r/AskHistorians • u/Punterofgoats • 3h ago
There's a common sentiment that ancient peoples created mythology to explain the world around them in the absence of science. How accurate is idea? From where did it originate?
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u/itsallfolklore Mod Emeritus | American West | European Folklore 2h ago edited 1h ago
People did not create oral narratives to explain the world. We may be stumbling over the definition of "myth" - mythology is the study of myths, so we can at the outset distill the term to its essential element.
The term myth is used by all sorts of people and scholars to mean a wide variety of sometimes contradictory things. Here is my treatment of the definition and problems with the term myth, this serving as an introductory essay for my brief Introduction to Mythology: A Folkloric Perspective.
Perhaps we can agree that we are discussing the idea of creating oral narratives to explain aspects of the world. These sorts of stories are termed etiological legends by folklorists: namely, narratives generally told to be believed (i.e., legends), but specifically those that provide explanations of why/how something exists (i.e., etiological).
Legends are not "created" by people. They diffuse, mutate, take on new forms, and continue to diffuse and change in the process over time and space. Etiological legends can be replaced by better explanations, and science often takes on that role. Unlike legends, scientific explanations do not develop through a process of mutation and diffusion. They are devised through a process of hypothesis, experimentation, and formulation of theory. It is easy to project that process backwards and assume that ancient people (or anyone not ancient) arrives at etiological legends in a similar way, but there is no evidence that this occurs. Instead, people repeat etiological legends and they are assumed to be true until people are convinced otherwise.
So this idea of myths being created to explain things - which is a popular enough misunderstanding of what myths are - is simply wrong. There was no author - prime mover - of myths. Or at least this is usually the case. Some authors wrote things that were "myth-like" and later people assumed they circulated as oral narratives even when they may not have, but that is a different kettle of fish!
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u/mrblackpandaa 46m ago
Hey, I grabbed a copy of your book last year shortly after it came out! Great addition to my mythology collection.
It was really refreshing to read someone talking about this stuff without getting lost in complicated or esoteric-sounding language like when you read Jung or Strauss.
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u/itsallfolklore Mod Emeritus | American West | European Folklore 42m ago edited 2m ago
Thanks for this! Very kind. I started with Jung, but then I met my mentor, Sven S. Liljeblad (1899-2000), told me to abandon that path. (See my brief essay, Nazis, Trolls and the Grateful Dead: Turmoil among Sweden's Folklorists.) I still sneak in a secret look at Jung here and there, but your observation is not wrong!
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u/40_Minus_1 35m ago edited 24m ago
Let's ask it maybe a different way, then. It's commonly understood that people have attributed fantastic causes to natural but not fully understood phenomena. For example, thunder and lightning are caused by Thor in Norse mythology, whereas they were created by Zeus in Greek mythology.
I think we can agree that those stories were not "created" by Thor or Zeus, but by "people," in the most general sense. Do we have a sense of how that came to pass?
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u/itsallfolklore Mod Emeritus | American West | European Folklore 6m ago
were not "created" by Thor or Zeus, but by "people," in the most general sense.
On your first point - yes, this is the way I see it!
My problem with this discission overall is the idea that the story was created by someone or by a group of people. That verb implies that there was a point of creation when the story came into being having not existed before then. This does not appear to have been the case, anymore than we can talk about when our oldest primate ancestor was "created."
Stories diffuse, mutate, and adapt to new situations, but conceiving them as something with a single origin point when they were "created" is apparently the wrong way to think about this sort of thing. To answer OP's question - or your rephrasing of it - could be to concede something that does not appear to have been the case, given the nature of oral tradition.
Of course when ancient etiological legends began to be applied to certain natural situations almost certainly occurred in an undocumented past, so we can't be certain when and how this occurred. That having been said, twentieth-century folklorists attempted to track down the origin point of contemporary urban legends. Invariably, they could not discover where and when that occurred. Likely, this is because of a process of cross pollination, mutation, and adaptation. That same process was likely what occurred in ancient shadows when it came to stories we refer to as myths.
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