[meteorite-list] More Muck from Paul

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:14:39 -0400
Message-ID: <7svpc3hmi305svjsb27ebo7ms09lbc3jop_at_4ax.com>

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:59:04 -0500, you wrote:

>talk about what you're talking about. The subject is the reliability
>(and the interpretation) of an oral (possibly written) tradition.
>

Exactly-- every culture produces it's own general mythology and creation
mythology. And "interpretation" is just a kind word for "guess"-- you take a
story with vague terms, ambigious elements, and little bits of fossilized
rambling like the one EPG quoted as "evidence", and then you start
"interpreting" it-- and whatever ideas you go into it looking to find are what
you are going to tease out of words in the story. It is a Rorschach test. If a
tale of a "mighty snake" coming to hurt men is what he conciders one of the
stronger bits of evidence he can put forth, then he has nothing. Nothing. The
story says nothing about the snake being in the sky. The story says nothing
about the snake glowing or burning. The story says nothing that suggest that
the cigar is more than-- uh, the "mighty snake" is anything more than a "mighty
snake".

I don't claim to know any more about the "true" original meaning of the "mighty
snake" in the story than EPG does-- but I'm thinking that it was-- a real big
snake. Ancient and pre-literate people make up stories about things that they
know-- they have gods that look like people, known animals, or mixed and matched
parts of people and known animals. Their "monstars" are known animals with
mixed and matched parts, or scaled up to much larger. Their "wrath of god" is
based on events from their surroundings, scaled up-- floods crop up in lots of
myths because lots of cultures are in areas that have occasional floods,
especially since most major cultures have started up along rivers. You want a
godlike event? Take something you know (a flood) and scale it up a few orders
of magnitude. Or thunderstorms. Or earthquakes or volcanoes, if you happen to
live in a place with earthquakes or volcanoes. But if you live in an area with
no volcanoes, you aren't going to come up with myths about liquid rock coming
from the ground. If you lived in an area with no rainfall and all water coming
from underground aquifers, you wouldn't come up with stories of water falling
from the sky. You live in an area with poisonous snakes? Well, you are going
to have a respectful fear of them. You might even think them somewhat evil.
You might think that they are sent by a god to punish you, or might be gods
themselves. So it is perfectly reasonable for a culture, when inventing a god
or demon, to make it a snake scaled (no pun intended) up very, very big.

There is a saying that goes something like "if you see hoofprints, think horses,
not zebra" (of course, that dosn't work well in Africa)-- if you are looking at
a problem, think mundane explanations before you think of exotic ones. Such as
don't call something a eyewitness account of a comet strike carried by oral
tradition 13,000 years when you could call it a story about a really big snake.

The snake and the water and the "strong white one" may well be original to the
story, (IF the story happened to date back to pre-European contact) or they
could be contamination to the original story brought about by contact with
Christian stories, which share all of those elements. Either way, there are
many other Native American creation myths that are unsupportive of or directly
contradictory to the one EPG quotes-- and the one reason he picks this one as
being "true history" is because it fits his preset conclusions-- just as with
the "muck" and "megatsunami" data.

What it comes down to is that people living in times with no television, no
radio, no internet, very little or no writing, little in the way of music, had
plenty of time to just plain make stuff up. Especially people living in small,
communal groups where people would be gathered together at night-- that's plenty
of time to kill, even if your hands are busy with toolmaking or working hides or
husking grain or some such. Plenty of time to make up stories about how you
think the world around you might work, and plenty of incentive-- fight boredom,
bond your tribe together, control their actions with threats of godlike
punishment or offers of godlike rewards... and a story about a giant snake that
attacks mankind and is then defeated by a strong leader (who happens to be
ancestoral to your group) fits lots of those criteria. And stories like that
would change, sometimes slightly, sometimes not so slightly, with each
generation of tellers, depending on what parts they liked or disliked, or
forgot, or misremembered, or if they thought up better (in their opinion)
plot-lines, or to fit a social or political agenda of the time. Claiming that
recognizable historical accounts would survive for several hundered generations
of oral transmission stretch credibility beyond the breaking point.
Received on Thu 23 Aug 2007 12:14:39 AM PDT