Religion, Myth, Science:

Un-Earthing the Stone of Wisdom

Myth is a fascinating and many-facetted subject. There are myths, sagas, and fairytales; there is folklore and superstition. There are ancient myths, and then there are modern myths, or urban myths, that supposedly have taken place in our own time. Collectively all of this can be labeled “traditions.”

Many people tend to dismiss traditions as untrue, and unbelievable. But are traditions really supposed to be true and believable? The purpose of science is to find the truth, in a literal, physical sense. The raison d´être of religion is to be believed, in a literal, spiritual sense. The role of fiction is to entertain. But what about traditions? They have variously been interpreted as distorted history, as remnants from an obsolete religion, and as entertainment. They have also been interpreted as psychological archetypes, as useful stories for socialization, and even as deliberate propaganda creations. Unlike science, many traditions do not purport to be literally true. And unlike religion, many traditions do not even expect you to believe in them.

A second meaning of myth is ‘a misconception,’ as in “it’s a myth that Stone Age man was primitive.” That misconception is, or at least has been, a common tacit assumption among scholars. The myth (i.e., misconception, erroneous assumption) is the norm, and the truth has an uphill battle for acceptance. In my experience, most of the time when science is wrong, it is not the data or the analysis that is flawed, but the (often subconscious) assumptions. In fact, we are getting close to the axiom here; Aristotle defined the axiom as something that is evidently true and impossible to prove. Those who believe in a myth in the sense of a misconception may consider it an axiom. One man’s axiom, another man’s myth?

In the area of New Age we find the opposite misconception-myth, namely that there was an ancient race of very advanced men (and women), whose now lost civilization was the mother of all civilizations. Scholars in religion call this Atlanticism, after Atlantis. While Plato described Atlantis as the richest empire ever, and the militarily strongest, he did not suggest that they hade any advanced but later lost technology, nor any occult powers. Those features have been added since the late 19th century, effectively converting the old literary tale into an occult myth. Some occult groups with links to the Nazis believed the American ex-congressman Ignatius Donnelly’s thesis that the Aryans were the descendants of the Atlanteans, and took that as a reason for restoring the pure race through methods that non-believers consider immoral.

Even many scholars have accepted the occult myth that the inhabitants of Atlantis were “advanced.” What separates scholars from Atlanticists is only that the former believe Atlantis to be fiction, while the latter believe it to be fact. But both have an erroneous image of it, since (according to my humble research) Plato simply described Stone Age Europe, the builders of the megalithic tombs in Western Europe and NW Africa. The island Atlantis was Ireland; the temples were the passage tombs in the Boyne Valley. The megalithic tomb construction ended suddenly around 2,800 BC, when the Old Kingdom of Egypt already had been established, which explains how the Egyptians could have knowledge about them.

As an illustration of tradition, we can look at folklore in Northern Europe. I grew up in southern Sweden, on the very border of the megalithic culture. A powerful image in the local folklore is the troll; among all the superstition and folklore the troll has a special place. They are described like a humanoid race separate from but similar to us, while most folklore creatures appear to be personifications of aspects of nature. Recall that also pagan Gods and Goddesses are of completely human form, but not the troll.

South of where I grew up, in the megalithic area, the trolls were small and lived under big stones and in mounds. They were mischievous, they didn’t tolerate the cross, they had great riches in their mounds, and sometimes at night you could see the boulder lifted with light and music coming out from underneath. I now wonder if not the lifted stones and the mounds refer to the megalithic dolmens and cairns in the landscape. North of where I grew up, in the forest, trolls were big as man and lived in small mountains, while in Norway they were huge and lived in big mountains. They abducted women and exchanged babies. When a baby was born, one had to keep ones eyes on it at all times, because it only took a moment for a troll to exchange the human baby for a troll baby. Only when it started growing up would one notice that it was a “changeling.” Certain features distinguished it, such as a brownish skin color and hair growth both inside and outside the ears.

Irish folklore tells us how the Milesians invaded the island from Spain, defeating the Tuatha de Danann. The latter made themselves invisible, and live on in the megalithic mounds as the fairy people. They can be mischievous, they are known to exchange babies (changelings), and just like trolls they occasionally abduct women.

There appears to be a connection between trolls, fairies, and the megalithic tomb builders. Furthermore, the fairies know magic, and the Swedish word for ‘magician’ is “trollkarl,” literally signifying ‘troll-man’. In spite of there being no association in people’s minds, troll and trollkarl may thus share a common origin. So, you may ask, the trolls and fairies are identical to the megalithic tomb builders?

I concluded that Plato based his description of Atlantis on Ireland, but while Atlantis sank, Ireland is still there. The island that sank may rather have been Dogger Bank, which was destroyed by the Storegga tsunami around 8,100 years ago, creating just such a mud bank as Plato mentioned. At about the same time, give or take some centuries, the rising world sea level (caused by the ice sheet over Canada melting away) engulfed it in its waves.

Thus, the island that sank may be a myth from Ireland, not about Ireland. This is an example of a very common feature in tradition: An older event or story gets attributed to a newer and more familiar person or place. Returning to the changeling motif, it is probably an explanation of retarded or handicapped children. The troll and fairies may therefore be age-old folklore that only later got associated with the monuments.

There is another fascinating—although remote—possibility as regards the trolls’ appearance as similar to but distinct from humans. Could it be an extremely ancient memory of the Neanderthal race? There are other mythical beings that also have been related to Neanderthal people, namely the various Bigfoot apparitions. Of course, while nobody claims to have seen a troll, there are people alive who claim to have seen a Bigfoot. Shall we believe them?

As late as in the mid 19th century a man in southern Sweden claimed to have met a “lindorm”. In that province the lindorm was a snake of superstition, the size of a boa with a deadly gaze, a feature it shares with the Greek Basilisk. Of course the man did not meet a lindorm, so why did he claim that he did? We can only speculate, but my guess is that those who claim to have seen Bigfoot may share his motive. Perhaps they want recognition, but personally I rather believe that they are jokers who get a kick from it, or in other words, that it gives them a sense of empowerment.

I have seen something similar: An invented academic. Thanks to the cooperation of quite a few people, he became so credible that media would report on his research, such as a fake story that thermal water had been found under the university (the joke was on the jokers ten years later, when thermal water really was found under the university).

While these are examples of fraud, the way in which historical facts turn into myth is probably by loss of context. Already Plato wrote (in “Timaeus”) that Phaëthon’s ride was based on a true, historic event, and that this knowledge had been brought from Egypt together with the history of Atlantis. To concentrate the description of an historic event and facilitate memory, familiar details are eliminated, as elaborated on recently by E. W. Barber and P. T. Barber in How they severed Earth from Sky. When listeners in another time or place hear it, they may misunderstand the story completely. There is an example in this text. I wrote that a changeling gets a browning skin color, which means that it looses the usual rosy skin color. However, an American reader might associate the color brown with African-Americans and believe that it refers to racism against people of color. Nothing could be more wrong, since non-white people are totally off the radar screen in Swedish folklore.

There are several more paradigms for how to interpret myth. Sigmund Freud, for instance, might have interpreted the troll as a manifestation of sexuality, while Jung might have sought the image of the troll in the common subconscious. Robert Graves often interpreted Greek myths as misunderstood symbols from an earlier religion. His Irish background with its own rich mythology may well have guided his interpretations, but if that is for the better or worse can be debated.

So how does myth fit in with science and religion? In a strict sense science is the method and process of erecting and verifying theories, theories that can be used to predict facts about the unknown. Myth (tradition) on the other hand may be unintelligible knowledge. Note that science does not equal knowledge. We have probably all had experiences that cannot be explained by scientific theories. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, it just means that we can’t explain why it happened. Obviously we need a way to keep track also of inexplicable experiences, if they impact our lives. Even if you don’t know what a comet is, you can see the connection between the sign in the sky, the raining of glowing stones from heaven, and the war and pestilence that follows the destruction. The chain of cause and effect is clear, even though the cause for the original observation—the sign in the sky—is inexplicable. For the survival of future generations it is important to save this information as a tradition to posterity. The sign in the sky becomes an omen.

Mircea Eliade, a philosopher studying religion, assumed the existence of “the sacred” as the object of religious worship, and saw myth (tradition) as a physical revelation of the sacred. In Christianity the sacred would have to be God, and the myths would be the religious beliefs. In other words, myth is religion under his assumption.

To put the issue of science and religion on its point, we may ask, is the existence of “the sacred” an erroneous assumption, or if you prefer, a myth? In traditional logic, a statement can only be true or false. If the sacred interacts with our physical reality it can, at least in principle, be measured and determined to be either true or false. But if it does not interact, it can neither be falsified nor confirmed. Furthermore, if the sacred does not interact, then what possible practical use can it have? However, if it does interact then it is perfectly natural. Thus, if God exists he is a natural phenomenon that has turned first into a myth, and then into religion, it would seem.

So what is the difference between the inexplicable omen in the sky (the comet), and the sacred, the God in the sky? It has been suggested that many gods originally were celestial objects, notably comets (only later, when the comets were gone, were the names transferred to planets). Those comets were fragments of a broken up larger body, in the same orbit as Encke’s comet, and several of them may already have crashed on Earth. In fact, the megalithic rock art is full of drawings resembling comets heading for Earth, and the megalithic culture may very well have gone under 2807 BC. That spring, a comet crashed in the Southern Ocean and sent a tsunami around the world, according to archaeologist W. Bruce Masse.

There is not a single reason for myths, just as there is not a single type of myths. They may contain crucial information, which may one day become useful. The cautionary principle therefore tells us to neither believe blindly in myths, nor to discard them. If you think about it, isn’t that precisely what we do? Certain myths (including religious myths) could be said to be proxies for science (like Newtonian gravity is a proxy for Einstein’s gravity). They codify empirical knowledge so that we may use it as a survival tool even when we don’t understand the cause and effect.

Science can thus make an historic myth intelligible again. If some people believed in the myth in a religious way, will they have made a loss when it was explained? Not in my opinion. On the contrary, they will find that their religion kept the myth alive, so that we today could regain knowledge that would otherwise have been lost forever. Science is then just the process to undo the damage so to say, and mythology has been the vehicle for saving the knowledge.

Does this mean that science will eliminate all religion, like the “universal acid” of Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea? For this to happen science would first have to explain everything for everyone; but even after that, many functions of religion would still be intact since it has a broader scope that science has.

Therefore, religious people may want to embrace the scientific method as an ally, as a tool of wisdom. Which brings me to the Stone of Wisdom. Remember that during the Stone Age, tools were made of stone—like the hammer, literally meaning ‘stone’. Thus, “The Stone of Wisdom” in my humble opinion simply means ‘the tool of wisdom’; that is, science.

Ulf Erlingsson, Ph.D.
2005-06-12