Book Review: The Origins of the World's Mythologies
The following is a summary of one of my favourite books: The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (2012), by Michael Witzel. If the world confirmed to my personal ideas of justice, then this work would be upheld as ‘The Golden Bough’ of the 21st Century and would be the basis for much more study in the fields of mythology and anthropology.
Written by Havard Professor of Sanskrit (Emeritus), Michael Witzel resulting from 40+ years of research, this book meticulously lays out evidence for a 75,000 year old myth cycle that we are still retelling today. Preposterous? Not according to Witzel’s iron fortress of a defence.
There are three reasons you should read this book, especially if you are a magician or a fan of mythology.
• It’s the best defence for the perennial philosophy ever laid out, being the idea that there has been a consistent body of knowledge, wisdom and spirituality going back to the darkest reaches of prehistory, which has been preserved by story-tellers and teachers.
• Witzel challenges Carl Jung’s idea that mythologies share similarities due to the structure of the human psyche. Instead he favours the idea that our world stories are just extremely old, dating to times when we had common ancestry. The most important work on Carl Jung’s Archetype hypothesis was done by Joseph Campbell who researched an enormous body of world mythology looking for cross-cultural similarities. Campbell’s idea of the monomyth is now pervasive. Witzel however shows a more complex story: half the world’s mythologies don’t fit the mould, which breaks down Jung and Campbell’s idea of universality.
• The Origins of the World’s Mythologies could do for 21st century anthropology and magic what Sir James Fraser’s Golden Bough (1890) did for the 20th century. Fraser was amongst the first to study the anthropology of magic. Though dated, his theories came at a time that the English speaking world was in the thrall of their late Victorian (through to Edwardian) occult revival. Aleister Crowley considered the Golden Bough compulsory reading for his magic students, and Gerald Gardiner, used it as inspiration to create his religion Wicca which is more popular today than ever.1 Witzel provides for us a very important update to modern mysticism. His evidence give us permission to marry European mythology (and mysticism) to that of Asia, Polynesia, Northern Africa, and the Americas.
• Witzel’s work is the most beautifully defended academic thesis I’ve ever read! This man understands his critics and he has out manoeuvred them at every turn. Even if history, somehow, ultimately proves his thesis wrong, I will love him forever for showing me how to build such an edifice.
Having thusly recommended The Origin of The World’s Mythologies, I warn you, this is a purely academic work, not an action novel. If you prefer easy, or more personable reading you may prefer to read writers who have been influenced by Witzel, such as myself or Gordon White who based his book Starships on Witzel’s thesis.
Witzel’s three part proposal.
Witzel stages his thesis into three sections, from the most evidential to the most speculative. The first of these are two, roughly 40,000 year old myth cycles. Poetically, he names these after the (much earlier) ur-continents Laurasia, and Gondwana2.
‘Laurasian mythology’ groups together the traditions of Europe, Asia, the Americas and Austronesia3. The dating of these stories comes from genetic evidence. Europeans and Asians together result from a single ancestral migration out of Africa. The last time these ancestors were a singular race is currently thought to be around 40,000 years ago. The ‘Asian’ group then migrated through the pacific as the Austronesians (from 4000 years ago), and into the Americas (approx 17,000 years ago4).
‘Gondwanan Mythology’ groups together the indigenous peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and parts of Southeast Asia especially the Andaman Islanders5.
Mythemes of Laurasian mythology
6This group of cultures has the following attributes in their stories.
• A Primordial Chaos births the universe: Non-being becomes being. (Interestingly, and as I have discussed in other writings, this fits very well with the Big Bang theory.)
• A group of deities that include: Father heaven, Mother Earth7 and their children.
• Four or five generations of gods, explained in more detail further on in this article.
• A ‘Father sky’ and a ‘Mother earth’ who are separated by their offspring allowing life on Earth to flourish, and creating the milky way.
• A war between gods in heaven.
• Cheiftains or rulers being descendants of the sun. (Or sometimes, all of human kind).
• A time before death, and/or an attempt to conquer death by a hero demigod. Mortality becomes certain due to the failure of this mission, or due to a transgression by a god.
• Technology is taught to humans by rebellious god/s (or angels) This technology can include: Fire, weapons, makeup, metallurgy etc.
• The destruction of the old world (Ragnarök, Armageddon etc.)
• A new heaven and a new earth come out of the destruction.
Mythemes of Gondwanan mythology
This group of cultures represents an older tradition, being shared by groups that separated earlier.
• The sky, earth, and sometimes ocean, prexist. There is no ‘beginning of the universe’ in these cultures, showing that this is not a core archetype.
• A high god, who lives in the sky. (Not necessarily with a wife).
• Lower gods, often children of the high god, who act as tricksters and heroes and who liase with humans.
• A widespread and common (but not entirely universal) ‘rainbow-snake’ deity.
• The primordial period is ended, often with a flood. Usually due to an evil deed by a son of the high god. (The Eurasian flood myths usually happen later in the myth cycle, during the age of man).
• A trickster deity who walks the earth for example: Raven or Anansi.
• Humans are created, often by the trickster deity. Often from clay, trees or earth.
• The breaking a taboo by humans leads to a disaster. Often causing earthly mortality.
• Just as there is no beginning of the universe, there is no end of the world.
The four or five generations of Laurasian Mythology
Using the Greek mythology of Hesiod’s Theogony as an example the five generations are as follows:
1. Primordial deities: Chaos, Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the Abyss), Eros (Desire), Erebus (Darkness), Nyx (Night). Gaia births Uranus, the first sky god, who has no father and becomes her lover.
2. The children of Gaia and Uranus: The Twelve Titans (Cronus, Rhea, Oceanus, Tethys, Hyperion, Theia, Coeus, Phoebe, Crius, Iapetus, Mnemosyne, Themis). Prometheus (who’s gift of fire dawns in the age of man).
3. The Children of Cronus and Rhea: (The six older Olympians) Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hestia
4. The Younger Olympians and Other Divine Offspring: Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Ares, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Persephone, and others (mostly children of Zeus and other Olympians).
5. Heroes and Demigods: Including: Heracles (Hercules), Perseus, Helen, and Achilles.
A 75,000 year old myth cycle
Witzel then follows his evidence, to propose an older myth cycle that is the ancestor of both the Laurasian and Gondwanan myths. Sticking with the continental theme he calls this ‘Pangaean Mythology’.8 Carefully he admits that the evidence for this older group is more difficult. This myth cycle, based on our current understanding will have been formed before the late migrations out of Africa approximately 75,000 years ago.9
The central Pangaean myth, and perhaps the only truly universal mytheme, according to Witzel, is the flood myth.
Braver than most academics, Witzel then explores how far his thesis can possibly be pushed based on his evidence. His conclusion is that the model falls apart around the 100,000 year mark. That is to say, it is possible (but difficult to prove) that human stories have lasted this long!
Wizel’s evidence
The following are counted as evidence in Witzel’s expansive study,:
• Language families. As a leading Sanskrit scholar, and historical linguist, this is Witzel’s primary field of expertise. Groups of a common language family help track human migrations and coincide with common traditions.
• Genetics. The mapping of genetic haplogroups in current populations has a lot to tell us about historical human migrations. This field of study is currently experiencing a golden age, with many new discoveries since Witzel’s publication in 2012.
• Literature. Documented stories from both oral and literature traditions preserve commonalities.
• Archeology: Artefacts that depict gods and mythological events hint at, or reveal common features.
• Approximately 180 pages of references! Detailing previous research in the field.
Supporting data since the book was first published.
Since the book’s publication in 2012, I have come across several discoveries that strengthen Witzel’s thesis.
• In 2017, bones of Homo Sapiens from the Jebel Irhound site in Morocco were dated to 300,000+ years old! This has doubled our understanding of the age of ‘anatomically modern’ humans from 150,000 to 300,000 years old! The long estimate based on the dating is up to 350,000 years old. This also suggests a longer history of human language, making Witzel’s boldest proposal: 100,000 year old stories, that much more plausible.
• The ‘Seven sisters’ of the Pleiades constellation.
Though not a new discovery as such, this topic has been trending in recent years. The Pleiades star system has been called ‘the seven sisters’ by several distant cultures:
• The ancient Greeks (Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope Titan Atlas and Oceanid Pleione),
• Australian Aborigines including the Anangu (Central/Western Desert) and Northern Territories tribes. They are called the Karatgurk sisters, the Napaltjarri sisters as well as other names.
• Hindu Tradition, known as Krittika, they are the six mothers of the war god Murugan (sometimes conflated with seven wives of the Seven Sages). Although six is the wrong number, in some versions of the myth there were seven.
• Maori mythology has Matariki as a mother with six daughters: Matariki (The mother star), Pōhutukawa, Waitī, Waitā, Tupuānuku, Tupuārangi, Ururangi – The star of the winds and weather.
These cultures were obviously extremely far removed from each other until modernity, suggesting the possibility that the seven sisters is an extremely old mytheme. Other cultures have the stars as seven members of a family, for instance seven brothers. Weirdly a common trope is that there are now six sisters, represented by the brightest stars in the constellation, with the seventh sister said to have gone missing. It is known by astronomers that the stars Pleione and Atlas have moved closer together (from our vantage point on earth) over time. It has been calculated that these would have been visible as separate stars tens of thousands of years ago, leading some to speculate that the ‘missing sister’ mytheme is indicative of a story that is up to 100,000 years old (I have heard numbers from 16,000-100,000 years ago and I am not qualified to fact-check which is more likely).
• A traditional Australian Aborigine story explains that the Wellesley Islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria used to be parts of a peninsula. Geologists have verified that this was the case 13,000 years ago before ocean levels rose.
Ancient aboriginal stories preserve historic sea level rise
• The magnificent work of anthropologist Lynne Kelly on indigenous and ancient memory systems
, has built a cross-cultural working model on how to preserve vast amounts of information in oral cultures, without writing. Kelly has used this technology to win multiple memory competitions. Her work compares cultures from the Ancient Greeks to Sub-Saharan African tribes, Native American tribes to the Australian Aborigines. She posits that this technology was universal in prehistory, and her work shows us the techniques that could produce cultural memories that last tens of thousands of years.
Footnotes
Gardiner’s other primary influences were Margaret Murray, Charles Godfrey Leland's, and Crowley.
The two landmasses Laurasia and Gondwana separated from each other 215 to 175 million years ago which was the late Triassic. It is perhaps then a bit confusing that Witzel uses these terms for his theory dating 40,000 year ago to present.
Austronesians are: Polynesians, Micronesians, Filipinos, and several other island races.
New theories are pushing out the earliest migrations of humans into the Americas to up to 24,000 years ago. These dates are however, still being debated by archaeologists.
In the English-speaking world the most famous Andaman Islanders are the Sentinelese of Sentinel Island below India. Though often said to be ‘uncontacted’, this is not actually the case. While they don’t allow outsiders ashore, they will sometimes meet with traders who offer them goods such as metal and coconuts in the shallow waters. Their language and culture is not well understood by outsiders.
These are summarised by me for the sake of brevity and as such they may slightly deviate from the complexity of Witzel’s vision.
See my earlier article: Mother Sky and Father Earth, for a gender inversion of this model.
Pangaea was the supercontinent that Laurasia and Gondwana split off from.
There were earlier Homo Sapien migrations out of Africa into the Levant and beyond, but as far as we can tell these didn’t stick, with these groups either retreating or dying out.