The goal of comparative mythology is to find a “proto-mythology” that is the foundation from which all global myths may have been constructed. The same can be said for the fields of study of comparative religion and comparative cosmology—the attempt to find those common threads in the tapestry, or the first-laid cement framework before the walls went up. Myth, religion, and cosmology are all attempts to describe a culture’s history, beliefs, and identity and place in the Universal scheme of things. When scholars find common themes and motifs, it posits that ideas either spread from culture to culture, or developed simultaneously, and asks then how this happened.
It also begs the question: What is scientifically sound and what is pure fiction? How much of these myths and stories and religious beliefs were grounded in some true knowledge of the natural order of things, and how much were simply fantastical interpretations of how things worked? Two different schools of thought rule comparative mythology: Comparativists, who believe that a single myth was the origin point for all other myths that evolved around it, and Particularists, who suggest that different themes and elements in myth go against a common proto-myth, or as Joseph Campbell calls it, “monomyth.”
Figure 3-1: A diagram of the path of the monomyth of the hero’s journey.
The monomyth Campbell referred to was the hero’s journey, which he describes at length in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, a theme found in most if not all narrative stories and myths, in which as he describes it, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” where he then encounters all kinds of strange forces and entities, overcomes challenges, and emerges victorious, to then return a hero, often with newfound powers and abilities. The typical monomyth could be broken down into 17 stages within three main headings: the Departure/Call to Adventure; the Initiation/Trials and Temptations; and the Return/Mastery. If we think of the most widely known religious “stories” of the hero’s journey we can see this pattern: Jesus Christ, Buddha, Moses, Osiris. Some of the more modern stories we know and love that follow this structure include Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker takes on the hero role, and the journeys of Frodo in the Lord of the Rings tales. Possibly the most famous monomyth example of all is the quest of King Arthur and the Arthurian Romances of chivalry, adventure, and the journey to knighthood and the discovery of the Holy Grail. Some people think the modern-day Indiana Jones movies also follow this monomyth. In fact, along with the three-act structure, the monomyth/hero’s journey has become a very beloved and critical foundation for most of our favorite movies and television series, whether they are westerns, mysteries, or science fiction. Always, a lead character is being asked to mimic this mythical structure in a way that is satisfying to audiences on both a surface and subconscious level.
Many myths contain archetypes, or universal motifs, symbols, or symbolic patterns, ideas, and patterns of thought, and images that resonate with people on a global, collective level. Some of the most widely used archetypes include the dying God, as mentioned earlier, the Trickster, the scapegoat, the lost lover, the sexual wild woman, the damsel in distress, the rogue, the mentor/wise sage, the warrior, the great Mother, the powerful Father/Lord, and even elements within a story such as a Great Flood, the end of the world, virgin births, resurrection, and even sexual intercourse. The use of archetypes speaks to the subconscious, to the psyche, more so than to the conscious mind or intellect.
Three Popular Motifs
In myths from around the world, we are apt to find one of these three popular motifs present in one form or another. Each has its own archetypal symbolism, and all three represent the power and hold that the natural world had over our ancestors, who had yet to truly understand the way nature worked.
The Green Man
The Green Man motif is a symbol often found in carvings on churches, buildings, and homes that feature the face of a man surrounded by leaves or vegetation. Though the term was actually coined in 1939 in an article in The Folklore Journal, the Green Man, or Jack in the Green, was already a widely used motif and pagan fertility figure or nature spirit that represented the cyclical rebirth of nature each spring. Green Man motifs have appeared as far back as 400 AD.
Figure 3-2 : A Green Man sculpture on a Cistercian Abbey, Abbey Dore.
The World Tree/Axis Mundi
Present in many religious traditions and myths, from the Native American to the Meso-American to the Nordic and Siberian, a central “world tree” supports the heavens and connects the three levels of heaven, earth, and underworld together. In Norse myth, this tree is called Yggdrasil. In Hindu myth, it is the Ashvattha. To the Latvians, it was the Cosmic Tree. The Maya called it the yax imix che. Also associated with the concept of a “tree of life,” the World Tree was often believed to connect different dimensions or realities, and today might be considered a wormhole! The World Tree was one of many axis mundi symbols, which represented the center of the world where the heaven connects with the earth. A natural object such as a vine or mountain, or a manmade object such as a tower, staircase, pole, or pillar, could also represent the axis mundi.
The Serpent/Snake
A serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. A naked-like being called Mucalinda protected Buddha from the elements after he achieved enlightenment. A dragon/serpent named Ouroboros swallows his own tail as a symbol of infinity, cycles, and eternity. The Nagar dragon eats from the roots of the Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse myth. The Vision Serpent meant rebirth to the Mayan civilization. The two-headed serpent Nehebkau guarded the entrance to the underworld in Egyptian myth. The snake Goddess Wadjet, an Egyptian cobra, was even the first known oracle and is depicted as the crown of Egypt. Apollo killed the female serpent Python, who guarded the holy seat of Gaia at Delphi.
The serpent is one of mythology’s oldest and most widely used symbols, and the snake is associated with the most ancient nature rites and rituals on record. The snake represents duality to some cultures, fertility to others, and was often the guardians of temples and sacred spaces. Because snakes shed their skin, they became associated with the cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth, as well as healing, immortality, and transformation. Sea and cosmic serpents and many types of dragons are also common motifs and were sometimes given deity status, as with the Central American Quetzalcoatl or “feathered serpent,” and the Ayida-Weddo of Haiti, a spirit of fertility and wife to the spirit father, Dan. Often, sacred serpents were depicted at or near World Trees, coiled around the trunk or under the tree itself. Another match-up of the Tree of Life and serpent symbolism is the caduceus of Hermes and the staff of Moses, both of which were rod-like sticks or staffs with coiled serpents entwined around them.
Myth and Psyche
Other than seeking that “monomyth,” there is also the search for common psychological themes and elements (including Jungian archetypes), and historical and scientific accuracy, all of which might suggest parallels between cultures that may not have had the opportunity to actually communicate with one another. Mircea Eliade, who was a professor of the history of religions, even believed that myth was an essential foundation of religion as well as a part of the human psyche. This was echoed by Joseph Campbell’s own belief that myth allowed people a way to understand their own individual lives and was more than just some archaic attempt at story-telling.
That myths were “heroic legends” as once described by classicist Robert Graves, who authored a number of books on myth and religion, has never been argued. Clearly, myth and even religious parables, legends, and stories tell us of the experiences and journeys of heroes and heroines and Gods and Goddesses, yet the common threads suggest that beneath those flashy tales of challenges overcome and obstacles met with are some real, factual details about life as they knew it. Legends and myths contained a seed of truth that may only be understandable if interpreted via the psyche, and not the mind and intellect. Myth and legend also document actual experiences as understood by those who experienc
ed them, even if that language is primitive to us. Myth and legend serve to attempt to express a deeper spiritual connection we once had with our natural surroundings, thus giving deity-like powers to aspects of nature we didn’t yet understand (like volcanoes, lightning, and earthquakes). Myth and legend also helped our ancestors articulate their idea of their place in the cosmos, again from their level of knowledge and understanding, not ours.
Joseph Campbell used the term metaphor when describing the purpose of myth, and if myths are to be taken metaphorically, then they don’t have to be true or false, fact or fiction. They simply have to act as stories that represent or symbolize something else, which is what metaphors do. Therefore, the characters and events in a myth, religious story, or legend may be more about what they symbolize than they are about themselves directly. Thus, a God fighting a three-headed creature may not be so much about the God or the hydra, but more about overcoming huge challenges or standing up to obstacles and succeeding. A raging, angry God of the Sea unleashing a flood on lowly sinful humans may be less about the God, the flood, and the drowning people, and more about how karma catches up with us in the end, and how our actions have often equal and opposite reactions.
Like the stories in the Bible, myths can also be educational, moral, and inspirational—even motivational. They can entertain and instruct us, direct and guide us, and even tell us what to do to assure our success in the world. Magical and supernatural elements serve as story devices to represent the unknown both within us and outside of us. Everything is symbolic, and everything is important.
In other words, a myth or legend is a single story that tells two stories at once, as described so succinctly in “The Role of Truth in Myth—Myth As Metaphor” from the Exploring the Arts Foundation. What a great way to describe myth and legend. Two stories at once, two purposes, two truths on two different levels. Because although metaphor, symbol, and motif are ever present in all myths, we still see glimpses of hard fact, hard knowledge, and hard science—even if it looks a little funky to us on this side of the wormhole of time.
A Time of Gods
Take, for example, a couple of our favorite Roman Gods—Jupiter and Vulcan, to be exact. Jupiter is the supreme God of light and sky in the Roman pantheon, and the Roman equivalent to the Greek Zeus, also known as Jove (sounds similar to Jehovah!). Vulcan is the Roman God of fire and the patron of metal works and craftsmanship. His Greek equivalent is Hephaestus. Jupiter throws lightning bolts through the sky and was also called Totans, the Thunderer; Lucetius, of the light (similar to Lucifer); and Fulgurator (of lightning). Vulcan, on the other hand, had his workshop below the volcano Mt. Etna in Sicily, where he forged metals, iron, and armor that shook the ground and spewed ash and spark and flame into the skies above. Heck, his name even sounds like volcano.
So thousands of years ago, when there were raging thunderstorms and volcanic eruptions, without the scientific understanding of weather, climate, storm systems, volcanism, plate tectonics, and associated earthquakes, people did what they had to do to deal with nature in a way that made sense to them. Surely, those brutal storms and that fierce lightning that lit up the dark skies were the rage of a God disappointed in mortal actions. Surely, the shaking of the ground and the eruption of ash and debris out of the top of the mountain was the God below forging his wares, angry perhaps at his wife, Venus, who was a big flirt and desired by all.
The actions and behaviors of nature became the actions and behaviors of the characters in myth and religious stories.
In fact, what was going on in the skies was as much of interest as what was happening on the ground. Cosmic influences and even pure astronomical knowledge are evident in many myths and origin stories. Our ancestors were observers and had a keen sense of what was going on with the stars and planets and the moon, even if they didn’t necessarily understand the hard science behind it all. Gods and Goddesses represented various planets and the sun and the moon. Solar deities became associated with some of the most critically important deities and even religious figures (Mithras, Jesus), and even the constellations were assigned to various deities.
The earliest sciences may have been astronomy and mathematics, with medicine coming up from the rear to show. Descriptions of the physical world and how it “measured up” are all over myths and religious texts, often peppered in with tales of fantastical and even miraculous elements, begging the question: Did our ancient ancestors have vivid imaginations as we do today, or was the supernatural world actually visible to them in a way it isn’t today? Look at the popularity of the paranormal today. Can we really then discount all stories of oddities we don’t have names or explanations for that our ancestors wrote and sang and spoke of?
We are not so sure.
The Mill and the Wheel
Because astronomy is a field of science that relies on observation, we today have the abundance of ancient glyphs, rock art, and drawings of the movement of the moon, sun, and stars, and even how they correspond with natural growing and hunting cycles below. Our calendars reflect this ancient astronomical knowledge of measuring time in accordance with cosmic movement and activity. Even the moon’s phases and solar and lunar eclipses were easily recorded over periods of time if one was observant enough, even later allowing the Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus to study and perfect our understanding of the phenomenon known as the precession of the Earth’s axis as approximately 26,000 years about the second century BC, long before we had telescopes and computers to figure that stuff out for us.
One of the most instrumental written works examining myth and the transmission of knowledge is Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth. Published in 1969, and written by two scholars, professor of history and philosophy of science at M.I.T. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, professor of the history of science at University of Frankfort, Hamlet’s Mill was the amazing and complex examination of the role of astronomical objects and movements, and their association with various myths and legends. When others were theorizing about myth as a representation of a hero’s journey and an archetypal human adventure story, the authors of this book contended that it was more about “as above, so below,” and the connection between cosmic activities and those that happened far below, on earth.
The title came from the story of a legendary mythical figure called Amleth, who owned a powerful mill that rotated around the pole star. This heavenly mill’s wheel, as the myth states, symbolizes the turning in the sky of the stars, and the axle of the wheel is the axis running from the North Pole. The Amleth myth has elements not found in the Shakespearean story of Hamlet, but our concern here is that this mill would become the great wheel in the sky by which astronomical events occurred. The spinning millstones then represented the circular rotation of the orbits of planets and our own as it spins on its axis, giving us our particular view of the skies.
The main astronomical observation this book focuses on is the precession of the equinox and the travels of the sun through our zodiac system. Because this would have been observable to all cultures and civilizations, the theory is that common themes in myths all over the world come from said observations, with the symbolic retelling of the sun’s journey and the appearance of a new pole star, often accompanied by great earthy distress. The millstone would fall off its frame in the legend, signifying the passing of one zodiacal age giving way to another, which was later symbolized by tales of kings overthrown by new rulers and a new established order for the “new age.” The stories of Gods and Goddesses and their own interactions with the sun, sky, sea, and earth were then to be thought of as imaginative ways to depict astronomical events, including comets, meteors, dying stars, and solar activity, but at the heart of it all was the precession.
The strange thing is, this precession took a total of 26,000 years for the sun to make a complete journey around the astrological cosmos from the point of view of our Earth’s wobbling axis, and that means t
hat observations would have to have taken place for thousands of years to figure this out. Somehow, these ancient peoples knew of the changes of one zodiac sign to another and often modeled their stories with symbols associated with one sign. The incredible focus on detail and observation of the skies above obviously played a huge role in the ancient worldview that emerged over time into the view we have today.
As the wheel of the mill continues to turn on and on, we pass from one age into the next, from one epoch into another, from one celestial cycle to another, and a number of books look at the precession as a model for many legends and myths, suggesting that science and math somehow wormed its way into those stories of gods and goddesses we once took for pure entertainment.
Though Hamlet’s Mill was dissected, and not always positively so, by critics and scholars who blanched at the complex and often-confusing text and the numerous assumptions that were based upon a shaky and unproven theory of the existence of the discovery of the precession long before the acceptable Greek date, perhaps even as far back as 4000 BC, and despite the many suggestions that the two author/scholars were operating with limited, tenuous, and outdated source information, it has taken on a sort of renaissance as a more scientific way to examine myth, even as it goes against the grain of most scholarly thought. A whole new area of study has sprung out of Hamlet’s Mill called “archeo-astronomy” (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 7), and many books that came afterward, including the seminal The Mythic Image by Joseph Campbell, Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, and dozens of others, attempted to either challenge, expand, confirm, or deny the book’s content.
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