Abstract

In the development of human culture, we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of history, religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated by mythical elements.

E Cassirer

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 09 May 2007

What are Myths?

Myths are tales that pass down from generation to generation and have become traditional, but mythologists squabble over precisely what a myth is. Some say it is necessarily connected with religion, while others say it is much broader, simply any folk tale, or somewhat less broadly, a tale with a serious purpose distinct from a folktale, which is primarily an entertainment. For the Greeks, “muthos” originally meant something uttered, something from the mouth—a tale, a statement, spoken drama. It probably was associated with religion because the occasions when something significant was uttered were chiefly religious occasions.

The myth exists on the conceptual level and the ritual on the level of action.

C Levi-Strauss

Myth was the thing said (legomenon) and ritual the corresponding thing performed (dromenon, from which comes our word “drama”), so it is often said that myths are explanations of rituals:

Myth in my terminology is the counterpart of ritual. Myth implies ritual, ritual implies myth, they are one and the same…

Sir E R Leach (1910-1989 AD)

It is undoubtedly the case that many myths, perhaps especially in the Near East were associated with rituals, and that some of them may have been created to account for actions whose purpose are no longer apparent.

G S Kirk, Myth (1970)

Regardless of whether the myth or the ritual is original, they replicate each other. The Scottish biblicist and Arabist William Robertson Smith (1846-1894 AD) propagated this view as a way of rationalizing much of the Jewish scriptures, and it is worth quoting Kirk because he correctly rejected the idea as a general hypothesis, but it is valid, as he concedes here, more particularly, and perhaps especially in ANE cultures. Smith accepted that the Semites performed rituals only for a reason, but the story, or myth that explained the ritual was of minor importance and could change.

Semitic myths are embodied in poems designed originally to be chanted or recited at religious exercises. Their objective was to provide an interpretation of ritual in terms of connected stories. In course of time, however, many of the underlying rituals fell into disuse, so that the myths survived as purely literary compostions…

T Gaster

The English classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928 AD) and Gilbert Murray (1866-1957 AD) found not just Greek literature but all art based on myth as ritual. People gradually stopped believing that the imitation of an action caused it to happen, but still continued to practise ritual as an end in itself, changing into drama and other arts. Some compositions that survive until today as myths were originally literary descriptions of the ceremonies themselves. This is true of the supposed Genesis creation myth when the days of creation are counted. The days are, of course, the days in the week long ceremony when each creative act was celebrated, not any actual days of creation that no human being could possibly know about, even if a god did do the creating. The same is surely true too of some of the miracles of Jesus. They were ceremonies already celebrated among the circle in which Jesus moved, that of the Essenes. Examples are the wedding at Cana, the raising of Jair’s daughter, and the mass feeding, which was truly the origin of the Eucharist because Jesus was conducting one, but it has been suppressed in favour of the uniqely Christian inauguration of it “in memory of me”, supposedly started by Paul.

So, a broad category of myths, although far from all, were meant to be repeated on ritual and ceremonial occasions, and their repetition was part of their purpose, often to preserve the continuity of nature and society. Seasonal and fertility festivals fall into this category—the rituals to reverse the decline of the sun at the winter solstice, and to bring the rains to fertilize the earth required some sort of imitative action to bring it about that the myth explained and justified by showing how and why it was instituted for the first time. Retelling the mythical origin was essential to the continual repetition of the ritual which itself was a type of sympathetic magic to compel the event or to remind a deity of its obligation. The Egyptians had a ceremony each year to remind the Nile of its obligation to rise and inundate the valley!

Another example is the Egyptian myth that each night, when the sun passed beneath the earth, it was threatened by the dragon Apophis, necessitating the priests to get into the celestial telephone exchange called the temple to practise the rituals, chant the hymns, and utter the spells and prayers that would save the sun god from a fate that would affect everyone on earth. The ritual involved the recitation of the myth of Ra’s origin and ancestry, and how he was to defeat the serpent of the night that threatened him, and everyone else. In Babylon, at the New Year (Akidu) festival, the priests of Marduk reminded the god how he was to defeat Tiamat and create the world. Everyone seemed to join in the ceremonies which thereby became a social obligation. Effectively the recitation and enactment of the myth sustained the world. The ritual was not a celebration of the past, but an affirmation of the present. The past and the present were not distinct.

But an association between myth and ritual, even when it is clear, cannot certainly indicate which came first. Inasmuch as myths were independently invented with an explanatory purpose—as Tylor thought, but Smith denied—some could have preceded the rituals, which were then devised to act out the myths which were seen as a form of magic, but the reverse is equally possible, and perhaps more so, that old rituals that had evolved over long periods, but with a forgotten purpose, had myths grafted on to them. Elsewhere in these pages, the custom is noted of a habit parishioners attending one English Protestant Church had of genuflecting to a particular bare recess. The custom went on for generations with no one asking why. Then a vicar had the church decorated and old paint was removed to reveal, in this recess, an image of the Blessed Virgin, a relic of Catholicism that had obviously been whitewashed over at the Reformation. The original Catholic parishioners had continued their habit of bowing to the Virgin, and the custom went on even when the image in the corner had been forgotten!

In the ANE, a common enough reason for changing a myth would have been a conquest, or dynastic change, when a new king and priesthood imposed their new beliefs on to a conquered or subject people. The explanation of rituals by myths was a continuous process not a single one. J G Frazer thought it self-evident that the priests of Attis and Cybele ritually castrated themselves, and the myth of the self-castration of Attis was invented to explain it. Perhaps so, but maybe, in earlier times, the sacred priestess, who represented the goddess, each year copulated with a youth, the sacred king, who was subsequently killed by castration, and that was the origin of the myth. Then, when the miracle occurred that occasionally a castrated youth survived, he was made a priest, and at a later stage still, men keen to become priests, or simply in a religious frenzy castrated themselves, and thus qualified as “Galli.” No one knows this either, but it shows the simple explanation that the myth directly explained a castration ritual is not necessarily so.

Some myths did not have to be ceremonially repeated, but gave a legitimacy to a people. Such a myth was a sort of title deed. Athenians were indissolubly linked with Attica where they were born as children of Athena, their goddess, who sprang herself fully formed from the head of Zeus, the Greek Lord God. So, their entitlement was God given. The Jewish myths of the Old Testament, as Christians call it, are title deeds for Jews, establishing a God given right for the Palestinian hills, and even to the whole of the Levant, since the myths include one that the mythical first real king of the Jews had conquered it all.

Some myths become heroic narratives that help to define the people through informal repetition and story telling, or some just establish mythical relationships such as that the moon is the wife of the sun, or the supposed relationships between nations, through the relationships of the founding heroes, again prominent in the Jewish scriptures. Such myths of informal repetition also give a reason for the emotional commitment to an attitude or belief that rulers like their subjects to have. They can unconsciously reflect the social structure of the society in which they are popular. Sir E R Leach (“The Legitimacy of Solomon”, Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, 1970) showed that some of the myths of the Jewish scriptures were meant to disguise contradictions between how Israel was conceived as being and how it actually was.

Another kind of myth offers a conjectural explanation of some puzzle. People die. The Epic of Gilgamesh explains the ineluctable divine origin of death. Seeking to avoid it, Gilgamesh searches for increasingly higher authorities for a solution to the problem of death but each one tells him that human mortality is inevitable.

Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering?
Life, which you look for, you will never find.
For when the gods created man,
They let death be his share,
And his life kept in their own hands.

Epic of Gilgamesh

Eventually, he discovers there are exceptions. Utnapishtim and his wife survived the Flood and are now immortal, but the exceptional circumstances will never be repeated. Orpheus and Eurydice is the same lesson. Orpheus descends to Hades to retrieve the dead Eurydice, and almost succeeds, but human imperfection supercedes. Humans are not gods, and Orpheus cannot resist a little backward glance to make sure she is following him, thereby breaking his bond and the maid slips back into death. The story of Adam, Eve and the snake in the Jewish scriptures also explains human mortality, and with the same explanation—human frailty—the man breaks his word and death is the outcome.

One form of the definition associating myth with religion was the presence in them of gods, and so the presence of gods was considered the characteristic of myths. Yet a swath of tales exist that are not particularly about gods, though they are about people in the mythological fantasy time called by the Australian Aboriginals, “Dreamtime”, when social customs began, and humans often had the supernatural abilities we have in dreams, though they were not gods. Few scholars would not be willing to call these myths. The gods are not really central to the Odyssey and the Argonautica—they are stories about human adventures, and the gods come in to them as conjectural explanations for events that the men did not understand.

The Mythopoetic way of Thinking

The style of mythical explanations might be something to do with the way pre-literate, pre-logical people thought. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939 AD) noted that pre-literate people treated whatever they met in their world like themselves in a tacit belief that they and plants and animals all understood it equally. He suggested pre-literate people thought emotionally and mystically:

The mythic mind never perceives passively, never merely contemplates things. All its observations spring from some act of participation, some act of emotion and will.

E Cassirier, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Cassirer surmised that the point about myth is that the image it evokes is not, as we think it, a representation of something. In a real sense before writing, reading and arithmetic, it was the thing. Primitive people are in a childlike, mythopoetic state of mind:

Myth arose in the savage condition prevalent in remote ages among the whole [human] race.

Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871)

C Levi-Strauss (b 1908 AD) showed that primitive societies think differently from developed societies, even ones as undeveloped as those in the Bronze Age. It is Stone Age thinking, and Levi-Strauss used the terms “bricolage” and “bricoleur” for this mode of thought. They pertain to using whatever is at hand without any effort to find something better, the bricoleur essentially bodging things together to make something that will do. That it was being done at all is a sign of improvement over savagery, of logical thought emerging. That it leads to a type of taxonomy, albeit one based on principles that seem perverse or whimsical to the logical mind is proof that mythology is not thoughtless.

To use a modern term, myths are fantasy. They relate impossible happenings, but not so much in any way that seems to have been thought through, not deliberately thought out, but rather presented as strange dislocations of familiar or natural causes and associations. The fantastic figures of myths are giants, monsters, supernatural animals, supernatural heroes, magical objects and mysterious phenomena, like invisibility, prophecy, flight, shape-shifting, souls and spirits. The rules of normal actions, reasoning and relationships are distorted and no longer pertain, and supernatural happenings and transformations need and get no explanations. They just are, in this mythical world. The reason is that these narratives originated in a time before people could think rationally.

For primitives, speculation was unlimited, unrestricted by any scientific conditions, and Nature and man were not distinguished. People were social, and society was embedded in Nature and depended on its forces. Though the myths that have come to us are much later, they still reflect the way people thought in the era before rational thought had evolved. Myth illustrates the thought processes of pre-literate, pre-rational people when Nature, whatever it was, was understood in one way. Primitive humans thought only in terms of the personal.

To the mind of a pre-philosophical man, there is no special difficulty in accounting for the apparently haphazard nature of much that goes on in the world. He knows that he himself is a creature of impulse and emotion… What more natural than that the ways of the world around him should have a similar explanation?… Everything there has a personal explanation, not only external and physical phenomena like rain and tempest, thunder and sunshine, illness and death, but also those overmastering psychological impulses…

W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy.

They did not distinguish anything they met as different from meeting their neighbour, their wife or mother. They did not give everything in Nature a personality, they believed it, and thought only in that way. The notion that everything had a spirit was not imposed on natural objects and phenomena, everything was alive, and what was alive had a personality because that is what they understood as life.

The beginning of the emergence from savagery of mythopoetic thinking, the personification of all mental experiences real or envisioned, was the recognition of opposites—the acceptance of dualism in the world—of polarity. Up and down, night and day, hard and soft, left and right, raw and cooked, fresh and putrid, light and dark, full and empty, men and women, us and them, me and you, wet and dry, hot and cold, summer and winter, all were opposites that must have come as a mysterious revelation to the early mind. G E R Lloyd (Polarity and Analogy) pointed out the role of opposites in Greek philosophy, thrust into Greek consciousness, not for the first time, but emphatically as a philosophical principle by the dualism of the Persian religion. C Levi-Strauss had noted the importance of polarity in the Amerindian myths he collected and analyzed. Before long, some of the polar opposites began to seem more all pervading or more cosmic in importance, and the types of opposites were categorized by analogy until a whole bundle were considered good and their opposites bad—good for people and bad for them.

Among the significant categories were life and death, and all those that went to support life and death, light and dark, summer and winter, day and night, wet and dry, glut and famine, and so on. In all this, reason is beginning to prevail, but explanations continued to be personified and mythical. Fire and its role in preserving and tenderizing food in cooking became significant in myths as a great purifier and preventer of corruption. Water too was noted as a provider of life. Agriculture, led to society being more obvious in contrast to wild uncultivated and uncultured Nature, with village and town contrasted with jungle and desert, cultivation and irrigation contrasted with wilderness and chaos, and the sea too to most of these people was a wild, chaotic and dangerous place—in short, what people did was compared and contrasted with what Nature did, introducing for the first time the notion of warfare between humanity and Nature, whereas in the hunter-gatherer stage, Nature had been seen as a human benefactor. An important purpose of speculative myth was to explain these opposites—to make some sort of mythopoetic sense of them, though it is not the purpose of all myths to do this.

So, when the dry season came to an end and the storm clouds brought rain, Babylonians saw the gigantic bird Imdugud coming to save them, darkening the sky with its immense wings causing the blackness of storm clouds, and the chill after the summer heat was because it ate the bull of heaven whose hot breath had scorched the crops. This myth was not an amusing fiction, but was “true”. It was how they actually understood the situation. It was real for them—a pre-rational explanation. To us they are allegory or fantasy, but they were not to those who conceived them. When we say primitive explanation is allegory, it is we who have made it so, and it is our fantasy, not the primitive people’s. In fact, we need not be too smug over our own abilities to think rationally. Tests of formal operational thinking found that most, even trained logicians, got the test wrong, commonly giving the same illogical reasons as untrained laypeople.

Max Müller then George William Cox saw in the Indo-European mythologies the contest between light and darkness. The Aryans based their mythology on the sun, the dawn, and the sky, with solar myths dominant.

I look upon the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of day and night, on battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principle subject of early mythology.

M Muller

It is simpler to suppose that a well known type of story was introduced in many places to serve as a primæval precedent of the rituals than to believe that in so many places the rituals spontaneously generated a uniform pattern of myth.

J Fontenrose, Python

But Kirk points out that combat myths are more commonly associated with rituals than other types, so Fontenrose is able to add, elsewhere:

It is undeniable that myths are closely attached to rituals.

And this reflects the close association of combat with the changing seasons and the two suns, the good sun and the wicked sun, this being a dominant aspect of seasonal solar worship. Myths that are relics of old religions have the conflict between good and evil typically as their religious theme, and this stems from the solar drama. Analysing different Greek myths, Cox decided gods and heroes all had some element of the good sun in them, the good sun being victorious over the wicked one, or the bright sky over the dark one—though which was which actually varies according to geographic and climatic situation. The combat of a white dragon and a red dragon, or the hero and the boar or dragon, all stand for the good sun battling the wicked sun. Often the reward of the victor is the virgin bride, standing for the earth goddess, or the earth goddess is imprisoned in a tower, and the hero must save her. It is the didactic purpose of myths that perhaps distinguish them from stories just meant to entertain.

The dislocation of causes and connexions make myths often seem dreamlike. The confusion of temporal and logical sequences in myths is like what we experience in dreams. One subject or location in a dream changes into another with no cause or reason, and its characteristics and situation grossly altered, yet seemingly naturally—in the dream! The conviction of some extant primitive people, like those studied by anthropologists, Australian aboriginals, Tobrianders, and so on, that myths are dreamed might suggest that early humans thought in a dreamlike way, and indeed Australian aboriginals have a sense of continuity with their ancestors and origins that anthropologists have called “Dreamtime”:

The whole life and activity of many primitive peoples, even down to trifling details, is determined and governed by their dreams.

E Cassirer

Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes, a professor of psychology at Princeton, published in 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a controversial theory of the human mind.

From the early civilizations of the Near East, Jaynes came to the conclusion that most of the people in these archaic cultures were not subjectively conscious as we understand it today. Analyzing Homer’s great epic, The Iliad Jaynes concluded that the characters of the Trojan siege did not have conscious minds, no introspection, no sense of subjectivity, as we know them in the modern human.

There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad.

Rather they were men whom the gods pushed about like robots. The gods sang epics through their lips. Jaynes declares that these Iliadic heroes heard “voices”, real speech and directions from the gods—as clearly as those diagnosed epileptic or schizophrenic today.

Jaynes stresses that the Iliadic man did not possess subjectivity as we do—rather “he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon”. This mentality of the Myceneans, Jaynes calls the bicameral mind. What was this bicameral mind? Jaynes briefly discusses brain biology—in that there are three speech areas, for most located in the left hemisphere. They are:

1. The supplemental motor cortex
2. Broca’s area
3. Wernicke’s area.

Jaynes focuses on Wernicke’s area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke’s area that is crucial for human speech. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge “collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke’s area”. And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the “gods” who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give “directions” to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the “two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals”. Hence the bicameral mind!

Archaic humans were ordered and moved by the gods through both auditory hallucinations and visual hallucinations. The gods mainly “talked” to them—but sometimes “appeared”, such as Athene appearing to Achilles.

Jaynes believes in the mentality of the early Mycenean that volition, planning and initiative were literally organized with no consciousness whatsoever. Rather such volition was “told” to the individual—“sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ’god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone”.

Jaynes thinks the great agricultural civilizations that spread over much of the Near East by 5000 BC reflected the bicameral mind. These civilizations were rigid theocracies! They were reminiscent of the Queen Bee and the bee-hive. These bicameral societies reflected “hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or works, inventory of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler, and particular to gods”.

Jaynes contests that such theocracies were the only means for a bicameral civilization to survive. Circumventing chaos, these rigid hierarchies allowed for “lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so” to kings and gods. He says, “the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones”.

In these ancient bicameral societies the idol or the statue was literally the god, says Jaynes. The god/goddess had its own house. It was usually the center of a temple complex. The size varied according to the importance of the god and, of course, the wealth of the city. In these theocracies, the owner of the land was the divine idol—and the people were the tenants. The steward-king served the god by administrating the god’s estates. According to cuneiform texts, the gods also enjoyed eating, drinking, music and dancing. They required beds for sleeping and connubial visits from other gods. They—the statues—were washed and dressed, driven around on special occasions. Ceremony and ritual evolved around these idols.

The collapse of the bicameral mind came slowly, it was a slow erosive breakdown. But Jaynes spotted the first serious indications of collapse by the time of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, around 1700 BC. Authority had started to crumble—and due to this Egypt had to re-unify itself, hence the Middle Kingdom. Jaynes considers that this slow collapse was caused by natural disasters, such as the Santorini volcanic explosion that devastated many Greek islands. Migration of different peoples into new areas disrupted the bicameral societies already in place. Conquest over peoples by others resulted in further collapse. And writing gradually eroded “the auditory authority of the bicameral mind”.

Jaynes felt a real tipoff of this bicameral breakdown could be discerned in the Babylonian lines [To Marduk]: “My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance…” It was with this, he thinks, that one could detect for the first time the mighty themes of the world religions: “Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god.”

For Jaynes this ruin, this bitter bicameral breakdown led to the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. Moving from the Iliad, Jaynes declares that Homer’s Odyssey is unlike its predecessor. Here we have wily Odysseus, the hero of many devices, a man of a “new mentality”. The Odyssey was about a man who was learning how to get along in a “ruined and god-weakened world”.

With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century BC, with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!

So, Into Rationality

It seems extreme, but we now know that many human actions are still unconscious, and at some stage in human evolution we must have been much less conscious than we now are, but not everyone thinks it was so recent:

Any “mythical” stage of Greek thought lay in the far distant past… possibly far back in the Neolithic Age…

G S Kirk, Myth

Jaynes might have brought it closer than we imagined, but, far or near, a lot of rational thinking stands between the original myths of pre-rational people and the myths we now have. So, not everything in myths is necessarily derived from pre-literate ways of thinking. By the time people had started to think rationally, myth had become loved as a genre, whether religious or narrative, and inventions began to be made appropriate to the genre. Australian aboriginals with their idea of the creative past as “Dreamtime” can distinguish their own dreams from reality. They now know what reality is, primitive though their social arrangements might still be, but they treat dreams and reality as equal in value. It is a stage between a semi-consciousness that confuses dreams and reality, and the modern fully conscious, logical state in which most people distinguish the two:

After the primitive stage of genuine myth making, there is a transitional period, in which the old images and symbols are retained, but with a nascent consciousness that they do go beyond the meaning proper… Finally, there may come a time when rational thinking asserts itself, and the foremost intellects of the race awaken out of the dream of mythology.

Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy

Jaynes seems to follow F M Cornford (1874-1943 AD), who also thought rational thinking asserted itself in sixth century Ionia. Perhaps that is when the butterfly stretched its wings and first flew, but the interval from the primitive stage to the final one is a long one. The Assyrians were there, or almost there, and the Sumerians were past the primitive stage themselves. Cornford is careful to speak of “intellects” awakening, because it was popular to personify the whole human race as a child growing up, as if a whole race of people could be treated like a single one of them. In other words, too many people got carried away with a metaphor that could not possibly have offered anything acceptable to science. Myths cannot be considered as collective dreams because people do not dream collectively. What there are are collective thoughts—thoughts that are exchanged and become so popular that everyone accepts them. Myths were the first collective thoughts:

Religious ideas are produced by a synthesis of individual minds in colective action, but once produced they have a life of their own.

E E Evans-Pritchard, Themes of Primitive Religion

Plainly, it is common to every living person to grow through various levels of consciousness until they reach maturity, and Jean Piaget (1896-1980 AD) spent his life tracing them. Observing infants and children, he showed how they learnt to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, how they used symbols, then generalizations then abstractions.

Piaget concluded that before the emergence of philosophic and scientific thinking in pre-Socratic Greece, the level of conceptual thought of mature humans was little more than that of a modern ten year old. As more complex ways of thinking were explored, more adults were taught them and gradually the level of conceptual thought improved as people progressed beyond ten years old, until now they think maturely at about 18 years old. Though they still have things to learn, they are able to do it, unless they have been mentally disabled in some way. If conciousness in human beings developed through history in the same stages, the the metaphor of the infancy and childhood of a race means something, though it needs care in use.

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the pre-conscious psyche.

C G Jung

Jung thought that people have something innate called archetypes which myths reflect, but it is a pure speculation and unscientific because untestable. Real images not abstract concepts characterize primitive thought, and also schizophrenia, in which conceptual thought seems to revert to a primitive level rich in images and symbols, and the notion of self becomes uncertain. Freud considered religion, art and morality as generally illogical for logic is not innate or instinctive, but evolves with culture. Levi-Strauss was another who took primitive thought to be based on analogy. Analogy to this day impresses and persuades simple people especially in religious matters because it appeals to immature levels of thought, atavistically speaking, the primitive levels.

In the Upanishads, a father is educating his son about Atman, telling him to bring a banyan fruit, then to break it open. He asked what he saw—a lot of tiny seeds. The father told his son to break a tiny seed and tell him what he saw. The seed was too small to have any visible stucture, so the boy answered that he saw nothing. The father's lesson for the boy was that the vast banyan tree came from nothing, yet the essence of the tree must have been present in the “nothing”. It was the tree's soul or Atman. The father goes on to tell the boy to put a handful of salt in a gourd of water, and to leave it overnight. The boy did as he was told, noticing the salt settled at the bottom of the gourd. When the father asked his son to bring the gourd the next day, and to tell him what he saw, he could see nothing. The salt had dissolved. Told to taste the water the boy reported that it tasted salty. The father's lesson was that the salt was still present but invisibly as its soul. And like these examples soul pervaded the whole universe.

This father is thinking logically not purely mythopoetically, and has lessons in didactic method to teach us all, but not in proving what he has to say. These are analogies that prove nothing about the soul of the universe. Had there been proofs of the soul, then his analogies would have perhaps been good illustrations of its supposed ephemeral nature, but they prove nothing. Bishop Butler wrote a whole book purporting to prove Christianity in the same way, and though it is ingenious enough, it never approaches its objective.

The scientific view has its own invisible entities that could serve as this “soul” of the world, but they can be demonstrated by simple experiments to actually exist. Energy is an invisible entity that really does pervade everything, and does indeed do things as its name implies, like making salt dissolve and trees to grow. Energy could have been called soul or spirit and religions might have made a modicum of sense. Indeed, New Age gurus use the word “energy” for their own gullible devotees in the same way as traditional believers use soul. The primitive thinking which generated mythopoetry personalized its agents, so energy became “gods”, or “spirit” or “soul” having the characteristics of a person. Though a degree of logical thinking is possible even when the thought process is mythical, and analogy is elementary reasoning, abstract formal logic is a literate skill, and emerges only with the invention of writing.

Must Myth Reflect Ritual?

Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960 AD), an American anthropologist, saw both myths and rituals as fulfilling the same psychological need of people in society, though they could appear independently of each other. The need they fulfilled was to promote regular behaviour which reduced anxiety. The modern need for fashion paradoxically does the same for manufacturers. Of course, fashion does change, but it gives long periods of stability from unpredictable, almost random, fluctuations, allowing manufacturers to feel confident of knowing what they are making will sell. Ritual is an obsessive repetitive activity that gives an assurance of regularity, of normality, that there are no fundamental surprises. Everyone can rest assured things do not fundamentally change. Myths then give reasons for the rituals, justifying an essentially insane activity. They too do not have to be right, just reassuring, like the spurious explanations that stock brokers always have for market movements.

Yet all myths do not have this purpose because stories that seem indistinguishable from myths are also told as pure entertainment, and to offer pseudo scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Plainly, if an effort had been made by primitive people to explain their ritual behaviour, some myth will have done it, and although anthropologists have reported modern primitives in remote lands with extensive ceremonial and no mythical explanations, it seems unlikely that it would have been the norm. As soon as any child asked what it was all about, some adult would have fashioned an explanation, and of such explanations some would have been selected by the people on some criterion and would then have evolved into a more or less elaborate myth. Any childish enquiry about anything would have similarly produced a myth which had nothing to do with religion or ritual other than that the people explained their own thoughts as coming from the gods, just as some modern Christians still do. According to Jaynes, people believed their thoughts came from gods until only about a thousand BC! All explanations then are sacred ones, even when they are wrong.

So, the mythical outlook reflects a primitive manner of thinking which became a genre as thought advanced to higher stages. Plainly, then, rituals, which began as play-acting events that were considered necessary, were explained in the manner of thinking that then obtained, but so too were other things. What has happened is that the highly conservative nature of religion has preserved the mythical genre in particular connexion with religion, whereas in other fields more advanced thinking has replaced it. So now we have the relics of it in folklore and in whatever myths have been recorded and passed on to us from ancient times. Religion dominates this latter. So the classification of myths as sacred stories simply reflects an historical accident of socialization.

At any rate, it is plainly true that “almost every ritual, like almost every action in everyday life, can be referred back to some myth which provides a sufficient reason for it”, according to R M and C H Berndt, who studied Australian Aboriginal society. The myths that explained the other actions of everyday life obviously did not explain any religious ritual, and all myths cannot be related to rituals. Of course, these are cultural differences. Essentially secular societies like the Greeks had plenty of myths that were often nothing to do with religion, or did only to the extent that the caprice of some deity affected life, little more than a fairytale explanation of randomness. Theocratic or hieratic societies like the Jews, whose every action was a ritual, associated myths with them, and with a multiplicity of religious occasions. Here rituals are defined as “a controlled group of actions performed in a prescribed order for a supposed supernatural purpose”. If it sounds rather like magic, then the inference is obvious.

The fashionable idea that magic is necessarily individual and not social is fallacious.

G S Kirk, Myth

It is fashionable because Christians have used their propaganda power to make it so, allowing them to deny that their social ceremonies in church are indeed magic.

So there are good reasons why many of the myths we still have from ancient times are associated with religion, though far from all. To people who thought like children, logic had not emerged as a complete way of thought, except in elementary ways like cause and effect, which even young children have an idea of. People wanted explanations, they wanted causes, but chains of logic—formal thinking—was still beyond them. Religion was their science.

In the development of human culture, we cannot fix a point where myth ends or religion begins. In the whole course of history, religion remains indissolubly connected and penetrated by mythical elements.

E Cassirer

Mostly their responses were emotional and sympathetic. Religions and therefore religious explanations were emotionally valued as being a matter of life and death. Again, modern Christians think the same, although their life is now a life after death, not real life. And, just as Christians value their Holy Book, these early people valued their religious myths more than common myths, and preserved them more readily when writing was discovered.

Thinking was in an affective, mythopoetic mode, and religion developed when people thought in this pre-logical way, so that now religion is ineluctably linked with mythical explanations—supernatural ones. Many modern primitives studied by anthropologists will say that some of their myths are “true” whereas others are “not true”. The quizzical marks suggest that the primitive understanding of what is true is not likely to be ours, but it is “true” to them. It means to them something like “important”. And what are “true” myths? Most commonly they are the ones linked with religion, while speculative explanations and folktales, they do not consider as true! Like our distinction between fact and fiction, to them religious myths are true in the sense of being fact. Other myths are fiction. They are not true. Folktales and speculative myths can become true if they are accepted as religious myths, and as religious myths were elaborated, some mythical conjectures were adapted into them. Because dreams were just as “true” to them as actuality, their boundaries between fact and fiction were not ours, and this it is that introduces the fantasy into this primitive mode of thinking and explaining things.

[Myths] concern the world as it was in some past age before the present conditions were established.

Stith Thompson, The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend

Quite so, but the conditions were the conditions of thought in the human mind and human society, not the external actuality of Nature as some might imagine this means.

Myths are usually envisaged as taking place in a timeless past.

G S Kirk, Myth

Kirk wants to make a distinction between myth and folktales in that he says folktales are set in historical time, but he is surely wrong. The introductory formula of fairy tales, “once upon a time”, that Kirk thinks implies some historical time—some time in remembered history—really suggests no particular time, and therefore any time and every time! A characteristic of myths, perhaps the key characteristic, is that they are timeless, as he says himself. What is timeless is always so—it is continuously true, and myths have this quality. The events of them are in a continuous loop. They never stop. They are like the film Last Year in Marienbad.

Fairy or folk tales are the same and many are ancient myths whose context has been lost making them even more timeless than they were. Some might even have been the religious myths of dead religions, while others offer a timeless cautionary message, against pedophiles (Little Red Riding Hood), warning little girls not to get pregnant (Humpty Dumpty), and so on, no less mythical since myths are personified speculative warnings and explanations.

Myths of the ANE

The myths of Mesopotamia are the best preserved and most extensive of the ANE, and have influenced most of their neighbour’s mythologies, not least the Greeks via the Hurrian myths of Syria, and thereby the Phœnician ones. The Greek Kronos is Kumarbi, and Typhoeus is Ullikummi. Mesopotamian myths are well preserved because they are written on baked clay tablets in cuneiform script, and thousands of these small tablets with their tiny script have been recoverd from excavations like those of the library of Ashurbanipal. Some of the languages on them, like Sumerian, are not fully understood, so the translations have their uncertainties and guesses. Moreover, the tablets are sometimes damaged and fragmentary and some in a succession comprising a book are missing, so whole chapters can have been lost.

What is quite inexcusable, though, is that many have been reburied! They have been put in the cellars of museums and forgotten, or ignored, some for a century or more! Literally thousands of tablets, and many in Semitic languages and therefore offering no insurmountable problems of translation, have never even cursorily been examined, or, if they have, the scholars have kept quiet about it. Why should that be? It is a scandal like that of the inexcusable delays in publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more than one critic has suggested there were less than scholarly reasons for it. Religious professionals, the bent scholars of these pages, have always been more interested in preserving their beliefs and their sinecures than in discovering the real roots of Judaism and Christianity. They know, of course, that the only outcome must be evidence that their cherished religions were not supernaturally revealed at all, but continued an ancient tradition.

Even the Akkadian material, some of which appeared in a spate of publication in the 1920s and 1930s and now the source of our knowledge of the quest of Gilgamesh and Babylonian Flood myths, has subsequently been neglected. But the Sumerian scripts are the older, and the language was preserved as a holy one even when everyone spoke a Semitic dialect. It was the beginning of the use of arcane languages for religious purposes that we see continued in the use of Hebrew by the Jews, and the use of Latin by the Catholic church. Sumerian texts were written down by 1700 BC, but, from linguistic analysis, are copies of works a half millennium older, and even the Akkadian material of Ashurbanipal’s seventh century BC library are Old Babylonian of a millennium earlier.

Civilization had arisen in Mesopotamia based on neighbouring cities, each with a king and a temple to a deity, the king being the regent on earth of the deity. The myths of each city explained why its deity was important, how it had founded the city and its temple, and guaranteed them to its citizens. When one city was overcome by another, their myths were changed to show why one city and its god were dominant over the other. Thus Inanna made Enki drunk and removed from him the deeds which established Enki’s city of Eridu as the favoured city, and took them to Uruk, her city. The Babylonian creation myth showed how Marduk, the Babylonian god, became the supreme god, taking on the powers of Anu, Enlil, and Enki, then building his own temple, the Esagila, at Babylon and adopting it as his own city.

All of these myths are literary ones, not oral ones. They are poems and not the spoken myths of emerging consciousness. Consciousness has well and truly emerged, but myth remained the genre of explanation from the earlier period, albeit now a literary form. Samuel Noah Kramer thought the Sumerian myths expressed basic relationships in a personalized way. Anu, Enlil and Enki are sky, air, and ground—earth and water—the sky separated by the air from the ground. Since myths are much more than this, he attributes the elaborations to the conscious imaginations of the scribes. So, who were the poets? Emergent civilizations quickly evolved minstrels, in Mesopotamia, the “nar” who are mentioned along with the “dubsar” or scribe, but the absence of any hints of an oral tradition behind the poems, unlike Homer’s work, suggests that any oral phase was long superseded by these professionals, or that the poems first heard in Mesopotamia were transmitted to Greece by travelling bards. The long history of civilization here in Mesopotamia meant that minstrels, cantors, and scribes had long before been employed by temples, and it was their work that was set down, whether or not there was an additional but unrecorded tradition of pop music.

The neo-Assyrian tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library were copies of ancient traditional works, the rubrics of them often explaining that this was a new copy. So, the original myths were established centuries before, and the changes made to the originals had long ago been accepted into the established myth, which had been thoroughly polished by the professional poets and musicians leaving no trace of a primitive stage. The Gilgamesh stories changed language from Sumerian to Akkadian, with the core unchanged, although subtler changes of detail and emphasis were made. Some of the details were folktale like elements and they might have been incoprporated from popular sources. The fact that the mythical stories of Babylonia were taken into neighbouring countries suggests the power of the Babylonian myths compared with any native myths. They were obviously preferred. It was cultural imperialism. Lesser countries adopted the culture of the great one.

Thorkild Jacobsen saw the intention of the mythmakers as a symbolic projection of Nature, with detailed speculations of experiences expressed as personified gods. Enki has the characteristics of water, flowing in irrigation canals, then sinking into the earth and fertilizing it. R Pettazzoni has shown unarguably that the chief deity is most commonly a sky god of storm and rain in hot countries, with the clear implications of the release from anxiety when the god freed them from the very real fear of drought and famine. He really was their saviour.

In the Sumerian myth of Nunurta and Asag, Ninurta’s weapon, Shamur, tells him to attack the demon of sickness and death, Asag. He does so, killing the monster but causing the water of Kur, the underworld, to rise, displacing fresh water from the irrigation canals. This will bring famine, and to stop it, Ninurta builds a pile of stones “in front of” Sumer and “on top of” Kur, stopping the bitter water (presumably salty) from rising. The water already present, the god drains into the Tigris and the irrigation system again brings in fresh water. Ninurta’a mother, Ninmah, the earth goddess, is made the Lady of the Stones. Plainly, the myth is to do with irrigation, and the flood from Hades sounds like an incursion of the sea. Sumer was low lying, being near the mouths of the Tigris and the Euphrates at the head of the Persian Gulf. The stone wall suggests a sea wall to hold back the sea, which was considered as evil and chaotic, and properly associated with the underworld and death. Ninurta was a warrior god, a type of Mars, suitable for killing monsters, and Ninmah was a proper goddess to invoke to protect the land from attacks by salt water. Ninurta here has a role similar to that of Marduk in the later myth when he kills a sea monster in the form of Tiamat, the chaos demon. One would imagine that a sea wall would have left archaeological traces, but no doubt any that remain will be well silted over by now, and well back from the present head of the Gulf.

Enki does not appear in this myth, even though he is responsible for fresh water, and irrigation, but he appears with Ninhursag, another name of the earth mother, in a complicated myth in which Enki impregnates successive generations of his own female offspring, and nearly dies from eating eight plants but for Ninhursag planting him in her womb and creating eight minor gods to save him. This myth occurs in the perfect land of Dilmun, often considered to be a protoype of Eden, a place that nevertheless is dry and needs irrigating, something Enki arranges. Yet there are marshes nearby that the offspring of Enki walk in, and the place is supposed to be south of Sumer. It must be the northern edge of Arabia, virtually at the western edge of modern Kuwait—a place that was then probably partly beneath the sea—but edging on to the marshes at the mouths of the rivers. The meaning of the myth is mixed, having some aetiological purpose but at core is about irrigating the desert margins to make them productive.

Of course, we have to accept that we are translating a myth into our language and our reasonable and logical patterns of thinking. Perhaps our interpretations are right, but we must always remember that the people who heard and repeated the myth did not think as we do. The underlying logic, as we see it, might be right, but they actually understood the causes to be gods interacting the way the myth describes. That was their reality. We have invisble energy, forces and fields but they had invisible gods doing the same sort of things. The primitive Amerindian or Kalahari Bushman tracking game can read what are, to a townie, invisible traces, yet his explanation is likely to be in terms of gods and spirits, how the wind god makes dust to erase the tracks, and so on. When Enki was described as a superrnatural heavenly bull of vast dimensions who mates with the goddess of the river Tigris as a cow to fill her with fresh water, that is how the local people understood it—as a direct linking of impregnation with fertility of the fields. It was not an allegorical interpretation to them. Enki, who became Ea, floated everywhere in his boat, like a feather on a stream, determining fate, blessing flocks, growing crops, filling the river with fish, calling down rain, inventing useful skills like farming, ploughing, tools and bricks, and appointing the other gods to supervise everything.

Interestingly, in other traditions, Enlil did these things. Enlil was the air, and was therefore a wind and storm god, but several important myths relating to him had curious parallels in the Enki myths. Enlil was also the god of irrigation and therefore of fertility, presumably because he blew in the rain clouds. Perhaps once, as rival gods of rival cities, they had the same functions, and some of their myths were copied, but with the unification into a nation state, some attempt was made to emphasize their different functions.

The myth of the descent of Ishtar is Akkadian, but scarcely differs from the myth of the descent of Inanna, a Sumerian myth from almost 1000 years earlier. The goddess choses to visit her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, and, after finding the entrance, descends though seven gates progressively losing her garments on the way. When she arrives, she is dead—and naked! The gods find out what has happened and send one messenger (Akkadian version) or two (Sumerian version) to retrieve her, for which purpose they have a vial of life-giving holy water. She is resurrected and ascends again into the world of life, but is faced then with the ineluctable rule that to return from death a substitute must be offered. It is her husband, Tammuz (Sumerian, Dumuzi). The differences between the ancient Sumerian myth and the more recent Akkadian one occur at several points, but the ancient Sumerian one results in Inanna’s resurrection being at the expense of death and disease being generally released into the world, like the Greek myth of Pandora’s box. The later version explains the seasonal loss of fertility and apparent death of vegetation in the world. The two messengers, in the Sumerian version, made from the dirt beneath Enki’s fingernails, are plainly temple officials—human priests—one carrying water and the other the food of life, the Greek nectar and ambrosia. In the Akkadian version the single messenger is a Eunuch whom Ereshkigal falls in love with, so, she is willing to let him use the holy water on Ishtar. The notion of the Queen of the Dead falling in love with an infertile Eunuch fits the theme of the myth which combines infertility and death. Dumuzi appears in another myth standing more for ewe’s milk than the shepherd god, the myth highlighting the antipathy between thunder and milk in a folktaley way.

Mesopotamian myths are often concerned with the connexions between fertility, life and death, the creation of the world, its polarities and its social and technical functions. But these are personified as the relationships and activities of gods, helping men but also hitting them with the demons of evil and disease, and the effects of their anger as the dangers of floods, famines and wars. The Flood myth is widespread in the ANE. In the Akkadian myth, the hero is Utnapishtim, with his wife, the only immortal humans in the Gilgamesh myth. In another fragmentary Akkadian myth, the hero is Atrahasis. On a broken Sumerian tablet, the hero is Ziusudra, who was warned in a dream to build a boat. Flood is an ever present danger in a broad flat river valley like that close to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, so the theme is appropriately local. Catastrophic flooding must have occurred regularly giving rise to the thought that a divinely severe one could kill off everyone in the world, with only the truly pious being allowed to escape. And the sky looks like a great heavenly sea—or flood—with the sun god sailing across it in his ark. The name, Ziusudra, is curiously reminiscent of Dyaus Pitar, the Greek Zeus, and Zarathustra! The Flood myth might be a decayed creation myth in which the Noah figure and his wife had the role of Adam and Eve, the first humans, and the pairs of animals being the first animals, all riding on the ark which was the dry land floating on the watery primæval world. In the old adage of “as above so below” the sun god sailing his ark across the heavenly sea was considered to reflect what god saw below! When other myths of origin, like that of Marduk were consciously chosen over earlier ones like this, they were nevertheless retained in an altered form.

Akkadian myths are less concerned with irrigation, and so Ea, the equivalent of Enki, has evolved into more of a god of wisdom, though not losing his aqueous connexions. The myths are concerned with monster fights, conditions in the underworld and pestilence, but also wise men overcoming dangers, and even managing to ascend to heaven to plead with the gods, and finally the wish for immortality as in the Gilgamesh epic. The gods, the city gods of the Sumerians, had lost their singular association with the cities and had become the pantheon of a powerful nation state. In both Assyria and Babylonia, the cities were subsumed by the state, so the god’s purpose as deed holders for the individual cities was diluted, and concerns were more with the broader society that had ensued—justice, administration, kingship and the function of religion as a political tool. The move from mythical form to literary form is illustrated by the Creation Myth which is all together more mythical—shorter and more cryptic—in its Old Babylonian incarnation than in the later long winded Assyrian one.

At the Babylonian Akidu (New Year) festival myth, the Enuma Elish was recited by a solitary priest on the fourth day of twelve days of ceremonial, standing for the twelve months of the year, which were the twelve ages of Creation in microcosm. The purpose of it was to regenerate the king at the start of the year, at the spring equinox, and the creation myth was an important part of it. A portion of a ritual text from the Seleucid era describes the whole procedure, and has been published in ANET.

The world began as primæval water, the fresh water of Apsu, a male principle, and the bitter salt water of Tiamat, a demonized goddess. They gave birth to intermediate gods of obscure nature, probably meant to stand for mud, familiar as a semi-solid deposit from water, and so conceived here as types of “thicker” water (Lahmu and Lahamu), and then the separation out of these until there is a distinct divide between them (Ashar and Kishar) conceived perhaps as a horizon. And, indeed, this last pair gave birth to the sky god, Anu, and he gave birth to the water god, Ea. So the succession seems akin to a settling out process, as if earth is shaken with water and left to settle. The primæval series of god is then the stages in which the water clears to leave land, water and air as distinct layers. The young gods then offended the older ones who decided they were mistakes and to kill them. Ea prevents the plan by killing Apsu and taking over his realm and functions. After mating with Damkina (Ninhursag), Enlil, the god of air wind and storm, is born and acts to separate Anu from Ea.

This latter is to take a liberty because in the extant myth, the son of Ea is not Enlil but Marduk, an amalgam of the other gods, but the emerging sense of the myth suggests it was Enlil in an earlier version, and, as we know, Marduk was imposed quite consciously as top god to go with Babylon as top city. Tiamat, who is chaos and everything that opposes society—to us the personification of evil, but then seen as the turbulent and bitter sea—rallied the old gods and now Ea and Anu were impotent. The newest god, Marduk agreed to confront Chaos on condition that success would be rewarded by his being made top god. They agree and he succeeds in killing the monster with a fierce wind that split Tiamat into two halves. Since Enlil was the wind and storm god, this plainly confirms he was the original hero. The two halves of the monster make up the waters of the sky and the waters of the ground, suggesting that in the original myth, Enlil, wind, divided Chaos to make the sky, Anu, and the ground, Ea. Here is the plot of Genesis 1. Marduk, the new god, having killed the monster, he is made top god, a significant step towards monotheism.

Marduk completes the creation by setting in place the heavenly bodies, appointing gods to their places and duties, and making men to serve the gods, whence the use of the word “services” ever since for religious rituals. Having built his temple, the Esagila, at a great hevenly banquet, the assembled gods assigned to Marduk his fifty names, a recitation that takes fully a quarter of the whole poem, a rather tedious and pointless drill, one might think, except that it seems to be essential to the transfer of power from Enki to Marduk, as Enki, curiously means “fifty”. The names possibly represented the gods and therefore the charter deeds of the the different cities that comprised the Babylonian nation, and were a mythical form of constitution, and therefore seen as peculiarly important.

The myth of Gilgamesh is from Sumeria, but we have it as an Akkadian version. It addresses the question of mortality. Gilgamesh appears on the post-diluvian Sumerian king list, so is considered likely to have been an historical king, the king of Uruk. Several Sumerian stories relate to Gilgamesh, some seeming to be essentially non-mythical history, describing, for example, how he conducted his statecraft, his death and funeral. The epic itself is from about 2000 BC, but the main and most complete source is that from Ashurbanipal’s library. Fairly complete versions in Hittite and Hurrian are known, and a fragmentary one on Old Babylonian tablets. Generally, they complement each other, confirming the main source, but expanding on its lacunae. They show a myth that was basically not being changed but rather was being religiously copied. Despite all this, though, only the eleventh tablet about the Flood is completely preserved, so plenty of gaps remain. This is a careful composition far removed from any oral tradition but written in the mythical genre, and making use of mythical themes. It is really quite like the bible, a carefully compiled compendium of Sumerian myths arranged to make a convincing whole.

Many themes are present in the Enuma Elish mythology and can be traced through Hurrian myths into the Greek ones in Hesiod’s Theogony, or that is the thesis of Cornford, in a much cited paper. Insofar as the Babylonian epic is based on ritual, so too is the Typhoeus story in Hesiod. The ritual was a ritual battle between the king (Marduk) and a priest wearing a demon mask (Tiamat), and the myth was an explanation of the ritual, according to myth-ritual theory. Yet, it seems unlikely that a ritual battle should simply have started for no reason, then a myth derived from it. More convincingly, the myth arose as an explanation in the pre-logical mind of some important conflict in Nature, and the ritual inaugurated as a magical enactment of the conflict, choreographed to come out right! The significant battle here as in many other places is the seasonal battle between the rainy season and the dry season, or elsewhere the summer season and the winter season. The rains or the summer sun, respectively, brought fertility and life to the people for another year, so it was important to them that the outcome was what they wanted.

Common Themes in Greek Myths

Greek myths are not at all original. They have been extensively rewritten, and it can be seen continuing in the works of the great Greek dramatists. These myths have been modelled much more as entertainment or as explanations of human psychology than the originals. Literary editors and authors like Æschylus campletely change the purpose of a myth, and the same has already happened in Homer and Hesiod, although the originals are still intact enough to be seen still. The same is true of the Jewish scriptures which have used a variety of ancient mythical sources, as well as historical archives and king lists, drawing on Sumerian models, but have deliberately recast the material according to a new quite conscious plan—that of the Deuteronomist—and this overlays the mythological groundwork. G S Kirk has catalogued the themes—in a list reminiscent of G Polti’s 36 plots—that arise in Greek myth as:

1. Tricks, riddles, ingenious solutions to dilemmas used by gods and heroes for all purposes:
   • to disguise or unmask
   • to catch a thief or adulterer
   • to win a contest
   • to delay pursuit, etc
2. Transformations
   • of men and women into birds, trees, animals, snakes, stars
   • as a punishment
   • avoidance of an impasse
   • of deities into humans, temporarily
   • of women to evade amorous attention
   • of Zeus to further it
   • of waterdeities into all shapes
3. Accidental killing of a relative, lover or friend, often followed by flight to avoid vengeance or obtain purification
   • of Laius by Oedipus
   • of Actaeon by his dogs
   • of Cyzicus by the Argonauts
   • of Electron by Amphitryon
   • of Hyacinthus by Apollo
   • of Procris by Cephalus
   • of Catreus by Althaemenes
   • cf Megara by Heracles
   • cf Dryas by Lycurgus
   • cf Aigeus by Theseus, etc
4. Giants, monsters, snakes
   • as opponents of gods
   • as guardians of treasure
   • as ravagers to be destroyed by a hero
   • occasionally friendly, eg Hundred-handed giants, some Cyclopes, some Centaurs
   • sometimes of mixed animal and human shape, eg Sphinx, Minotaur, Centaurs, Satyrs
5. Attempts to get rid of a rival by setting impossible and dangerous tasks
6. Fulfilling a task or quest, sometimes with help of a god or girl
   • killing a monster
   • gaining an inaccessible object
   • freeing, sometimes marrying, a princess)
7. Contests
   • for a bride
   • for kingship
   • for honour
8. Punishment for impiety of various graphic kinds
   • for attempting a goddess
   • for boasting that one surpasses a deity
   • special kinds of death for opposing Dionysus
9. Displacement of parents or elders
   • actual or feared displacement
   • often in accordance with an oracle
10. Killing, or attempting to kill, one’s own child often in accordance with an oracle or prophecy
    • by exposure
    • to avoid displacement, cf 9
    • by accident
    • to appease a deity
11. Revenge by killing or seducing a man’s wife or murdering his children
12. Sons avenge mother or protect her against an oppressor
13. Disputes within the family
    • sons fight each other
    • children oppressed by stepmother
14. Deceitful wife, vainly in love with young man, accuses him of rape
15. Deceitful daughter, in love with father’s enemy, betrays father, is punished for it
16. Incestuous relationships
17. Founding a city
    • in accordance with an oracle
    • by following a certain animal
    • by other tokens, etc
18. Special weapons needed to overthrow a particular enemy, cure a wound, etc
19. Prophets and seers
    • understand language of animals
    • propound riddles
    • cure childlessness
    • reveal way out of an impasse
20. Mortal lovers of goddesses and mistresses of gods
21. Perils of immortality as a gift to men, danger of infinite old age if youth is not specified
22. External soul or life-token, the life of a hero depends on a hair, a firebrand, etc.)
23. Unusual births
    • from the head or thigh of Zeus
    • from mother at point of death
    • by castrating father, etc
24. Enclosure or imprisonment in a chest, jar, or tomb

Special Themes in Greek Myths

1. Fire
   • its gift or recovery
     • Phoroneus
     • Prometheus
   • needed for sacrifices
     • Zeus
     • Prometheus
   • makes immortal
     • Demophon
     • Achilles
     • cf Meleagrus
   • and the cooking of children
     • for testing or revenge
     • Tantalus
     • Atreus
     • Procne
     • Philomela
     • madness
     • Ino
     • Melicertes
   • or of the old
   • Medea
   • Pelias
   • cf Ixion and Eioneus
   • as divine or cathartic (Zeus’s lightning, stars as souls)
   • renewed annually
     • women of Lemnos
     • Heracles on Oeta
2. Golden age
   • golden race in Hesiod’s five-races myth
   • reign of Kronos
   • men dine with the gods
     • Tantalus
     • marriage of Peleus and Thetis
     • Cadmus and Harmonia
     • Mecone
     • cf Apollo as servant of Laomedon
     • Admetus
3. Disappearing fertility-deities, and attempts at retrieval from the underworld
   • Kore/Persephone ravished by Plouton, retrieved for part of each year
   • cf Dioscuri taking turns in underworld?
   • Adonis (cf Mesopotamian and other Asiatic fertility-gods)
   • cf Orpheus and Eurydice
   • cf Heracles and Alcestis, etc
   • mortal fertility-figures like daughters of Cecrops and Anius
4. Origin of old age and disease, perils of near-immortality
   • Pandora and the release of ills
   • the end of the golden age
   • punishment for trying to evade death
     • Sisyphus
     • Asclepius
     • Bellerophon?
   • dangers of immortality
     • Cheiron
     • Peleus
     • Tithonus
     • Cumaean Sibyl
     • cf Caeneus, Meleagrus
5. Displacement of elders
   • Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus (Heracles)
   • suppression of children to avoid displacement
     • Zeus and Thetis’s son
     • Laius and Oedipus
     • Priam and Paris, etc
   • cf family curses, Atreidae, Labdacids
6. Unusual births
   • earth (or sea) fertilized by divine seed or phallus
     • Kronos produces Typhoeus
     • Ouranos
     • Aphrodite
     • Hephaestus
     • Erichthonius
     • cf Ixion, Nephele
   • men created from earth
     • Deucalion and Pyrrha
     • the Spartoi at Thebes
     • Prometheus made man out of clay
   • birth from a male god
     • Athena from Zeus
     • Dionysus from Zeus (in a second birth)
     • cf Asclepius removed from mother by Apollo
     • Zeus’s brothers vomited up by Kronos
   • birth of twins, one mortal, the other divine
     • Polydeuces and Castor
     • cf Heracles and Iphiclus
7. Enclosure
   • in chest, which is set afloat
     • Danae and Perseus
     • Auge and Telephus
     • Tenes and Hemithea, etc
   • of fertility-object in chest
     • Adonis
     • put in chest by Aphrodite
     • Erichthonius, as snake
     • cf Leda’s egg
     • Meleagrus’s soul
   • as imprisonment in jar, tomb, or bronze room
     • of Ares by Aloadae
     • cf of Eurystheus or Cleomedes of Astypalaea
   • as refuge
   • of Polyidus
   • Danae
   • cf of evils in Pandora’s jar
8. Sex-change
   • of Teiresias
   • of Caenis-Caeneus
   • cf transvestism
     • Achilles
     • Dionysus
     • priest of Heracles in Cos, etc

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