Parallel Myths

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Parallel Myths Page 1

by J. F. Bierlein




  To my mother,

  Veronica LaFleur Parrent Bierlein

  (1931-1992),

  and

  Robert G. Hirschfeld

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  PART ONE: AN INVITATION TO MYTH

  1. An Introduction

  What Is Myth?

  Language and Myth

  Time and Myth

  History and Myth

  The Civic Myth

  Morality and Myth

  The Sense of the Sacred

  2. The Cast of Characters

  The Greek and Roman Pantheon

  The Norse Pantheon

  The Gods of India

  The Egyptian Pantheon

  The Hawaiian Pantheon

  The Aztec Pantheon

  PART TWO: THE MYTHS

  3. Beginnings—The Creation Myths

  Creation Myths of India

  The Creation Myth of Iran

  The Norse Creation Myth

  Greek Creation Myths

  Creation Myths of Africa

  Creation Myths of Egypt

  The Creation Myth of Finland

  The Chinese Creation Myth

  The Creation Myth of Japan

  The Polynesian Creation Myths

  Creation Myths of the Americas

  The Babylonian Creation Myth

  The Biblical Creation Stories

  The Talmudic Creation Story

  “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson

  Some Notes on the Creation Myths

  4. The Earliest Times

  The Biblical Fall

  The Talmudic Fall

  The Story of Poia (Blackfoot Indian)

  The Four Ages of Man (India)

  The Five Ages of Man (Greece)

  The Five Suns (Aztec)

  The Five Worlds (Navajo)

  North American Indian Myths of Emergence

  Three Stories of Maui the Trickster (Polynesia)

  Prometheus and Epimetheus (Greece)

  The Origin of Medicine (Cherokee)

  Murilé and the Moonchief (Kenya)

  The Human Race Is Saved (Iroquois)

  5. The Flood Myths

  The Story of Noah

  Manu and the Fish (India)

  Utnapishtim (Babylonia)

  The Flood Myth of Hawaii

  Tata and Nena (Aztec)

  Deucalion (Greece)

  North American Flood Myths

  The Flood Myth of the Incas

  The Flood Myth of Egypt

  6. Tales of Love

  Greek and Roman Love Myths

  Two Peruvian Love Stories

  Angus Og (Scotland and Ireland)

  Algon and the Sky-Girl (Algonquin Indian)

  7. Morality Tales from the Myths

  Morality Tales from the Mahabharata (India)

  Anansi the Spider (West Africa)

  Greek Morality Tales

  8. Four Parallel Stories

  The Story of Two Brothers (Blackfoot Indian)

  The Story of Two Brothers (Egypt)

  Bellerophon (Greece)

  Joseph and Potiphars Wife (Genesis 39)

  9. Some Brief Myths of the Hero

  The Story of Siegfried (Norse/Germany)

  Theseus (Greece)

  Hiawatha Tarenyawagon (Iroquou)

  The Myth of Sisyphus (Greece)

  10. The Journey to the Underworld and the Path of Death

  Ishtar in the Underworld (Babylonia)

  Marwe in the Underworld (Kenya)

  Savitri (India)

  Pare and Hutu (New Zealand)

  Sayadio in the Land of the Dead (Iroquois)

  The Spirit Bride (Algonquin)

  Osiris and Isis (Egypt)

  Blue Jay in the Land of the Dead (Chinook)

  The Greek and Roman Afterlife

  Peruvian Death Myths

  Socrates on the Greco-Roman Afterlife

  Persian (Zoroastrian) Death Myths

  Nachiketas (India)

  Jewish Death Myth

  Tibetan Death Myths

  Baldur (Norse)

  The Death of Moses (The Talmud)

  11. The End—Visions of the Apocalypse

  How Rudra Destroys the Universe (India)

  The Persian Apocalyptic Myth

  The Islamic Apocalyptic Myth

  Maitreya (Tibet, Korea, Mongolia)

  Ragnarok: The Twilight of the Gods (Norse)

  North American Apocalyptic Myths

  The Old Testament

  The New Testament

  PART THREE: THE MODERN READINGS OF MYTH

  12. Views of Myth and Meaning

  13. Parallel Myths and Ways of Interpreting Them

  The Discovery of Parallel Myths

  Myth as a History of Prehistory: The Matriarchal Theory

  Transitional Thinking in the Interpretation of Myth

  Psychological Theories of Parallelism in Myth

  A Modern Nonpsychological Approach: Structuralism

  Philosophical Perspectives on Myth

  The “History of Religions” School of Myth

  14. Myth—Yours, Mine, and Ours

  Modern Questions of Faith

  The Demythologization of Judeo-Christian Culture

  The Legitimacy of the Supernatural

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to:

  My parents, John and Veronica Bierlein, for endless hours of dedicated editing, reading, moral support, and friendship above and beyond the call of parental duty;

  My mother in her own right, as she died during the production of this book, for her gift to me of the love of reading and the life of the mind;

  Robert G. Hirschfeld, for his consistent friendship and encouragement;

  My wife, Heather C. Diehl;

  Iris Bass and Lesley Malin Helm, my editors at Ballantine Books, for their assistance, advice, and consistently good humor;

  My sister, Cheryl Bierlein Fowler;

  Renee, for her encouragement and assistance;

  My friends at the Hoyt Library, Saginaw, Michigan: Vi, Fay, Ernestine, Pat, and Kate, among others;

  My high school English teachers: Kathy Hughes, John Kiley, Erik Swanson, and Art Loesel, for their introduction to the love of literature;

  Many other friends, including Maggie Rossiter of the Saginaw News, Sam and Ilona Hirschfeld Koonce, Dr. Steven Hirschfeld, Dr. Bill and Darlene Underhill, and many others.

  Preface

  Myth is an eternal mirror in which we see ourselves. Myth has something to say to everyone, as it has something to say about everyone: it is everywhere and we only need to recognize it.

  This book is for the person who would not normally think about mythology, let alone read a book on the subject. Based on the premise that to understand myths is an important step toward understanding ourselves, it was written as an invitation to the reading of myths and recognizing the mythic in our daily lives.

  Throughout the 1980s and into the present decade, popular interest in mythology has been continually on the rise. It is being discovered by a new generation, in the way it has spoken to countless generations past. The popularity of the books of Joseph Campbell, the televised Peter Brook dramatization of the Indian epic The Mahabharata, and the prominence of myth in such radio and television programs as “Northern Exposure” are all evidence of this current fascination.

  There have been numerous studies of myth and mythology. However, many of them, though fascinating, scholarly, and comprehensive, are written in language not readily accessible to the average thinking reader. They are not presented in a way that speaks directly to the person who is only just discovering the subject. I have felt
that a “reader-friendly” approach to the subject is necessary, though it is my hope that my book will not be the last stop in the reader’s exploration of myth, but a first step.

  I have been intrigued by mythology since childhood. It began many years ago when my teacher read to us from Thomas Bulfinch’s Mythology, and it grew through my high school and university years, and as I became acquainted with the writings of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Paul Ricoeur, and others. This enjoyment has been complemented by a delight in opera; seeing the great myths presented in operatic form has made them more alive and given me new insights.

  For most people, “mythology” means Greek or Norse mythology. However, this book goes beyond these sources to include myths from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Exposure limited to European literature does not allow the reader to see the fascinating parallels that exist among the myths of widely separated cultures.

  Such parallels demonstrate that human beings everywhere have much in common; the “primitive” and the “modern” are not all that different as we might think. In reading these myths, the gaps between cultures narrow to reveal what is constant and universal in human experience.

  I hope that you discover this fascinating bond of humanity while being thoroughly entertained.

  —J. F. BIERLEIN

  Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1989 and

  Frankenmuth, Michigan, 1993

  PART ONE

  AN INVITATION

  TO MYTH

  Life is a narrow vale between the cold

  And barren peaks of two eternities.

  We strive in vain to look beyond the heights, We cry aloud; the only answer

  Is the echo of our wailing cry.

  From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead

  There comes no word; but in the night of death

  Hope sees a star, and listening love can hear

  The rustle of a wing.

  These myths were born of hopes, and fears and tears,

  And smiles; and they were touched and colored

  By all there is of joy and grief between

  The rosy dawn of birth and death’s sad night;

  They clothed even the stars with passion,

  And gave to gods the faults and frailties

  Of the sons of men. In them the winds

  And waves were music, and all the lakes and streams,

  Springs, mountains, woods, and perfumed dells,

  Were haunted by a thousand fairy forms.

  —Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)

  1. An Introduction

  Was unterschiedet

  Götter von Menschen?

  Dass viele Wellen

  Vor jenen wandeln

  Ein ewiger Strom

  Uns hebt die Welle

  Verschlingt die Welle

  Und wir versinken.

  What is the difference

  Between gods and humans?

  That many waves before each

  from an eternal stream

  The waves lift us up;

  the waves overcome us,

  and we are swept away.

  —Goethe

  WHAT IS MYTH?

  What is myth? Let’s begin by telling one.

  Centuries ago in China, a young boy asked his grandfather how the world was created. The grandfather responded in the same way that his own grandfather had many years before:

  Once there was only a great chaos, Hundun. There were two emperors: Hu, the Emperor of the Northern Sea, and Shu, the Emperor of the Southern Sea. When they found Hundun, he was an incomplete being, lacking the seven orifices necessary for sight, hearing, eating and speech, breathing, smell, reproduction, and elimination. So, zapping him with thunderbolts, they bored one of these orifices every day for seven days. Finally, Hundun died in the process. The names Hu and Shu combine to form the word Hu-shu, or “lightning.” Thus the work of creation began when lightning pierced chaos.

  Within our own century a strikingly similar view of the creation was presented as a scientific theory. Harold S. Urey, the 1934 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, speculated that the origins of life might have been in the action of some kind of energy, perhaps lightning, on the primordial atmosphere of the earth. Whether or not Urey was familiar with this Chinese myth we do not know, yet his explanation echoed the one told by the Chinese grandfather.

  In 1953, a graduate student of Urey named Stanley L. Miller put this theory to the test in an experiment. He prepared two glass globes, one of which contained the gases believed to have composed the early atmosphere of the earth, and the other to collect gases formed as a result of his experiment. He activated the gases with “lightning” in the form of 60,000 volts of electricity. To his surprise, some of the materials that gathered in the second globe included nucleotides, organic components of the amino acids that join together to make DNA, which is the basic building block of all life. This was the first time that nucleotides had been produced in any manner independent of a living organism.

  On first reading, the Chinese myth sounds quite primitive. It is anthropomorphic; that is to say, the characters are natural forces personified. The two elements that form lightning are referred to as “emperors,” and chaos is portrayed in human form. This “primitive” myth, however, converges with advanced and sophisticated speculations on the origins of life. This becomes our first clue as to what myth is. It is the earliest form of science: speculation on how the world came into being.

  To the man on the street, however, the word myth brings to mind lies, fables, or widely believed falsehoods. On the nightly news, a health expert speaks of the need to “eliminate commonly held myths about AIDS.” In this context, myth is used to mean “a misconception”—in this case, even a dangerous misconception. But myth, in the sense that we use it in this book, often stands for truth. A myth is often something that only begins to work where our own five senses end.

  If myth were only a collection of stories, of falsehoods, why then does it continue to fascinate us? Why has myth persisted for centuries? As we shall see, a single definition of myth is never adequate, for it is many things operating at many levels.

  As we have seen, myth is the first fumbling attempt to explain how things happen, the ancestor of science. It is also the attempt to explain why things happen, the sphere of religion and philosophy. It is a history of prehistory, telling us what might have happened before written history. It is the earliest form of literature, often an oral literature. It told ancient people who they were and the right way to live. Myth was and still is the basis of morality, governments, and national identity.

  Myth is hardly the sole property of the “primitive, prescientific” mind. Our lives today are saturated with myth, its symbols, language, and content, all of which are part of our common heritage as human beings. Fables, fairy tales, literature, epics, tales told around camp-fires, and the scriptures of great religions are all packages of myth that transcend time, place, and culture. Individual myths themselves are strikingly similar between cultures vastly separated by geography. This commonality helps us to recognize the beauty of the unity in human diversity: We share something with all other peoples in all other times.

  Now we can begin to make some very general statements about myth.

  Myth is a constant among all human beings in all times. The patterns, stories, even details contained in myth are found everywhere and among everyone. This is because myth is a shared heritage of ancestral memories, related consciously from generation to generation. Myth may even be part of the structure of our unconscious mind, possibly encoded in our genes.

  Myth is a telling of events that happened before written history, and of a sense of what is to come. Myth is the thread that holds past, present, and future together.

  Myth is a unique use of language that describes the realities beyond our five senses. It fills the gap between the images of the unconscious and the language of conscious logic.

  Myth is the “glue” that holds societies together
; it is the basis of identity for communities, tribes, and nations.

  Myth is an essential ingredient in all codes of moral conduct. The rules for living have always derived their legitimacy from their origins in myth and religion.

  Myth is a pattern of beliefs that give meaning to life. Myth enables individuals and societies to adapt to their respective environments with dignity and value.

 

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