Mythology and Shared Cultural Identity

Having discussed in my previous post the narrative and thematic similarities between the Prometheus stories and stories involving Satan, temptation and knowledge in the Tenakh I feel the need to attempt an explanation for these relationships and what we can learn from them.

Many historians and philologists have noted certain connections between mythological and religious texts; I will take both these genres as a whole corpus as mythology was/is undoubtedly a way of expressing what would be regarded today as religion. It is my opinion that the formation of a specific, doctrinal religion represents an evolution from mythology, which had a distinctly oral tradition associated with it.

To take the Tenakh as a case study again, one can immediately see the use of at least four distinct sources throughout the text. This shows that the corpus of material is a compilation of stories which come from myriad cultural, political and geographical circumstances. No where is this more evident than in Genesis One and Two. Genesis Two appears to many scholars to be based on an older, more pagan background – thus we have the challenge of the serpent to Yahweh’s power and more of a focus on the arboreal, floral and faunal nature of man and the Earth; this is far more similar to mythologies where man, often made from dust or mud, is inextricably linked with the Earth/Mother Earth. Genesis One meanwhile offers itself as a staunch opposition to the Babylonian creation epic, The Enuma Elish. This account is a later addition to the corpus of biblical text, dating from the time of the Jews return to Israel following the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC. It was in this period that the Torah as we have it now started to solidify and take shape as a complete work after centuries of focus on oral tradition and separate scraps of poems, stories and legal documents. Genesis1 can consequently be placed in this context of great upheaval both religious and political. Therefore, the book of Genesis tries to battle against the context of Babylonian polytheism by adopting a similar mythic structure to the Babylonian cosmology. Similarities such as the pattern of universal construction, and the assertion that Yahweh was sole creator and master over previously divine bodies such as the sun.

From this example we can conclude that neighbouring cultures had a profound effect on each others religious and mythological texts. In a period characterised by a constant change in ‘national’, racial and linguistic borders such exchange is inevitable. For the Jews exiled in Babylon it was necessary to adapt their doctrine in order to reflect the environment they found themselves in; an environment which seriously challenged their previously certain beliefs. This example provides an explanation for certain trends in religion based upon texts, written by peoples who had a close geographical and political relationship. However it does not explain why there are recurring motifs in many mytho-religious doctrines from peoples who could only have had minor (if any) cultural meetings.

A prime example of this is the adherence of many cultures to a belief that an episode of global destruction occurred in the primeval past. Meso-American, Indian, Scandinavian, Greek, Sumerian, Hebrew and even Polynesian cultures all record flood myths. In these myths it is a common feature that only very few people are allowed to survive, thus enabling mankind to begin again. It seems to me that this recurring story is an example of a shared culture, a culture which predates civilisation and multi-lingual nations. I would postulate that there resided among shamans, story tellers and priests the memory of an expansion of mankind out of the cradle of evolution. It has been observed by anthropologists and archaeologists that this happened in separate waves, with mankind leaving Africa and travelling around the fertile crescent, into Europe, Asia and beyond. The Ryan-Pitman theory and the Lake Agassiz theory both postulate that a dramatic increase in sea level, caused by either the flooding of the Black Sea or the draining of the great glacial lake in North America (Agassiz) became a fixture in the folklore of these largely nomadic humans.  Couple this with the fact that during migrations very few people would have survived in order to create new colonies and the basis of flood myths becomes apparent.

This is of course theoretical but the consideration of such startling similarities in folklore, myth and religion warrant the postulation of such theories. It must always be remembered that we as a species have a common origin and therefore on some level we share some innate cultural memories which help constitute our psychology. Freud believed that the Oedipus myth was a by-product of just such a shared identity and it represented the deepest parts of our very psyche as a species. This as an example may well have been unsuccessful as the Oedipus style story does not recur in other cultural traditions; however the theory in itself is sound. There is in the mythology of the world shared ideas such as universal destruction and the remaking of civilisation, forbidden knowledge, tricksters who attempt to deceive the Gods or help mankind or both, and many others. The Prometheus myth is a prime example of a story which has its grounding in such shared ideas and as such the studying of it allows us to better understand the psychology of our ancestors; their hopes, fears and how they believed the world worked. Biblical and literary scholars have a process by which they establish the more reliable and plausible aspects of a text. If an item is referred to by multiple sources (such as Matthew, Mark and Luke) it is more likely to be true than if just one source mentions it. If we take world mythology as a whole discourse, an entity in and of itself, and apply this technique we may get one step closer to understanding our ancestors on a deeper, unified level and maybe arrive at truths which geography, imperialism and language has hitherto barred from us.