10.5 — The Rest of the World's Myths, and the Monsters

The mythologies that get less attention in English-language books, and the creatures that turn up in nearly all of them.

East Asia

What is the structure of Chinese mythology?

Less a single system than several overlapping ones, because three traditions coexisted for two thousand years and borrowed from each other.

Folk religion supplies an enormous bureaucracy of gods — and the word bureaucracy is not a joke. The celestial administration mirrors the imperial one: the Jade Emperor at the top, with ministries, regional officials, and a Kitchen God in every household who reports annually on the family's conduct. People smeared honey on the Kitchen God's image before he departed, so that his report would be sweet or his mouth stuck shut.

Daoism supplies the Eight Immortals, alchemy, and a body of philosophy about acting in accordance with the way things are.

Buddhism arrived from India in the first century CE and was absorbed, with Indian figures transformed — most strikingly Avalokiteshvara, a male bodhisattva in India, who became Guanyin, a female figure of compassion and the most widely worshipped deity in Chinese popular religion.

Confucianism was less mythological and more concerned with ritual, family obligation and the ordering of society, and it supplied ancestor veneration as a structural practice.

What are the famous Chinese stories?

Pangu, who separated heaven and earth by growing between them for eighteen thousand years, and whose body became the world — breath the wind, eyes the sun and moon, blood the rivers.

Nüwa, who made humans from yellow clay, carefully at first and then by dragging a rope through mud and flicking the drops — which is presented as the origin of the difference between the nobility and everybody else. She also repaired the sky when it cracked, using melted stones of five colours.

The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, which fictionalises the real seventh-century pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang to India for Buddhist texts. Monkey is born from a stone, learns immortality, wrecks heaven's peach banquet, is trapped under a mountain for five hundred years, and is released to escort the monk. He is possibly the most widely known fictional character in East Asia and has clear connections to Hanuman, which is argued about.

The cowherd and the weaver girl, separated across the Milky Way and permitted to meet one night a year on a bridge of magpies — the origin of the Qixi festival, and of parallel festivals in Japan and Korea.

What about Japan?

Shinto is the indigenous tradition, centred on kami — a word usually translated as gods but closer to "presences worthy of reverence", which can be deities, ancestors, mountains, waterfalls, unusual trees or exceptional people.

The creation account has Izanagi and Izanami stirring the sea with a spear and forming the islands from what drips off it. Izanami dies giving birth to fire and Izanagi follows her to the underworld, is told not to look at her, looks, and flees from what he sees — which is the same structure as Orpheus, arrived at independently.

Amaterasu, the sun goddess, hid in a cave after being offended by her brother, and the world went dark. The other gods lured her out by holding a party outside, with a dance so raucous that her curiosity brought her to the entrance, where a mirror was positioned so she saw her own light. The Japanese imperial line traditionally claimed descent from her.

Yokai are the enormous class of Japanese supernatural creatures — the kappa in rivers, the tengu in mountains, the tanuki, the shape-shifting fox — and they are the direct ancestors of a substantial amount of modern Japanese popular culture.

The Americas, Africa and the Pacific

What survives of Mesoamerican myth?

Less than there should be, because most of it was deliberately destroyed.

Bishop Diego de Landa burned the Maya codices at Maní in 1562, along with religious images, in a mass event he recorded himself. Four Maya books survive out of what must have been thousands. Landa also, in the same career, wrote the account of Maya writing and culture that later made decipherment possible, which is an unusually direct case of one person destroying and preserving the same thing.

What survives includes the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya creation narrative, recorded in the sixteenth century in the Latin alphabet. It contains an account of the gods making humans several times and failing — from mud, which dissolved, and from wood, which had no memory or gratitude — before succeeding with maize. And it contains the Hero Twins, who defeat the lords of the underworld at a ball game.

Aztec myth centres on the sun requiring blood to continue moving, which is the framework within which human sacrifice was carried out at scale. The current age is the fifth, each previous one having ended in catastrophe. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, is a creator and culture-bringer.

The Maya calendar did not predict the end of the world in 2012. The Long Count simply completed a cycle of about 5,125 years, and Maya inscriptions themselves refer to dates far beyond it.

What is in African mythology?

An enormous range, since Africa contains more linguistic and cultural diversity than any other continent, and generalising is meaningless. Some of the widely known traditions:

Yoruba, from West Africa, with Olodumare as the remote supreme being and the orishas as the deities people actually deal with — Ogun of iron and war, Shango of thunder, Yemoja of water and motherhood, Eshu the trickster at the crossroads who must be addressed first. The tradition crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people and survives in Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Haitian Vodou, frequently by identifying orishas with Catholic saints so that worship could continue under prohibition.

Anansi the spider, from the Akan of Ghana, a trickster who obtains all the world's stories from the sky god by capturing four impossible creatures through cunning. Anansi stories travelled to the Caribbean and the American South and are a documented ancestor of the Br'er Rabbit tales.

Egyptian myth is African and is treated separately in 10.3 for the ordinary reason that it is exceptionally well documented.

What is Dreamtime?

The English term for a set of concepts in Aboriginal Australian traditions, and the translation is poor.

It refers to the period in which ancestral beings moved across a featureless land and formed it — but it is not simply a past. It is understood as continuously present, accessible through ritual, story and place. The ancestral beings' journeys are recorded as songlines, routes across the country whose features are named in sequence in a song, so that the song is simultaneously a narrative, a map and a title deed.

A person who knows the song for a route can navigate it across hundreds of kilometres of country they have never seen, because the landmarks are in the words in order.

These are among the oldest continuous cultural traditions on Earth, with archaeological occupation dates in Australia exceeding 50,000 years, and some Aboriginal narratives describe coastal features now under water that were dry land at the end of the last ice age — which would make them accurate oral accounts around ten thousand years old.

The monsters

Why do dragons appear everywhere?

They appear in Europe, China, India, Mesoamerica and the Middle East, and the European and Chinese versions are so different that treating them as one creature is misleading.

The European dragon is a hoarding, fire-breathing reptile, an antagonist to be killed by a hero — Beowulf's, Saint George's, Fafnir in the Norse material.

The Chinese long is a benevolent creature associated with water, rain and imperial authority, with no wings and no fire, and is petitioned rather than fought. Indian nagas are serpent beings associated with water and treasure, sometimes protective — one shelters the Buddha with its hoods.

The proposed explanations for the recurrence include fossil finds, which is plausible and documented in specific cases: large bones exposed by erosion were interpreted as dragons and griffins in both China and the Mediterranean, and Protoceratops skeletons in the Gobi have been argued as the source of the griffin.

A second explanation is that it is a composite of the things primates are innately wary of — snakes, large cats, birds of prey — which has been proposed and is not testable.

A third, and the least exciting, is transmission. Trade routes moved stories, and a serpent guarding water or treasure is a story that travels well.

Which other creatures recur?

The flood, in 10.3.

The trickster — Loki, Anansi, Coyote, Hermes, Krishna in some aspects, Sun Wukong, Eshu, Reynard. A figure who is neither good nor evil, who breaks rules, and who frequently produces necessary change by doing so. Almost every mythology has one, and it is one of the strongest cross-cultural patterns.

The hero's journey — departure, trials, a descent into the underworld or its equivalent, and return with something. Joseph Campbell's formulation of this in 1949 has been enormously influential on storytelling, particularly on film, and is also criticised by folklorists for being loose enough to fit almost anything and for flattening genuine differences between traditions.

The dying and returning figure — Osiris, Persephone, Baldr, Dionysus, Inanna. Frequently associated with the agricultural year, and this connection was pushed hard by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, whose comparative method is now regarded as having over-generalised badly while remaining a foundational text.

The world tree — Yggdrasil, the Ashvattha in Indian texts, the Maya ceiba, the Siberian shamanic tree.

The wild man — Enkidu, the yeti, the sasquatch, the ban-manush. A figure at the boundary of the human, which is what makes it useful.

Why do so many mythologies share these patterns?

Three explanations, and all three are partly right.

Transmission: stories travel with trade, migration and conquest, and the Indo-European mythologies genuinely share ancestry, which is why Dyaus Pita, Zeus Pater and Jupiter are recognisably the same name.

Shared experience: everybody has floods, seasons, death, birth, storms and the sky, and the number of stories that can be told about them is not unlimited.

Shared cognition: human minds process narrative, agency and causation in similar ways, so the stories that are memorable and transmissible are similar. Stories that spread are the ones that fit a mind, which is a selection process, and the surviving myths are the survivors of it.

The failure mode to avoid is deciding that all myths are secretly the same story. They are not, and the differences — Norse fatalism against Egyptian confidence, Mesopotamian bleakness against Indian cyclicality — are where the actual information is.

What comes next

The next Part turns to a different kind of thinking about the world: how to estimate anything, what everybody on the planet is doing right now, and the full scale of things.