Choosing our mythology

You know what’s interesting to think about? It’s the realization that the myths that we study in school were once taken very seriously by people. We seem to find it ok to classify all of these mythologies, from the Greek, the Roman, the Norse, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Native American, or from wherever origin they might come, as of a fundamentally different “stuff” than our current religions. We seem to think that there’s something fundamentally different about Christianity, Judaism, Islam — at least as Abrahamic religions; I can’t speak so much about which non-Abrahamic religions are still in the cool spot — that will guarantee either the validity of one of them (if we are optimistic) or at the very least, their continued longevity (if we are skeptical).

But I mean…all of this stuff we have is so yawn-worthy. Yay, love your neighbors. Alternatively, smite them. Smite them with kindness. Kind them with smiteness. So boring. Life and death-ish. And maybe you might have some beautiful imagery and symbolism and prophecy and dream of what the end of this world might look like, but nothing…spectacular.

Why can’t we believe something interesting…let’s look at a passage from the Indian Mahabharata as translated by Charles Berlitz in his 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle:

Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Vimana hurled against the three cities of the Vrishis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant as ten thousands suns, rose in all its splendour. It was the unknown weapon, the Iron Thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.

This “iron thunderbolt” (as well as the flying ship “vimanas”) are talked about a lot…and even if we want to be skeptical, we must at least admit that these things sound incredibly cool. I think nearly everyone is “skeptical” about the Lord of the Rings happening (although, there are probably some people who do believe it was true), but we can admit that is something that sounds incredibly cool. If we want to indulge our curiosity, we might want to note how this sounds suspiciously like a nuclear weapon.

But that’s all mythology! It’s just an elaborate story that just happens to describe destruction and carnage in a way that we misconstrue to be a nuclear holocaust.

Of course, I’m no archeologist, and I do not posit anything as fact, but some claim that the Indian settlement of Mohenjo-daro, which seemed to flourish from 2600 BC as an immaculately designed and planned city with urban sanitation for heck’s sake to about 1700 BC when it was mysteriously abandoned, had skeletons that showed several times the amount of “normal” radiation.

That’s just silly though. No reputable organization thinks that (so archeologists and anthropologists, don’t hit me). But Mohenjo-daro itself, as well as several cities from the Indus Valley civilization, did feature quite advanced urban planning. There is evidence that the IVC had knowledge of a kind of proto-dentistry and drilled molars have been found.

I guess the IVC didn’t “mysteriously abandon” and that there are other scientific explanations…and as time passes, we might find out exactly how their culture thrived with such advancements that no other contemporary area had seen at the time.

And now…it’s time to burst your bubble! Mythology has a few problems…The fact is that epic poems such as the Mahabharata described nearly all of its war-scenes with such hyperbole, so to interpret them as being indicators of WMDs would mean, as Colin Briggs says: atomic bombs must have exploded over the north Indian plains with such frequency as to reduce said region to an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland, a misapprehension which any visit to the area will rapidly dispel.

Epic poetry itself is designed to gratify one party (the victor) over the other party. Or it is supposed to pump up the feelings of its audience, and when you hear about your civilization using catastrophic space nukes, that’ll pump you up. It’s like when you tell a story over and over…you want your friends to be impressed by what you did, so eventually you realize that you might have to stretch the truth just a wee bit to get things more noteworthy.

As for the quote of iron thunderbolt? It was fabricated from several sections of the Mahabharata unfortunately…The translator just decided to pick and choose which parts of the original source sounded best; he took some descriptions quite out of context, and tried to force words to mean what he wanted them to mean

Maybe this is why we don’t trust mythology. But surely, our own religions would never pick and choose what parts they would accept from original sources, translate opportunistically, and force words to mean one thing or another.