The Origins of Mythology: "Comparison and Theory"

This is an old-school weblog series, tracking my progress through The Origins of the World's Mythologies, by Michael Witzel, a thick monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

My initial impressions about this chapter were overly optimistic. I thought I was going to find here a survey of the author's method, with some discussion of the theory of comparison. And that's how it started.

But about halfway through, I realized that instead I was being given a close-up tour of the method as it applies to the results that I will become more fully acquainted with in the next chapter.

Quick Summary

The question that drives this chapter is this: "Why do we find the same myths all over the world, even in cultures that don't have any recent connection to each other?" And the solution Witzel provides forms the heart of his method: Humans took these stories with them through all their migrations around the globe.

Two General Impressions

One, a memory: I was once given a tour of a chapel by an overly enthusiastic organist. About fifteen minutes into it, I realized it was not going to end anytime soon. My guide knew the date and cost of every piece of equipment, from floor to roof tiles; the names of all the key donors; the unique history of every piece of artwork commissioned (at x sum) for placement in the space. For a historian of that particular chapel, it would have been fascinating.

Witzel's second chapter is a bit like that. I like where his method is taking us, I like the overall design, and some of the decorative fine points are pretty appealing. But the exhaustive explication is a tad wearying. Even so, I have mixed feelings about this chapter. What Witzel is proposing is truly mind-boggling. The dispersion of key mythological bits and pieces, filled out with material recovered from this or that corner of the globe, is going to take us back more than 40 thousand years, to a mythological complex that was practically born with human language. Or at least that's what he's hoping to prove.

Understandably, the author may be concerned that his project won't be given a fair hearing, and so he layers on methodological justifications, giving weight and clear explanation to the choices he made. Also, Witzel clearly hopes others will carry forward this research, so he's laying the groundwork for future researchers. Cutting a path.

But the tradeoff (here's my second thought) is that Witzel's account loses all dramatic appeal in the process. He has to give huge chunks of his results away to make sure we understand his method, and that robs the book of any revelatory quality. It's like a strip tease with no tease. That might be an asset in scholarly studies, but it makes the reading quite a bit duller.

Setting Up the Problem

So let me try to restate some key points I've gotten from the chapter so far, in more dramatic fashion than Witzel has done. I'll try not to distort it too much. Here goes.

When you compare the earliest recorded mythologies from remote parts of the world, such as Mesoamerica (Mayans, Inca), Polynesia, India, and Greece, certain stories emerge into a kind of three-dimensional clarity. What explanation could exist for the remarkable similarities between myths told in such far-flung places? There are really only four possibilities:

1. these stories were spread from major cultural centers to outlying areas by trade routes ("diffusion")
2. these stories emerge in each culture because human beings are hardwired, neurologically or linguistically or in some more psychically mysterious way, to tell them ("archetype")
3. these stories emerge in each culture because of environmental factors (say, rainstorms and agriculture), and such things are accidentally explained the same way ("convergence")
4. these stories have been inherited from a common source and passed down through countless generations as humans migrated to these far-flung places ("common origin")

The first explanation, "diffusion," doesn't work for myths that lie close to the center of a remote culture, because traders and visitors and immigrants don't easily insert their stories into the center of a foreign culture. This is especially true since the myths have religious dimensions and uses. We all know how open traditional religions are to innovations from passing foreigners and trade-partners. Or anybody else. Enough said.

The second explanation, "archetype," works well in theory as an explanation for the similarities, but it has two strikes against it. One, it sort of looks like mumbo-jumbo (my word, not Witzel's). It takes a bit of hand-waving to get universal archetypes embedded into the human soul as an explanation for anything. Possible, but unprovable. (Jung made the effort; some people still accept that; most scholars of this material don't.) Two, it doesn't work well for explaining the differences between the mythologies of these peoples. In other words, if it's embedded into the human psyche, why over here and not over there? (The myths aren't everywhere, they're just incredibly widespread.)

There's another thing, too, that makes the human-hardwiring explanation hard to fit to the evidence. The mythical bits and pieces we're talking about are interconnected. They follow a storyline or plot that transcends and links together the individual mythical units. What archetypal patterning could account for that? (Could a storyline really be embedded into human brain matter?)

This last wrinkle causes trouble for the third explanation, too ("convergence"). If human cultures are making these stories up spontaneously, thanks to similar environmental conditions, why are they also slotting them into the same plotline?

This question cuts deep for the "convergence" model: Witzel can point to clear examples of convergence. And guess what? Despite outward similarities, convergent myths don't serve the same functions within the two myth systems. Not so the stories we're looking at here.

So that leaves the last option: a common origin. Is that possible? To be clear: the migrations that separated humans who wound up telling tales in the Mayan tongue from the humans who scratched out the Rig Veda and the Theogony of Hesiod go back twenty thousand years or more. That's a long time to pass down a tale.

There are some supporting clues, though. For instance, in both Hawai'i and central Australia, a great flood myth is told. But neither area is subject to flooding--the one, thanks to mountains, the other, arid conditions. (If this was "diffusion," the only possible alternative here, the Australian aborigines would likely have told the outsiders, "What's a flood?" But if they had inherited the tale before they came to Australia, they're much more likely to hold onto it. See remark above about religious conservativism.)

Even with this kind of support, though, common origins is an extraordinary claim, so it requires several checks. How to proceed? How to get past guesswork to something more like proof?

Witzel's "Genetic" Solution

The answer lies in science, actually. Genetics, linguistics, taxonomy. Treat mythical units ("mythemes") like genes. How does an organism come to possess a trait? Through inheritance and mutation. Your possession of a certain trait (say, vertebrae) suggests common descent with many kinds of creatures who share that trait (vertebrae), whereas your five-digit hands and feet suggest a much smaller pool of shared DNA.

Or look at linguistics (Witzel's primary field). Shared vocabulary, overlapping declension patterns, shared but unique grammatical rules, point to kinship--again, common descent from an earlier language that wasn't exactly either descendent language but, over time, gave birth to both.

If a similar comparison between traits, genes, vocabulary, grammar, can be undertaken for mythologies, it should be possible to trace out "path dependencies" for myths--mythological elements or traits that have been passed down to more than one mythological system. Close comparative work could allow the researcher to trace these "genes" back to the parent, and so to reconstruct some of that parent's genetic blueprint. The parent (the mythological sequence or plotline) that gave birth to these far-flung descendants will not be identical to any of them. And some of the parent's traits may be difficult to define with certainty. But something of its shape, its contours, should emerge.

In the process of building up the family tree for these mythologies, layers of divergence and resemblance should appear at higher and lower levels on the genealogical chart--like your backbone and your five-digit hands and feet. So, for instance, traits shared across Eurasia but not found in Mesoamerica would suggest a branching of the mythological "family tree" at the point where humans crossed the land bridge into America. As humans migrated, they took some stories but not others--perhaps because those stories hadn't been told yet. After the migration, the ones who migrated invent new stories again, which will be spread to different parts of America but won't be found among the population that didn't cross to America.

Once such stories get injected into the DNA of a particular region or language family, some few survive and go on to shape the regional, and then local, mythologies. All the way down to your own tribe's interpretation. The result is obvious, and a lot like genetics: over time, you have tremendous variety, built on an underlying substrate of common inheritance.

Two Key Terms

Here are two key terms worth defining, as they're central for Witzel's work:

"path dependency" - defined as "the set of foundational topics in each civilization that have exercised extraordinary influence on all its subsequent stages" (p. 39, emphasis original). Witzel uses this concept to explain why particular myths and "doctrines" persist over countless generations of humans. (The idea of an eternity spent in "heaven" or "hell," for instance, he traces back at least 3,000 years to Zoroaster.)

"cladistic analysis" - the effort to establish a "family tree" of mythological tales, "just as botanists, zoologists, paleontologists, geneticists, linguists, and philologists habitually construct from their data" (p. 3)

Last Thoughts

That's the project as I understand it. I'll let you know next time if I need to correct anything in my explanation.

But meanwhile I hope you can see why this is exciting stuff. Witzel is promising to take us back to a Cro Magnon mythological system, and his method for doing it has at least a decent chance of getting the picture into reasonable focus.

The Origins of Mythology: "Introduction"

This is an old-school weblog series, tracking my progress through The Origins of the World's Mythologies, by Michael Witzel, a thick monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

Photo credit: Oxford University Press

In the intro, Witzel, a Harvard Sanskrit professor, lays out the terrain for his study, which intrigued me the moment I read this: review of it. I have formal education in religious studies and mythology, and I like writing what some folks call "mythic fiction" (which isn't actually limited to mythology). So I was intrigued enough to buy a copy, partly because I immediately recognized that the premise for this book is unusual, even unique. Let me explain.

Witzel claims that the far-flung mythologies of the world can be traced, scientifically (on the model of linguistics), back to an original mythological complex or "storyline." He promises to use various methods to recover this storyline in the upcoming chapters. But here (in the intro) he's setting out what's unique about his approach, and why it just might work. This is common fare for academic books (for good reason), but I won't rehash all the arguments. A brief catalog of the 36-page intro:

• some older theories about why myths from different eras and geographical locations share so many similarities
• weaknesses in said older theories
• a survey of various attempts to interpret myths
• how all of the above differ from the approach of Witzel in what is forthcoming in the book

The take-aways are more interesting than the bits just referred to. Here are a couple.

Witzel's definition of myth (a bit complex, but worth tackling):

a 'true' narrative that tells of cosmology and society as well as of the human condition and that is frequently employed to explain and justify social circumstances (p. 35)

 Or, more eloquently:

myth tries to make a significant statement about human life itself: 'where do we come from, why are we here, where do we go?' Just like Gauguin's enigmatic painting, myth artistically combines many motifs into a meaningful whole, modifying the older (even the reconstructed original) layout according to individual local conditions… Myth still binds humans to their natural habitat and social background; it provides people with reasons for the cyclical seasons of nature, for festivals, rituals, and social strata; myth also tells of a deep underlying meaning of human life itself, satisfying basic spiritual needs (p. 34)

This description nicely brings together some important observations about myth. One, that it "combines many motifs." In fact, its vitality and "meaning" are related to its combinatorial quality, the complex interactions of elements in the myths (see Claude Levi-Strauss). Another, that myth is tied to ritual and festival. That makes it public, social, cultural. And finally, Witzel helpfully keeps in view the religious dimension of myth, or its "spiritual" dimension if you prefer, which is important but surprisingly rare (among scholars of this material).

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to give a glimpse of his main methodological point, which is the purpose of his introduction. Witzel's unique contribution here is going to be to take whole complexes of actual mythologies (say in Japan, India, Greece, etc.) and compare them, searching for "path dependencies" or "descent lines" still in evidence across those cultures. Older approaches (some of them groan-worthy if popular) just compare individual stories. So Witzel's work is massive, cross-disciplinary, and so far pretty compelling. I'll let you know when I get through chapter 2, which promises to be a fairly quick run through theories of comparison.

I linked to Frederick Smith's review of the book above, but here it is again (PDF).
And I found a good shorter review of it here: "Comparing Mythologies on a Global Scale: A Review Article By N.J. Allen" (PDF)

The Wizard of Oz: American Faerie

For a long time, I’ve wondered if (and how) the creatures of faerie that resided in Europe could have made their way to American soil, where I live. Or is our soil already occupied by native sprites, whose voices and stories people like me (of European extraction) can’t easily catch on the wind?

Frank Baum made an effort to catch the wind of an American fairyland, to weave fresh American fairy tales, most famously The Wizard of Oz. This is, on its surface, a pretty simple book (as it should be): simple in language and straightforward in its telling. That’s not to say there aren’t unexpected and delightful turns. But the plot is easily followed. The characters have humorous incongruities, but not what I would consider great complexity. Like most (or perhaps all) European fairy tales, the narrator is “omniscient,” moving seamlessly into the perspective of any character most central to the current action. Like European fairy tales, this one has wild woods, witches, magic shoes, a magic hat, instructions that must be obeyed. Like European tales, it has just the right number of helpers and wishes to come out without any extras at the end.

But it also has distinctly American qualities. (The Library of Congress calls it “The first totally American fantasy for children.”) For instance, the places where magic happens are almost always wide open, not close and clustered forests. This setting is more typical of the American heartland. More importantly, maybe, it has newly-minted characters. The iconic Scarecrow, the ever-so-modern Tin Woodman, and that girl Dorothy in her pigtails, carrying her basket out of the house for a long walk. Oz, of course, the elfland version of that iconic American, the traveling charlatan and sideshow performer—with a good heart. Not surprisingly, he’s from our world (Omaha). And then the various peoples, like Munchkins and Winkies, who remind me a little of elves and dwarfs but aren’t. This feels like American innovation. Even the names of things have a fresh, non-traditional sound.

I wish I knew why this tale was and is so appealing. Maybe it’s Dorothy’s innocence—her goodness that prevails over all obstacles. Maybe it’s the freshness of Oz-land. Maybe Baum captured something, an American flavor of European folklore. Or maybe he was just a gifted storyteller, weaving surprises that his readers delight in.

Maybe one of you can solve the riddle for me.

At the end of the day, I’m not ready to pack up and find my way to Baum’s faerie. But plenty of Americans have been (witness this site, and this list of books, with full text!), and that’s quite a legacy.

"The Fairy Way of Writing" - Joseph Addison

In 1712, a British critic named Joseph Addison discussed what we would call “fantastic” or “fairy stories” as an identifiable literary form. This is, he says, “The Fairy Way of Writing”:

There is a kind of writing wherein the poet quite loses sight of nature and entertains his reader’s imagination with the characters and actions of such persons as have many of them no existence but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits.

Addison seems to think, when the story is “fantastic,” art becomes something apart from nature. While this may appear to make sense, in fact fantasy arguably requires more sympathy with nature, not less. What’s more, the beings he mentions don’t exist merely in the author’s or readers’ imagination. They exist in a tradition of storytelling that both author and reader dip into.

Addison seems to admit this a little later in the essay:

Besides possessing “a particular cast of fancy, and an imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious”, the author “ought to be very well versed in legends and fables, antiquated romances, and the traditions of nurses and old women, that he may fall in with our natural prejudices, and humor those notions which we have imbibed in our Infancy.”

In effect, fantastic tales “work” because we recognize something in them, however strange their new embodiment in this particular tale. This, by the way, is nice early confirmation for a point I’ve made before in this blog: to write good fantasy, it’s crucial to really know the deeper stratum of folk and fairy tradition that is employed – whatever tradition the author chooses.

Now back to Addison: Even stranger, at one point in the essay he seems to admit the possible existence of fantastic kinds of beings:

we are sure in general there are many intellectual beings in the world besides our selves, and several species of spirits, who are subject to different laws and economies from those of mankind.

It’s not clear to me how seriously he means this. If he’s serious, this leaves open the possibility of “wonder,” the sneaking suspicion that these stories (or something like them) might really be true.

As a recent critic, David Sandner, puts it, “Modern skeptical humanity should be immune to the ‘secret terrors’ of the fantastic, but is not.” Sandner adds that this is part of fantasy’s “power,” namely, its ability to reawaken our supposedly bygone, superstitious fears. (Think ghosts, goblins, demons.)

But critics of fantasy sometimes point to this very power as a fault: the longings and fears fantasy reawakens are “childish." From a staunchly modern perspective, this “childhood” is also the childhood of humanity—the “premodern man.” If readers discover that they are, in some way, “premodern” (superstitious, irrational, unenlightened) … Well, I don’t think that’s the fault of fantastic literature. It only shows that fantastic stories, done well, are a rightful part of our human storytelling heritage.

I’ll conclude with a quote that shows how perceptive Addison could be about what makes for a good, effective “fantastic” story. He says that if the author of a fantastic story lacks a deep knowledge of traditional legends and folk tales,

he will be apt to make his fairies talk like people of his own species, and not like other sets of beings ... and think in a different manner from that of mankind ....

Source: David Sandner, Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Praeger, 2004), 21-23; 316-325.

Longing for the Medieval

"Bedrock Fortress," by t.j. blackwell

One of the delights of fantasy novels is their ability to take us to places we’d like to go. If that’s true—I think it usually is—then it’s interesting that so many fantasy novels take place in a kind of medieval world.

If you think about it, most of us were taught in school (or somewhere) that the Middle Ages were a superstitious, unenlightened age, where people died young from plagues and constant warfare, and they had to sleep on dirt or stone floors and live indoors without good windows. Those were the “dark ages.” No science; no medicine. Nobody could read, either, so people didn’t get to think for themselves.

If you’re American, you also were probably taught to associate that time with the terrible idea of “kings,” both high kings and petty ones. I remember in particular learning about the feudal system, with peons and lords and constant battles, and walled cities and the whole thing. Nobody envied those peons. Nobody thought highly of those lords, either.

So, if I’m remembering correctly, if all of us really were taught to think of the Middle Ages as backward and superstitious, why do we all want to go there?

Before I hazard a guess, I want to point out one thing that rarely gets included in the fantasy medieval past: the Church. If you dip into a book like A Day in a Medieval City, by Chiara Frugoni, you’ll discover that the Church was everywhere in the Middle Ages. It was in the middle of most cities (which weren’t all that large), and there were monasteries, abbeys, and such things all around the countryside. (Twain’s Connecticut Yankee makes good dramatic use of this fact.) Churches and steeples and friars and monks appear all over medieval tapestries—as do hell, and the manifold torments of its occupants. To use a Twain-esque expression, you couldn’t swing a … er, rope … without hitting a monk or a friar or some other cleric, in the medieval past.

My point is that the fantasy novel doesn’t give exactly a realistic picture of medieval life. I don’t mean that it should. For one thing, this strange silence about religion, which you’ll find in Tolkien already, might be due to the fairy tale and folktale influence on the genre. After all, European folktales were passed down—if not invented—in a society permeated by the Church and its representatives. And yet, rare is the monk or nun or friar in one of these tales, and far more seldom still is the tale really “religious,” especially “Christian,” in any explicit way. (This topic is for another day.) Moral, yes; religious, not especially.

So one possible caricature is: Fantasy novels happen in a vaguely medieval society where, as in fairy tales, the Church is not a real player—religion isn’t the point. To answer our question—“Why?”—you might say that fantasy novels, out of respect for tradition, take place in the same half-articulate social set-up that the folktales assume.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think for many fantasy fans, we experience a longing for a pre-technocratic society. We want to “go there,” where you have to start a fire with a flint (whatever that is) and, if you’re going to reach a remote kingdom, you have to walk through a barren countryside where there aren’t any good roads or automobiles or railroad tracks. Maybe a forest. This might be happening in some land that we can’t find on a map—in fact, all the better. We just want to go there, to Middle Earth (maybe especially there), and live where elves are not far off and dwarves might be inside a mountain. Or dragons might still plague people who live in houses with roofs of thatch. Something about that pre-plastic, pre-automobile, pre-highway, pre-Walmart, existence entices us.

And another thing: we seem to sometimes perceive the “good”—whatever that is—more clearly there, where the technology doesn’t get in the way. Free of its cords and electric pulses, its clutter, we perceive the “evil” there more sharply, too. And that, again, is a legacy of faerie, I expect. For there, in that world of brilliant color and deep shadow, uncluttered as it is by smokestacks and water towers, we sooner expect to encounter the magic that we crave, from some “other world,” hanging around the bend. Yes, even though we know that magic to be full of peril, unpredictable, and ever unwilling to bend its rules to the self-absorbed. Yes, because somewhere we seem to cling to that old-fashioned idea ...

  

The Genius of Compelling Fantasy

I think most fantasy fans would agree that fantasy has some link to fairy tales. At least it did when fantasy first started being written. Should it still? Here’s my two cents.

Traditional folktales or “fairy tales” have a kind of power that shouldn’t be lost in fantasy – at least not all of it. The “genius” of a compelling fantasy novel is its ability to evoke that mythic or faerie “dream-world” Novalis wrote about (see my first post, “What is a fairy tale?”). It can do this in varying degrees and however the writer feels the urge, but to do it effectively, it has to draw from the taproot itself. Put another way, it can’t be derivative to achieve its true genius. The writer of a fantasy novel (at least of the kind I’m thinking of) has to be steeped in these imaginative traditions at least enough that they bleed in some way into the tale, like tea leaves darkening water. Otherwise, we are left with the individual writer’s own imagination, such as it is, and we’ve lost the tradition that makes for compelling fantasy.

Any long piece of writing is an almost magical act of communication by symbol and sign, evocation and allusion. In fantasy, of course anything can be imagined—there can’t be any hard-and-fast rules about that. Let the imagination roam free, and let it use any source materials it must. But if the story is going to unfold magically also in the reader’s imagination, something shared has to exist. Allusion has to find something beyond the individual writer’s mind to tap into.

Take Tolkien, for instance. In creating Middle Earth, he managed to convince quite a few people that this place was (almost?) real. He did this, I would suggest, by drawing on the mythology and folktale with which he was very well acquainted. From that deep, subterranean stream, he drew out inspiration for strange things like “gollums” and rings of power. He brought in crystal balls, wizards, ghosts, trolls—even pipe tobacco. All of this he combined into his own brew, with patience and hard work I might add, paying attention to the potent properties of each, as they contributed to what was not only a new story but almost a new genre of story—the fantasy epic.

When fantasy is at its best, to me—and this is just my opinion—it draws on this deep, subterranean stream. The reader recognizes, even without having read (say) Snow White, the envious queen, her vanity and guile, as well as the purity and tragedy of her victim. Less convincing or potent—again just my preference—is the fantasy novel that relies on what we can call derivative fantasy tropes, ones used by many fantasy writers before, perhaps even Tolkien (say, dwarves and elves at odds, or little people who are amazingly tough). Successful fantasy can find the power from the old traditional tales—however used, however innovative that use. Using fantasy tropes or themes runs the risk of mistaking incidental details in the old faerie tale tradition for their real power and promise. Knowing (or at least using) only Tolkien but not (say) Beowulf, the creator of a fantasy story will be unable to go beyond Tolkien’s particular use of traditional tale elements, combined as the tale he told required, and so will be hampered from bringing forward anew the power of those and other elements for the new story he or she wishes to tell.

What do you think? Have you ever been disappointed by a fantasy novel that’s full of well-worn tropes and creatures? Have you ever read fantasy that seems to draw fresh vitality from those same tropes and creatures? How would you explain it?