What do origin myths explain

Explanation, then, is not unique to nor did it begin with science. Science shares explanation with mythology. What distinguishes science from mythology is verification. Not only does science propose answers, it proceeds to test these answers, and if the answers prove incorrect, they must be rejected or modified. Mythology differs from this. An origin myth offers an explanation that is to be believed.

Acceptance, not verification, is what is called for. Both are explanations, but only one of these explanations can be verified. What is explanation? At bottom, it amounts to translating the unknown into the known, the unfamiliar into the familiar.

And what do human beings know best? They know how people think and feel and act. And from a very early stage of culture, people have projected human thoughts and emotions into the external world, endowing objects and forces of nature with human personality and greater-than-human power. The personalized supernatural beings thus created were assigned the role of providing plausible and satisfying explanations for the unknown. In this way, origin myths were born.

One more word about explanation. At the heart of explanation lies causation. The idea of causation, again, was not born with modern science, nor from the early Greek philosophers. It is much older than that. Indeed, causation is very deeply rooted in human thought. Among the Kuikuru Indians of central Brazil, for instance, a tribe I have studied in the field, a cause is quickly found when something untoward or unusual happens.

Another man, whose manioc garden was being ravaged by peccaries, decided than an enemy had put a picture of a peccary in his garden to draw these animals to it. The pattern of causal thinking I found among the Kuikuru occurs among primitive peoples everywhere. I think it is safe to say, then, that the quest for causes, which is so central to modern science, is actually a legacy bequeathed to science by our pre-scientific Old Stone Age ancestors.

However, the kind of causation employed by primitive peoples is of a very special kind. It is personal causation. That is, the agent responsible for an action generally has the attributes of human personality.

Impersonal causation, a hallmark of modern science, is regarded as insufficient by primitive peoples. Thus, the Kuikuru know it was the wind that blew the roof off a house, but they carry the search for explanation one step further and ask, " Who sent the wind? How could it be otherwise? The members of a pre-literate society could not possibly know the physical causes of cyclonic storms generated high in the atmosphere by complex meteorological forces.

They are also interested in more remote and enduring questions. Who was the first man? How did people learn to plant? What happens after death? For tens of thousands of years people have been crafting answers to these questions, answers that are embodied in the vast body of imaginative narratives we call origin myths.

Over the last hundred years, anthropologists have developed a keen interest in origin myths and have made very extensive collections and analyses of them. Certain myths are all but universal, and their extensive distribution attests to their great antiquity. The best example of this is the famous Flood myth.

The Flood story recorded in the Bible was by no means original with the ancient Hebrews, but was derived by them from the earlier Gilgamesh Epic of the Babylonians.

But the Babylonian version in turn drew on a pre-existing Flood myth that no doubt went back thousands of years earlier. So old is the Flood myth, in fact, that it has had a chance to diffuse far and wide. Indeed, it is known to practically every human society from aboriginal Australia to Tierra del Fuego.

One should not make the error of believing, however, that just because a myth is known throughout the world, it must necessarily reflect an actual occurrence.

The near-universality of a flood story is no more proof that a flood once covered the earth than the widespread belief in a Fall-of-the-Sky myth is proof that the sky once actually fell. Myths are not merely explanations, but also function to assure, encourage, and inspire. They are also literary creations: narrative epics, full of drama and romance, of novelty and imagination, of quest and conflict.

But while often having great literary merit, origin myths should not be thought of as the work of a few creative geniuses. They are, instead, the product of untold thousands of narrators who, in telling and retelling a myth, have embellished it here, dropped a character there, transposed two incidents, amplified a cryptic part, given greater motive or justification to an action, and so on.

Because they continuously change, then, there is no "official" version of a myth. Indeed, even in the same village one may readily obtain half a dozen versions of the same myth. With these general considerations in mind, let us turn now to a brief survey of the kinds of origin myths found in the primitive world.

The view that the earth is the center of the universe, which, until Copernicus, prevailed throughout Europe, was by no means unique to Western thought.

It is no doubt a legacy from Stone Age times. Moreover, if the earth is of prime importance to them -- as it is -- why not make its creation primary in time as well? Thus, in primitive mythology, it is the rule that the world was created first, and that the sun, the moon, and the stars follow it. In fact, the sun, moon, and stars are often mythological characters who first lived on earth but who, after a series of adventures or misfortunes, ended up in the sky to find their ultimate resting place as heavenly bodies.

A few societies have no myth to account for the origin of the world. For them, the world has always existed. More commonly, however, the earth is thought to have been created by the actions of supernatural beings. Rarely, though, does a deity create the world out of nothing: generally, he or she has something to work with. Some Polynesian peoples, for example, believe that the sea was primeval, and that the land was created by a god, Tane, who drove to the bottom and came up with mud from which to fashion it.

The Norse gods Odin, Vill, and Ve made the world from the body of the giant Ymir, using his blood for oceans, his bones for mountains, his hair for trees, and so on. It is not unusual for several gods or culture heroes to be involved in the creation, each contributing his or her portion to the final structure. Beliefs about the origin of human beings fall into three main types: 1 they have always existed on earth, 2 they did not always exist but were created in some way, and 3 they previously existed, but in another world, and had somehow to be brought to this one.

The first belief is exemplified by the Yanomamo of Venezuela about whom Napoleon Chagnon says, "The first beings cannot be accounted for. The Yanomamo simply presume that the cosmos originated with these people. The Norse god Odin created man from ash wood and woman from alder. The Machiguenga of Peru believe the were made by a god, Tasorinchi, who carved them out of balsa wood. The Tlingit of Alaska say the Raven created not only the first human beings, but also the first animals, as well as the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And of course, in the Biblical account, it was God who created the progenitors of the human race, fashioning Adam out of clay and Eve from one of his ribs. The Warao of the Orinoco delta, on the other hand, believe men first lived in a skyworld where the only animals were birds.

Then one day a hunter shot a bird with such force that his arrow pierced the ground of the skyworld and continued to the earth below. Peering through the hole and seeing a rich land beneath them, teeming with all manner of game, the hunter attached a long cotton rope to a tree and lowered himself to earth.

There he was ultimately joined by his fellows, who finally decided to abandon the skyworld and settle permanently on earth. The Karaja of central Brazil reverse the process. Their ancestors, they say, once dwelt in an underworld until one day one of them climbed up a hole in the ground and out onto the surface of the earth, where his fellow tribesmen later followed and where they eventually settled.

Origin myths also explain the variety of animal life that covers the world. Makunaima, a Guiana Carib culture hero, climbed a large tree and with his stone ax cut off pieces of bark which he threw into the water. One by one, they turned into all the animals in the forest. Sedna, according to the Eskimo, cut off her fingers, which turned into seals, whales, walruses, and other ocean mammals.

Often, particular incidents are introduced into an animal creation myth to account for the size, shape, color, and peculiar habits of each animal. In almost all primitive myths there is a close association between animals and men. Countless episodes tell of the transformation of human beings into animals, or vice versa.

Animal-human matings occur commonly. Indeed, it is not uncommon for animals to be regarded as the precursors of the human species -- a crude foreshadowing, in a way, of the theory of organic evolution. However, the origin assigned to an enemy is likely to be unflattering. The Saliva of Columbia, for example, say that their hated Carib enemies arose from large worms in the putrefying entrails of a serpent-monster killed by a Saliva culture hero.

A common belief in the primitive world is that all peoples were once a single tribe, living together and speaking the same language. But then something happened among the Tikuna of the Upper Amazon it was the eating of two hummingbird eggs , and thereafter people began to speak different languages, split into separate groups, and dispersed far and wide. Here we see a clear parallel to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Many primitive myths tell of a Golden Age during which life was easy and pleasant, discord was unknown, tools worked by themselves, no one ever died, and the like. Then something went wrong, and ever since, travail, misfortune, and death have been the lot of mankind. This notion of a Fall of Man is likewise familiar to readers of the Bible. In contrast to a Golden Age, there is often a belief in the notion of a Primordial Simplicity. According to this view, the earliest stage of the human race was one of ignorance and innocence out of which the benighted were lifted by a god or culture hero.

This mythical being taught them many things -- how to make tools, how to build houses, how to plant crops, even how to copulate properly.

Among many elements of culture purportedly unknown to the earliest people was fire. However, rather than being given fire by the gods, most primitive peoples say they had to steal it.

In myth I recorded among the Amahuaca of eastern Peru, fire was stolen from the stingy ogre, Yowashiko, by a parrot who flew away with a burning brand in its beak.

Angered by the theft, Yowashiko tried to douse the flames by sending rain. However, other larger birds spread their wings over the parrot, thus keeping the flames alive so that eventually fire became available to everyone. This account is of course reminiscent of Greek mythology, in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.

The subjects of myths reflect the universal concerns of mankind throughout history: birth, death, the afterlife, the origin of man and the world, good and evil and the nature of man himself. A myth taps into a universal cultural narrative, the collective wisdom of man. An excellent illustration of the universality of these themes is that so many peoples who have had no contact with each other create myths that are remarkably similar.

Unlike fairy tales, myths are not always optimistic. True to the nature of life, the essence of myths is such that they are as often warnings as promises; as often laments as celebrations.

Many myths are instructive and act as a guide to social norms, taking on cultural taboos such as incest, fratricide, and greed. Myths are also pervasive in the arts and advertising, for a very simple reason.

From film to cars to perfume, advertising uses visual metaphors to speak to us. While artists of every generation reinterpret myths, the same basic patterns have shown up in mythology for thousands of years. A name, phrase, or image based on a familiar myth can speak volumes to those who have been absorbing these mythic tales since birth.

When we hear the expression, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" or when we see a television commercial featuring a wooden horse full of soldiers, we recognize the reference to Odysseus, who tricked the Trojans into admitting an army into their city this way. When Jacqueline Kennedy referred to her husband's tenure as a new Camelot, we understand that she meant it was a golden age, like that of King Arthur.