The New Yorker Goes in Search of the Oldest Layer of Mythology

​This week, the New Yorker ran a lengthy piece asking whether it is possible to reconstruct the oldest myths. Writer Manvir Singh, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, frames the investigation around the character of Edward Casaubon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), a clergyman who sought to find the key to prove all world mythologies were related and descended from Christian truth. Singh teases the idea that such a key, minus the Christianity, has finally been found, but his article turned out to be a rather bland summary of fairly well-known studies that were already considered standard when I read and used them in writing my 2013 book Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages.

​Singh gives a bit of a potted history of attempts to understand the relationship between various groups of myth, and he hits some of the usual highlights, including James Frazer’s Golden Bough, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, Joseph Cambell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, etc. The central discussion is, and cannot fail to be, the scholarship reconstructing Proto-Indo-European gods and myths through a cross-cultural comparison of various Indo-European languages and mythologies. This scholarly project is now two centuries old, and its outlines are well-known to anyone who has given a cursory look into myths and legends. I need not belabor the point here except to point out that the key texts Singh discusses, books by Calvert Watkins and M. L. West, date back to 1995 and 2007 respectively, so this is not exactly breaking news.
 
However, in his odd fixation on Middlemarch, he gives the impression that Eliot created Casaubon’s obsession from whole cloth; it was, by contrast, a popular scholarly fixation for a century. To name but a couple of examples: Jacob Bryant became famous in 1774 as the leading advocate of “Arkism,” the belief that all global religions and mythologies were distorted or decayed memories of Noah’s Flood and the Ark. His book, A New System, attempted to show the underlying unity of all mythologies. John Bathurst Deane wrote The Worship of the Serpent in 1830, arguing that all pre-Christian world mythologies were rooted in the worship of the serpent and were decayed forms of a Satanic cult. (Hargrave Jennings would modify this later in the century, arguing that the serpent was a symbol of the penis, the true object of universal veneration!) Such arguments, though, were essentially the same as claims going back to the Middle Ages that pagans preserved distorted memories of the Great Flood and its aftermath. Even Flavius Josephus, writing as early as the first century CE, and Eusebius, writing in the fourth, attempted such a synthesis, drawing on pagan writers to show (supposedly) that they preserved the narrative of the Flood and stories from Genesis in the guise of pagan myth. (If you want to go still further, you could argue that the interpretatio graeca of the ancients, identifying foreign pantheons with the Greek gods, has the same underlying function.)
 
By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea had spread in many directions, including occultists like Helena Blavatsky who saw all mythology as descended from a prehistoric original true history, and Atlantis writers like Ignatius Donnelly who attributed all mythologies to memories of the antediluvian kings who ruled over Atlantis before its fall. These were, at heart, merely refinements of the earlier Christian notion of Arkism, retooled for a less Christian age.
 
This kind of background would have been helpful to provide to the New Yorker’s readers so that they could understand that the impulse to find the one true origin of mythology is heavily influenced by Western ideas about a single origin point for history and stretches back thousands of years, in many forms, mostly revolving around trying to justify the dominant beliefs by showing that other cultures had lesser version of the truth.
 
Singh hints at this obliquely when he relates the criticism of the more recent attempts to find the origins of mythology. Michael Witzel argued in 2012 that all global mythologies fall into one of two groups, a primitive and unsystematic group (the “Gondwanan”) belonging to the Black people of Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia and a more sophisticated and more recent revelation (the “Laurentian”) belonging to the lighter-skinned peoples of the Earth, which presents a unified story from creation to apocalypse—conveniently mirroring the Bible. Singh notes that this idea relies on “outdated” models with “racial overtones,” though he makes no note of the foregrounding of a Bible-style end of the world, which is not really a feature of most mythological systems except in the vague sense of cyclical renewal found in many, but not all, mythologies, until contact with Abrahamic cultures.
 
We also hear about Yuri Berezkin, a professor in Russia, who codes mythological and folkloric motifs in order to try to trace back core themes to the time before humans left Africa. As Singh notes, these motifs are so vague and general as to basically be useless.
 
The trouble with all of these quests for the oldest mythologies is that there is no real way to confidently distinguish between stories that spread from 60,000-year-old source, stories that spread due to later dissemination and contact, and stories that emerged independently because of common structural formulae inherent in the human mind—like the widespread artistic themes David Lewis-Williams identified as automatically generated within the brain by altered states of consciousness. I can’t help but think of Walter Burkert’s twentieth-century efforts to argue that the Heracles myth dates back to the Neolithic and the impossibility of proving that case, despite the time frame (about 12,000 years) being a far cry from the 60,000 years modern mythographers want to push stories back to.
 
Indo-European myths tended to remain similar over time because (a) originating around 6,500 years ago, they were not terribly old, relatively speaking, compared to all of human history and (b) they are rooted in language and poetry, which tended to preserve them over time. When you back 60,000 years, you enter a time when there is no scholarly consensus about the origins of language, the forms early languages took, or the way languages evolved over time. We cannot even agree whether monogenesis—the origin of all language from a single ur-language—is what really happened or if language families developed independently. If we cannot trace all world languages back to a single source about which we can say much of anything (Meritt Ruhlen, who supports monogenesis, identified just 27 words that could supposedly be traced to this language), then it is difficult to find evidence of what people were talking about in that language.
 
All of which is a long way around saying that Singh’s article did not really grapple with some of the deeper issues involved before reaching what is, nevertheless, almost certainly the correct conclusion: “If there’s a key to all mythologies, it isn’t buried in vanished languages or ancient ruins; it lies in the basic patterns of how we think, feel, and tell stories.” I kept waiting for Singh to reach some interesting new conclusion, but the story remains steadfastly the same as it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago.