Thus, even though the Greek myths were in a very real sense sacred stories, in this respect they were more like modern literature, films, or the stories of comic book heroes than the Judeo-Christian Bible. Skip to content The sources we have that tell the stories of the gods and heroes come from many different authors from different parts of the Mediterranean world and from different points in time, spanning several centuries.
Previous: What is a myth? Meanwhile, in the Iroquois culture of the Northeastern United States, they have this story. Three hunters pursue a bear. The blood of the wounded animal colors the leaves of the autumnal forest.
The bear then climbs a mountain, leaps into the sky. The hunters and the animal become the constellation Ursa Major.
Then again among the Chukchi, a Siberian people, the constellation Orion is a hunter who pursues a reindeer, Cassiopeia. Meanwhile, in the Finno-Ugric tribes of Siberia, the pursued animal is an elk and takes the form of Ursa Major. These sagas all belong to a family of myths known as the cosmic hunt that spread far and wide in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas among people who lived more than 15, years ago.
Every version of the cosmic hunt shares a core story line. A man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals and the creatures are changed into constellations. What d'Huy did was use phylogenetic software that's used for evolutionary tree building to analyze the extant versions of these myths and see how related they are. To give you an idea how you do that, I'm going to go back to a podcast that we ran last December with Nick Matzke, an evolutionary biologist who also used the phylogenetic software in an unusual and interesting way.
He analyzed the relationships among some 60 bills in various state legislatures around the U. We have these 60 bills which are clearly quite related to each other.
Somebody writes a bill in one state and maybe it almost gets passed so somebody in another state pretty much copies the bill and makes a few little changes to it.
What Matzke did was plug all these bills into his software that analyses usually genetic sequences and established a relationship tree among all these bills. I'll let him explain how he did that and then I'll be back with more from Julien d'Huy.
Matzke: I went to Berkeley and got a PhD. I studied phylogenics, which is the study of phylogenies — phylogenies of the evolutionary trees, showing the relationships of different species through common ancestry. I learned a lot about that and then I went off to do a post doc in Tennessee. In Tennessee, they ended up passing one of these bills in We had always talked about — we're like, "These bills that look like they're just being copied and modified, we should do a phylogeny at some point — do an evolutionary analysis of them.
It had gotten up to being about 60 bills so that we can show how these policies have evolved — how the anti-evolution policies have evolved through time.
I dropped everything back in July and August and for about a month, crashed through this analysis where I took all those bills, lined up all the text, coded all the characteristics — all the variations between these texts — and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA.
We use them for dinosaurs. They get used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified. That's basically how this paper came about. Mirsky: What did you actually uncover when you did this laborious text analysis?
Matzke: There's a couple main results that are sort of the technical results of this. Part of the point was, yeah, ha-ha, creationism evolves.
I think it's a useful point to make, but there were some technical results which was, "How strong is the signal of common ancestry when you have something —" with animal species, we know they have common ancestry.
That's been immensely well-established. But if you have a collection of textual documents, you don't know starting out how much of that is due to copying and modification and how much of it is due to independent composition by different writers and things like that. Mirsky: Again, these are bills in various legislatures around the country. Matzke: Exactly. Every legislative session in every state, which is either every year or every two years, hundreds of bills get proposed on all sorts of topics.
Each one of those gets published. These days, they all go online when they're published. Groups that know how to pass on such stories improve the life-chances of those who hear them, and those folk in turn pass on the stories to their children.
Traditional tales often hinge on ethical or moral issues, or they permit insight into the way other people think. So they insist that you should keep your promises — and should avoid making rash ones; that courage and perseverance will be rewarded and that the wicked do not prevail in the end. The British Isles have their myths and legends, preserved in some of our earliest written records.
The story of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who battled monsters and a dragon, probably originated in eighth-century Northumbria, although it was not written down until the early eleventh century. Irish legends of gods and heroes were also written down in the twelfth century or later. In Welsh there are heroic poems from as early as the sixth century; one such poem contains the first ever reference to the hero Arthur. Arthur is a blended type of heroic figure. Some of his characteristics stem from a legendary Welsh hero who fought monster-cats and dog-headed men and who went off to the Underworld to steal a magic cauldron.
Yet Arthur also takes inspiration from a British war-leader, mentioned in early chronicles, who led his people against the invading Saxons. In the mid-fifteenth-century, Sir Thomas Malory who was confined as a prisoner in the Tower of London, wrote down the best-known version of the Arthur story, incorporating into it tales of the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail.
Malory included the ancient mythic ending, in which Arthur does not die after his last battle, but rather is borne away by boat to the Isle of Avalon.
Legends about Robin and his men, clad in Lincoln Green, who haunt Sherwood Forest, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, are first printed in the late fifteenth century. Later still, Robin is transformed from a thuggish and immoral thief to a dispossessed nobleman in exile in the greenwood. These two myths became very popular once again in the Victorian period. Both stories were mobilised for political and ideological purposes.
Robin Hood and his Merry Men spoke to ideas of a peculiarly English democratic tradition and independence of mind. Robin stood for fairness and justice, for a certain amount of distribution of wealth, and he hated the hypocrisy and corruption of the establishment: the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the bloated and greedy churchmen whose treasures Robin regularly stole.
Robin came to stand for the sturdy average Englishman, mistrustful of authority, but loyal to his rightful king, gallant towards women and with a marked sense of humour. Both these mythic figures had important work to do in the contemporary culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British myths, legends and folktales have survived in all kinds of different contexts.
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