Review of When They Severed Earth From Sky

When They Severed Earth From Sky: How The Human Mind Shapes Myth, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber. Princeton University Press, 2004.

This is a pretty good one, folks. I became interested in myths and how they work when a friend gave me a copy of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces for Christmas a few years ago, which, as I understand it, is something of a standard in the field. I thoroughly enjoyed Campbell, and he makes some excellent points, but I was never satisfied with his explanation of myths proceeding from some deep, psychological urge inherent within each human. I suspect that if Campbell had had the chance to read Barber & Barber, he would have been left muttering, "Wish I'd thought of that..."

As I understand it, those who study myths are constantly asking two questions: (1) Why are there myths all over the place and all throughout time? and (2) Why are so many of them so similar? Campbell answered this by appealing to psychology; we as humans are wired the same way, so myths are expressions of how our minds function. Barber & Barber, on the other hand, do a fine job of suggesting that many myths are in fact means of transmitting real data about real events from one generation to another through a predictable process of encoding. In other words, a volcano in the Pacific Northwest exploded a few thousand years ago, the people in the area at the time witnessed it, came up with an explanation for it, and passed it on as a story to their children to warn them not to go near the exploding mountain. This is, of course, an extreme simplification, but Barber & Barber go into detail explaining the hows and the whys of the transformation from event to myth.

Barber & Barber spend the first part of the book outlining their principles for how an event is processed by a witness, explained, encoded, transmitted, and, over time, fogged up so that nobody remembers what it was really about in the first place. There are certain very practical reasons, they argue, that myths turn out the way they do, and many of those reasons are rooted in the pre-literacy of the people telling the stories. If you don't have a system of writing, you can only transmit a certain amount of data over time (limited by peoples' memory), so the data you do transmit had better be a) worth remembering and b) entertaining enough to be memorable. They then give some examples of how these principles have worked by explaining the bases for various common myths (e.g. stellar deities, the spirit world, dragons, and the Prometheus myth).

While Barber & Barber provide ample evidence to support their assertions, there are of course a few areas where their argument does not persuade. The most noticeable of these is in chapter 10, where they posit that people tend to compress actions and stories so that, for example, if you have stories of a grandfather named John who slays a dragon and a grandson also named John who later slays a grue, over time people will attribute both the dragon-slaying and the grue-slaying to one guy named John. This explains, in part, why so many heroes (like Hercules) are credited with doing so many fantastic things: it's just easier to say that Hercules did all these things than it is to say that Hercules did most of them while Phil did one of the others. It also explains why, for example, the pre-Deluge people in the Bible are said to have lived for centuries: there were several generations of guys named Methuselah, and rather than remember just how many Methuselahs there were, people just compress them all into one guy who lived a really long time. In my mind, their argument is weak on this last point, since they seem to be relying only on (reasonable) speculation and not evidence. I think that there are other things going on in these stories of people like Methuselah, and I suspect that Barber & Barber might agree to some extent.

In spite of whatever flaws I might list, the book is mostly very readable (though the section on astronomy is a bit difficult due to our own unfamiliarity with the subject), and it provides some outstanding insights into the mindset of cultures that are very far removed from our own. The reality is that most of humanity has lived very close to nature, without a concept of reading or writing, and having only the stars to help them record the passage of the ages. Barber & Barber help us recapture some sense of that by showing that these myths are not the product of unintelligent or unenlightened people.