When They Severed Earth from Sky

[Dave Monroe]

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland and Paul T. Barber.
   When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human
   Mind Shapes Myth.  Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2006.

Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to
rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors
believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think
that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George
actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist?
Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did
not begin as fiction.

This absorbing book shows that myths originally
transmitted real information about real events and
observations, preserving the information sometimes for
millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists'
interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago
created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed
point for point in the local myth of its origin. The
Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the
story--for nearly 8,000 years.

We, however, have been literate so long that we've
forgotten how myths encode reality. Recent studies of
how our brains work, applied to a wide range of data
from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern
stories reported in newspapers, have helped the
Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by which
such tales both develop and degrade through time. Myth
is in fact a quite reasonable way to convey important
messages orally over many generations--although
reasoning back to the original events is possible only
under rather specific conditions.

Our oldest written records date to 5,200 years ago,
but we have been speaking and mythmaking for perhaps
100,000. This groundbreaking book points the way to
restoring some of that lost history and teaching us
about human storytelling.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7805.html

Chapter 1

TIME CAPSULES

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7805.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7805.pdf

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com