First this item that got me started…
Odyssey Sirens ‘were monk seals’
A German scientist claims to have found the Sirens of the Greek myth of Odysseus, who lured ships onto the rocks with their song: they are, in fact, monk seals.
Karl-Heinz Frommolt, head of the Achieve [ED. Archive?] of Animal Sounds at the Humboldt Museum in Germany, believes he has identified the Sirens’ lair on the Li Galli islands, off Sorrento on Italy’s Amalfi coast. The island is known as Le Sirenuse, the Island of the Sirens.
His team identified a configuration of rocks which amplifies sound coming from the island. However, tests showed a human voice could not reach far enough out to sea – whereas a moaning monk seal’s could.
I have problems with links, sorry.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4559217.stm
the meat course follows below…
This little story about the Sirens reminds me that almost all mythology is probably based on our tendency to anthropomorphise events and phenomena, that cannot be understood with the knowledge extant at the time of the experience.
We always seek a `rational’ explanation, and where none exists, we make one up.
The ‘created’ explanation becomes part of the belief system when it is mythologized, ie when the event or phenomenon no longer exists, only the explanation.
It seems irrational not to eat the meat of the pig, when other forms of meat are consumed.
It seems irrational to wrap the hair in a turban at all times.
It seems irrational to avoid walking under ladders.
But there was surely a major event in the history of the culture that proscribed a change in behaviour thereafter. Pigs may have `amplified’ diseases by being the only animals of the time to be kept in close confinement. Those diseases may have decimated the society: and pigs become taboo. Long hair may have been a restriction in combat. Ladders may have been more dangerous places in a society with poor tools and no safety laws.
Other `myths’ are merely cultural remnants, the origins of which are no longer important. The Spanish lisp today. It is an affectation. They once had a King who lisped. His whole court adopted lisping in order to conceal the King’s disability. We wear a black tuxedo today because a rebellious young Beau wanted to shock the peacock-attired fashionistas of his time by appearing at a ball in no-colour attire. The next ball everyone had copied him, and so do we still today. The sacred executive tie is a fossilized neckerchief of authority. It serves no other purpose. The only way you could improve on the design of a tie is to get rid of it, unlike most other apparel.
Some cultural knowledge emerges slowly, rather than by cataclysmic event. In ages when there was a lot more time for the study of the workings of Nature, in ages when Arabs founded the Science of Astronomy strictly by generations of observations and few tools to assist, in ages when boreal hunter-gatherers discovered that the forest is a super-animal with everything intertwined, science was an accumulation of repeated observations, an experiment (passed on from generation to generation) without a theory.
Those island dwellers, living around the source of the Indonesian Tsunami, that fled to high land when they saw the sea rapidly receding, did so because of an ancient belief that such a sign would be followed by giant waves. It must have happened many times over many generations for the connection to be made, and become lore.
These observations over time became pre-science belief systems. The proto-Finns came to worship Tapio, the spirit of the forest that kept them alive. Even a few decades ago, the older foresters would still apologize to a tree before felling it. The act of not appreciating the tree had become taboo. They discovered stewardship long before the Greens.
Similar cultural observations over generations include, as examples, the taboo on incest found in most societies. Without knowing anything of DNA, the effects of a small gene pool were mundanely clear to these early societies.
Some people have said that a 7 year old today knows more than a 7 year old, 200 years ago, I don’t agree. The human brain hasn’t changed – even with a better diet. It still forms neural networks at the same speed, and pulses at the same speed. The 7 yr old brain today may `see’ a lot more different things, but the `understanding level’ (making sense of what it sees) is equal. Where one brain focused on the shimmering of the lake, the brush of wind through the leaves, the ever-changing sculpture of the clouds, the youthful brain of today focuses on the shimmering of the TV, the wind of the other media and the ever-changing sculpture of data. It is the same thing. We may be smarter, but we are not wiser.
Certainly we are no wiser in understanding the false mythology of political/religious republicanism as practiced by Bush & Co. They have indeed exploited a series of myths to achieve and hold their position, just as Hitler exploited the Thule/Arayan mythology for his own ends. He even sent his top radar scientists off to prove the Earth was concave at one crucial moment.
The only justification they have for what they do – knowing full well its human consequences and sacrifices – is that the sustaining myth is more important than reality. The `sacred mission’, the `crusade’, the sense of destiny appointed; these are all the hallmarks of the Tyrants – of people who are anti-science, and thus anti-knowledge. The pure scientists, of all disciplines, are the diplomats of this world, bargaining facts, experiments and theories into an ever-incomplete pattern of the way everything is affected by everything else. Life is diplomacy. Negotiating with everything around us to achieve stasis or balance, is what most people do.
That is why most people accept the status quo, as long as it does not impinge too deeply on their everyday lives. And why most people buy into the mythology, because basically they have never thought about `why’. Why do I wear a tie? Doesn’t the government always know what it is doing? Isn’t it dangerous to question God?
The word `god’ in fact is a useful title for a whole range of things that we still don’t understand about ourselves, and the world we live in. There is an entire cosmos of logic that our tiny brains will probably never be smart enough to understand.
But the Bushian mythology is easier to understand with hard fact. And it must be exposed by an accumulation of observed public facts, until the astronomy reveals a pattern that reveals the true nature of the mythology to everybody.