The Hunt for the World's Oldest Story
7 days ago
- #anthropology
- #mythology
- #literature
- George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' features Reverend Edward Casaubon, who dedicates his life to finding 'The Key to All Mythologies,' a quest to uncover a single origin for all myths.
- Casaubon's project fails due to the diversity of myths, his pedantic nature, and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn't know.
- The allure of finding patterns in myths persists, with scholars like Max Müller, James Frazer, and Joseph Campbell attempting to systematize myths, though their methods often lack rigor.
- Indo-European studies provide credible evidence for shared myths, such as the sky father Dyeus Puhter and the serpent-slaying myth, traced through linguistic and poetic formulas.
- Attempts to reconstruct older myths, like Michael Witzel's Laurasian and Gondwanan mythologies or Yuri Berezkin's motif database, face challenges due to the lack of concrete evidence and potential biases.
- Despite the difficulties, certain mythic patterns, like triumphant orphans or hero's journeys, persist across cultures, suggesting universal human experiences rather than a single ur-myth.
- Modern mythographers use advanced tools to uncover not a hidden code but the shared contours of human experience, showing how myths continue to resonate across time and space.