Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.”

Heraclitus

 

 

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"I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

Publius Terentius Afer

 

 

 

 

 

 

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There is no evidence of a founding ice age super-civilisation that colonised the world before being destroyed in a disaster of cosmic proportions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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But that still leaves us with a central mystery. Why do mythologies around the world have so much in common? At what point did they emerge, how were they disseminated? And what function, what truth do they serve?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Human Condition

 

 

 

 

 

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One may argue that what distinguishes genuine researchers wishing to push beyond the boundaries of Academic orthodox thinking from those who would exploit our wish to escape a mundane existence both past and future, is the rigor and consistency of their method and the depth of their research, and their openness to being wrong as much as right.

 

 

 

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The irony is we are far more likely to disbelieve truth than wish fulfilling fancy. Look what happened to Copernicus and Galileo after all.

 

 

 

 

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In his book ‘The Origins of the World's Mythologies’ E. J. Michael Witzel defines myth as a narrative:

 

- that is told or recited at certain special occasions;

 

 

 

 

 

 

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- that is standardized (to some extent);

 

 

 

 

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- that is collectively owned and managed (often by specialists);

 

 

 

 

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- that is considered by its owners to be of great and enduring significance;

 

 

 

 

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- that contains and brings out such images of the world, of past and present society, and of the human condition as are eminently constitutive of the life society in which that narrative circulates, or at least where it circulated originally;

 

 

 

 

 

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- that, if this constitutive aspect is consciously realized by its owners, may be invoked (etiologically) to explain and justify present-day conditions;

 

 

 

 

 

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- and that is therefore a powerful device to create collectively underpinned meaning and collectively recognized truth (regardless of whether such truth would be recognized outside the community whose myth it is.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Witzel accumulates data, some of it reconstructed, from many disparate cultures, in which a semidivine character, usually of solar origins, was responsible for the “beginning of humankind on earth and their subsequent lineages.” Examples include Indian (Manu), Greek (Herakles), Japanese (Jimmu), Mayan (Hunahpu and Xbalanque), and Incan (Viracocha).

 

 

 

 

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In "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" Joseph Campbell argued that this shows evidence of the diffusion of protomyths carried from one civilization to another as they are established. That is, between 3500 BC (Sumer) and 1350 AD (Inca).

 

 

 

 

 

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However, the evidence Witzel brings to bear is too broadly distributed for this to have been possible within the temporal limits previously ascribed. Thus, a much greater time frame must be considered. The period begins before the migration of humans across the Aleutian land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, which must have occurred before it was inundated by the melting of the polar ice cap after c.11,500 BC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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He rejects Campbell’s diffusionist theory for being too prone to Jung’s influence, for adopting a toolbox approach in which a variety of repetitive tropes and ideas can be invoked without systematic rigor and objectivity. For Witzel, Jung’s insights are intriguing, including his notions of archetypes and a collective unconscious. But he argues that they are better explained as the result of story and myth transmitted in very old historical migrations rather than because they are inherent in the human psyche.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“The comparative method in mythology starts out from similarities found in various sets of evidence (myths). Such comparisons are normally carried out in random fashion, across space and time. They are not performed systematically or in historical fashion; comparativists have stopped at the rather general level of comparison (whether Jungian or diffusionist): anything in myth, anywhere and anytime, was compared with anything else.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By combining the study of comparative mythology with historical linguistics, physical anthropology, population genetics and archaeology Witzel is forced to take his dating not just to recognizable prehistoric periods, but to much earlier eras, when early humans could have carried an inherited story out of Africa, across continents and land bridges that achieved their present shape as the result of postglaciation climatic conditions. The dominant Laurasian mythology, which, Witzel argues, emerged around 40,000 BC, was to a great extent transmitted through the Eurasiatic superfamily of languages scattered across the Eurasian land mass that included among its affiliations Indo-European, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic.