When They Severed Earth From Sky

I also read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber last summer. This is another book in the gathering storm against rational purism. It also suggests an intriguing possibility, that when a society becomes literate that it loses certain capacities for understanding intuitive knowledge of the kind carried in myth.

The authors propose that myths function like delivery systems for messages, with an interesting story acting as an envelope for the myth, keeping ordinary people interested enough to pass the myth down generations, the useful information contained within the envelope. When at some future time, trouble erupts (literally, such as a volcano), the payload is delivered and people can be warned about a future event or danger. What literate people seem to unlearn when they make the transition from a pre-literate culture, is that the myth has a payload. They concentrate on the story, gods and their daughters fighting, etc. and miss the message encoded in the myth. The story is merely a "soap opera" designed to ensure the story with its payload intact is delivered down the halls of time, ready to deploy when the right circumstances arise.

This book relates directly to another book with similar themes: The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which discusses the resistance by ancient natural philosophers to include the fossilized remains of ancient creatures in their Linnean systems for categorizing biology. Yet, the myth makers and the followers of phenomenology interpreted these remains more accurately than nineteenth century science. This says much about creativity and science, about as Huxley once said, that that science advances by the investigation of anomalies, or in Mayor's terms, an interest in phenomenology, a curiosity about the strange and paradoxical, which science could well do with a dose of today. The intuitive and phenomenological may be vital to creativity in science and mathematics, if one looks honestly at the history of those fields.

If science had known about emergence then, how different the Greek philosophers systems for classifying creatures might have been. The possible bird like origin of the dinosaurs might have been recognize two thousand years ago.