Don't Know Much About Mythology

Kenneth C. Davis

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061925757
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

In this fascinating installment of the New York Times bestselling Don't Know Much About® series, Kenneth C. Davis explores the great myths of the world and their implications for art, science, religion and culture throughout history.

What is an Egyptian pyramid doing on the U. S. dollar bill? • Did a pharaoh inspire Moses to worship one God? • What's a Canaanite demoness doing at a rock concert?

Since the beginning of time, people have been insatiably curious. They've asked questions about where we come from, why the stars shine and the seasons change, and what constitutes evil. The imaginative answers crafted by our ancestors have served as religion, science, philosophy, and popular literature.

In an engaging and delightfully irreverent question-and-answer style, Davis tackles the epic of Gilgamesh; Achilles and the Trojan War; Stonehenge and the Druids; Odin, Thor, and the entire Norse pantheon; Native American myths, and much more, including the dramatic life and times of the man who would be Buddha. From Mount Olympus to Machu Picchu, here is an insightful, lively look at the greatest stories ever told.

CHAPTER ONE

ALL MEN HAVE NEED OF THE GODS

Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.

—HESIOD (c. 700 BCE), The Theogony

Know thyself.

—Inscription at the Delphic Oracle, attributed to the Seven Sages (c. 650 BCE–550 BCE)

No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a word of God.

—CARL GUSTAV JUNG

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

—SIR JAMES FRAZER, The Golden Bough

The highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

—NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, Zorba the Greek

What are myths?

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

Where does the urge to make myths come from?

Are all myths historical?

Who was the man who “found” Troy?

How did an ancient myth cast doubt on the divinity of the Bible?

When does myth become religion? And what’s the difference?

Are myths all in our minds?

You’re driving down the highway and you pass an accident along the road. Admit it. Without even thinking, you slow down and rubber-neck, just like everybody else. Instantly, your mind seeks an explanation for what you see.

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.

MYTHIC VOICES

Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.

—HOMER, The Odyssey (c. 750 BCE)

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?

MYTHIC VOICES

In my opinion mortals have created their gods with the dress and voice and appearance of mortals. If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods’ bodies the same shape as their own. The Ethiopians say that their gods have snub noses and black skins, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

—XENOPHANES (c. 570–475 BCE)

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 hu...