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Contents at a Glance
Part 4: One Big Family Feud: Norse and Northern European
Part 5: The Cradle(s) of Civilization: African and Near-Eastern
Part 6: Kashmir to Kyoto, and a Lot in Between: South- and East Asian Mythology
CHAPTER 21: Land of a Thousand Gods: India
CHAPTER 22: Get out the Fine China: Early Chinese Myth and the Three Teachings
CHAPTER 23: Japan: Myths from the Land of the Rising Sun
Part 7: “New World”? Says Who? Mythology of the Americas
CHAPTER 24: Central and South American Mythology: Civilizations, Cities, and Ball Games
CHAPTER 25: Sea to Sea, and Lots of Animals in Between: Indigenous Myths of North America
Part 8: The Part of Tens
CHAPTER 26: Ten Mythological Monsters
CHAPTER 27: Ten (Plus One) Mythological Places
CHAPTER 12: Snow, Ice, and Not Very Nice: Norse Deities
The People and Their Poems: Norse Origins and Oral Tradition
A Viking life for me
A song to pass the time on a long, cold night
Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dwarves: Creation of the World
Molding and divvying up the world
Living in one big tree house
The Good, the Bad, and the Mortal: Norse Deities
Norse gods: A rough and tough bunch
Norse goddesses: Tough, sexy, and equal
Here be dragons (and giants and dwarves): Some other magical beings
Ragnarök: The End of the World
The death of Balder
The final battle .
Binge-worthy Programming: The Saga of the Volsungs
Volsung family history
The great Dane Sigurd (the guy, not the dog)
Love’s losers and the psychic hotline
The last of the Volsungs
and the Heorot drive-thru
Beowulf meets party-crasher Grendel
If (Grendel’s) Mamma ain’t Happy,
The Wolf-Queen: Mebd (Maeve)
The Great Cattle Robbery: An Irish Epic
The great Irish hero: Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn MacCool)
The Snake Charmer: Saint Patrick
Creating humans from bamboo . . . or maybe Omumborombonga?
The Trickster Spirits: Huveane and Uhlakayana
Trickster number 1: Huveane
Trickster number 2: Uhlakayana
The house that Uhlakayana (or maybe Huveane) built
Mesopotamian Gods: Okay, We Fear You . . . You Happy?
Enûma Elish: The Babylonian Creation Story
Just one big happy family
A corporate reorg and some new leadership
Gilgamesh: Epically Sumerian
Gilgamesh the king: Big man in Uruk
Searching for immortality
Hebrew Mythology: A is for Apple, B is for Babel
In the beginning
Oh look, a flood myth
The Tower of Babel and different languages
18: Three Cheers for Egypt: Ra, Ra, Ra!
Write Me a Really Big River
Order from chaos: One version of how the world began
creator gods and their side of the story
Trouble in paradise: Horus and Seth
The “framework story”: The story that sets up all the others
Scheherazade keeps ’em coming back: Talking to stay alive
The Stories within the Stories within the Story
From Baghdad to Batavia, on, in, and under the sea: Sinbad the Sailor
The great Persian genie-off: Aladdin, his lamp, and the genie 273 Open, sesame! Ali-Baba, some thieves, and the clever Morgiana 275
PART 6: KASHMIR TO KYOTO, AND A LOT IN
CHAPTER 21: Land of a Thousand Gods: India
The Vedic Invaders
Creation of the world, animals, and people
Warlike gods for a warlike people
Memorized mythology: The Vedas
Hinduism: Room for Many Gods
Sources of Hindu myths
The creation of the world and Brahma, the creator
The other big gods: Some okay guys
The goddesses: A mixed bag
Life after life: What you sow is what you reap
Two Coexisting Religions: Buddhism and Jainism
Buddhism and its start in India
Jainism: Give it up!
The interrupted creation of people
Multifaceted
The world under the fifth sun
for rain, corn, and
What a coincidence: Mythology, Moctezuma, and the conquistadors
Scylla and Charybdis
Introduction
Mythology For Dummies, 2nd edition, is about the stories people tell that really matter. The telling of myths may be one of the most important things human beings do. Everyone tells myths. Every culture of every time produces myths. Put together all these myths, and you come up with the subject of mythology, a vast body of stories about heroes, gods, spirits, monsters, and forces of nature.
To understand mythology is to understand human beings. That’s why myths are worth thinking about. Just like human beings, myths can be stirring, inspirational, funny, and beautiful. On the other hand, just like human beings, myths can be complicated, cruel, violent, obscene, or just (seemingly) absurd.
About This Book
This book is meant to be a quick reference for anyone who wants to discover the basics of world mythology. We’ve organized it into chapters that deal with specific topics; if you have a particular interest, you can just read the pertinent chapters and not bother with the rest of the book. Or you can read the whole thing but in any order you like. Though we devote a big chunk of the book to classical mythology (Greek and Roman myths), we also try to cover as much of the world as possible.
One important thing to remember: We take myths very seriously; Mythology is religion. Some of the myths in this book are stories from cultures that don’t exist or religions no one practices anymore. Others are myths from cultures and religions that are alive and important to millions of people the world over today.
Don’t get us wrong; we’re not saying that myths aren’t funny. Many myths are really funny, and they’re supposed to be. Neither are we saying that our entire discussion of myths is serious, because it isn’t. We want this book to be engaging and entertaining, so we have fun talking about mythology with the hope that you have fun reading about mythology. But when we say that something is a myth, we’re not saying that it’s false or wrong.
Many other books on mythology often include complicated analysis of myths and try to convince you what different myths may mean about a civilization or culture. But in this book, we give you a fun overview of exciting tales from around the world. Don’t worry; we explain any theoretical or technical concepts as we go along, but we mainly want to tell stories!
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you read this book:
» We list dates in terms of BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era). Most scholars refer to dates in this way rather than BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, or “In the Year of Our Lord”) because the new abbreviations are more considerate in an age when scholars of different religious faiths (or no religious faith) work together.
But don’t let that confuse you. The year 19 BCE is the same as 19 BC, and not only did we write this book in the 21st century AD, but we also wrote it in the 21st century CE.
» We generally use the word deities to refer to gods and goddesses together. We may occasionally use “gods” to mean “gods and goddesses.”
» We’ve written this book in English, but most myths weren’t told originally in English. We’ve often had to choose among different but equally okay ways of rendering human or divine names into English. Was the hero of the Trojan War called Achilles or Akhilleus? Was the founder of Taoism named Lao Tse or Lao Tzu? We’ve tried to make good decisions, but don’t be surprised if you see some of the names spelled very differently in other books.
Foolish Assumptions
Dear reader, we make a few assumptions about you:
» You may have encountered some myths (Americans often learn about Greek mythology in school), but you’d like to know more about those myths and mythology in general.
» You may know a lot of myths from a particular culture — perhaps you are a fan of Japanese Manga — but would like to widen your knowledge of mythology to include other cultures.
» You’re reading this book because you don’t really know what mythology is, or what myths are, and you’d like to know.
Icons Used in This Book
Along the way, we’ve marked some information with these three icons.
Remember icons point out the information that’s especially important to know. We also use this icon to indicate places where we tie bits of mythological theory with myths, pointing out what kind of myth you’re looking at.
The Tip icon highlights suggestions or explanations that may help you better understand a complicated story or topic.
This icon identifies historical or scholarly information — things the professionals who study this stuff care about. This info isn’t essential to the topic at hand, so the book makes sense even if you skip over all these icons. But it may be more fun if you don’t.
Beyond the Book
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free accessanywhere Cheat Sheet that includes tips to help you keep mythology at your fingertips. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and type “Mythology For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
You can start reading this book at any point in any chapter! If you want more than we can offer in this For Dummies book, we’ve tried to reference the original sources for mythology, or the cultures and histories behind them, as we go along.
If you are a fan of the Percy Jackson novels, you could check out Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Fans of Japanese Manga will enjoy Chapter 23. Fans of Marvel’s Thor and Loki will enjoy Chapters 12 and 13. If your family traces its roots to Africa, Chapter 16, 18, and 19 might be interesting. If you are wondering why so many kids today are named “Finn” or “Maeve,” check out Chapter 15. Fans of Disney’s Aladdin will want to read Chapter 20.
1 Mythology Basics and Why the Stories Endure
IN THIS PART . . .
Define myth and make connections between myth, religion, and history.
See how myths survive, even in the face of science and even when they’re based on a religion that no one practices anymore.
IN THIS CHAPTER
» Seeing what makes a myth and how myths are shared
» Examining common mythical themes and ideas about them
» Introducing common mythical characters
» Looking at famous American myths
Chapter 1
The Truth About Myths
Mythology is a way of understanding the world, and it’s just as important and as “true” as the scientific or historical ways. In fact, science, history, and other logical ways of thinking simply fail to describe some very important things — things that folks care about. But myths can do the job.
We take myths very seriously. Now, we’re not saying that myths aren’t funny; many myths are really funny, and they’re supposed to be. Neither are we saying that our entire discussion of myths is serious, because it isn’t. But when we say something is a myth, we’re not saying that it’s false or wrong. In other words, we don’t think that science and history belong on one “correct” side and mythology belongs on another “silly” side. (We’re big fans of science and history, by the way!)
That’s what we think: that myths are important and worth taking seriously. And anything worth taking seriously should be fun to think about as well.
In this chapter, we show you how to spot a myth, what makes a story a myth, and the overlap among myths, legends, and folktales. We also explain how myths from long ago continue to survive today, the different kinds of myths, and what scholars and students of myth think these stories mean.
We offer explanation wherever we can, but if you like quick, unambiguous answers, mythology is probably going to make you cranky. Myths exist, you see, to answer those human questions that don’t have quick, unambiguous answers.
How to Spot a Myth a Mile Away
A myth is a story. The Greek word mythos means “story,” and sometimes it means “thing you say that gets folks to act in a certain way.” That’s the basic concept. But, of course, not just any old story can be a myth. Amy (one of the authors of this book) was served a whole pig’s head for dinner in Thailand; this story is a good one and worth telling, but it isn’t a myth. Chris (the other author of this book) once got shot at by some people in the woods — another good story, but not up to the standards of mythology.
Experts love to argue about difficult, hard-to-define subjects, and mythology has been a popular topic for argument for the last two centuries. Scholars argue about what’s a “true” myth as opposed to some other kind. Some mythology snobs insist, however, that no one confuse myths with other similar types of stories, such as legends, sagas, and folktales. (We define all four in the following sections.) But there is not a bright, obvious line between myth, folktale, legend, and factual historical accounts. (See “Different Types of Myths: Historical and Fictional American Legends.”)
Most stories known as myths have elements of legend or folktale in them and vice versa. These terms are useful in helping decide what’s a myth and what isn’t, but you shouldn’t get too hung up on them.
Specifics of mythological proportions
You may know a myth when you see it, but you still need some kind of definition before you can get down to the business of fully appreciating myths. Myths can be stories about gods, goddesses, and supernatural events and supernatural beings, and humans’ relationships with them; they can also be tales from “history” (whether factual or fictional). What’s common to all myths is that they explain truths or values and stories that help groups of people (such as a specific nationalities) identify themselves, understand their world, and define their values. Myths help validate the social order, such as hereditary kingships or social class structures. They also can provide a “history” of a kingdom that makes the existence and growth of a kingdom or nation seem inevitable.
Because myths are often about humans and the gods, they’re also often about religion. Every myth in this book was or still is part of a religion people practiced seriously.
The word myth has come to mean “untrue” in some contexts; people say something is “just a myth” if no factual basis exists for it. But myths do have their own truths. They provide people with a view of the world and a set of values that can
