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
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.