Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [9]
For more than a hundred years, scholars have debated different views of the role that myths have played in the human experience. Religion, psychology, anthropology—all of these are lenses through which we can view that role. This book takes into account such approaches to mythology and raises another set of questions: Are these timeless stories simply collections of amusing tall tales from long, long ago? Did myths begin as the ancient world’s version of The Sopranos? Are they simply old versions of entertaining stories about sex and violence—or were they created to cement the social order with divine kings lording over the common person? Do myths reach some deeper level of human thought and experience, as many anthropologists and psychologists suggest? And finally, how do the ancient ideas found in myths speak to us today?
In his 1949 classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell wrote: “Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic magic ring of myth.”
Throughout human history, myths have provided what T. S. Eliot, a poet deeply interested in myth, called “the roots that clutch.” Exploring Campbell’s “magic ring of myth” takes Don’t Know Much About Mythology into territory that has been touched upon in my previous books, especially those about the Bible and the universe—the powerful connections between belief and science, the conflicts between faith and the rational world, and a deeper sense of the mysterious in human life, which are all part of man’s search for meaning.
Underpinning these books, I hope, is an idea expressed by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” How Promethean! (See? I told you myths live in our language.)
Over the course of the more than fifteen years that I have been writing the Don’t Know Much About series, I have discovered that people are not ignorant about subjects like history and religion by choice. On the contrary, I’ve discovered that people of all ages are eager to learn and have endless curiosity. One of the saddest things I have witnessed in these years—especially when I visit schools—is how the innate and insatiable curiosity young children have about the world gets absolutely killed by the tedium of school.
I remember so well how myths saved one little boy from that tedium. And I also believe that the story of myth is ultimately about our innate human curiosity. Like that curious newspaper boy who wanted to know what “argus” meant. Or that curious woman who wanted to know what was in the jar given to her by the gods. Or that curious pair in Eden who wanted to gain knowledge. This is what got us where we are today. The human experience is about a boy asking questions and pushing the envelope of curiosity. Across centuries of time and great distances of culture, mythology is about that common human experience and that driving curiosity about other people, the world, the heavens. Deeper than intellect alone, it’s a piece of what makes us what we are—call it soul, collective unconscious, or even superstition. I hope, if nothing else, this book will help you discover that childlike curiosity that has driven us from dark caves to the outermost edges of the universe.
CHAPTER ONE
ALL MEN HAVE NEED OF THE GODS
Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard.
—HESIOD (c. 700 BCE), The Theogony
Know thyself.
—Inscription at the Delphic Oracle, attributed to the Seven Sages (c. 650 BCE–550 BCE)
No science will