Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (2 page)

In modern India, many Hindus still make offerings of their hair to a temple deity in thanks for help in medical crises or to ask for good grades on exams. What some of these devout Hindus didn’t know was that their hair was then used to manufacture high-priced wigs that accounted for a $62-million export business. But one set of beliefs ran head-on into another, because many of those wigs were purchased by Orthodox Jewish women who observe an ancient code of modesty that forbids the public display of their hair after marriage. When Orthodox Jewish rabbis in Israel declared that these wigs were made with hair offered for purposes of idolatry, their use was forbidden. Thousands of Orthodox women, according to the
New York Times
, publicly burned their human-hair wigs.

Another story from India is less benign. As recently as 2004, people have been charged with the very rare practice of ritual human sacrifice. The goddess Kali is an ancient Hindu goddess who slays evil but has always been known as a demandingly bloodthirsty deity. Millions of Hindus still travel to temples dedicated to Kali in eastern India. Most buy innocuous souvenirs of plastic swords and postcards featuring Kali’s fearsome images on which she is bedecked with skulls and belts of severed feet. But several disciples of Kali have been accused of ritual murder, a chilling vestige of an ancient past—not at all exclusive to India—when human sacrifice was viewed as a necessary means to please or propitiate the gods. Recent discoveries of Peruvian and Celtic mummies, Egyptian sacrifices, and Mesopotamian mass graves are grim evidence that some of these victims went as willing sacrifices to help their people in this world or their divine leader in the next.

Myths also play a serious role in history. Perhaps the most deadly historical example of the impact of myth comes from World War II, when Adolf Hitler drew upon ancient Germanic myths to help enthrall an entire country. In the classic history of Hitler’s climb to power,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, William L. Shirer wrote, “Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expressions of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.” Shirer recalled Hitler saying, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.” Hitler was deeply taken by Wagner’s operas, which drew vividly on the world of German heroic myths, pagan gods and heroes, demons and dragons. Hitler intrinsically understood the deep emotional power of the symbols of these myths. Massive statues of ancient Germanic gods played a prominent role in the Nazi mass rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s. Hitler grasped the visceral power, as well as the propaganda value, of a shared Teutonic myth in uniting the German people with a “master race” ideology.

One need only watch Leni Riefenstahl’s famed—or notorious—documentary,
The Triumph of the Will
, to get a sense of the operatic mythology behind these mass pageants. Hitler deliberately mingled Christian and pagan elements, and when he solemnly marched up to stand before a wreath honoring Germans who had died in battle, he appeared to be playing the role of high priest in what one of his biographers has called a “pagan rite of communion.” There is a scholarly debate as to whether Hitler himself was a true believer in the occult, but Nazi officials certainly set out to find historic and religious symbols and artifacts—apparently, including the Holy Grail—to embellish the Nazi cult of power.

In wartime Japan during the same period, myths were the source of the national Shinto religion, as the Japanese emperor Hirohito was supposedly descended from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu. In the waning days of the war, this devotion to the emperor-god led to the use of the notorious kamikaze
*
pilots. With the war going against Japan in 1945, young men were recruited and given enough training to fly their dynamite-laden planes in suicide crashes aimed at American warships. While it once might have seemed difficult for modern Westerners to imagine, an ancient myth-religion was used to drive these young fighters—and an entire nation—with fanatical devotion to its emperor. That was barely half a century ago, in a thoroughly modern, industrialized, and well-educated society.

And, of course, it doesn’t end there, as recent history has proved too well. In the past few years, the world has witnessed the combustible mixture of belief and fanatical devotion. “The virgins are calling you,” Mohamed Atta wrote to his fellow hijackers just before 9/11. The notion of dying a martyr’s death and gaining entrance to a paradise with the promise of virgins is clearly a powerful idea that continues to drive the terrorists who strap explosives to their bodies, or drive cars filled with explosives, or fly hijacked jets into buildings. They are motivated by beliefs whose roots stretch back to the most ancient of times. The idea of warriors gaining access to paradise through death is certainly not exclusive to any one mythology or faith.

When Afghanistan’s Taliban was still in power and banning music, television, and kite-flying, the harsh regime destroyed several massive Buddha statues chiseled into a cliff on the ancient Silk Road. Beyond eliminating what they viewed as idolatrous images, these Islamic fundamentalists were attempting to eradicate a vestige of a 2,500-year-old belief system derived from the complex myths of India. The destruction of these irreplaceable cultural artifacts shocked the world and raised a deeper question: Can you kill beliefs and ideas by killing an image? That is not a new idea. The Spanish conquistadors and priests who followed them into Mexico in the 1500s may have leveled the temples and buildings of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, but did they completely eradicate the beliefs behind them? The Spanish in the Americas, the British in Ireland and Australia, and the United States government have all attempted to “control” defeated people by taking away their language and beliefs. It doesn’t always work.

So, myths can be a powerful business. And that is one reason they have been around for thousands of years. As old as humanity, the first myths belong to a time when the world was full of danger, mystery, and wonder. In the earliest of human times, every society developed its own myths, which eventually played an important part in the society’s daily life and religious rituals.

One of the chief reasons that myths came into being was because people couldn’t provide scientific explanations for the world around them. Natural events, as well as human behavior, all came to be understood through tales of gods, goddesses, and heroes. Thunder, earthquakes, eclipses, the seasons, rain, and the success of crops were all due to the intervention of powerful gods. Human behavior was also the work of the gods. For instance, the Greeks, like most early civilizations, had a story to explain the existence of all the bad things that happen in the world—from illness and pestilence to the idea of evil itself. The Greeks believed that, at one time, all of the world’s evils and problems were trapped inside a jar (not a box!). When this jar was opened by the first woman, all of the world’s misfortunes escaped before this woman—Pandora—was able to close the lid.

The Blackfoot Indians of the American Plains also blamed the woes of the human condition on a troublesome female. When Feather Woman dug up the Great Turnip after being told not to do so, she was cast out of Sky Country—or the heavenly paradise. Yet another woman is seen as the source of the world’s ills in a tale told by a nomadic group from the ancient Near East—the “cradle of civilization,” as they called it back in your school days. In one version, her name was Havva, and she disobeyed her god when she ate from a forbidden tree. Of course, most of us know her by the more familiar name—Eve.

Obviously, we now have many more scientific answers for most of our questions about the world and universe. We know why the sun rises and sets. Why the rain falls in some seasons and not in others. What makes crops grow. We have a much better understanding of where we came from. We understand illness and death—to a certain degree. And although the source of evil in the world—and why bad things happen to good people—is still a great mystery, we have even begun to unravel the beginnings of the universe.

But in earlier times, people invented stories to explain these beginnings. In the Creation story of the Krachi people of Togo in Africa, for instance, the creator god Wulbari and man lived close together, and Wulbari lay on top of Mother Earth. But there was so little space to move about that the smoke of the cooking fires got in Wulbari’s eyes and annoyed the god. In disgust, Wulbari went away and rose up to the present place where humans can admire him but not reach him.

In another African tale, of the Kassena people, the god We also moved out of the reach of man, because an old woman, anxious to make a good soup, used to cut off a bit of him at each mealtime. Annoyed at such treatment, We went higher to escape this daily eating of his flesh.

These may seem like amusing legends of “primitive” people. A god who goes to the heavens because smoke gets in his eyes and another god who is peeved at being cut up for the day’s soup. But consider these mythical stories: A god who is so angry when a woman eats a piece of fruit that he makes childbirth eternally painful for all women. In his anger, this ancient Hebrew god—who also liked to walk around the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening—gradually removes himself, like Wulbari and We, from his creation. Or a god whose body and blood are consumed each week at a ritual of sacrifice called the Eucharist.

In other words, what we call one person’s “myth” is often another person’s religion. One of this book’s essential goals is to explore that transformation of myth into religion. And how that transformation has changed history.

Many books about myths approach the subject from one of two perspectives: geographically—that is, simply grouping myths together by a region or particular civilization; or thematically—the broad range of typical myths, such as Creation stories or other explanatory myths. Creation myths set out to explain the origin of the world, the birth of gods and goddesses, and eventually the creation of human beings. Explanatory, or causal, myths try to give a mythic reason for natural events, such as the Norse belief that Thor made thunder and lightning by throwing his hammer.

Don’t Know Much About Mythology
takes a slightly different tack. It sets out to examine all the fascinating myths created by these ancient cultures and relate them to their histories and achievements. Besides Creation and explanatory myths, another fundamental type of myth is the “foundation” story, which explains the beginnings of a society—often with the distinct sense of superiority that direct descent from the gods clearly implies. For instance, it is impossible to understand Egyptian history and culture without understanding Egyptian mythology. For the Egyptians, their elaborate system of myths and beliefs was life itself—it was the critical underpinning of this amazing empire that lasted three thousand years.

Part of that mix of myth and history is the way in which myths became the means to rule and domination. Once local rulers understood that connecting themselves to the gods would cement their hold over people, myth was elevated to an institution that could prove more powerful than an army. Most of the great ancient civilizations—whether in Egypt, China, or Mesoamerica—were theocracies, in which there was no difference between religion and state. With connections to the gods and usually the cooperation of a potent priesthood, divinely anointed rulers held the power of life and death over their subjects. Even in societies that did not produce a godly king and a central government tied to the beliefs, the most respected and feared person in the society was the shaman, sometimes known as the “witch doctor”—a man whose deep connection to the gods enabled him to heal or kill. In his groundbreaking book
Guns, Germs and Steel
, Jared Diamond singled out the power of belief as one of the key means for the wealthy and powerful—what he calls the “kleptocracy”—to maintain their hold over the poor and powerless.

The history of myth, in other words, goes hand in hand with the history of civilization. Stop and think about “ancient civilization.” What does it mean? The wheel. Zero. Writing. Bronze. Glass. Fireworks. Paper. Noodles. Indoor plumbing. Beer. These are only a few of the pleasant and delightful creations devised by the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, India, Rome, Africa, Central America, and Japan. They also gave us astronomy, democracy, the calendar, God, philosophy, and a whole set of complex ideas that have driven students crazy for centuries. The scientific discoveries, practical inventions, laws, religions, art, poetry, and drama of these ancient people have driven human life and culture—civilization as we know it.

These same ancients “invented” the myths that grew hand in hand with their civilizations, making it impossible to separate one from the other. While the impact of myths may seem less obvious than that of the wheel, writing, or a mug of beer, these ancient legends are still a powerful force in our lives today. They remain alive in our art, literature, language, theater, dreams, psychology, religions, and history.

With that in the background,
Don’t Know Much About Mythology
traces the story of myths through the ages and shows how myths helped make civilization. It also looks at the way myths moved from one group to another in the exchange of civilizations. The familiar mythology of the Greeks did not emerge full-blown from the sea—the way Aphrodite supposedly did. It drew upon ideas from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, and other ancient neighbors. While many of us may be somewhat familiar with the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the later tales of the Hebrew patriarchs which were set down in the Book of Genesis, we may not know about their connection to much older Mesopotamian stories, such as the epic poem
Gilgamesh
, a tale of a very flawed hero from the same part of the world. Myths don’t just spring up from virgin ground—they are often borrowed from older sources and then molded and remade into new myths.