The Punchline

 What is myth? Where does it come from?

 I don't mean stories like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, which are just warnings. Don't go into the woods alone, little girl; or don't be so strange that ordinary people get nervous. They're code for  'Do what society expects', and not much more. I mean the real myths,the ones that have come down from so far back in time that they were old beyond imagining when they were first written down.

 They're code too, of course. In pre-literate societies they were how knowledge was passed on. Embed it in a story, then spread the story so widely that the whole culture remembers it. People always change a story, though, even when it travels from village to village. We add a tweak here or there, change an oak into a willow because we happen to live near a stream where willows grow. Have you ever told a joke that wasn't quite the way you first heard it? Every repeat sees the story change.

 But I bet the punchline of that joke was still the same.

 Myths are encoded information. Our problem today is that we live in an empirical society, where we believe what we can touch and hold and not much else. We live in a world of science and objectivity, and the writers of those fables didn't. There's evidence that their brains were built differently, with a larger corpus callosum that meant greater exchange between the left and right halves of the brain. That meant the lines between reality and fantasy became blurred. They thought differently, in short. It means we have to understand what their myths meant to them, while not understanding how their minds worked.

 This is quite tricky.

 It's a little easier to work out where the myths came from. You find identical motifs, similar tales with the same numbers used in the same places, all over the world. I talked about this a little in my last blog, Memory and Myth. Because the stories are spread so widely, it means they must have originated in one place and then travelled with peoples as they migrated. So the creators of the stories must have lived during the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago or more. Sea levels were 400 feet lower then and humans might have flourished in the tropics, places like the Persian Gulf and Yellow Sea, and sailed east and west along shores which no longer exist. When the water rose the cultures were drowned, but the stories they'd sowed survived, in outposts on higher ground, or maybe among more savage peoples who began to look for better lands in the changing world.

 I think I could write at least three or four stories set in a world like that, without even trying. And there's one more interesting thing.

 Our world might be about to change just as radically, now mightn't it?

Memory and Myth

  I don't have time to write at the moment. It's the first time that's happened to me in my life, and I don't like it.

 There's just no way around it. Caz, my wife, works early mornings, and I work late afternoons until midnight. We have one shared day off a week to do all the laundry, clean the house and so on. The rest of the time I'm either looking after the kids, at work, or trying like hell to get enough sleep to last through the next day. There's simply no time to write. Nothing. I could do five minutes here and there, but that's not enough to keep my head in the story. I'm hemmed in and can't find a way out.

 I can't write, but I can still think, and read, and I can still research.

 Currently I'm going through Hamlet's Mill, an essay on the importance of numbers in ancient myth. The thesis is that myths were stores for information, particularly on the stars. So if myths from Iran, Finland and Mexico all have a hero who rises to heaven without dying, and in all three cases makes his last journey with six companions and a dog, then there must be meaning behind it. For me, the most interesting thing is that the myths must all derive from a common source - an ancient culture that spanned the world. Or a group of such cultures, or maybe just survivors from civilisations that fell. We don't know the details, but there must have been someone watching the stars back then, during the last Ice Age maybe, ten thousand years before the first pharaohs.

 Whoever it was measured the movement of stars so accurately that they knew the Earth wobbles on its axis over a 26,000 year cycle. Impressive, eh? But they didn't mine coal, or gold, because we'd have found their pits if they did. They weren't industrial. Their culture was built on different values to ours. Maybe they thought in different ways. They may be as alien to us as dinosaurs.

 Isn't that interesting? My wife watches Black-ish, a show that makes it pretty clear that for all the progress society thinks it's made on civil and race rights, for black people the same issues still remain. As a white European man I can't really understand their experiences. So how am I supposed to comprehend a culture lost so long ago that the only relics we have are myths?

 Well, I can't do that, either. I can incorporate some of this into my work, whenever I can start working again. Meantime, this ancient culture seems to have flourished without writing anything down. They used memory and myth to record the things they thought were important. They kept every word in their minds, and still created tales that have lasted for thousands of years.

 In these days when I have so little time, that's an encouraging thought.