Parallel Myths

Most cultures—at least the ones detailed in this book—have in their mythic pantheons gods and goddesses attributed to specific natural phenomena, deities in charge of the sun and moon, the rivers and oceans, the earth and nature, and the heavens. To early civilizations, attributing a god—in distinctly human form—to these patterns of nature was the only way for a pre-scientific mind to understand the world. A fierce storm or a volcanic eruption is easier to process as the act of an anthropomorphized being with emotions and motives than as the result of random happenstance. If everything is random, nothing is predictable, and an unpredictable world is terrifying. Of course, one of the appeals of science is its attempt to predict the patterns of nature, and those predictions provide a sense of control. Early cultures, in contrast, attempted to control nature by offering sacrifices to their gods, whimsical and capricious though they may have been. By creating the gods in their own image—an interesting variation of biblical Genesis—humans could persuade, appease, and bargain with their gods in the same way they might bargain with each other. If humans could be appeased, then human-like gods might be similarly persuaded.

Humans not only personified nature in the human characters of gods, but they did the same with distinctly human concepts, such as