Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [8]
And second. This is, admittedly, a rather “Eurocentric” organization that looks at history as it progressed from a Western perspective. The chapters proceed in a rough chronology from the dawn of Western history through its gradual contacts with the rest of the world and through the impact on the West of that growing contact with these “new worlds.” Frankly, the myths of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece have a lot more to do with Western history than the myths of early China or the San people of the Kalahari Desert. That does not imply that one set of myths is superior, or that one is more “right” or “wrong”—just that I have tried to organize the book to reflect the role myth has played in our history. It is also worth noting that so many of these myths—regardless of their geographic origin—are often more alike than different, a point that will be underscored many times in this book.
In this way, I hope to provide an accessible portal into the myths and the civilizations that created them. Typically, our schools may teach a little bit about one or two of these groups, but rarely discuss them in connection with each other. What did the Greeks learn from the Egyptians? How were they different? Were the Egyptians really Africans? Did the Chinese influence the Hindus or vice versa? How did a handful of Spaniards overthrow mighty empires and convert thousands of Aztecs and Incas from their old beliefs to Catholicism? These are the sort of questions that make this book a somewhat unique addition to the vast literature of mythology.
No small task! The scope of this book is much wider than simply retelling old stories from a modern—and perhaps skeptical—perspective. Unfortunately, for most of us, learning about ancient civilizations—if we learned anything at all—wasn’t very interesting. One of the key objectives of the Don’t Know Much About series is to revisit all those subjects we should have learned about back in school but never did, because they were dull, dreary, and boring, as well as badly taught and riddled with misinformation.
But beyond that, Don’t Know Much About Mythology also tries to spin a thread that winds through all of my Don’t Know Much About books. The history of world myths is deeply connected to such subjects as geography, biblical history, and astronomy. And one of my goals in this series has always been to show how seeing those connections makes learning about these subjects become far more compelling.
Finally, this book and the subject of mythology touch on something deeper still. In the late nineteenth century, a generation of scholars began to view myth as part of the primal human need for a spiritual life. In a classic study of myths, called The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer tried to demonstrate that every ancient society was deeply invested in a ritual of sacrifice that involved a dying and reborn god whose rebirth was essential to the society’s continuing existence.
A little later, Sigmund Freud argued that myths were part of the human subconscious, universally shared stories that reflected deeply rooted psychological conflicts—most of them sexual, in Freud’s view. Then Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple who eventually split with Freud, suggested that myths were rooted in what he called the “collective unconscious,” a shared common human experience as old as mankind itself. Jung believed that this collective unconscious was organized into basic patterns and symbols—which he called archetypes. Our dreams, art, religion, and, perhaps most important, our myths are all among the ways that man has expressed those archetypes. Jung also believed that all myths have certain