When They Severed Earth from Sky

How the Human Mind Shapes Myth

Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Paul T. Barber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691127743, 9780691099866
• eBook ISBN: 9781400842865
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction.


This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years.


We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions.


Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.

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Time Capsules

The son of Danaë…slew the Gorgon, and, bearing her head adorned with locks of serpents, came to the islanders bringing them stony death. But, to me, no marvel, if the gods bring it about, ever seems beyond belief.

—Pindar, Pythian Ode 10 (trans. Race 1997, 363)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evidence shows that people have had brains like ours for at least 100,000 years. By that time, as the excavated bones show, our vocal tract had developed for speech as we know it [Lieberman 1975, 1991]; and language could not have come into being without both an efficient vocal mechanism and the complexly structured brain necessary for language.

But if people were so smart—just like us—100,000 years ago, why do the myths they passed down often seem so preposterous to us? And not just to us. Even ancients like the Greek poet Pindar, who made his living telling such stories ca. 500 B.C., sometimes felt constrained to a disclaimer: “Don't blame me for this tale!” The narrators present these myths as “histories”. Yet how can we seriously believe that Perseus turned people to stone by showing them the snaky-locked head of a monster, or that a man named Herakles (or Hercules) held up the sky for a while, slew a nine-headed water monster, moved rivers around, and carried a three-headed dog up from the land of the dead? Or that a man named Methuselah lived for almost a millennium? That an eagle pecked for years at the liver of a god tied to a mountain, or that mortal men—Beowulf, St. George, Siegfried, and Perseus included—actually fought dragons? And how can one view people like the Greeks or the Egyptians, who each believed simultaneously in three or four sun gods, as having intelligence? Didn't they notice a contradiction there? Why did people in so many cultures spend so much time and attention on these collections of quaint stories that we know of as “myths”?

The problem lies not in differing intelligence but in differing resources for the storage and transmission of data. Quite simply, before writing, myths had to serve as transmission systems for information deemed important; but because we—now that we have writing—have forgotten how nonliterate people stored and transmitted information and why it was done that way, we have lost track of how to decode the information often densely compressed into these stories, and they appear to us as mostly gibberish. And so we often dismiss them as silly or try to reinterpret them with psychobabble. As folklorist Adrienne Mayor points out, classicists in particular “tend to read myth as fictional literature, not as natural history” [Mayor 2000b, 192]—not least because humanists typically don't study sciences like geology, palaeontology, and astronomy, and so don't recognize the data.

In order to understand how and why myths were constructed to encode real and important data, we must come to understand the possibilities—and hazards—for the collection, processing, and transmission of information in nonliterate societies. Just how much can you keep in your head? Simply put, writing allows people to stockpile data in masses that are not possible when one must rely on memory alone, and it allows people to transmit as much as they want—without much compression—to future generations. Conversely, without writing, people had both to winnow out the key information, presumably according to perceived importance, and to compress it by any means possible until it fit into the available channel: human memory. We have come to term this overarching problem the Memory Crunch.

During two dozen years of empirical research on myths from all over the world, we found that many of these stories could be understood through a series of simple observable principles. These principles show how particular types of myths developed out of actual events: how people crunched down the information into the limited channel available for transmission, enhanced its memorability, then shot these little time capsules of knowledge down the pipeline to the listeners of the future.

Not all myths are of this type, of course, but many more of them turn out to stem from actual events and real observations of the world than twentieth-century scholars have commonly believed, and possibly all types of myths can be understood better through understanding the close relationships between myth, language, and cognition. At any rate, myths encoding verifiable facts proved the easiest place to begin recognizing the cognitive processes involved.

Working initially from a few myths whose historical or archaeological origins are independently known and verifiable, we first noticed a dozen or so rather specific principles. (One of us works principally in Old World archaeology and linguistics, the other in comparative literature and folklore.) This empirical list increased slowly to about forty principles, over the next fifteen years, as we happened on more and more usable data. Then, abruptly one day, they all collapsed down into four overarching principles, each of which has clear correlates in linguistic process. Why were we so surprised? After all, myth is transmitted through language, and it is the same human brain with its peculiar design features that must handle both language and the data it encodes into language. These myth principles start to make the inner workings of myth rationally intelligible on many levels.

Discussion of the four fundamental “mytho-linguistic” principles—Silence, Analogy, Compression, and Restructuring—forms the greater part of this book. For each, we present the more specific principles we discovered that fall under its sway, together with parallel insights about language and a multitude of examples from world mythology. If Indo-European myths (especially Greco-Roman, Germanic, Slavic) and those of the Pacific Northwest preponderate, that is where the combined knowledge and interests of the present authors are strongest.

What this book is not about is archetypes, the stuff of C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell. Those aspects of myth that appear “universal” are, in our opinion, the result of pitting human cognition against the small-channel problem just described—common responses to common problems.

Why would one want thus to “strip the veil of mystery” from mythology? Some people won't want to; they don't have to read this book. But for students of cognition, the practical structure of myth gives interesting new insights into the language-oriented brain that spawned myth. And for archaeologists, the decoding of myth provides the possibility of restoring a certain amount of actual history to the “prehistoric” world, the world before writing. Writing was invented a mere 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and presumably mythmaking for 100,000 or more. That's a lot of history lost.

To recover what is left of these precious time capsules, we begin with some of the most transparent mythologies available and build our way, principle by principle, toward the knottier stuff.¹

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¹ For the reader's convenience, the Myth Principles from the entire book are reprinted together in the Appendix (pp. 245-51), in the order discussed, with hierarchical indentation.

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The Memory Crunch:
How Long a Pipeline?

MEMORY CRUNCH

When all accumulated wisdom must be stored in the brain and transmitted orally (as in a nonliterate society), people reserve the formal oral tradition for transmitting the information they consider most important, often for survival.

Along time ago, so long you cannot count it,…the spirits of the earth and the sky, the spirits of the sea and the mountains often came and talked with my people.

Sometimes the Chief of the Below World came up from his home inside the earth and stood on top of the mountain—the high mountain that used to be…. One time when the Chief of the Below World was on the earth, he saw Loha, the daughter of the tribal chief. Loha was a beautiful maiden, tall and straight as the arrowwood. Her eyes were dark and piercing; her hair was long and black and glossy....

The Chief of the Below World saw her and fell in love with her. He told her of his love and asked her to return with him to his lodge inside the mountain. There, he said, she would live forever and forever. But Loha refused to go with him.

Then the Chief of the Below World sent one of his warriors to a feast of the tribe, to plead for him and to arrange for a marriage with Loha….

But again the maiden refused. And the wise men of the council would not command her to go…. When the messenger returned to the middle of the mountain and reported the maiden's answer, the Chief of the Below World was very angry. In a voice like thunder, he swore he would have revenge on the people of Loha, that he would destroy them with the Curse of Fire. Raging and thundering, he rushed up through the opening and stood upon the top of his mountain.

Then he saw the face of the Chief of the Above World shining among the stars that surrounded his home. Slowly the mighty form of that chief descended from the sky and stood on the top of Mount Shasta. From their mountaintops the two spirit chiefs began a furious battle. In a short time all the spirits of earth and sky took part in the battle.

Mountains shook and crumbled. Red-hot rocks as large as the hills hurtled through the skies. Burning ashes fell like rain. The Chief of the Below World spewed fire from his mouth. Like an ocean of flame it devoured the forests on the mountains and in the valleys. On and on the Curse of Fire swept until it reached the homes of the people. Fleeing in terror before it, the people found refuge in the waters of Klamath Lake.

[After a discussion,]…two medicine men, the oldest and most revered of the Klamath people, rose from the water, lighted their pine torches, and started toward the mountain of the Chief of the Below World. From the waters of Klamath Lake, the people watched the flare of the torches move up the long ridge on the east side of the mountain…to the top of the cliff which hung over the entrance to the Below World.…There the medicine men paused for a moment, watching the flames and smoke coming up through the opening. Then they lifted their burning torches high above their heads and jumped into the fiery pit [as sacrifice].

…The Chief of the Above World, standing on Mount Shasta, saw the brave deed of the medicine men. He saw that it was good. Once more the mountains shook. Once more the earth trembled on its foundations. This time the Chief of the Below World was driven into his home, and the top of the mountain fell upon him. When the morning sun rose, the high mountain was gone. The mountain which the Chief of the Below World had called his own no longer towered near Mount Shasta.

Then rain fell. For many years, rain fell in torrents and filled the great hole that was made when the mountain fell upon the Chief of the Below World. The Curse of Fire was lifted. Peace and quiet covered the earth. Never again did the Chief of the Below World come up from his home. Never again did his voice frighten the people.

Now you understand why my people never visit the lake. Down through the ages we have heard this story. From father to son has come the warning, “Look not upon the place. Look not upon the place, for it means death or everlasting sorrow.” —Klamath story, recorded 1865 [Clark 1953, 53-55]

Who can doubt that we have here a volcanic eruption, with its river of fire, quakes, ash-fall, and lava bombs? Certainly no one who has fol-lowed the recent eruptions of Etna, Pinatubo, and Shasta's neighbor Mount St. Helens.

Active volcanos outside of Hawaii generally erupt rather seldom, in human terms: maybe once every few centuries or millennia. Yet when they do, they wreak havoc, and it is just as well not to be living in the path that the lava and other lethal flows will take. So one can understand that people who had experienced devastation from a fiery mountain would view it as a life-and-death matter to warn their descendants of the danger. But the message might have to traverse hundreds or even thousands of years to do its job.

Is transmission of oral information across centuries even possible? We read in the newspaper about how unreliable the witnesses to accidents and crimes can be a month later. What hope is there that verbal information could survive so long intact?

The Klamath story quoted above refers specifically to the place we know as Crater Lake—in fact, the story was related as answer to a young soldier at Fort Klamath when he inquired why the native people never went to that breathtakingly beautiful spot (figure 1). Geologists have reconstructed that a volcano dubbed Mount Mazama formerly towered 14,000 feet high between Mounts Shasta and St. Helens. It certainly once qualified as “high”, just as the story says; and, equally correctly, the giant is no longer there. After emptying its magma chamber of lava in a catastrophic eruption, Mazama collapsed to form a crater 4,000 feet deep which, as the narrative relates, never erupted violently again and gradually filled with water to form today's magnificent Crater Lake. That eruption, so accurately described and vehemently warned against in the tale, has been ice-dated to 7,675 years ago [Zdanowicz, Zielinski, and Germani, 1999].

Figure 1. Crater Lake, Oregon, the enormous bowl formed by the cataclysmic eruption of a volcano, Mount Mazama, nearly 7,700 years ago. Later extrusions built up the small cone-shaped island.

So yes, real information can reach us intact across more than seven millennia of retelling. Even if we might not agree with their explanation of why these things occurred, the Klamath tribe in the 1860s still knew in considerable detail of events observed millennia earlier.¹

Nor is this longevity of information an anomaly. Investigating another part of the world, Bruce Masse reports his surprise at

the realization that the majority of Hawaiian myths were firmly attached to Hawaiian chiefly genealogies,…[which] purported to go back in unbroken lineage for more than 95 generations before Kamehameha I,…[including] several Pele myths in which the volcano goddess had battles during the reigns of named genealogical chiefs…, battles that resulted in the production of discrete named lava flows whose locations were known historically.

Much to my surprise, the radiocarbon dates for these lava flows matched not only the relative order of the named chiefs in the genealogical record, but closely matched absolute dates as well if a 22-year period were used for the length of each chiefly generation. [Masse 1998, 55]

Evidence abounds from several continents, in fact, that properly encoded information has passed unscathed through the oral pipeline for one to ten thousand years and more—for example, in Australia [Dixon 1984, 153-55, 295]. But the conditions must be right for this to happen.

First of all, the information must be viewed as important, as in the Klamath warning about innocent-looking Crater Lake, which, for all they knew, might explode again next week. (Similar taboos against entering the heartland of a former vast catastrophe came to exist among Evenki shamans and herders after the 1908 Tunguska “cosmic event”, which was thought locally to have resulted from two shamans battling [Menges 1983, 4-6].) After all, you can remember only a limited (even if fairly large) number of stories to pass down, so anything added to the corpus of stories to retell had better deserve its place—it is ousting something else. This being so, we can state as another working hypothesis the Relevance Corollary, that formal oral mythologies are neither unimportant and “off the wall” nor random in their content.²

Second, the information must continue to correspond to something still visible to the hearers, such as Crater Lake to the Klamath. If tellers of volcano myths migrate away from all volcanos, the original meaning of those myths is sure to become clouded or lost.

The third condition for intact transmission is that it be encoded in a highly memorable way. If Uncle Nestor, so boring he puts everyone to sleep, is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 - Time Capsules
• 2 - The Memory Crunch: How Long a Pipeline?
• 3 - The Silence Principle: Of Lethe and the Golden Calf
• 4 - More Silence: Movie Reels from Snapshots
• 5 - Analogy: Our Brain's Best Talent
• 6 - Willfulness: The Atom or Thou
• 7 - Multiple Aspects: The More the Merrier
• 8 - Multiple Viewpoints: Ear, Trunk, or Tail
• 9 - Views through Biased Lenses
• 10 - Metaphoric Reality: Magic and Dreams
• 11 - Compression: Methuselah and the Eponymous Heroes
• 12 - Post Hocus Ergo Pocus: Space Aliens Mutilate Cows!
• 13 - Restructuring: New Patterns for Old
• 14 - Mnemonics: Behind the Silliness
• 15 - The Spirit World: A Realm Reversed
• 16 - Of Sky and Time
• 17 - Prometheus
• 18 - Fire-Breathing Dragons
• Appendix: Index of Myth Principles
• Bibliography
• Index