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the paleolithic period
30 May 06
Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2005.
The fate of the Sky God reminds us of another popular misconception. It is often assumed that the early myths gave people in the pre-scientific world information about the origin of the cosmos. The story of the Sky God represented exactly this type of speculation, but the myth was a failure, because it did not touch people’s ordinary lives, told them nothing about their human nature and did not help them to solve their perennial problems. The demise of the Sky Gods helps to explain why the Creator God worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims has disappeared from the lives of many people in the West. (22-23)
Armstrong’s book begins with a brief definition of the nature of myth: she reminds us that in ancient and traditional societies, the sacred and the profane are almost indistinguishable, that “[t]he very existence of the gods was inseparable from that of a storm, a sea, a river, or from. . . powerful human emotions (6)”, that myth functioned as a sort of culturally embedded psychology: “It not only helped people to make sense of their lives, but also revealed regions of the human mind that would otherwise have remained inaccessible.” (10-11)
Her chapter on paleolithic mythologies is interesting. All of what we know about paleolithic societies is based on conjecture, but Armstrong makes a convincing case for certain patterns of religious experience that seem to arise frequently in hunter-gatherer societies. Sky gods, almost always male, are found in almost every polytheistic pantheon; they are typically viewed as creator gods, responsible for having made everything, but for various reasons now removed from the world, absent from the daily lives of people. Sky gods are also normally disposed of by their successors, as in the example of Ouranos and Kronos in the Greek pantheon. What struck me about the excerpt at the head of this post is that Armstrong specifically states that the assumption “that the early myths gave people in the pre-scientific world information about the origin of the cosmos” is a misconception. If so, why does the Sky God represent this type of speculation? She seems to suggest that the Sky God was in fact a paleolithic attempt to provide information about origins, but that the Sky God was in turn doomed to fail because of a modern misconception about the nature of paleolithic myth—or perhaps a paleolithic misconception about the function of their own myths. I imagine little is known about exactly why the Sky God is almost universally dethroned, but Armstrong’s suggestion here that it’s because in some way the myths didn’t work seems facile. The parallel to the gods of western monotheisms is fascinating, nonetheless, but difficult given the weaknesses in Armstrong’s analysis of the Sky God’s demise.
The first great flowering of mythology. . . came into being at a time when homo sapiens became homo necans, ‘man the killer’, and found it very difficult to accept the conditions of his existence in a violent world. Mythology often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments. (30)
Here, Armstrong seems to suggest that mythology can provide a mechanism to help humans cope with the ugly realities, not of life as it happens to us, but of the ugly things we have to do to survive. Admittedly, for paleolithic humans who might identify with animals in a way inconceivable to modern humans, one can imagine that hunting and killing a powerful and majestic creature might cause a certain anguish. And in our times, I suspect a considerable number of people would reconsider the casualness with which they eat meat if they were required to do the killing themselves. Nevertheless, I’m a little worried by Armstrong’s suggestions that mythology helps assuage our guilt. Returning to the parallel between the paleolithic Sky God and the modern monotheist gods, it isn’t difficult to find mythologies within the modern religions that justify and even promote atrocities. Here, for instance, is a video game promoted by dominionist christian Rick Warren. True, video games aren’t quite parallel to mythologies, but the dominionist vision behind this one arguably is. And if the function of a mythology is to help assuage the anxiety and guilt we felt as paleolithics when confronted with the need to kill big game to survive, it can also function to increase the comfort we feel as moderns when called upon to kill other people.
Thanks to Secular Front for the video game link.
Posted by pzed on May 30, 2006 at 4.33pm
Categories: fragments, scripture
Comments on "the paleolithic period"
[...] I was perhaps a little hard on Armstrong in my previous post. The chapter on the neolithic period is stronger, generally, than the chapter on the paleolithic. Even PZ Myers acknowledges Armstrong “has interesting ideas about religion,” and I’m looking forward to her chapter on what she calls the axial age, essentially the period during which the so-called great religions of the world were born. I’m hoping for insight as to how and when our society lost the knowledge that nothing ends, that life is a constant struggle, that there is no ultimate victory. This is the irony in Moore’s all-knowing god character reminding us that nothing ends: it is precisely in the historic creation of all-knowing god characters whose faithful believe in beginnings, ends, and ultimate victories that that old knowledge has been lost. [...]
Posted by words » Blog Archive » convergences on February 4, 2008 at 9.19pm :: link
