Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [5]
When Afghanistan’s Taliban was still in power and banning music, television, and kite-flying, the harsh regime destroyed several massive Buddha statues chiseled into a cliff on the ancient Silk Road. Beyond eliminating what they viewed as idolatrous images, these Islamic fundamentalists were attempting to eradicate a vestige of a 2,500-year-old belief system derived from the complex myths of India. The destruction of these irreplaceable cultural artifacts shocked the world and raised a deeper question: Can you kill beliefs and ideas by killing an image? That is not a new idea. The Spanish conquistadors and priests who followed them into Mexico in the 1500s may have leveled the temples and buildings of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, but did they completely eradicate the beliefs behind them? The Spanish in the Americas, the British in Ireland and Australia, and the United States government have all attempted to “control” defeated people by taking away their language and beliefs. It doesn’t always work.
So, myths can be a powerful business. And that is one reason they have been around for thousands of years. As old as humanity, the first myths belong to a time when the world was full of danger, mystery, and wonder. In the earliest of human times, every society developed its own myths, which eventually played an important part in the society’s daily life and religious rituals.
One of the chief reasons that myths came into being was because people couldn’t provide scientific explanations for the world around them. Natural events, as well as human behavior, all came to be understood through tales of gods, goddesses, and heroes. Thunder, earthquakes, eclipses, the seasons, rain, and the success of crops were all due to the intervention of powerful gods. Human behavior was also the work of the gods. For instance, the Greeks, like most early civilizations, had a story to explain the existence of all the bad things that happen in the world—from illness and pestilence to the idea of evil itself. The Greeks believed that, at one time, all of the world’s evils and problems were trapped inside a jar (not a box!). When this jar was opened by the first woman, all of the world’s misfortunes escaped before this woman—Pandora—was able to close the lid.
The Blackfoot Indians of the American Plains also blamed the woes of the human condition on a troublesome female. When Feather Woman dug up the Great Turnip after being told not to do so, she was cast out of Sky Country—or the heavenly paradise. Yet another woman is seen as the source of the world’s ills in a tale told by a nomadic group from the ancient Near East—the “cradle of civilization,” as they called it back in your school days. In one version, her name was Havva, and she disobeyed her god when she ate from a forbidden tree. Of course, most of us know her by the more familiar name—Eve.
Obviously, we now have many more scientific answers for most of our questions about the world and universe. We know why the sun rises and sets. Why the rain falls in some seasons and not in others. What makes crops grow. We have a much better understanding of where we came from. We understand illness and death—to a certain degree. And although the source of evil in the world—and why bad things happen to good people—is still a great mystery, we have even begun to unravel the beginnings of the universe.
But in earlier times, people invented stories to explain these beginnings. In the Creation story of the Krachi people of Togo in Africa, for instance, the creator god Wulbari and man lived close together, and Wulbari lay on top of Mother Earth. But there was so little space to move about that the smoke of the cooking fires got in Wulbari’s eyes and annoyed the god. In disgust, Wulbari went away and rose up to the present place where humans can admire him but not reach him.
In another African tale, of the Kassena people, the