When They Severed Earth from Sky
How the Human Mind Shapes Myth
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- 32,99 €
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- 32,99 €
Publisher Description
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction.
This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin. The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story--for nearly 8,000 years.
We, however, have been literate so long that we've forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important messages orally over many generations--although reasoning back to the original events is possible only under rather specific conditions.
Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago, but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps 100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to restoring some of that lost history and teaching us about human storytelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To the contemporary reader, Medusa-along with numerous other mythological beings-is simply an amusing creature created by our ancestors that has little grounding in actual history or science. But why do Promethean stories abound, even among peoples who lived on opposite sides of the earth and had no contact with each other? Why are dragons so common in myth, and why do all dragons have scales? In this accessible and entertaining book, Barber and Barber answer these questions by showing that the creation of mythology is deeply connected to cognition and the development of language in humans. They also reveal ways in which mythology cannot be taken for granted in providing important clues to historical events. Citing examples as varied as Abbot and Costello's infamous "Who's on First" skit, Klamath tribal legends, UFO phenomena and Austro-Hungarian vampirism, the authors develop a veritable underworld of Myth Principles, giving them energetic and memorable titles such as the Baby-with-the-Bathwater Reflex, the Rainbow Corollary and the Goldilocks Principle. By applying these principles to myths from around the world, the authors reveal that volcanoes were the basis of numerous myths, that flood myths have more to do with celestial events than earthly ones and that the reason that people around the world tell similar stories is because all humans have the same mental structures. The authors, who work in archaeology and linguistics and in comparative literature and folklore, respectively, are able to make connections that will ensure that both general readers and scholars take a deeper look at both old and new legends. In other words, theirs is a great choice for fans of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.