"Very deep is the well of the past" -Thomas Mann

“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp, amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. Everything seems to be full of God's reflex, if we could but see it. Oh, how I, have prayed to have the mystery unfolded, at least hereafter! To see, if but for a moment, the whole harmony of the great system! To hear once the music which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding.
-Charles Kingsley, His Life and Letters, I, 55

As a boy we lived within a stone's throw of the legendary Bourke's Luck Potholes at the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa. It was one of my favourite childhood haunts.  The awesome potholes were named after a persistent prospector and gold digger named Tom Bourke who in the 1880s discovered signs of alluvial gold in the canyon in the late 1880s. He quickly staked a claim and began to pan for gold. Sadly, his claim did not yield a single ounce of gold, while other prospectors in the area struck it rich. However, the legend lived on.

Bourke's Luck Potholes (Wikimedia Commons)

The Elusive Nature of History

History is thought by some to be a factual account or chronicle of past events, of both fortune and misfortune. However this is not so, history is but an interpretation (or misrepresentation) of something which in itself is mysterious, elusive, and undefinable like a morning mist that has transpired. It is a narrative or report of events through the lens of a mind not my own, an author, an interpreter, an editor, or an observer. It is impossible to represents events as they had actually occurred or were. At best history is a means of gazing out across the vast vistas of time through the eyes of another. We can never get a grip on reality as it is, without interfering with it. On the micro level this is known as (or confused with) Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  In Physics it is called the Observer Effect. Entropy sets in with time the moment conscious experience slips further and deeper into an abyss of unconscious oblivion.

Quantum Physics contorts our linear concept of future, present, and past even more to a point where we may literally not know whether we are coming or going we get so “entangled”. Stephen Hawking suggests we could conceivably warp time-space sufficiently to arrive back to somewhere before we started and even modify histories in ways never dreamed of before. (See A Brief History of Time.) Now that could be a lot of fun with a new class of holographic and cybernetic therapists and shamans, avatars, emerging doing fixit or hatchet jobs on our behalf! Historian Michael Parenti unravels the record of the past in his History as Mystery exposing the ideological agendas that invariably underlie our history books and scriptures that then seek to inform or reconstruct our futures.

Historia, by Nikolaos Gysis (1892)

Folk-Lore, Legend, Mythology

Is 9/11 history, folk-lore, legend, or mythology? There are already elements of all four wrapped in that awful but recent tragedy. The historicity of events such as the Lunar Landings and the Holocaust are now being questioned by a new generation that never experienced or can even imagine the likes of it ever happening despite the evidence of Martian Rovers and Modern Day Genocides. Historic events take on mythological dimensions with time. This applies especially to the more distant, so-called "pre-history" accounts recorded, say, in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Alphabets dwindle into hieroglyphs, pictograms and eventually neolithic doodlings left to scholars and specialists to decipher and interpret for us. It is all very hidden and occult.

Equally so the epics recorded in the ancient Sanskrit and Mayan texts. Such myths are stories generally not believed to be true, or at least not literally so, involving impossible adventures or supernatural, fabulous mythological creatures. Much of it is couched in poetry and romantic metaphors that isn't always literally true but instead, as it should be, poetic. Are the stories about  Aladdin and his mysterious lamp and magic carpets, for instance, fact? Fantasy, perhaps? Or fiction? Yet, if it can be imagined could it not also be true? After all, it is a construct of a rational mind, is it not? Legends, on the other hand, are stories peoples tell about themselves, often with improbable, exaggerated elements. Folk-lore are usually oral traditions, kind of trans-generational gossip, handed down from one generation to another giving cohesion to a community or people.

Anthropologist and mythologist, James Frazer exposes his own prejudices (and mine) when he writes of the Old Testament:

The annals of savagery and superstition unhappily compose a large part of human literature; but in what other volume shall we find, side by side with that melancholy record, psalmists who poured forth their sweet and solemn strains of meditative piety in the solitude of the hills or in green pastures and beside still waters; prophets who lit up their beatific vision of a blissful future with the glow of an impassioned imagination; historians who bequeathed to distant ages the scenes of a remote past embalmed for ever in the amber of a pellucid style? These are the true glories of the Old Testament and of Israel; these, we trust and believe, will live to delight and inspire mankind, when the crudities recorded alike in sacred and profane literature shall have been purged away in a nobler humanity of the future. (James George Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, Studies in Comparative Religion Legend and Law, Abridged Edition, Preface.)

There is something enduring, “historic” if you like, in the ephemeral, truths that "delight and inspire".

It is likely that legends and mythologies do contain elements of historical fact. For instance, Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. For many years scholars doubted that the Trojan Wars ever took place. Since the Heinrich Schliemann and Carl Blegen excavations, the existence of the ancient city of Troy proved that historical truth lay behind the legends and myths of these ancient places and poets. The Mycenaeans, the Hittites, Agamemnon, and Nestor are indeed historical realities from our mythological past. The same could be true of the mythologies of the ancient Sumerians and Hebrews. Similarly the Incas and Mayans and the fabulous stories of Credo Mutwa.

Even fiction can and does incorporate historical fact. It can be argued that even if Christ-Myth theories were valid and, heaven forbid, the Bible pure fiction, that there still remains an underlying and abiding authenticity in the Gospel stories of the New Testament that is far more true than conspiracy or a spurious eruption of the Collective Unconscious.   (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ-myth and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus.) Of course, to get to the core of the truth running through such stories takes a lot of digging, dredging, and reduction of the ore to extract the gold. (See "Reductionism".) By the same token we cannot simply take our daily newspaper or school history text books at face value. They carry a hidden agenda.

Euhemerus

The idea that mythologies might be based on actuality is called "euhemerism", so named after the ancient Greek mythographer Euhemerus. I first met Euhemerus through the writings of the Early Church historian, Eusebius. "The term euhemerism is derived from his name, and is the philosophy attributed to Euhemerus which holds that many mythological tales can be attributed to historical persons and events, the accounts of which have become altered and exaggerated over time" (Wikipedia). Euhemerus considered mythology to be "history in disguise." It is like when astute whistleblowers disguise fact in fiction. An extension of this can be found in prophetic writings such as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged  where future fact is disguised as fiction. Similarly Star Trek, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, and John of the Apocalypse.

Eusebius cites Euhemerus...

With regard then to gods the men of old have handed down to their posterity two sets of notions. For some, say they, are eternal and imperishable, as the Sun and Moon and the other heavenly bodies, and besides these the winds, and the rest who partake of the like nature with them; for each of these has an eternal origin and eternal continuance. Other deities they say were of the earth; but, because of the benefits which they conferred on mankind, they have received immortal honour and glory, as Heracles, Dionysus, Aristaeus, and the others like them. (Eusebius, Praep. evan. ii.2.59B-61A)

"It is not at all correct to elevate any human being to the position of a god." ~ Nelson Mandela at home, Soweto, South Africa, February 1990

Mandela Window,Regina Mundi Church, Soweto

We have an innate tendency to deify and to mythologise. We transfigure our heroes. We are witnessing the deification of Nelson Mandela right now in the South African psyche contrary to Madiba's own aspirations. Googling "deification of Mandela" renders numerous instances of this peculiar phenomenon. (Eg. http://www.politicalworld.org/showthread.php?14420-Why-do-humans-deify-people.)  There could yet come a time when we will even wonder whether Madiba ever existed in the sense that Prof. Gary Gutting recently asked "Did Zeus Exist?"  We worship our rugby heroes such as Bryan Habana and idolize our celebrity stars like Charlize Theron projecting qualities of a Hercules to the one and the attributes of a Venus to the other. Then comes the day when Atlas shrugs and no longer wishes to carry the burden of the world systems on his shoulders.

Another somewhat extreme example of euhemerism is Sitchinism and the divinisation of the Sumerian sky-heros, the Sumerian trinity, Anu, Enlil, and Enki. In Zechariah Sitchin's view the Sumerian gods were historical personages, extra-terrestrials in fact, who visited Earth, created humans and returned to their home, Nibiru, from whence they will come again. Drawing largely on Sumerian mythology and Genesis 6 a New Age theology has evolved which, with apology to Ireneaus and others, could be summarised: "The sons of heaven became sons of earth in order that the children of earth might become children of heaven. Extraterrestrials became terrestrials so that terrestrials might become extraterrestrials." Here is a mythic elaboration of the Christian and ancient Greek doctrine of apotheosis, "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods" (Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 57, 1-4 cf. 'If the Word has been made man, it is so that men may be made gods' (Ireneaus, Adv. Haer V, Pref.)

Enki (Wikimedia Commons)

The Enduring Essence of Mythology

Joseph Campbell, American mythologist, quotes Thomas Mann, "Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it bottomless? The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable" (Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p 5 from Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers).

Hans Schindler Bellamy wrote, "We must rather go to the mythologist, the quiet collector of 'cosmic fiction', who has not been taken seriously up till now, for the true meaning of the reports that have been handed down to us for time immemorial."
(Hans Schindler Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man)

There is gold hidden in these ancient traditions, wells, and potholes. Tom Bourke for all his misfortune is remembered for his persistence. Legend has it that Tom struck it lucky when he found nuggets of alluvial gold in the potholes that now bear his name. The other gold diggers are largely forgotten and unknown. The young boy of Bourke's Luck would sit many hours and look out in sheer bliss across the deep gorge and geological sandglass of the Blyde River Canyon and ponder things as they were.  "Very deep is the well of the past!" Such is the stuff our stories are made of. We must relentlessly pan the streams lest it slips through our fingers forever!

Blyde River Canyon. Photo CG Garvie

©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za