Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (4 page)

But older legends about Arthur go back even further, to an ancient Welsh collection of tales called the
Mabinogion
. These stories—which may have had their origins even earlier in Celtic Ireland, and then migrated to Wales—contain some of the earliest-known references to a character named Arthur. He is also mentioned as a military chieftain in post-Roman Britain, fighting against the Saxon and Norse invaders, and his name is derived from Artorius, a Latin name recorded in Britain in the second century. Spinning off from these ancient Celtic and Welsh myths came elaborate, Christian-influenced tales of Arthur and his wife Guinivere, as well as the collection of noble knights in their quest for the Holy Grail—the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. These tales were recycled and rewritten by many writers, working over the next several centuries, gradually transforming the legendary king and his court into the more-familiar image we hold of Arthur today—chivalrous knight in medieval armor. These medieval romances were complex fictions created by later generations looking to turn this Dark Age Welsh warlord into a Christian king of England. By the Middle Ages, when the concept of the knightly order and the ideas of chivalry developed, the legends of Arthur were draped in these medieval fashions, removed by centuries from Arthur’s far more primitive historical beginnings.

Another intriguing example of a legendary figure is Christianity’s St. George, famed as the slayer of dragons and best known as the patron saint of Britain (and Portugal). Like Arthur’s, George’s origins pose a tricky question and show how myths and legends sometimes merge. Based upon an ancient story from the Near East, the legend of George was transformed into a Christian allegory, and he was later sainted by the Roman Catholic Church. The source of the St. George story has been traced to Palestine, where European Crusaders probably first learned of it during the period of the Crusades in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. During the First Crusade, a vision of St. George supposedly led the Christians into battle at Antioch, against the Saracens. During the Third Crusade, King Richard I placed himself and his army under the protection of George, who came to be seen as the patron of soldiers.

Little is known about the Christian St. George’s actual life. He probably came from Lydda, in what is now Israel. According to religious tradition, George became a soldier in the Roman army and rose to high rank. But after he converted to Christianity, he was arrested and executed, possibly during the persecution of the Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian around 303 CE. Before his martyrdom, George supposedly helped convert thousands of new Christians after slaying a dragon that had terrorized the countryside. This dragon had been appeased with the regular sacrifice of two sheep, but when sheep grew scarce, the dragon demanded a human victim, chosen by lot. When the king’s daughter was selected as the victim, George promised to kill the dragon if the people agreed to be baptized.

But the stories of George slaying the dragon are much older than the Christian era. In one earlier version, set in Libya, in North Africa, George came to the aid of a group of local people who were obliged to sacrifice a virgin each day by feeding her to a dragon. George slew the dragon and rescued the maiden, who was chained to a rock. According to this local legend, George also had the power to fertilize barren women, who, by visiting one of his shrines in northern Syria, were said to be magically impregnated by him. While it is possible that someone resembling St. George might have once lived, he belongs to the misty era of early Christianity and even earlier pagan eras, unlike Arthur, whose living, breathing inspiration probably existed in Roman Britain. Shrouded in stories that mixed magic and Christianity, dragons and Roman persecution, George was adopted as patron of the Order of the Garter by King Edward III (1327–1377) and he was invoked as England’s patron by Henry V at the famous Battle of Agincourt in 1415. (St. George is not the only Christian saint drawn from older “pagan” sources. Another example is St. Brigid, one of Ireland’s patron saints, who is very much like an older Celtic goddess also named Brigid. See chapter 5.)

George’s evolving story is a perfect example of how myths are sometimes shared and become layered with meaning as they are adopted and adapted over the course of time. The story of a dragon slayer is one of the most common themes in ancient myths, and there are connections between the stories of St. George and of the Greek hero Perseus, and of even older dragon slayers in both Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths. The dragon, in fact, is one of the most universal archetypes, often related to evil and chaos, and images of these creatures have been found in Egyptian tombs, on the Ishtar gate in Babylon, on Chinese scrolls, on Aztec temples, and even in Inuit bone carvings.

Another mythical dragon slayer was the Canaanite god Baal. In one myth, Baal slays the dragon Lotan (whose named was changed to Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible), the symbol of chaos. For this act, Baal was rewarded with a beautiful palace built by the gods in his honor. Readers of the Bible are familiar with Baal in another context. He was seen as one of the chief “false gods” whom the Hebrew people of the Old Testament had to overcome in establishing the Promised Land of Israel.

Fables
are simple, usually brief, fictitious stories, typically teaching a moral, or making a cautionary point, or, in some cases, satirizing human behavior. In many fables, the moral is usually told at the end, in the form of a proverb. Often, they feature animals that speak and act like human beings, as in the most famous examples—those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave who supposedly lived about 600 BCE, but about whom little else is known. Stories like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” in which slow and steady wins the race, or “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” in which a fun-loving but lazy grasshopper plays while the ant dutifully stores away food for the winter, were simple morality tales.

For generations, “Aesop’s Fables,” which may have come from more ancient sources, were handed down orally, until around 300 BCE, when they were gathered into a collection,
Assemblies of Aesopic Tales
. Compiled by an Athenian politician named Demetrius of Phaleron, this collection was later translated into Latin by Phaedrus, a freed Greek slave. About five hundred years later, in 230 CE, another Greek writer combined Aesop’s fables with similar tales from India and translated all of them into Greek verse. Among the world’s oldest known fables are those from India, called the
Panchatantra
, an anonymous collection written in Sanskrit (and translated as “five treasures”). Derived from Buddhist sources, they were probably written as instructions for the children of royalty.

The fables of Aesop, which are sometimes intermingled with Greek myths, have remained an essential part of Western culture and are as familiar to children today as they may have been to Athenian children two thousand years ago. Such stories as “Androcles and the Lion,” in which a slave saves his own life by removing a thorn from the paw of a lion, or “The Crow and the Pitcher,” in which a thirsty crow fills a pitcher with stones to raise the water level so he can drink (moral: necessity is the mother of invention), are still widely told. And they permeate our language and literature. In “The Fox and the Grapes,” for example, a fox decides that some grapes growing too high for him to reach are probably sour anyway. The moral of the fable—that people often express a dislike for what they cannot have—is the source of the common expression “sour grapes.”

Related to fables are
folktales
, another type of story usually handed down orally, which often deals with common people and is primarily meant to entertain rather than instruct. Unlike legends, folktales are not supposed to have actually happened and don’t usually involve national heroes. Although the term “folktale” is often used interchangeably with “fairy tale,” they are two different forms. Folktales generally tell of the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of ordinary people;
fairy tales
are usually filled with elves, pixies, fairies, and other supernatural creatures with magical powers. In both of these, the central character tends to be a person of low status, frequently trapped in a case of mistaken identity, who has been victimized or persecuted, like Cinderella by her wicked step-sisters. Over time, and often with magical help, they overcome adversity and their goodness is rewarded as they are restored to their proper place in society. In other words, for average people, folk-and fairy tales are the equivalent of stories of people winning the lottery, always holding out hope that some stroke of luck or miraculous intervention will change their luck and fortune forever.

The tales of
Arabian Nights
, including “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin’s Lamp,” and “Sinbad the Sailor,” are examples of the best-known folk-and fairy tales. Another collection of the most familiar folk-and fairy tales are
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, the famous German stories collected by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm between 1807 and 1814. These include “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow-White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel,” many of which were drawn from much older, mythic sources.

Where does the urge to make myths come from?

Like the witness to the car accident at the beginning of this chapter, people everywhere love—or perhaps need—to create a good story. And if the details change a bit in the retelling, what’s the difference? Who hasn’t slightly embellished their biography or stretched the truth with a touch of dramatic flair to add some color and spice to an encounter at the supermarket or an argument with the boss? Often, these stories—just like everyday rumors and tabloid-newspaper reports—change with each retelling. It has always been that way, and in the broadest sense, the myths of every culture include all of these types of “stories”—legends, fables, folktales, and fairy tales—to form a broad worldview.

But the larger question remains: where do these stories come from? Are they all inspired—as is most likely the case of King Arthur and possibly St. George—by some actual person or events? Or are all of these mythical stories simply the work of human imagination? People have been arguing about that for more than 2,500 years.

As early as 525 BCE, a Greek named Theagenes, who lived in southern Italy, identified myths as scientific analogies or allegories—an attempt to explain natural occurrences that people could not understand. To him, for instance, the mythical stories of gods fighting among themselves were allegories representing the forces of nature that oppose each other, such as fire and water. This is clearly the source of a great many explanatory or “causal” myths, beginning with the accounts found in every society or civilization that explain the creation of the universe, the world, and humanity. These “scientific” myths attempted to explain the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the course of the stars. Myths like these were, in some ways, the forerunners of science. Old mythical explanations for the workings of nature began to be replaced by a rational attempt to understand the world, especially in the remarkable era of Greek science and philosophy that began about 500 BCE.

The most fundamental and universal “explanatory” myths are Creation myths, found in every culture. Quite often, there is more than one Creation myth for a particular group, whether a tribe or civilization. Sometimes these are variations on a theme; other times they represent different traditions that arose in different periods. Or some can reflect different regions or cities that generated their own Creation myths. In Egypt, for instance, there were at least four major Creation accounts, each one from a different major religious center. These are myths that set out to explain the ordering of the universe and are very often associated with myths that explain the appearance of humans. (The major Creation myths of each civilization will be discussed in each of the following chapters.)

Are all myths historical?

Whether searching for the historical Jesus, King Arthur, Atlantis, or Troy, people for centuries have had a deep fascination with the possibility that all of these stories and mythic characters are based on identifiable historical events. This concept, called “historical allegory,” is not a recent one, but goes back to a very old explanation for the source of myths—the notion that they all began with real people and actual events. With the passage of time, and the retelling of the stories, the events and the people involved became distorted and layered with legend.

One of the first people to suggest that all myths are based on real people and events was a Greek scholar named Euhemerus (a native of what was then a Greek colony on the island of Sicily), who lived during the late 300s and early 200s BCE. Like an ancient Greek
Gulliver’s Travels
, his
Sacred History
described a journey that Euhemerus said he had taken to three fantastic islands in the Indian Ocean. On one of these islands called Panchaea, Euhemerus claimed he had found old inscriptions written by the great god Zeus himself. Euhemerus insisted that he discovered these inscriptions on a pillar inside a golden temple on the island. The writings proved, according to Euhemerus, that Zeus and the other gods of Greece were all based upon an early king from the island of Crete. To Euhemerus, the gods of Olympus and other characters of Greek myths were all real heroes and conquerors who had been deified, and he claimed to be able to document the entire primitive history of the world from these inscriptions.

While the tale Euhemerus told was clearly a work of fiction, his idea that all the gods were representations of people who had once lived had significant influence for centuries, even carrying over into the Christian era. The belief that all of the Greek myths were based on actual events was used by early Christians to dismiss what they called pagan mythology as a purely human invention. In other words, Christians argued that the Greek gods—who were later adapted by the Romans—were not divine at all, and everyone should acknowledge the one true Christian God.
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