I am watching John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In episode 3 at around 5:00 (linked below) Vervaeke says:
Myths are not false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic stories of perennial patterns that are always with us.
This take is not unique to Vervaeke. I have seen similar claims many times before—that myths supposedly encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths. These claims are seldom accompanied by examples, nor does Vervaeke provide any. (At least no clearly understandable examples in his first 4 episodes.)
If you think the claim is reasonable, can you give some good examples?
I agree with the sentence you quote from Vervaeke (“[myths] are symbolic stories of perennial patterns that are always with us”) but mostly-disagree with “myths … encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths” (your paraphrase).
As an example, let’s take the story of Cain and Abel. IMO, it is a symbolic story containing many perennial patterns:
When one person is praised, the not-praised will often envy them
Brothers often envy each other
Those who envy often act against those they envy
Those who envy, or do violence, often lie about it (“Am I my brother’s keeper?”)
Those who have done endured strange events sometimes have a “mark of Cain” that leads others to stay at a distance from them and leave them alone
I suspect this story and its patterns (especially back when there were few stories passed down and held in common) helped many to make conscious sense of what they were seeing, and to share their sense with those around them (“it’s like Cain and Abel”). But this help (if I’m right about it) would’ve been similar to the way words in English (or other natural languages) help people make conscious sense of what they’re seeing, and communicate that sense—myths helped people have short codes for common patterns, helped make those patterns available for including in hypotheses and discussions. But myths didn’t much help with making accurate predictions in one shot, the way “eternal and valuable truths” might suggest.
(You can say that useful words are accurate predictions, a la “cluster structures in thingspace”. And this is technically true, which is why I am only mostly disagreeing with “myths encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths”. But a good word helps differently than a good natural law or something does).
To take a contemporary myth local to our subculture: I think HPMOR is a symbolic story that helps make many useful patterns available to conscious thought/discussion. But it’s richer as a place to see motifs in action (e.g.
the way McGonagal initially acts the picture of herself who lives in her head; the way she learns to break her own bounds
) than as a source of directly stateable truths.
Thanks for the reply.
Could you please elaborate on this part? The “mark of Cain” has always seemed like pure fiction to me. I do not understand what it is supposed to refer to, if anything.
The Good Samaritan is a biblical parable about valuing proximity more highly than ingroup status when extending compassion.
Reynard the Fox was a popular character in medieval England whose flanderised personality trait was using cunning to defeat the might of the bear, the lion, and other anthropomorphised animals.
Toy Story is a parable about jealousy, rage, and accepting how the passage of time and shifting social dynamics might change your role in society.
Thanks. I suppose all those technically count as myths, but none of them are what comes to my mind when I think of “myths”. These feel to me more like fringe examples than “core” examples.
Can you think of any examples that more obviously “feel” like myths? Because it still seems to me that most myths do not match the description.
When I think about semantically central “myths” seen through a western lens, I’m guessing you’re meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.
I’m not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.
Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent—to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns—that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant.
Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society.
What I would caution however is that when we’re backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it’s possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations.
Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.
Something I’m less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.
I’m not sure “proximity” is the best word to describe the Good Samaritan’s message. I think “ability to help” would more centrally describe what it’s getting at, though of course prior to the creation of modern telecommunications, globalized financial systems, etc. “proximity” and “ability to help” were very strongly correlated.
One element of the Good Samaritan message is about moral foundations. Jesus is telling his people, “The kind of ‘goodness’ I’m interested in is more about concretely helping than it is about purity or authority or group loyalty. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick up on the care/harm axis around here. You can get a long way towards building a higher-trust society by focusing more attention on care/harm. We’re way oversupplied on authority and purity around here anyway.”
(Oh no, I’m doing Bible study on Less Wrong; multiple of my past selves are screaming right now.)
Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for, but Aesop’s Fables do a good job conveying non-trivial wisdom e.g., the fox and the grapes
Thanks. But in my experience, fables usually more overtly convey a message, whereas a lot of myths have no obvious message or meaning IMO.
Joseph Heinrich has several examples along with a proposed theory to explain them in his two most recent books Weirdest People in the World, and The Secret of our Success . Roughly the theory goes that certain things cannot be rediscovered by trial and error quickly enough. For example, many indigenous people have myths that guide how they prepare food, for example casava. The South American stories tell them how to prepare it, based on their myths, and those instructions ensure they clear out the cyanide before eating it. In Africa where it was transplanted the locals have no such myths, and the toxin builds up very slowly over decades. By the time it kills you, you are unlikely to point the blame at the food everyone has been eating apparently safely. As a result the deaths in Africa are Many times higher than those is South America because of differences in preparation. Many stories and myths work like this.
He also describes several that exist to help people get past major cognitive biases. Like using the randomness of divination to avoid falling into a pattern of hunting (recency bias among others) which prey could learn and adapt to. There is always a myth that goes with the practice.
Astral Codex Ten has a good recent article on this.
While the debate is ongoing, the Cinderella effect may be an example. That is whether the percentage chance of abuse by a non blood relative is higher than by a blood relative. Arguments seem to revolve around lower absolute rates by step parents vs higher percentage rates; and issues with data reliability.
With things like casava I wonder how the SA people got onto the effect in the first place, if it’s so weak and hard to disentangle. We have trouble doing that sort of thing now with meta-reviews and double blind studies!
The hard way: Generations of death. One family does things differently and starts a superstition about it. They do it and it works, but they don’t know why so they start a superstition. That becomes a myth.
This is also why Africa doesn’t just copy them. There is no respect for the myth and no understanding of the science, because the people who brought it over also disregarded the myth and assumed the plant was safe so didn’t do science until it was too late.
Read the book it is amazing.
Does that work? The effect is weak, the pressure is competing with a lot more significant causes of death. And myths spread horizontally too. They’re not single family things, there can’t be enough variability and isolation to have a full Darwinian selection because it’s not like you have the tribes with the wrong belief being completely exterminated by that mistake.
That said, reading up on it it sounds like cassava can also cause acute poisoning, and that sounds like a much stronger feedback signal for people to notice.
Once again, I will point to the source: Joseph Heinrich, the secret of our Success. Yes you are correct it is messy. It is debated.
Generations of data, fewer differences in environmental factors between members (diets, lifestyle, diseases, etc) to obscure the effect. For long-term effects like this, ‘modern science’ hasn’t really existed long enough to get much data in comparison to centuries of generational trial-and-error
Edit: also, long-term effects measured now have a bunch of confounders due to lifestyle change and rapid technological and medical development, while their conditions were basically stationary. Scientists would kill for that kind of data now!
Thanks for the answer.
Do most myths serve purposes like this, or is it only a small minority of the myths?
The Cinderella story seems to me an awfully convoluted way to convey so little information...
It has a lot more, that is just the headline. There is behavioral norms, expectations, what punishments look like, do they work or not, etc all of that is telling you where the Overton window was for the people who shared that version of the story. It has morals, warnings, behavior to avoid and behavior to emulate. It shows class function and has the very subversive message that movement between levels of class is possible, even if the upper class don’t want that to be true. It also has the subversive message that the nobility isn’t particularly noble (Cinderell’s family), but some really do live up to the ideals (the Prince). So don’t judge people by their status, look closer.
This is a minefield of a topic however, as people get very touchy over things. Already in this thread there are accusations of misogyny in myth, but is that true or do some cultures value different things? Are the Igbo, the Sami, and the Dine woman haters because they tell stories about the power of motherhood? Are those stories holding women back and creating a patriarchy or are they recording and passing on something meaningful about the difference between men and women and what female power looks like? You will get a big argument whichever side you come down on. Same with the yin/yang myth and all it symbolizes.
Another minefield here are the people who cannot tell the difference between representing a thing and supporting/endorsing it. Thus the bowdlerization of myth over time. Cinderella used to have scenes where the sisters carved up their feet to fit into the slipper. Briar Rose/sleeping beauty was not always woken by a kiss but by giving birth 9 months after the Prince visited her. Acteon wasn’t transformed and murdered for gazing upon a goddess but for attempting to “grape” her. There are, however, some people who assume if you include content in a story, that story is endorsing the content, thus the myths were said to be misogynistic and normalize assault of women when to the Greeks it was a warning to men that bad behavior would not go unpunished. The gods were watching. This is still a very fraught topic and people just don’t want to wade into it.
With all that said, it does appear that almost all myth has value Imbedded in it. Some cultural, some scientific, some no longer relevant. But stories survive only because they are valuable.
I think that people often get overly caught up in the fanciful details. Take Cinderella, you are correct that it is a lot of words for that message, but we remember it because of those words. Just the sentence “non-blood relatives can be dangerous to kids” would be forgotten and would be disbelieved. Cinderella has lasted for almost 2,000 years being traced back to the Greek historian Strabo in the first century. Gilgamesh is over 4,000 years old. The oldest known story is over 100,000 years old and we can trace its movements across continents and through many languages.
Humans tell stories, humans remember stories, humans are motivated by stories. Stories have power. True phrases are as quickly forgotten as spoken.
There is a magnificent YouTube channel, creganford that distills the academic learning on ancient stories and myth. Here is a link to one of his videos on how we know what we know about unwritten stories.
Thanks for the explanation.
Prophet Elijah was a loyal servant of god and instead of dying he got an uber directly to heaven on a badass burning chariot.
Eternal truth: That’s where all those burning chariots are going.
(I appreciate the spirit behind this answer.)
I often think about iconic comic book characters as essentially today’s version of these kind of mythical stories, which cut across people’s disagreements about religion. The story of Spider Man has been retold many times but generally contains a classic arc:
Peter finds himself unexpectedly with a lot of power all of a sudden.
Peter has an opportunity to use that power to do the right thing at effectively low cost to himself, and chooses not to for selfishness/laziness reasons.
His choice not to do right has unforeseeable negative consequences both for society and for him personally.
He then dedicates himself to saving people/fighting crime/etc.
In many versions of the story, he pays a lot of personal costs for the time and energy he spends helping others, but he still does it.
In many versions, at some point he gets burned out or panicked that it feels like his power to do good becomes an obligation he can’t escape, and he feels distraught by all the people he cannot help.
In many versions, he eventually (through some dramatic event) comes to terms with his inability to save everyone, and learns that what he can accomplish is still valuable and good, even if he can’t save everyone.
I think its essentially an aspirational model of what it means to be a good person living a balanced life as you come of age and gain authority, power, and responsibility over others. And I do think that people absorb these truths from the story.
I gave a good faith attempt to think of good examples of myths that encapsulate eternal and valuable truths. But unfortunately, instead of good examples, many counterexamples immediately burst into my mind. Many myths depict essentially misogynistic views of women: Eve, Pandora, Circe, Helen, the Sirens. Many myths show how dangerous it is to anger the gods, sometimes for almost nothing—such as being noisy in the Mesopotamian flood myth, or through hubris: Babel, Icarus, and many others. Or they suggest that to appease the gods it is acceptable to sacrifice animals or people, including one’s own child: Isaac’s sacrifice (stopped at the last second), Iphigenia’s sacrifice...
Myths might hold wisdom within the narrow context of a specific culture, but eternal truths? I’m dubious.
I think it’s fair that while not “eternal” some stories and myths hold concepts about very basic facts of human psychology that keep being relevant because they’re just emergent from our biology and/or basic game theory. We still talk about “sour grapes” to refer to someone simply deciding to disguise their need to settle for less than they can achieve with disdain—that dates back to Aesop’s fables.
Also some of these are bundles of multiple things at once. I think for example the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice isn’t quite as straightforward—Agamemnon overall as a man does not come off as pious and righteous, he is arrogant and prideful instead. It’s hard to fully parse what a Greek’s opinion of that story would have been overall, but Agamemnon is also the same guy who pisses off Achilles with his greed (which fair, was about a slave… but neither man was exactly an abolitionist here), and eventually gets murked by his wife in cahoots with her lover because of that sacrifice. And Agamemnon in general was the last of a long cursed lineage that basically kept going through these cycles of murder and revenge because of the sins of their ancestors. He’s not a positive model and the sacrifice might as well have been seen as an act of prideful selfishness on his part, not unlike Stannis Baratheon’s sacrifice of his daughter in Game of Thrones which is modelled after it.
That whole debacle of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra, and Orestes leaves no one looking like the good guy. The moral message of that story is extremely muddled to me.
In the Euripides play, I think the moral message is fairly clear: sacrificing an innocent for the greater good (as Agamemnon wants to do) is a vile, cowardly act, but sacrificing yourself for the greater good (as Iphigenia volunteers in the end) is heroic.
I think this a quite good and maybe nontrivial moral message, but I wouldn’t classify a play written by a professional playwright in the highly civilized Athens as a myth. And I don’t know if we have good records of what the older, folk version of the myth said, and whether it had a positive message.
That’s also the thing, myths like these are often canvases that get riffed on for various purposes. It’s hardly a new thing, their own cultures were doing it already from the get go. “Myths” aren’t singular monolithic things, they’re pieces of culture that can be rearranged in many ways.
But the Oresteia of Aeschylus, as far as I remember, very clearly implies that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were wrong to try to punish Agamemnon. I do not think Aeschylus concedes that Agamemnon did anything wrong.
Euripides was famously more “progressive” than Aeschylus, to the point of getting mocked about it by the more conservative Aristophanes IIRC. Athens had its own politics (lots of it!) and while history may not be an exact circle, sometimes it rhymes pretty hard.
Maybe it’s just like modern soap operas or reality shows, and the point is just schadenfreude. “Man I am sure happy I’m not any one of those horrible people”.
I think we see this often in myths that stay with us as powerful allegories because they exemplify a trope or pattern that we may want to express. For example, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice could exemplify how excessive greed or inability to control your urges can lead to losing everything. Orpheus quite literally fails the “marshmallow test”. A similar thing happens in the story of Eros and Psyche, though in this case through her own perseverance Psyche manages to eventually win back what she lost. David vs Goliath is a story about how moral fortitude, courage and wits can triumph in the face of naked brutish violence. The tale of Hua Mulan is a story about the conflict between duty to the family and duty to the law, and how one navigates that (so is the story of Antigone who buries her traitorous brother and gets executed for it).
The thing is also, these are patterns, not universal truths—you’ll sometimes find myths expressing opposing patterns because both can hold in the appropriate circumstances. And some myths simply express values that we do not acknowledge any more as worth uplifting. Abraham and Isaac is about blind obedience and faith unto God. The Tower of Babel is about how if you try to build or do something too ambitious you’ll get smacked down, and you should just know your place.
We have a lot more stories that have become established with this “mythic” power today, if anything. David and Goliath is also Frodo and Sauron or Luke Skywalker and the Death Star. If you think about the ties between power and responsibility your mind likely evokes Spider-Man’s famous motto. No parable about vicious ambition eating itself and leading to a disastrous fall is better known today than the Tale of Walter White, He Who Broke Bad. And the old stories aren’t dead. We know more about other cultures than we used to. We eat that shit up, if anything. We have games and shows and comics about the Greek-Roman gods and their myths, and about the Norse, and about the classic Biblical stories… Are these myths weakened by the fact we don’t literally believe in their truth any more? But well, look at for how long Christian Europe still hung onto classical pagan myths as a source of metaphor. You only need walk through a frescoed 18th century palace, go visit a museum, read the Divine Comedy to see medieval and early modern artists expressing themselves with the language of Greek gods and heroes. Did they literally believe those to be true? Obviously not, they were good Christians who would never do that. But they believed them to be meaningful and powerful and thus sort of story-true instead of true-true. I think we’re doing perfectly fine on that department, and if we’re not it’s because of limits and constraints to artistic expression which have more to do with its commercial model than any spiritual impoverishment. Requiring people to literally believe every single myth they reference is factual would require them to be naive idiots. And we still have our supposedly true-true myths that still are in some sense myths—meaning they double as powerful stories imbued with meaning. We have stories about the creation of the world by the Big Bang, about the rise and fall of the powerful Dinosaurs, about the rise of one clever ape who managed to spread across the world and become Man, about all sorts of kings and heroes and empires and their wars and struggles. I’d argue the mythical cycle built around World War 2 is in some sense the creation myth of the modern liberal world. These myths of course don’t quite look the same way that the Iliad and Odyssey did—but then, does anything look the same as 3000 years ago?
Perhaps instead of thinking of myths as eternal Truths, its more useful to think of them as heuristics, or easy ways to capture and communicate complex ideas. Tech for thinking complex thoughts. Humans rarely have the capacity to think abstractly, so we mostly reason by metaphor to something concrete.
From this perspective, stories and metaphors give shape to the kinds of thoughts people can think.
I think of Chinese Cheng Yu, the 4 character idioms that refer to stories that have morals or lessons, as being the most compressed form of this. Most cultures, from ancient Greece to rural America, have some form of this.
When s someone references a Less Wrong phrase that conveys a complex idea via a metaphor, like Cupstacking, the Map is not the Territory, they are doing the same thing. To some extent, one of the projects of Less Wrong is to replace and expand a vernacular.
On the other hand, recently Americans have been fed a glut of superhero, Western, and epic fantasy stories that have a single clear Good guy and Bad guy, and a straight forward arc of the person winning (usually though violence) being the Good guy, or at least Our guy. There is a struggle for power, honor, respect, justice, safety, the girl (or her memory), and all that is right. Whoever opposes the Protagonist/POV character is the bad guy by default.
This story has very little to do with universal truths, but it does shape thinking, especially when so often repeated.
Vampires.
They are night dwelling monsters who look like humans (predatory people tend to sneak around at night)
They trick you and drain your blood (you can be convinced to do what they want, giving them your life force or even dying)
They can make others into a vampire (can recruit people into their evil group)
(My favorite) They need to be invited into your home. A piece wisdom for the overly agreeable!
Maybe the vampire story originated from a story about a violent gang member tricking innocent people and killing them, recruiting for his gang etc. But over the years, storytellers enhance the story, making it an incredibly potent version of itself.
Perhaps, too, we internalise the story, and when we meet someone who’s a little off, the image of a vampire will pop into our heads.