Parallel Myths

“In reading these myths, the gaps between cultures narrow to reveal what is constant and universal in human experience.”

Like great literature, myths reveal our commonalities rather than our differences. To read myths from across so many different cultures and to see how “different” cultures saw the world in strikingly similar ways is to understand that far more unites us than divides us. In our current technological age, when STEM courses wrangle eager bodies like punk rockers to a mosh pit and social media seems more anti-social and divisive, the yearning for myth is greater than ever. Humanity can have both science and myth; humans can comprehend the truths offered by both if they are open to them.

“A myth is often something that only begins to work where our own five senses end.”

Among the many definitions of myth this book offers, this quote directly gets at the way in which myth articulates truths not that we can see or hear—the way science arrives at truth—but that resonate on an emotional, intuitive level. These truths may be difficult (or impossible) to put into words, but their vitality and profundity have no less weight than any truth that can be measured and recorded.

“A myth contains the story that is preserved in popular memory and that helps to bring to life some deep stratum buried in the depths of the human spirit.”

In a sense, myth reveal truths that are already present in the human psyche. They give form and shape to concepts that lie dormant in the subconscious of every human being. Jung’s “collective unconscious” theory speaks to this idea and suggests one possible cause for the phenomenon of parallel myths. Although a more spiritual theory than diffusionism, it has its own merits and its own appeal. If all people are born with preserved imagery hard-wired into their consciousness—the very same, basic imagery—then humans are indeed far more alike than different. This definition of myth also serves as a plea for tolerance and understanding.

“Even today it is not uncommon for a person living in a traditional culture to not know his or her chronological age; it simply doesn’t matter.”

Until recently, Bierlein claims, history and myth were inseparable. Early people did not see history as distinct from their spiritual existence. Rather, their “history” was simply a replay of events that had happened before and would certainly happen again. The concept of viewing history as a discreet and linear series of events to look back on and analyze was foreign to traditional cultures. Age, as a measure of time and history, is not a relevant concept in such cultures. One’s life simply is in much the same way that some cultures do not recognize the notion of the individual as separate from the community or from nature.

“There were no shades of gray, for to question the validity of the moral code was to question the validity of the myth and the legitimacy of the society itself.”

Since the morality imparted by myths was in the form of decrees from the gods, there was no wiggle room, no insanity defense, no childhood trauma as an excuse for breaking the law. If early societies were to remain cohesive without devolving into anarchy, the laws had to be absolute, and that absolutism was reflected in the myths. Relativism—the idea that we each abide by our own morality—would be anathema to these early cultures. Bierlein argues that the decline of myth and the loss of respect for its unequivocal standards has led to an epidemic of social ills, including violence, mental health issues, and a “decline in public and private ethics” (22).

“[F]or since the Age of Reason was heralded by his eighteenth-century philosophers, he has seated himself on the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival Regent.”

In his book The White Goddess, Robert Graves sees contemporary parallels between the advent of science and “reason” and the decline in morality. Apollo, god of science, “wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt” (28-29), and all the self-proclaimed enlightened philosophers who thought they were pulling humanity out of the dark ages and into a utopia of rational thought were in fact creating a myth-less dark age of their own.

“Why did she elude him? Women are still that way; they are often coy and will play hard to get. Men must sometimes change themselves in order to win a woman.”

In the Hindu myth of creation, the first man and the first woman have a complicated relationship. As they are created out of two halves of Brahma’s body, the female questions their separateness, wondering how two halves of the same being can make love, so she eludes the male by turning into a cow, then a mare, and so on, forcing the male to pursue her. In a roundabout way, the myth gives a narrative form to the subtle dance of courtship in which men and women engage. It also makes a casual generalization about men and women that feeds an age-old stereotype.

“Kokomaht, the Creator, lived underneath the water and was two beings in one. He rose up out of the water and said his own name, Kokomaht, the Father and Creator of all.”

The Yuma myth of creation speaks to the power of a name. Kokomaht says his own name in much the same way that the God of the Old Testament calls himself Yahweh, distinguishing himself from all other gods. Adam and Eve are given dominion over the animals by virtue of their power to name them. In Ursula LeGuin’s famous fantasy trilogy The Earthsea Cycle, wizards gain power over the natural world and its elements by learning their true names. To know a thing’s name is to know its identity, its true self—an astonishing notion that even gods must become self-aware.

“These younger gods grew restless and chose Marduk as their champion. It is he who finished the work of creation by slaying Tiamat, his mother, and Kingu, her lover.”

The Babylonian creation myth alludes to a theme that has been used repeatedly in myth and literature: the killing of a parent—although usually the father—in order to establish one’s own destiny. Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother; Hamlet must kill his uncle who has married his mother. Luke Skywalker must confront and destroy Darth Vader, his father, to fulfill his destiny as the heir apparent of all-but-extinct Jedi knights. The parent/child dynamic is a fraught one, explored in the work of Freud as well as in the stories of myth. The theme of regeneration and renewal demands that the young supplant the old even if doing so entails murder.

“God blessed them, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.”

In the Genesis creation story, God, after creating the world and all the plants and animals, creates Adam and Eve. His “blessing” includes a command quite out of step—rhetorically—from the rest. God (actually the writers of the Old Testament) equates the benevolence of “fruitful” procreation with the aggression of conquering. The dissonance is hard to miss, and it’s worth considering how much of humanity’s ill-regard for the environment can be traced to the inclusion of one word in a sacred text.

“When Gabriel began his task, he learned that the earth was reluctant to give up any soil for the creatin humans. The earth knew that mankind would someday ruin the earth and spoil its beauty.”

In the Talmudic creation story, God orders the angel Gabriel to gather soil with which he will create humans, but the earth—obviously sentient—foretells humans’ destructive ways even before they are created. Not only is earth personified, but it is endowed with seer-like abilities, able to see what humanity will become. This scene suggests an interesting parallel with the Gaia Theory of the Earth, which posits that the planet is in fact a self-regulating organism capable of the same functions as any other life form. While not implying sentience or knowledge, the theory nevertheless implies life, certainly a precursor to awareness.

“Then Yahweh God said, ‘See the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever.’”

One of the most egregious sins humans can commit is to think themselves the equal of God. Here, God warns of the danger of knowledge, that humans must be kept ignorant lest they think too highly of themselves. The elaborate details of the Garden of Eden narrative are really just a way to maintain the intended order, both social and cosmic. If people defy the “natural” order of things, they risk the collapse of both society and God’s universe.

“In the fourth age, people walk around in darkness, completely ignorant and blind to the truth. Their senses are clouded in darkness and illusion (maya). They are unable to separate what is true from what is false, and they really don’t care about the difference.”

In the Indian myth of the cycle of creation and destruction, the fourth age—the final stage before the destruction and ultimate recreation of the earth—is marked by humanity’s inability to discern truth from fiction, light from darkness. It’s hard to miss the contemporary parallels—the relativity of truth based on political affiliation and news outlet; the willingness to ignore factual evidence if it contradicts one’s preferred point of view. It’s a shocking bit of prognostication from a series of texts written thousands of years ago and a reminder of the relevance of myth even in today’s world.

“And his final words to her that night were that love could not dwell where there is no trust.”

When the god of love, Cupid, takes the beautiful maiden Psyche as his lover, the one caveat is that she may never see his face. She abides by this agreement for a while, but eventually, overcome with curiosity, she sneaks into his room at night and takes a peek. Awakened, Cupid flees, lamenting Psyche’s lack of trust. The story of Cupid and Psyche is an example of myth-as-morality-tale in which the story imparts a moral lesson. While Psyche and Cupid eventually live happily ever after on Mount Olympus, it is only after Psyche endures a series of terrible trials at the hands of the bitter and jealous Venus.

“With beauty comes vanity; and vanity, when threatened by a rival, causes beauty to become very ugly indeed.”

To attribute motive to Venus’s cruelty, the myth offers this bit of wisdom. Venus’s main attribute, her very identity, is her beauty, and when Psyche threatens her vanity, she threatens her identity. After all, if Venus is not the most beautiful, then what does she have to offer the world? Contemporary corollaries are not hard to find, especially in this culture in which we fetishize beauty above all else. Interestingly, for the Greeks who also had specific cultural ideals of beauty, they could see the hazards of prizing only physical beauty above all else.

“Ollantay told the emperor that he understood the law and his friend’s duty to carry it out. But he was not a traitor to the emperor; the law was a traitor to love.”

In this Peruvian love story, the mortal warrior Ollantay, facing execution for his love of Cusicollur, the emperor’s daughter, makes an argument that could be the mantra for forbidden lovers everywhere. Love, he claims, transcends all, even the laws of the divine Inca. If love is decreed by the gods, his love for Cusicollur carries the sanction of the gods themselves, and who is a mere human to overrule the will of the gods. The fact that the emperor recognizes the logic of Ollantay’s argument and spares his life reflects the power of love to supersede all else.

“Humans were given reason and skill, but still they use their hands to make weapons to kill each other off. One is well-advised to heed Daedalus’s warning and not fly too high or too low.”

In the famous myth of Icarus, the son of the inventor Daedalus flies too close to the sun and his wings disintegrate, sending him plummeting to his death. A closer reading of the story, however, suggests that it’s his proximity not to the sun but to Mount Olympus that dooms the youth: “This is why the gods never allow human beings to fly: They cannot stay within their limits. If they communicate with the gods, they become overly familiar and forget their place” (166). Like so many other morality tales, Icarus is doomed by his own arrogance. It is also telling that the moral here is: Although the gods have given humans intelligence and creativity, humans must be careful not to use them fully or else they may think themselves like gods as well.

“For us, myth is one way for modern man to know where he has been, and to work through the “maze” of our perplexing existence.”

The Greek story of Theseus is an ideal allegory of the trials of life (taken to a highly dramatic degree). Theseus, like all mythic heroes, achieves his hero status only after surviving a gauntlet of trials, including a literal maze in which he leaves behind a path of string to find his way out. Theseus, like all humans, looks forward toward his destiny while paying heed to the past. We all look to the past for lessons that will serve us in the future. The past serves as a guide by which we navigate both the present and the future.

“His [Sisyphus] scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.”

In his analysis of the myth of Sisyphus, French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus suggests that Sisyphus’s punishment—eternally pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again—is a perfect metaphor for humanity’s meaningless existence. Yet Camus finds value in the effort, arguing that the task itself gives meaning to life. Who’s to say, after all, that pushing a rock up a hill has no meaning if we decide to give it meaning. The effort, the work of it has inherent value, and therein lies life’s fundamental paradox: the desire to attribute meaning to a life that seems—according to existential philosophers—to have none.

“And what has befallen me is not the effect of chance; but this is clear to me, that now to die, and be freed from my cares is better for me.”

Here the Greek philosopher Socrates, standing before a tribunal that has just condemned him to death, argues that death is nothing to fear. Either death is the complete cessation of awareness or else it is a transition to a better place; either possibility, he claims, is an improvement over his current life. Socrates speaks with great composure on the verge of the greatest unsolved mystery known to humanity, a mystery we often imbue with fear. Fear of the unknown, however, does not rattle the great philosopher; rather, he examines his own death with the same rational temperament that he would any abstract philosophical question, and his analysis allows him to remain calm in the face of death. For Socrates, the rational mind rises above his unruly emotions.

“Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.”

Carl Jung, the great pioneer of psychoanalysis, offers his own definition of myth: a truth that lies somewhere in the brain’s nether regions, accessible when we perceive those truths expressed in mythic terms. Jung, who theorized about the network of human psychic connection he termed the “collective unconscious,” saw myth as an expression of the common spirituality all humans share, a spirituality not dormant but latent in every human consciousness and that allows us to recognize, appreciate, and learn from the same basic set of symbols and archetypes that have been replayed in countless stories throughout human history.

“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”

Joseph Campbell, contemporary scholar of myth, offers his own definition. Owing a debt to Jung, Campbell sees myth as a bridge between the mundane of everyday life and the spiritual divine. While this explanation veers into the unscientific (i.e., the untestable), it hints at a truth that can neither be seen nor heard but can indeed be felt, and that the fact that mythic truths elude the five senses does not make them any less truthful. After all, even Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan looked at the cosmos with a childlike wonder that transcended science.

“The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father.”

Classical scholar, novelist, and poet Robert Graves argued that to see myth in its proper context, it was necessary to see the whole picture, and that included early matriarchal societies that were eventually supplanted by patriarchies. Worship of the Goddess—still prevalent in Wiccan and pagan traditions—honored the divine feminine and saw in her reproductive power the power of the earth and of nature. Earth was she, Amazons were a race of female warriors who kept men around but did not need them, and early cultures honored the Goddess as the eternal and creative deity. Graves believed that the advent of Zeus and Odin heralded a paradigm shift when Mother Earth was usurped by male gods.