Ancient Myth and Modern Science: A Reconsideration

by John David Ebert

Myth as Psychology

Historically, the conflict between myth and science, according to Joseph Campbell, involved a discrediting of visionary cosmology in favor of one based upon “fact.” In his essay “The Symbol Without Meaning,” Campbell described how science gradually disentangled itself from the mythological projections of the medieval imagination through the discoveries of men like Columbus and Copernicus, which amounted to the “drawing of a distinct dividing line between the world of dream consciousness and that of waking.” As a result, “mythological cosmologies. . .do not correspond to the world of gross facts but are functions of dream and vision,” which means, for Campbell, that myths are projections of the human psyche onto the canvas of the universe. Their validity, consequently, is restricted to the psyche, and all myths are to be regarded as metaphors symbolic of, on the one hand, the mysteries of Being, and on the other, transformations of human consciousness.

Suppose, however, we discard Campbell’s insistence that myths have been cosmologically disqualified by science, and actually read them, instead, in terms of scientific narratives. Is it possible that we may find visions of cosmological knowledge once stored by archaic societies but now rediscovered by modern science?

Micromyths

In the Brihadharanyaka Upanishad, we find the myth of the Great Self whose cosmic loneliness is so immense that it splits into two beings, the first man and the first woman. The woman changes herself into a cow, the man transforms into a bull, and together they produce all the cattle. Then she turns into a mare, he into a stallion, and so on. Finally, the man has a revelation when he realizes that all the phenomena of the world have come forth from himself. “Verily,” he concludes, “I am all this that I have poured forth!”

The Hindu image of the cosmos as the body of a single living Being is a vision sprung from the depths of thousands of years of yogic practice, going back, perhaps, as far as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. Indeed, the entire civilization, in contrast with the West, has been inward turned all along, as a comparison of the eye-motifs of Hindu sculpture with those of the Greeks reveals, for the eyes of the gods and heroes of Indian art are usually closed, whereas those of the West are wide open. I would like to suggest that this particular creation myth — and there are, of course, thousands of them in Hindu sacred literature — may be rooted in a visionary transformation of cellular mitosis that came to some rishi while in trance. Mitosis is the process whereby living forms grow, as one cell splits into two, two into four and so on. This organic movement from center to periphery, and from less form to more, would then be a deep structure shared by the Hindu creation myth with Western scientific knowledge.

In his book The Body of Myth, physicist J. Nigro Sansonese develops his thesis that all “myth describes a systematic exploration of the human body by the privileged members of archaic cultures.” Myths, according to Sansonese, are encoded descriptions of physiological processes envisioned by yogis and shamans in trance states. He describes, for example, how the myth of Perseus slaying the Kraken by showing it the head of Medusa and turning it to stone is actually a description of the stopping of the heart along the vagus nerve that connects it to the visual centers at the back of the brain. The monster with all its tentacles is the vagus nerve itself, while the head of the Medusa with its snakes is “a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves.” And the entire story, then, describes how the yogi stops the beating of his own heart while in samadhi.

If Sansonese’s theory is correct, then a deep structure shared by the Hindu creation myth with the process of cellular mitosis might in fact exist. If it is possible that visualizations of interior physiological processes can manifest to yogis in trance states, then it is certainly worth considering that the Hindu creation myth is, on one level anyway, a visualization of a somatic process.

The same goes for shamanic trance states, as Jeremy Narby describes in his elegant book The Cosmic Serpent. Narby is an ethnobotanist who wondered whether it could be true, as Amazonian tribesmen claimed, that their extensive botanical knowledge originated in trance states induced by ayahausca, a psychoactive infusion derived from an Amazonian vine. The more he thought about the structural isomorphism shared by the double helix of DNA with the images of snakes and ladders universal to shamanism, the more he began to suspect that the serpents and geometrical patterns of shamanic iconography might actually be proprioceptions of DNA and intracellular activity. In the book, Narby details a series of paintings inspired by ayahausca visions that he showed to a friend conversant with molecular biology. His friend identified the geometric patterns as unravelled DNA, chromosomes during specific phases of mitosis, triple helix collagen structures and so on. In other words, Narby discerned the deep structures shared by shamanic trance visions with scientific knowledge of the soma. Thus, perhaps, Western civilization has arrived at knowledge by way of technological extensions of sensory organs that tribal peoples have long ago arrived at through proprioceptions during meditation and trance.

There exists, as a final example, a tradition in Christian mysticism of visionary states in which angels descend to human beings in order to inspire them with the spirit, as in the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel descends to announce to Mary that she is to become Theotokos, “God-bearer.” In most illustrations of this myth during the Middle Ages, Gabriel’s descent is accompanied by a miniature dove –signifier of the Holy Spirit — and the power of the Word, the Logos itself, is rendered visible entering into Mary’s ear. Thus, Mary is impregnated by the power of the Word , and her response is, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.”

But now consider the isomorphism of this with the image of a virus landing on a cell wall. The virus attaches itself and then squirts into the cell its own DNA — or RNA — which then overtakes the cell’s normal replicating functions and forces it to copy this new program, whereupon it then spits out hordes of viruses which burst through the cell and move on. I am reminded here of a miniaturized version of the Annunciation from an illuminated manuscript by Fra Angelico which depicts a giant, gleaming initial “R,” in which the Virgin Mary sits below the leg of the R, while Gabriel hovers just outside it. Immediately above her, in the R’s rounded oval, God the Father sits, gazing down, while from his fingertips the luminous gold sheen of the Logos extends, with the dove at its tip, puncturing through the arch of the “R” as though it were a cellular membrane separating Mary — who sits below like a blue nucleus — from God and the angel Gabriel.

The image of a virus landing on a cell wall and squirting its DNA into the nucleus is isomorphic with Fra Angelico’s illustration – although this may be a mere accident of the syntactical grammar shared by such images — but it is important to point out that the metaphysical and spiritual implications of the myth are in no way reduced to a biological function. Whereas a Jungian reading, for example, would elucidate precisely those dimensions through a cross cultural comparison of the Virgin Birth with, say, the impregnation of the Buddha’s mother by a tiny white elephant — or the myth of the birth of the monkey king Hanuman from the semen of Shiva poured by sages into the ear of Hanuman’s mother, Anjani — the point of this exercise is rather to develop new organs of perception with which to view ancient myths in a way that sidesteps the dogma of a Jungian approach.

It is important to point out that the metaphysical and spiritual implications of myth are in no way reduced to a biological function by these examples. If Narby and Sansonese are right, then the realization of these mythic images as micromyths of cellular processes should induce us to study myths in a new way, for it will be seen that science does not render myth obsolete, and that the tribal wisdom of indigenous societies whose scientific systems are rooted in myth can be taken seriously, rather than disparaged.

Macromyths

One of the primary functions of mythology — what Campbell used to call its “cosmological function” — is to project a world pictures onto the universe that is consistent with the knowledge of the time. The Christian cosmographer Cosmas, for example, in the sixth century imagined that the universe was a sort of gigantic chest in which the sun and moon revolved around a single enormous mountain that stood up like a monolith from out of a flat earth surrounded by water. Of course the Greeks had long since deduced the rotundity of the earth, and had even drawn up rough draft sketches of the theory of evolution and the heliocentric hypothesis, both of which were discarded, just as the primordial Christians discarded the world image of the Greeks since, in both cases, the images clashed with the respective spiritual dispositions of each culture.

Today we turn to science for our knowledge of what the universe looks like, and when we turn to examine certain scientific narratives of the origins of things with an eye for the deep structures that these narratives might have in common with ancient myths, we find surprising parallels. An example is the current scientific story of the creation of the universe. The idea of what has come to be known as the Big Bang was first put forth by a Catholic priest, the Abbe Georges Lemaitre, who in 1927 suggested that the universe might have arisen from a sort of “primal atom” of matter and energy. The idea of the emergence of the universe from a cosmic egg is, however, a mythological one as well, found all over the world. Here is another creation myth from the Upanishads:

In the beginning, this world was nonbeing. This nonbeing became being. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay there for a year. It burst asunder. One part of the eggshell was of silver, the other part was of gold.

The silver part is the earth, the golden part is the sky…

This is from a Tibetan creation myth:

From the essence of the five primordial elements a great egg came forth…Eighteen eggs came forth from the yolk of that great egg. The egg in the middle of the eighteen eggs, a conch egg, separated from the others. From this conch egg, limbs grew, and then the five senses, all perfect, and it became a boy of such extraordinary beauty that he seemed the fulfillment of every wish…

And an Orphic creation myth from ancient Greece:

…black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and…Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the universe in motion.

Thus Lemaitre, when describing his theory of the origin of the universe from a cosmic egg, may have been subconsciously evoking a mythological image. Then there is the deep structure shared by ancient creation myths with current narratives of the origins of life on this planet. On the first page of his book The Fifth Miracle: the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, physicist Paul Davies describes two contrasting theories regarding the origins of the first microbes. The old idea of cells emerging on the surface of the ocean in the presence of sunlight (and lightning), he insists, is made obsolete by new evidence, for “it now appears that the first terrestrial organisms lived deep underground, entombed within geothermally heated rocks in pressure cooker conditions. Only later did they migrate to the surface.” Several pages further on, he says that “our eldest ancestors did not crawl out of the slime so much as ascend from the sulfurous underworld.”

Now as anyone familiar with Native American myth knows, the common narrative for the origins of life involved the myth of emergence from the underworld. It is particularly widespread amongst the tribes of the Southewest– for example, among the Hopi, whose famous kivas are miniaturizations of this underworld. In a Navaho myth, the first people are in danger of being drowned by a flood, and as the waters rise, they all the other animals climb onto a gigantic reed that grows up to the world ceiling, from whence the First Man digs his way through to this, the upper world, in which we are presently dwelling.

On the same page, Davies suggests an exactly opposed theory for the origins of life, and, along with it, invokes an equally opposite mythological cosmogony when he says that life may have been brought to the earth from the heavens by meteorites from Mars that may have crashed into its Hadean oceans. The deep structure here is isomorphic with the creation myth of the Sky Father, one example of which is found on the first page of the Book of Genesis, in which Yahweh infuses the watery abyss with the Spirit. That image, in turn, was embedded in an older Mesopotamian cosmology that associated the heavens with the realm of the gods and the earth with clay that required an external agency from above to give it form.

In her book Narratives of Human Evolution, bioanthropologist Misia Landau examines a series of accounts of hominization from Darwin to Leakey and discovers that they all share in common the hidden narrative pattern of the hero myth. Using Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale as a stencil, she makes visible within these so-called “objective” narratives the presence of the hero myth as described in folk tales. According to Propp, the formula is of a humble hero who departs on a journey, receives magical aid from a donor figure, survives a series of tests and trials and arrives at some sort of an apotheosis. Landau shows how, in scientific narratives of human evolution, the hero is the nonhuman primate who departs from his arboreal habitat with the aid of natural selection and who is tried and tested by competition from other animals, harsh climate and predation, but eventually arrives at an apotheosis in the achievement of the upright posture of humanity.

Upon examining scientific narratives of three key points in the quest for the origins of things — of the cosmos, of life upon the earth, and of the emergence of the human from the animal — we discover structural isomorphisms with the ancient myths of the cosmic egg, emergence from the underworld, creation from the heavens and the hero myth. Apparently, scientists are mythologizing a lot more often than they realize when telling their accounts of the origin and evolution of things.

It is probable that we will never know precisely what “happened” at these key points in the evolution of the cosmos, because they involve knowledge of something that transcends the capacity of the human intellect ever to grasp. For whenever we pose such questions as “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” we are postulating eternal questions that can be answered only in terms of the complex semiotics of myth. When the human mind goes in search of origins, it strains its limits and begins to crack, while myth comes rushing along to fill in the gap. Perhaps Immanuel Kant was right: we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only through the human mind’s mythological schemata, for between ourselves and “reality” the screen of myth always structures our perceptions.

This essay was originally published in Parabola magazine in the Fall 2008 issue.