How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Campbell’s theory, as described in his 1972 Myths to Live By, is that myths serve four functions: (1) mystical, which “serves to awaken and maintain the individual sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that one lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it”: (2) explanatory, or “an image of the universe which will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed”; (3) normative, or to “validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely of the society in which the individual is to live”; and (4) guidance, or “to guide him [the individual], stage by stage, in health, strength and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.” This is a useful outline to help us get our minds around the varied culture of myths, but it is only answering how questions about myths at a proximate level. To know why humans need to experience the mystical, explain the world, create norms, or seek guidance, we need to consider myths from an evolutionary perspective.

  A myth is a form of symbolic communication that invests stories not only with ordinary people and events but also with gods, supernatural beings, and extraordinary happenings, often unfolding in a place or time different from that of ordinary human experience. There are many themes and subjects embodied in myths: origins (cosmogony and creation), eschatology (end times and destruction), heroes (humans with special powers and experiences), time and eternity (ages of man, periods of history), providence and destiny (destiny, mastery over fate), memory and forgetting (prenatal existence, previous lives, collective unconscious), higher beings (celestial gods), founders of religions, nations, and peoples (Abraham, Moses, Buddah, Romulus and Remus, Siegfried), kings and ascetics (Arthur and Merlin), transformation (coming of age), rebirth and renewal (seasons and ages), and messianic and millenarian (second comings and new world orders).

  If myths are to be explained on a deeper evolutionary level, then they must be universal for all peoples, including ourselves. Myths are not just someone else’s story, or stories that come from far-off times or places. We have plenty of myths of our own. Marxism was a political myth, as was pure laissez-faire capitalism, both providing explanatory, descriptive, and, most importantly, normative mythic functions. Freudian psychoanalysis was a psychosocial myth, as was Skinnerian behaviorism, both serving to justify and control human behavior. Science fiction provides descriptive myths, often of dystopian or paradisiacal future states of the world. This evolutionary explanation of myths, in fact, is itself explanatory mythmaking. The fact that scientific reasoning and empirical data are employed to support the argument makes it no less a myth—a story for us, of our time, that provides meaning and purpose.

  In this regard, science is a type of myth, in both function and typology. To some degree, cosmologists give us origin and eschatology myths, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch. Historians provide hero myths, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Jr. Archaeologists present time and eternity myths, from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age. Economists proffer providence and destiny myths, from total free market anarchism to pure communism. Psychologists furnish memory and forgetting myths, from recovered memories to repression. Astronomers and computer scientists supply higher beings myths, from extraterrestrial intelligences to artificial intelligences. Biblical archaeologists contribute founders of religions myths, from King David to Moses. Anthropologists produce transformation myths, from Samoan teenagers to Yanomamö warriors. Sociologists confer rebirth and renewal myths, from childhood to adulthood. And political scientists proffer messianic and millenarian myths, from the new president to the new world order.

  Why do we continue telling stories and constructing myths today? Because the epigenetic rules for mythmaking still reside within us. Consider monsters and beasts as myths. From the earliest cave paintings to the present, monsters and beasts lurk at the interstices of the natural world, appear on the margins of our perception, dwell in the dangerous lands remote from human habitation, come out at night, or in our nightmares. In the light of E. O. Wilson’s epigenetic rule for fear of snakes that generates narratives in the form of snake myths in cultures worldwide, we should not be surprised that the modern sciences of zoology and especially cryptozoology (the “science of hidden animals”) are ripe with mythic tales. For millions of years hominids evolved alongside other primates and mammals in a rich and varied zoological world. The identification of other animals, and the anticipation of possibly dangerous cryptids would have produced not only Type 1 and 2 Hits but also numerous Type 1 and 2 Errors in our thinking. Thus, in our own time we have correctly identified such genuine cryptid surprises as the giant panda, the pygmy hippopotamus, the Komodo dragon, and the long-thought extinct coelacanth. The nowfamous mountain gorilla was only discovered in 1903. The pygmy chimp (making us the “third chimpanzee” in Jared Diamond’s apt phrase) was only recently identified as being a separate species. But the field of cryptozoology is ripe with pseudoscientific hoaxes, exaggerated descriptions, and ridiculous claims. These are Type 1 Errors in thinking. But we must be cautious not to commit a Type 2 Error in rejecting a new discovery. There may very well be new and possibly dangerous animals lying in wait. They may not be dangerous to those of us living in suburban America, but they certainly could have been to our paleolithic ancestors, and this is where an epigenetic rule that would generate mythic monsters could have evolved.

  Or consider how an epigenetic rule might apply to the myths of dragons and werewolves. Dragons are the most common of all mythological creatures, usually portrayed as the hybrid of a serpent or crocodile, and constructed of any number of disparate mix-and-match parts such as the scales of a fish, the wings and occasionally the head of a bird, the forelimbs and sometimes the head of a lion, the ears of an ox, the feet of a tiger, the claws of an eagle, the horns of a deer, and the eyes of a demon. In the ancient world the dragon was a winged lizard or serpent, regarded as the enemy of mankind, and its overthrow is made to figure among the greatest exploits of the gods and heroes of mythology. The dragon is found in the myths of most peoples, where it has been worshiped as a god, endowed with both beneficent and malevolent attributes, combatted as a monster, or attributed supernatural power. It is mentioned thirty-one times in Judaeo-Christian scriptures, starting with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Dragons are often associated with water and sometimes live in caves under lakes or in the ocean bottom. In medieval tales the dragon dried up rivers and caused drought, forcing inhabitants to pay an annual tribute of gold or fair maidens. Many heroes of mythology are dragon slayers: Marduk, Hercules, Apollo, St. Michael, St. George, Beowulf, King Arthur. Some mythologists conjecture that the male dragon slayer is a symbol that represents the shift from egalitarian societies to patriarchal societies. The real source of the dragon myth may be frilled lizards, or reptiles that spit a toxic venom. But more likely it comes from a prebiblical Babylonian myth of the prime female deity who was a dragon named Tiamat. She was associated with the flooding of the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the beginning of the growing season, and her ritual killing by Marduk is possibly the source of many of the dragon and dragon-slayer stories in the world.

  Similarly, werewolves figure prominently in mythology. The peak of prosecutions for lycanthropy—the “condition” of a human taking on wolflike characteristics—was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France. The most famous case was that of Jean Grenier who, in 1603, boasted to three girls that he was a werewolf, telling them that a man “gave me a wolfskin cape; he wraps it around me, and every Monday, Friday and Sunday, and for about an hour at dusk every other day, I am a wolf, a werewolf. I have killed dogs and drunk their blood; but little girls taste better, and their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm.” Looking at this tale with the distance of almost 400 years, it is likely nothing more than male boasting and posturing; but since several children had been murdered at the time
Grenier was fingered and convicted. Why a wolf? The earliest myths are associated with a ceremony of a man putting on a wolf’s skin for protection from the cold, or to act as concealment when hunting for food. This mutated into the theme that the wearing of the skin passed on to the man great magical powers of strength, speed, and stealth, not just for hunting, but for exacting vengeance or gaining power over others. From here it was but a small step to changing the man into a wolf through the common mythic motif of shapeshifting, where creatures or objects can change into other creatures or objects, either at will or under special conditions. An evolutionary argument could also be made that, as pack hunters, wolves were a principal competitor to early humans in northern latitudes. Dogs, as loyal friends and noncompetitors to humans, do not generate such myths as wolves. (It also should be noted that werewolves did not have a monopoly on the genre. There were werebears, weretigers, werehyenas, werecrocodiles, and werejackals. Vampires were a type of werebat. Shapeshifting is found in countless myths, including the Burma-Assam tiger men who can share a tiger’s body, or the leopard men of certain regions of Africa.)

  Telling stories and constructing myths about animals have obvious survival significance to humans living in a paleolithic environment. Most simply and directly, it is a form of pedagogy and a medium of knowledge transfer of important information about the flora and fauna of the local ecology. A simple story can relay to a child that a particular food is poisonous or a certain animal is dangerous. A myth codifies this knowledge into the permanent record of a people’s store of wisdom. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, for example, in his study of the !Kung San people of Africa, observed that their knowledge of the local ecology was “detailed and thorough enough to astonish and inform professional botanists and zoologists.” And this knowledge, he noted, was often exchanged around the campfire in the form of storytelling and mythmaking:

  [Their knowledge covered] everything from the location of food sources to the behavior of predators to the movements of migratory game. Not only stories, but great stores of knowledge are exchanged around the fire among the !Kung and the dramatizations—perhaps best of all—bear knowledge critical to survival. A way of life that is difficult enough would, without such knowledge, become simply impossible.

  As Wilson observed: “Storytelling may be central in language because, in simulating real experience, they bring into play all of the cognitive and emotional circuitry evolved to deal with real experience. In other words, narrative is the best mnemonic procedure; it maximizes rate of learning and understanding.” It seems reasonable, therefore, to offer the following evolutionary explanation for myths: Some individuals inherited an epigenetic rule for mythmaking, in this case myths related to animals, that enabled them to survive and reproduce better in the surrounding environment and culture than individuals who lacked these rules, thus spreading the rules. As part of gene-culture coevolution, myth culture was reconstructed by each generation collectively in the minds of individuals. When oral myths were supplemented by written myths, the culture of myth grew indefinitely large, but the fundamental influence of the epigenetic rules for myths remained constant. Since some myths survived and reproduced better than competing myths, this caused mythic culture to evolve in a track parallel to, and faster than, genetic evolution. This quicker pace of mythic cultural evolution loosened the connection between genes and culture, although the connection was never completely broken. Thus we witness the plethora of modern myths, and our fascination with them.

  FROM MYTHMAKING TO MORALITY

  One of the classic myths of medieval Europe is the story of Beowulf and the monster Grendel. The myth comes to us from a single manuscript, dated circa A.D. 1000, but probably derives from an oral tradition of the eighth century. In its nascent form it was without title. It was later named for the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, although there is no historical evidence that such a person ever lived. The myth has two parts. In the first part the evil monster, Grendel, devours Danish King Hrothgar’s warriors and ravages his kingdom. Young Beowulf, a prince of the Geats of southern Sweden, hears about the monster through his noble uncle, Hygelac (who may have been a historical figure), and makes the king an offer to rid him of the Grendel monster. Meanwhile, the monster strikes at night, while everyone sleeps, stealing away numerous thanes (feudal lords) and devouring them in his keep. Beowulf sets a trap whereby Grendel grabs him one evening, but Beowulf, a mighty warrior, tears off Grendel’s arm. The beast flees, and the next day the people follow the trail of blood to discover the deceased monster. But the next night Grendel’s mother avenges her son, killing one of Hrothgar’s earls. The next day the people once again trek to the keep of the Grendel monster and there discover many monsters and dragons of the sea. Beowulf arrives to wreak vengeance for the latest killing, and finds and slays Grendel’s mother. In the second part of the story Beowulf assumes the throne when King Hrothgar dies, only to have a fire-breathing dragon ravage his land. Beowulf, now an old man, fights the dragon but is no match for the beast. With the aid of a young warrior named Wiglaf the dragon is defeated, but in the process Beowulf dies. His last words are uttered in desperation: “Dear Wiglaf, quickly now help me to see this old treasure of gold, the gladness of its bright jewels, curiously set, that I may yield my life the more easily and the lordship I have held so long.”

  What many scholars see in this myth, Campbell notes, is “the old Germanic virtues … of loyalty and courage, pride in the performances of duty, and, for a king, selfless, fatherly care for his people’s good.” But, we might ask, why does this myth contain ethical values of the Germanic code of loyalty to chief and tribe and vengeance to enemies? Might there be a deeper reason, one rooted in epigenetic rules pertaining to the human condition in a paleolithic community? How do we get from pattern-seeking, storytelling, and mythmaking, to religion?

  As pattern-seeking animals, humans evolved speech as one of the earliest symbolic patterns, with sounds and words representing objects and events in the physical and social environment. But no one knows exactly when language evolved. The scientific evidence is sketchy at best. Cranial endocasts of hominids as old as those of Homo habilis and even Australopithecus africanus (dating several million years old) reveal the nooks and crannies of the exterior surface of the brain. Some of these may correspond to the distinctive language centers of the modern human brain, but whether they drove language in these ancient hominids is impossible to prove. In the Kebara 2 burial site in Israel there is evidence of language in Neanderthals in the form of a nearly complete hyoid bone—a free-floating bone attached to soft tissue in the larynx that anchors throat muscles involved in speech—found next to a Neanderthal mandible.

  Equally important, however, is the question, why language? Language may have evolved for strictly adaptive purposes, giving our hominid ancestors a selective advantage in dealing with the physical and especially the social environment. On the other hand, all other modern primate species are social and hierarchical, yet not one of them has developed as complex a language system as ours. Perhaps language is, in part, a spandrel—a contingent by-product of an enlarged brain evolved for dealing with symbols and different components of language developed for other reasons and later employed in language and speech. Donald Johanson summarizes this as-yet-unsolved mystery:

  Language evolution is probably intimately linked to brain evolution, and since our brain has been growing and reorganizing over the past 2 million years, it seems unlikely that language suddenly arose from some radical new mutation. Human brains could have been language-competent long before spoken languages appeared. The enlarging brain of early Homo no doubt was capable of complicated cognitive coordination and calculation and as such relied on and used skills important to language. Perhaps language evolved in tandem with our enlarging brain or was a cause, rather than a consequence, of brain enlargement during the Pleistocene.

  Whenever and however language evolved, from pattern-seeking to speech-making to storytelling to mythmaking, humans sol
ved problems through language. Anthropologist Terrence Deacon goes so far as to invent a new species designation for us, Homo symbolicus, the hominid symbol user. Anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer societies, for example, have found that problems are often couched in the language of stories, myths, and other symbolic narratives, such as songs and poems. In his description of the Copper Eskimo, for example, anthropologist David Damas notes that “every man or woman in that group was said to have had his own compositions. Some of the subjects of the songs were man’s impotence in the universe, hunger, songs of the hunt, songs of lust, the fear of loneliness, and death.” The description is as applicable for suburban commuters in New York as it is for hunter-gatherers in Alaska.

  Paleoanthropologists believe that we evolved in small hunter-gatherer (and scavenging) communities operating out of a home base and utilizing considerable cooperation and communication. The late archaeologist Glynn Isaac proffered the “home base hypothesis” from which hunting and gathering would have been conducted, with food substances brought back to a specific place where it was shared. Archaeologist Lewis Binford pushes for a “scavenging” model, where ancient hominids more likely would have taken what they could find from the remains of already hunted animals, rather than hunting themselves. Either way, anthropologist Robert Bettinger demonstrates how, compared with individuals, “groups may often be more efficient” not only “in finding and taking prey, particularly large prey” but also in coordinating the activities of individuals, who might otherwise unduly interfere with one another. Finally, as in the case of resource storage, foraging groups that pool and share resources have the effect of ‘smoothing’ the variation in daily capture rates between individuals.” That is, as the group grows larger, “lucky” individuals share their take with “unlucky” individuals, and everyone benefits. Cooperation would have been as powerful a drive in human evolution as competition, if not more so. And communication is an essential tool of cooperation, so it makes sense that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, as well as their modern counterparts, would have employed language to tell stories and solve problems.