by the people who worshipped them. Zeus, the greatest of the Greek gods, had what in modern terms is called “a zipper problem.” He couldn’t avoid temptation in any form—goddess, mortal, or even young boy. His divine wife, Hera, was most irritated by his behavior but put up with it, a model of sort of the long-suffering, wronged but devoted wife.

Myths are also filled with sibling rivalries, one of the most basic of human emotions. In ancient Egypt, Seth kills his brother Osiris out of envy, jealousy, and a desire for power. Then Osiris’ son Horus continues the fight against his uncle Seth—a cosmic family feud that was the rivalry around which their national religion was focused. Other mythologies feature “trickster” tales filled with stories of unscrupulous characters, like the Native American Coyote finding endless ways to deflower maidens. The vanity of three goddesses of Mount Olympus, each wanting to be called the most beautiful, is the force that powers the chain of events which leads to the affair between Paris, the prince of Troy, and the beautiful mortal Helen—the daughter of Leda, seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. Those events bring the Greeks and Trojans to ten years of the Trojan War.

All of which leads to another question still—one that people have been asking for thousands of years:

Are the gods created in man’s image or is it the other way around?

Myths, legends, fables, folktales: What are the differences?

A famous old ad campaign for luxurious fur coats illustrated with photographs of usually over-the-hill celebrities used to ask the question, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” What do the so-called legends of Hollywood have to do with stories of ancient gods and heroes? Not much.

Although the words “myth” and “legend” are often used interchangeably, there are some notable distinctions. When most people think of myths, they have in mind some pantheon (another Greek word, it is formed from
pan
for “all” and
theos
for “gods”) of Greek and Roman gods. According to the myths, these divinities were believed to be supernatural beings who actually controlled events in the natural world.

Legends
are really an early form of history—stories about historical figures, usually humans, not gods, that are handed down from earlier times. Most Americans, for instance, are familiar with the legend of young George Washington and the cherry tree. This story of Washington as a young boy chopping down his father’s cherry tree and being incapable of lying about it was the purely fictional creation of a “biographer” named Parson Weems, who passed himself off as the rector of the parish at Mount Vernon. His stories of young Washington were tailored to fit into a neat collection of morality tales for children, well after Washington was dead. Nonetheless, stories such as the tale of the cherry tree became part of the national American legend of George Washington and his unquestioned honesty. But while Washington was certainly celebrated as a legend, both in his times and for centuries afterwards, nobody actually ever thought of him as a god.

Another familiar example of the distinction between myth and legend comes from ancient Great Britain. King Arthur is a historical figure about whom legendary stories have been created and retold for more than a thousand years, including, in recent times, in T. H. White’s popular
The Once and Future King
and the musical
Camelot
, which provide most of our images of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A figure in British prehistory, Arthur was most likely based upon an actual person, possibly a tribal chieftain in Wales, around whom an elaborate cycle of heroic tales was collected. George Washington’s biography and times were reasonably well documented, but the life of Arthur is more difficult to pin down with hard facts. Many of the stories about a king called Arthur first began to be collected in
History of the Kings of Britain
, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth between 1136 and 1138, anywhere from five hundred to a thousand years after the real-life model for King Arthur might have lived.