Viral Mythology

by Marie D. Jones

The progression of art from primitive and prehistoric to the more classical, ancient historical eras showed a distinct change in the focus of those creating the art. Where before, rock and cave art and other older forms emphasized animals, nature, hunting, and survival, later art focused on the cosmos, reproduction, war, battles, territorialism, Gods and Goddesses, religious beliefs and rituals, and the mysteries of death and the afterlife. The human body was examined, carved, engraved, painted, and sculpted, and the association of women and sexual reproduction was given special status along with important deities and mythical creatures that represented the powers of nature we did not yet have the scientific means to understand.

  3-D Art

  The proliferation of three-dimensional art, with sculpture, pottery, masks, and figurines, allowed even greater expression than just flat rock and wall art. As tools grew more sophisticated, so did our ability to create with them.

  And each culture has its own artistic and archeological history, even as all cultures are intertwined by the spread of information and ideas.

  Information exchange theory is an actual study and modeling of information exchange processes among interacting agents. In a fascinating paper titled “Art As Information: Explaining Upper Paleolithic Art in Western Europe,” authors C. Michael Barton, G.A. Clark, and Allison E. Cohen examined the temporal and spatial distribution of art during the Upper Paleolithic era and looked at how this art and, even more specifically, style performed an important social function at the time—that of information exchange. Their research was concluded to be indicative and applicable to other regions as well. To the researchers, style was a marker for how art was used to inform. Information exchange theory posits that stylistic elements are primarily used to convey information if they serve no functional or utilitarian purpose. They use the example of an artistic object of a spear thrower that is functional and has a purpose that can affect individual or group fitness. But if that spear thrower is carved in the likeness of a horse, it is stylistic and therefore selectively neutral by definition. The horse likeness is meant to convey specific information, maybe of a specific clan or tribe or group of people to whom that horse is meaningful; the image of the spear thrower itself is functional in nature. Art and the adaptation of art to the size of alliance networks also serve as a channel to spread the flow of information. The bigger the alliance networks, the more means of information exchange there is. The authors wrote: “Information will tend to flow along the channels defined and maintained through the negotiation of alliances. Alliances are of variable commitment and duration, are defined in many ways and at many scales, have many functions, some of which have material correlates.” Information along channels of alliances could be used to increase the environmental knowledge and reach for resources.

  One way art and style serve to spread the flow of information is through the distinct style, which is indicative of the culture, social beliefs, location, experiences, and interpretations of those experiences of the community in which that style originates. Style is a language, in a sense, that can communicate information via the visible manifestation of art.

  Visual means of saying something, of spreading information—even hiding and embedding information—preceded the more complex written style of communication. Just as a child will first draw crude images with big fat crayons before he or she has the dexterity and intelligence to pick up a pencil, or in this day and age, a tablet or computer, and type out a novel, art paved the way for greater methods, modes, and means of transmitting knowledge and information. Although a picture certainly is worth a thousand words, it appears that progress and evolution demanded a way for us to express information in ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million words.

  Thus, we began to write.

  Chapter 3

  Of Gods and Goddesses: The Rise of the Written Word

  Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

  —Joseph Campbell

  Thus we hope to teach mythology not as a study, but as a relaxation from study; to give our work the charm of a story-book, yet by means of it to impart a knowledge of an important branch of education.

  —Thomas Bulfinch

  Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

  —Karl Popper

  The problem with oral tradition is that often in the verbal passing on of information, things get misinterpreted, misconstrued, and miscommunicated. We’ve all experienced this whenever we’ve passed on a message from someone else and forgot to include a few key words, or got a piece of gossip that was embellished by several people before we heard it, or those family stories that always seem to be told a little differently by each successive generation.

  The problem with symbols and art is that they cannot always be properly interpreted unless we were the ones who actually drew them. Never can we really know what was intended to be communicated by a symbol, a drawing, a petroglyph, or even an elaborate painting. Heck, we still can’t even seem to figure out exactly what put that smirk on the Mona Lisa’s face!

  Thus, the need for a more sophisticated, adaptive, and complex means for passing on information arose both progressively and spontaneously in the form of the written word. Once our ancestors developed a writing system with letters or numbers or even hieroglyphs, they gained the ability to communicate in more detail and hopefully convey more information about who they were, how they lived, and even what they believed.

  Rare is the person who writes before he or she draws. Rare is the person who writes even before he or she speaks those first garbled words in baby talk. There is an order to expression that evolves as we do.

  In the Beginning...

  The Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia are often credited with the creation of the earliest form of writing, dating back to approximately 3500 BC. This writing was really nothing more than pictograms on clay tablets, intended to convey an object or idea, and was not true writing systems as we think of them. But the people of the Mesopotamian region are credited with the invention of “cuneiform,” a precursor to writing systems of a more alphabetized nature that evolved from basic lines and scratches in clay to more detailed “wedge-shaped signs” that were embedded into the clay with a reed stylus or other pointed object. Cuneiform functioned both phonetically, representing a sound, as well as semantically, representing a meaning, and took communication to a whole new level beyond just pictures of objects. Cuneiform became standardized so that it would be recognizable to larger groups of people, and was used for more than 3,000 years to communicate information in Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Old Persian, among others.

  Around the same time, 3100 BC, the Sumerians invented numerals, which allowed them to document measurement and amount of an object in question, and advanced their communications from the simplicity of pictographs to a more ideographic system, where a symbol represents an idea or concept.

  The first “true city” is thought to be Uruk, in Sumer, in the southern Mesopotamian region that today is known as Iraq. This is the cradle of civilization, where a progression away from more survival-based existence into a more cultural focus was obvious, and the need arose for people to keep track of things, especially items that were traded, sold, and bartered. Writing, therefore, was an adaptive necessity that also allowed for local laws, customs, rules, and rituals to be recorded in a more durable form than oral communication permitted, and provided a true record-keeping method for commercial transactions by temple officials who were given the role of keeping track of the movement of grain, animals, and other items sold from their stores and farms. One of the leading markers of a true civilization, according to archeologist V. Gordon Childe, author of Man Makes Himself, is the creation of standards of measurement and writing.

  According to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the invention of writing was the dawn of the information revolution. Writing was a great cultural and technological advancement that allowed information in the form of news and ideas
and innovations to be carried over much greater distances, without having to rely on the memory of the messenger. Egypt developed a writing system shortly after Sumer, about 3000 BC (although some archeologists suggest an Egyptian origin about 3400 BC), that, like cuneiform, may have been for record-keeping purposes, as well as for monumental displays of deities. Hieroglyphs are the most widely recognized script, even though the last hieroglyphic inscription dates all the way back to 394 AD. The word itself comes from the Greek hieros, for “sacred,” and gluptien, for “carved in stone,” but ancient Egyptians also developed other systems through time.

  From 2300 BC to 700 BC, the hieratic script was developed. This handwritten script was used for administrative and non-monumental texts up until the introduction of the “demotic” script of the Late Period of 661 BC–332 BC. Demotic script was a more abbreviated version of the hieratic, and then led to Coptic script in the first century AD.

  China had meanwhile developed its own writing about 1200 BC as a means of telling the future, using hot rods to create patterns in “oracle bones” made of cracked oxen shoulder blades and turtle shells. Chinese scripts also evolved and developed with the times, and for different purposes, with clerical script appearing about 200 BC for keeping records, and calligraphy, considered the highest art form, featuring characters that are drawn in perfect proportion, balance, and order. Scholars believe Chinese writing developed independently of the Sumerian/Egyptian system because it bore little resemblance to the cuneiform and instead had the characteristics of a logographic system, using symbols to represent whole words.

  Later systems arose in the Indus region of northwestern India and what is now Pakistan about 3000 BC that suggested they were more of a proto-writing system, or, a system of symbols, rather than the logographic system of use in China. Mexico and other Meso-American cultures adopted their own independent writing systems later, about 600 BC.

  From Proto-Writing to True Writing

  Writing evolved through many stages to develop from proto-writing of simple and obvious images and symbol systems, and the true writing of an alphabetic system. Those stages, in the correct order of development, according to A Study of Writing, by Dr. Ignace J. Gelb, professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, are:

  1. Ideographic—Basically composed of pictures and easily discernable images, with no relationship between the written or inscribed symbol and any speech sound.

  2. Logographic—A written sign stands for an actual word in spoken language.

  3. Syllabic—A symbol or glyph represents a single syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel, and sometimes ending with another consonant.

  4. Alphabetic—A symbol or glyph represents an actual sound, where there is a single character for every single sound.

  Proto-writing to true writing also follows a basic three-stage series of developmental milestones that begin with picture writing systems, using glyphs that directly represent an object or idea; the transitional system, where glyphs refer not just to an object or idea but to that object’s actual name; and the phonetic system, where glyphs refer to sounds of either a whole word (logogram), a syllable, or an elementary alphabetic sound.

  A True Alphabet

  The first true alphabet may have come about the late eighth century BC from the Greeks, who were the first to attribute sounds to both vowels and consonants, but they borrowed heavily from an earlier system courtesy of the Phoenicians. The letters and orders of letters of both systems are the same, but for the inclusion of separate letters for vowels in the Greek. From the Greek alphabet, the modern alphabets of Europe evolved.

  However, there is a second theory as to the origins of the alphabet that places its birth in Ancient Egypt about 1800 BC, courtesy of Semitic workers that lived along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This was a short, 22-character alphabet with names and a fix order for the characters, and was spread through the region most likely by Phoenician traders. Once the Greeks got hold of it, they introduced vowels into the existing alphabet to create their own. In fact, the first two words of the Greek system are alpha and beta, which put together made the name alphabet.

  Just as with visual communicative systems, writing systems soon spread or were independently developed as each culture felt the distinct need to create one, with the progress of trade, economic development, and necessity of recording more complex religious, administrative, and legal documentation. Writing may have begun as a means of expressing laws and rules and numbers and who bought how many sheep from whom for how much and when; it soon evolved into a form of artistic expression as well. Information didn’t always have to be basic, survival-based, and mundane. The evolution of writing did not happen quickly, or overnight, because of the factors of each culture involved. The symbols and glyphs that once conveyed all a culture needed to know or pass on became more complex and more evolved, and the need for a more sophisticated system arose, as the cultures themselves grew more complex and evolved. Again we are reminded of the child who graduates from crayons and blank paper to pens and pencils and lined paper to pads and computers—from scrawling his or her name on a drawing of the sun and a flower to writing complex, informative books.

  The story of expression is, indeed, the story of our own evolution.

  Sometimes information told its own stories, in its own way. For ancient civilizations, myth and religious writings became the premier mode of expressing ideas that informed others of the fundamental beliefs of a culture. Because scientific understanding may have been in short supply, this was often accomplished by ascribing the workings of nature to Gods, Goddesses, and other entities. Think about it. Today, we know what causes thunder and lightning. We have the scientific acumen and knowledge to grasp that, and it isn’t mysterious, even though we stand in awe of the workings of the natural world. But to our ancient ancestors, it appeared to be a much different world. Nature was filled with her own stories to be told—and understood.

  The First Stories

  The first stories told were no doubt myths and creation/origin tales that gave some structure to ideas and concepts about the origin of a culture—who they thought they were, how they got here, and their specific place in the bigger picture. What is a myth?

  According to Dictionary.com, a myth is:

  1. A traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature.

  2. Stories or matter of this kind: realm of myth.

  3. Any invented story, idea, or concept: His account of the event is pure myth.

  4. An imaginary or fictitious thing or person.

  5. An unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution.

  The word comes to us from the Latin and Greek mythos, which means “story, word,” and originates from about 1820 AD.

  Myths we are most familiar with act as both a fictional and, as we will see, potentially truthful account of history and creation according to a particular region or culture. Myths serve to explain the world around us, with common themes, motifs, and symbols that can be found across the globe. People often confuse myths with fables, legends, and folklore, which may have some mythical elements, but real myths appear to be less about entertainment and more about passing on important religious, spiritual, or natural information in the form of fantastical stories involving deities and creatures that most likely did not exist, or did exist albeit in a much less fantastical form than the myth describes.

  Carried on via both oral and written traditions, the academic description of a myth is a story that a particular culture holds true, though it may not be true for others, but myth can also serve as a metaphor for what is beyond the direct understanding or consciousness. Joseph Campbell, no doubt the world’s most well-known and highly respected comparative mythologist, called myth “a metaphor transparent to tr
anscendence,” meaning beyond our direct and ordinary state of comprehension and consciousness. In The Power of Myth, Campbell writes:

  Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

  Myths are not absolute truth, but can be described as relative truth to the culture that believes in the myth, in that the myth itself tells of the perception of that culture and of how it brings order to the chaos around it. Myths are the stories we’ve told as a species that are embedded with truths, realities, and even historical events such as earthquakes, wars, and meteor strikes. But they are not pure news reporting.

  Professor of history of religions and author Mircea Eliade looks at myth as a foundational element of religion and essential to it. Other religious scholars believe that myths are an inherent part of religion, because they are simply sacred texts that contain embedded in them wisdom and truths that may be divinely inspired.

  If we look at the traditional religious texts and their stories, we might say we are looking at myths that express profound truths to the cultures that believe in that particular religious tradition. Not all religious stories may qualify as myth, but some seem obvious in their comparisons. The stories of the Bible can be said to be the mythology of the Middle East, filled with parables and legends and lore of deities and humans with superpowers and miraculous events and great floods and wars—men born of virgins and angels and demons, all the same fodder for other myths from other regions but with perhaps just different names. Myths and religious stories share many similarities, which include: