Mythology: The Wellspring of Human Knowledge
Mythology and the Ancient Mind
Ancient culture is still but a mystery to present day historians who can only guess at the way the ancient mind perceived the world. They guess using snapshots of the past. These include shards of pottery, bits of dirt and clay, ancient architecture, and what fragments of writing remain to be read—that which can be read that is. Because archaeologists are not digging up plastic and micro chips, it is assumed that the technology of the ancients was moored to simplistic achievements. In fact, for long centuries the “modern” mind has supposed that the ancient’s intelligence itself was part of the evolutionary process, which includes, historians and ethnologists believe, a slow and gradual increase in mental acuity over the ages. Beginning in the Stone Age where apparently homo-sapiens stretched their mental imaginations with cave paintings and deluded mythos the mind of our species has slowly grappled more and more of the “real” world and has progressed to the Post Modern Age we currently enjoy today, where our mental sophistication produces Austin Powers and the six-o-clock news.
Satire aside, scientific ethics is mired in preconceived notions, no longer investigated, about how the world was and is. These notions are fabricated by cultural and political preferences that fund today’s world and have little to do with the great ages of the past. No matter, in almost any college textbook the indoctrination is the same: ancient human cultures emerged out of the evolutionary jungle with but simple “ape-like” ideas of the physical world around them. This world was filled with strange powers and movements which the uncomprehending ancient mind deified and pantheonized in oral tradition, from generation to generation, until a mythos was born. Over countless generations this mythos revealed a psychological framework from which the ancient mind looked out upon the cosmos, filled with stories of good and evil, pride and lust, strange creatures and powerful gods, and forming the beginnings of ancient morality and ritual leading primitive man out of the hunter-gatherer life and into the dawn of high civilization.
Perhaps the historians are right. But only partially and even then with the most simplistic of generalizations. Who would have guessed that the mythologies of the past were far more than fascinated utterances of befuddled minds? It turns out that certainly in some cases just the exact opposite is true: there were a highly advanced few who created the mythologies, not just as a psychological framework to explain the mysteries of nature to the masses--this was their cover story. Rather, mythology was created as a secret code of high art and science allegorically depicting astronomical processes, earth processes, and a cosmic vision of civilization and the frame of time. Ancient mythology was a way to measure the passage of time through world ages, recorded in story form that oral tradition could remember and pass down, filled with gigantic feats of heroes and gods which in turn generally represented planets, stars, equinoxes, and various other astronomical processes. And while the majority of the ancients may have been deluded by such tall tales and truly did worship their superstitions (not unlike the people of today), there were at least some who knew far, far better, and were of the sort with Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—great thinkers and observers who cultivated high science and civilization with the few stones that they had. Even more dauntingly, they emerged not out of the evolutionary jungle uttering a slow and gradual “aha,” but in a single thunderclap which stoked the fires of humanity and caused the whole race to stumble forward out of the mute wilderness and into the cosmic throne, no longer to be acted upon, but to hold dominion over the entire face of the earth.
Perhaps the best treatise on ancient myth is written by two ethnologists, the late Giorgio de Santillana, Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Hertha Von Dechend, Assistant to the Chair of the History of Science in Frankfurt. Their book is called Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. This essay does nothing less than peel back the cobwebs of ancient history identifying connections in ancient worldwide myths. These connections show a mind far beyond cave paintings, but stretching the utmost heavens concentrating on “numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas, on the structure of numbers, on geometry” (p. 345).
Santillana and Von Dechend show how myths all over the globe reveal commonalties that cannot be explained by modern geographic transmission as many ancient cultures were separated from all others geographically and temporally. Moreover, these myths show a subtext that reveals measures and mathematics. The authors write:
“Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before Columbus, and is linked in both places with certain attributes like the color red, it can hardly be a coincidence. Generally, there is little that finds its way into music by chance. Again, when one finds the numbers like 108, 9 X 13, reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus’ dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident” (p. 7).
“As we follow the clues—stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures—a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure” (p. 8).
“ To recapitulate for clarity, whatever is true myth has no historical basis, however tempting the reduction, however massive and well armed the impact of a good deal of modern criticism on that belief . . . Myth is essentially cosmological” (p. 50).
The authors of Hamlet’s Mill assert that ancient myth was cosmological and they do not pretend to have discovered the code to cracking such an ancient and vast cosmology spread over millennia and continents. Ancient mythology in its original form would have been a concise scientific language for concise comprehending minds. But over endless centuries (indeed, the flood myth of Gilgamesh was thought to be hoary with age by the Egyptians at 2300 B.C.) and through mass transmission through numerous cultures the pure language of myth has been diluted and remixed and diluted again until only shattered remnants of a once megalithic masterpiece of language remains.
Still, clues are left behind, and the gods of the Greeks, the Norse, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Mayan and the Olmec, of ancient Chinese dynasties and Native American tribes, show remarkable similarities which reveal that the ancients understood the precession of the equinoxes far before Hipparchus the Greek was supposed to have discovered it (127 B.C.); the movement of the planets including their solar years; the cycles of the moon and sun; the roundness of the earth and even its circumference; and curiously enough a frame of time encompassing the earth and bearing upon it cyclical cataclysms marking the start and end of life ages.
Mythology was more than a cold calculus for the ancient mind however. Today, astronomical science is extending into the nether reaches of space and theory and is coded by viciously complex formulas that only a select few understand. Even general astronomers cannot keep up, and the masses are left behind in eternal dark. We no longer have a place in such a huge, unfeeling space, and are left to our own designs in the purposes of time and measure. It was not so with the ancients, for in their mythology a language of purpose, relation, meaning, and faith was coupled with their complex cosmology—the seven stars of Ursa Major were the seven sages of story which brought wisdom and order, the pole star was a one legged hero which showed remarkable courage and provided humanity with hope. The cosmos itself was filled with oxen and school children, gods and heroes, serpents and devils, each with a purpose as well as a science, with an astrology as well as an astronomy, with a place in time and in timelessness. In short, mythology was an advanced scientific cosmology which kept the human connection firmly planted on earth despite the vastness above it. Mythology was keen understanding written in a story language a small child could learn. Later, as the child grew, he would only need the key to unlock the immensity of it all.
As a final note, we should not be at all surprised at such insights into the past. After all, while our present age boasts the most knowledge of any era in human history, it does not nor cannot boast the most intelligence. For knowledge is one thing, and is proven by technology; but intelligence is quite another, and is proven by wisdom and problem solving skills. Great advances of the past are thus the works of skilled problem solvers who were connected to a sacred cosmos. Mythology was not the work of cavemen or E.T., but of simple human ingenuity. And with this realization comes another: that in every age of human awareness, a proportionate number of genius and organized minds may remain constant, and an over-proportionate number of thuggish and superstitious minds remain ever popular. While we produce more food and provide more shelter in modernized countries, the stark truth is most of the remaining world is still mired in haunting need. Even in the industrialized nations there are consequences: pollution, economic destabilization, corporate takeover, reduced family structure, increased crime and welfare, etc. In short our search for knowledge has obtained far more, but our thirst for intelligence has remained a ratio of populace and is not by any stretch of the imagination a part of evolution. We may wonder at the immensity of it all. And wonder even more, now that we no longer look up to the stars.
Posted by john at December 23, 2003 04:13 PM
