11.1 — Why Every People Invented Gods, and Why the Stories Rhyme

Every human society ever documented has had gods, spirits or ancestors, and stories about them. There is no known exception.

And when you lay the stories side by side, they rhyme in ways that are hard to explain by coincidence.

A flood that destroys almost everybody. A trickster who steals something for humans and is punished. A world made from the body of a slain being. A young god who kills the old order. A journey to the land of the dead to bring somebody back, which fails. A hero with an unusual birth, an ordeal, and a return.

This chapter is about why.

Four explanations, and all four are partly right

One: shared inheritance

Some of the rhyming is because the peoples are related.

The Indo-European family — the ancestor language of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic and Persian — was spoken somewhere on the Eurasian steppe roughly five to six thousand years ago, and its speakers spread from Ireland to India.

And the correspondences are exact enough to be technical.

Dyeus Pter — "sky father" — becomes Sanskrit Dyaus Pita, Greek Zeus Pater, Latin Jupiter, and Germanic Tiw (whose day is Tuesday). The same name, in five languages, for the same sky god.

A storm god who kills a serpent: Indra kills Vritra (9.1), Thor fights the world serpent, Zeus fights Typhon, and a Slavic and a Hittite version exist too.

And the divine twins, the thunder weapon, the sacred cattle raid, and the fire ritual all recur.

So a great deal of the Greek–Norse–Indian resemblance is family resemblance, in the literal sense.

Two: the same world

Everybody has a sun that rises and sets, a moon that dies and returns, seasons, storms, birth and death.

And there are only so many stories those facts support.

A god who dies and returns is what a year looks like. Osiris in Egypt (11.7), Persephone in Greece, Baldr in the north, and the many Near Eastern dying-and-rising figures are all, in part, agriculture.

Floods occur. Almost every flood myth belongs to a people living on a river plain or a coast, and Mesopotamia — where the oldest written flood story is (11.8) — floods regularly and catastrophically.

Three: the same mind

And the deepest one.

Human cognition has features that generate this material without anybody deciding to.

Agency detection. You are built to see intention behind events, and the bias is asymmetric on purpose: mistaking a rock for a predator costs you a startle, and mistaking a predator for a rock costs you everything. So the system over-fires, and a mind that over-attributes agency will find intention behind the storm and the disease.

Narrative structure. You remember stories and you do not remember lists. Anything a preliterate society needs to preserve — history, law, geography, the moral order — has to be in story form or it does not survive, which is why the stories carry so much freight.

And the difficulty of imagining your own non-existence. Try it. Every attempt puts you somewhere watching. This alone produces a strong intuition of survival, and every culture has an afterlife of some kind.

Four: the same social problems

And the most under-rated explanation.

Every society has to solve the same problems: why the powerful should be obeyed, why you should keep your word to a stranger, why the group's rules bind you when nobody is watching, and what to do when somebody dies.

A story is an extremely efficient way to encode an answer. And gods who see what you do in private are a solution to a real coordination problem — and there is evidence that societies with moralising, watching gods tend to be the larger ones, though which way the causation runs is contested.

What myths actually do

Four jobs, and any given story usually does several.

Explanation. Why there are seasons, why snakes have no legs, why there is death. The weakest function and the one people assume is primary.

Justification. Why this family rules, why this land is ours, why this custom must be kept. The Purusha hymn (9.1) is this, and so is almost every founding myth of a nation.

Instruction. The moral content, which is what most of this volume has been extracting.

And handling the unbearable. Death, loss, injustice, the fact that terrible things happen to people who did not deserve them. A story does not solve those and it makes them survivable by giving them a shape.

The hero pattern

And the specific rhyme that has been most studied.

Joseph Campbell's monomyth, from 1949: a hero leaves the ordinary world, crosses a threshold, faces trials, receives help, undergoes a supreme ordeal, gains something, and returns transformed.

Two honest observations.

The pattern is genuinely there in many stories. Rama's exile and return (Part 2). The Buddha's going forth and return (6.2, 6.4). Gilgamesh (11.8). Odysseus. Theseus.

And the theory is overstated, and scholars of myth are generally sceptical of it. The pattern is broad enough that with sufficient interpretation almost any story can be made to fit, and Campbell's method involved a great deal of selective emphasis. Its enormous influence on modern film has also created a circularity: a great many recent stories fit the pattern because their authors read Campbell.

Where it is defensible: departure, ordeal and return is a real and common shape, probably because it is the shape of growing up and of every significant transition, and everybody has been through one.

What is not universal

And this is worth stating, because "all religions say the same thing" is a comfortable claim and it is false.

Not every tradition has a creator. Buddhism does not (6.12).

Not every tradition has an afterlife that matters. Early Hebrew religion is largely uninterested in it. Confucianism declines the question.

Not every tradition has moral gods. The Greek gods are powerful and frequently badly behaved, and nobody expected otherwise.

And the endings differ completely. The Norse world ends and the gods lose (11.6). The Indian world cycles endlessly. The Abrahamic world ends once, in judgement. Those are not the same story.

12.9 goes through what the traditions actually agree on, and the honest answer is: less than people say, and the overlap is mostly ethical rather than metaphysical.

How to read Part 11

The remaining eleven chapters cover Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, Japanese, African, American, Pacific, Celtic and Slavic material.

And the method is the one from 1.1, applied lightly.

Tell the story properly, because a summarised myth is a dead myth.

Say what it is doing — which of the four jobs, and what problem it was solving.

And extract what survives being lifted out of its culture, which is sometimes a great deal and sometimes nothing, and the chapters will say which.

What to carry from this page

The stories rhyme for four reasons at once: shared ancestry, shared world, shared cognition, and shared social problems. Any explanation that uses only one of the four is incomplete.

Your mind over-attributes agency on purpose, because the asymmetry of the errors made it worth it.

A story is how a preliterate society stores anything it cannot afford to lose. Which is why the stories carry law, history and geography as well as gods.

And "all religions say the same thing" is false. They differ on creation, on afterlife, on whether the gods are good, and on how it ends. What they overlap on is how to treat each other, which is a smaller claim and a more interesting one.

Next: 11.2 — the Greeks, from a universe made by castration to a family of gods who behave worse than the people worshipping them.