Searching for the oldest story in the world
I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, sometimes considered the greatest British novel, in a rainforest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days in the mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my thesis. Every evening, after dark, my research assistant and I would call it night, turn off the only lamp on the porch, and return to our separate rooms. Finally, alone, I picked up my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a child building a fort out of pillows, and read.
Those were good hours, although, to be honest, little of the novel stuck with me, except Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in the absurd: an elderly, self-important, somewhat absurd clergyman who devotes his life to a bold mission. Casaubon is convinced that every mythological system is the decaying remains of a single original oracle – a claim he plans to prove in his brilliant book The Key to All Mythology. He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a manuscript that would, in Eliot’s words, make ‘the vast field of mythological constructions…intelligible, even illumined by the reflected light of the correspondence’.
The ill-fated project is caught between the unbridled diversity of cultural traditions and the imagination of a single source, between the vastness of its material and the impossibility of controlling it at all, between the need for theory and the distortions it causes. These failures were deepened by Casaubon’s constraints – his pedantic love of detail (he dreamed of footnotes) and his refusal to engage in scholarship in languages he did not know (if only he had learned German).
Casaubon’s effort is an indictment of excess and a warning about the absurdity of such sweeping comparisons. But is this completely fair? The patterns are there. Floods, rogues, battles with monsters, creation and the end of the world – sometimes the similarities are uncanny. The people I worked with in Indonesia, the Mantawai, would sometimes point out the similarities between Jesus and their legendary hero, Pajita Sabau, who was also said to have been born without a father and rose from the dead.
Casaubon’s The Key to All Myths has stayed with me as a cautionary tale as much as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s idealistic, much younger wife and the novel’s heroine—she found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the lure: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course my approach was different. I was surrounded by mud and alone on a remote island, chasing the spirit of a crocodile; Casaubon was at his desk trying to draw myths he barely knew. But, in the midst of all this pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.
I’m hardly alone in feeling the pull. However much “Middlemarch” mocks Casaubon’s obsession, the desire to find patterns in the myth runs deep and wide. In the Victorian era, scholars such as Max Müller, and later James Frazer, attempted to systematize the myths of the world. “Freezer”The golden branch(1890), a scandalous, sprawling synthesis, charted cultures on a path from magic to religion to science, and argued that many myths and rituals—including the pillars of Christianity—were remnants of primitive fertility cults and sacrificial kingship. It left its mark on everyone from William Butler Yeats to Jim Morrison, though the absence of rigor has not aged well. Later, Robert Graves”The white goddess“(1948) enchanted a generation of poets and novelists with its vision of mythical unity; a Joseph Campbell novel.”The hero with a thousand faces(1949), a meandering treatise on the universality of the hero’s journey, inspired “Star Wars.” At the same time, Freudians and evolutionary psychologists were searching folk tales for evidence to support their theories. “Cypical stories stay at home,” says Robert Mackey in his book, “Typical stories travel.”story(1997), his classic guide to screenwriting, keeps the hope alive that mythological comparison can be commercially as well as intellectually rewarding.
The key that Casaubon longed for is particularly tempting. He wasn’t just tracing similarities; He was searching for a primordial legend, for a long-lost ancestor who could only be faintly seen in his descendants. He happens to believe this original tradition to be Christian truth, but apologetics aside, there is still something intoxicating about the search for the key: the idea that, by sifting through myth, we might reclaim the imaginary worlds of the first storytellers. Also, research is not just a scientific game; It is an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our warring wild races share something irreducible at their core.
Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, and even map ancient migrations, but only through mythology can we glimpse the inner lives of our ancestors – their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and awe. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for missing stories? And if we can, how far can we go back? Can we finally reclaim the myths of our first common ancestors—the myths that Casaubon so desperately sought?
If there is any field that lends credence to the dream of the Casaubonian Key, it is Indo-European studies. While Fraser’s method was free-wheeling, the Indo-Europeans were strict. This discipline is usually said to have begun in 1786, when Sir William Jones, a colonial judge stationed in Bengal, addressed the Asiatic Society. Years of study of Sanskrit had convinced him that it closely resembled Greek and Latin—“indeed,” Jones said, “no philosopher of language could examine them all without believing that they arose from a common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” He suggested that the Germanic and Celtic languages, as well as Old Persian, may belong to the same lost family. Others have glimpsed such connections before, but Jones noticed more than that; It set off a scientific pursuit and a popular fascination that has yet to come to an end.
Today, it is widely accepted that languages as diverse as English, Welsh, Spanish, Armenian, Greek, Russian, Hindi and Bengali descend from a single ancestor: the Proto-Indo-European language. Linguists have charted how words spoken five thousand years ago branched into the vocabulary networks we know now. My first name, Manveer, for example, combines two Sanskrit roots with obvious European cousins: “man,” meaning “thought” or “spirit” — and related to “reason” and “reason” — and “veer,” meaning “heroic” or “brave,” as in “virtue” and “manliness.”
But reconstruction did not end with nouns and deeds. The gods dance on our tongues, and when researchers compared Indo-European languages, they found striking mythological matches, too. British journalist Laura Spinney says in her latest book: “Proto: How an ancient language became global“, begins with the patriarchal sky god. Sanskrit speakers worshiped Deius Pater, or Heavenly Father. In Greek myth, Zeus Pater ruled over the gods. North of the Alps, speakers of Proto-Italian probably venerated Deius Pater. Among the tribes that settled near Rome, this name became the Latin Jupiter. With other counterparts found in the Scythians Latvians and Hittites, many researchers now believe that the first Indo-Europeans prayed to the Father of Heaven known as Dayus Bohtar.