myths and the Earth sciences Myth: ‘a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons … and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena … a traditional story originating in a pre-literate society dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors or heroes … set in the remote past in the other world or an earlier world … their principal characters are gods or animals’.
Vitaliano (see further reading, below) believes that a clear distinction between myths and legends is impossible and that the two are used more or less interchangeably; she uses the term
geomythology in a broad sense to refer to any geologically inspired folklore, regardless of its origin. Geomyths, then, are the attempts by ancient peoples or more recent unsophisticated people to explain natural phenomena. The earliest are those concerned with origins: of the Earth, the Solar System, the heavens, the gods, and mankind. They are early science, an explanation of the observable near and distant environment.
From the very many instances now known, only a few examples are given below; a wide range of other examples could be quoted from aboriginal peoples of all continents.
Hesiod's
Theogony (eighth century bc) is one of the earliest accounts. Three Muses appeared to him and urged him to tell how gods and Earth and seas and stars and the heavens came into being out of chaos. The gods performed valiant deeds, but they fought among themselves with much groaning and shaking, thunder, and lightning. The old gods were conquered and banished into the nether regions. Zeus prevailed, even over the terrible many-headed monster Typhoeus, and reigned over heaven and Earth for ever.
The Book of Genesis gives another view of creation and later of the great flood of Noah—the Deluge—which, because God was angry with the wickedness of men, killed off all living things apart from those that were with Noah in the ark. This story, based at least in part on the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, and perhaps on a much earlier Sumerian one (
c. 3400 bc) was almost certainly based on a folk memory of localized disastrous floods in the Tigris–Euphrates valley. Genesis, however, goes further and has the flood waters cover the highest mountains; and it is here that it becomes a myth that had a profound effect on ‘geological’ thinking for hundreds of years—and even today.
Early views of the Earth, for example, those of Thales (sixth century bc), had it as a disc floating on water or variously supported by a giant tortoise, a pig, or eight elephants (among many others); movements of these supporters caused the Earth to shake and produce earthquakes. Other earthquake generators were gods who shook the Earth to indicate their displeasure at and to punish men for their sins; demons who lived inside the Earth and in their fury shook it; a giant burrowing mole; vapours and winds rushing through internal caverns.
Greeks from the Aegean with folk memories of the huge Santorini eruption and knowledge of minor eruptions in the area were impressed by the larger and more continuous activity on Etna and Stromboli and the Aeolian Islands. They believed that Typhoeus was buried under the region between Etna and the Phlegraean Fields, that his turning on an uneasy bed caused tremors, and that the belching of the volcano was due to the gasping of the imprisoned monster. The Greek god Hephaestus and the Roman Vulcan were said to have a subterranean workshop below Etna in which they forged thunderbolts for Jove and weapons for other gods and heroes. Their fires resulted in the volcanic eruptions.
Perhaps the most famous of volcanic myths concerns the activities of the Hawaiian goddess Pele, who fled from Tahiti with a magic digging tool and began digging in the furthest north-west of the Hawaiian islands, Kauai, without result. She visited each island in turn with varying degrees of success, finally reaching Hawaii, where she dug the pit of Halemaumau or Pele's Fire Pit, the most spectacular of the region's volcanoes, which was in continuous eruption from 1823 to 1924. Pele is a most temperamental deity who sends out floods of lava when she is angry and causes tremors when she stamps her foot. Even today she is feared by the locals, who offer food to her to try to stop advancing lava flows.
Topographical features figure largely in geomyths. Gibraltar and Ceuta (the gateway to the Mediterranean) are known as the Pillars of Hercules, erected as a record of his labours and the limits of his wanderings. He is said either to have excavated the straits, thus allowing the Atlantic to flow into the Mediterranean, or to have to built up the features in order to prevent Atlantic monsters getting in. Huge blocks of rock (so-called ‘erratics’) scattered in large numbers over the north German plain were said to be missiles hurled at each other by warring giants. The Giant's Causeway with its splendid basaltic columns was believed to be the landward end of a causeway built by the giant Fionn MacComhal to get at his hated rival Fingal, who had built something similar on the island of Staffa. The hole made by another irate giant who picked up a large chunk of Northern Ireland is now Lough Neagh, and the lump that he hurled into the Irish Sea is now the Isle of Man. A carline (witch) undertook to carry a large hill from Ayrshire to Ireland, but she dropped it on the way to form what is now Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde. The grooves on the sides of the Devil's Tower in Wyoming were thought by the Indians to have been made by the claws of bears trying to scale the sides to get at escaping braves.
On a smaller scale, rounded pieces of amber were ascribed to the tears of the sisters of Phaeton as they mourned his tragic death.
R. Bradshaw
Bibliography
Vitaliano, D. B. (1973) Legends of the Earth. Indiana University Press. Bloomington.
