I spent Black Friday dutifully pilgrimizing a new game store in town, Saturday playing Shadowdark with a new playgroup, and Sunday trying to decide whether or not I have a cold or I’m just reacting to dust particles (still up in the air on that). We got a giant load of wood chips for the yarden last week, which has surprisingly fine sawdust in it, and we’re cleaning out the attic for the first time in roughly fifteen years.
In between sneezes yesterday I also re-watched the first season of The Legend of Vox Machina. It was beautifully animated and amusingly ribald, though it had little on Chaucer in the latter regard. Of the seven main characters, two had personal development arcs: Percival’s “forgive your enemies” and Pike’s contradictory “be true to yourself” and “be loyal to your tribe.”
Stories used to be for more than entertainment and moralizing. They used to contain practical information as well, like “if you see a tsunami, run the other way.” Those kinds of stories are the subject of today’s interview,
I ran across Dr. Burbery’s name in some Internet article (not this one, but one like it). He lives and teaches just a few hours away in West Virginia, and I leveraged the “edu” on my university e-mail to get his attention. Academics are generally open to journalists, especially academics who engage with pop culture the way he does, but they’re often more open to colleagues, even distant ones.
Anyway, Dr. Burbery was kind enough to answer a few questions, and here they are. All the links are mine, by the way.
Hayes: Opening question: I just happened to watch this episode of NOVA, called “Killer Volcanoes,” originally broadcast in 2017. It does the whole detective thing, including an ancient written source called the Babad Lombok, written on palm leaves, to track down a massive eruption of an Indonesian volcano. It sounds like a prime by-the-book example of what you're talking about.
I want to contrast that with Hunting Atlantis, starring a geologist who didn't finish her PhD and a British writer, which seems to me (an outsider) somewhat well-intentioned but sloppy, and then to Graham Hancock's latest foray into the same subject, which is even more guilty of cherry-picking real archaeological data to fit his preconceived notions, and which I wrote about a year ago.
That's my opinion; your mileage may vary.
What I really want to know: in this provocatively named field of geomythology, what counts as evidence? Is there an ethic of trying to falsify hypotheses? I'm aware that sciences grow more conservative as they mature, just before they are overturned, as part of Kuhn's cycle.
I'm very sensitive to complaints about academic snobbery, but also I understand that methods are important. I think it often comes down to transparent communication about methods, what we're beginning to call 'open science.'
Burbery: First, I should note that geomythology isn’t a science. It’s a discipline that scientists can learn from, and that could help give direction to their work. I have an example of a geologist who consulted Hawaiian myths as he studied certain volcanoes. He ended up challenging the received view on the basis of these legends.
But geomythology doesn’t make predictions like real science does. With most geomyths, there’s a chicken-egg question.
Take one of geomyth’s icons, the Cyclopes. I think there’s good evidence that it was inspired by the discovery of elephant skulls by pre-literate peoples in what is now Greece and Italy, where in fact many such bones are discovered to this day. However, it’s possible that it went the other way, that someone invented the Cyclopes story whole-cloth, and then found bones that “confirmed” it.
I don’t think that’s a very likely scenario, since it’s hard to find a completely fabricated legend. Usually it’s based on something, and in this case, finding the bones of a giant, human-seeming creature, with a large cavity in the middle of its face, would seem a probable inspiration for the story.
But again, we can’t say that for sure. So, geomyth’s not quite “there” as a science.
Second, as for the ethic of falsifying hypotheses, I’m with you 100% and I believe other practitioners in the field, like Adrienne Mayor and Patrick Nunn, are as well. Personally, I’m all about trying to falsify hypotheses, considering potential counter-arguments, and so on. I’m a Popperian from first to last. In fact, I sometimes compare my research methods to Houdini, who as you know, would (supposedly) take on all sorts of hindrances, such as being handcuffed, tied up, gagged, stuffed in a milk can, and thrown into a river, only to emerge intact.
I too try to engage the strongest possible arguments against my geomythical claims. In fact, I’ve been commended by reviewers for giving full weight to counter-arguments and engaging steel rather than straw men.
I hope that that ethic is practiced by others in the discipline, but unfortunately, the subject does attract a number of fringe thinkers. I’ve had to turn down interview requests repeatedly from a publication that presents itself as scientific but in fact engages things like UFO, the practice of interpreting lightning strikes, and so on.
Not to say this stuff isn’t fun, of course. I get the interest. But geomythology’s looking for strong, probable, if not airtight claims about how traumatic events (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc.) can inspire stories, and how those stories can be mined for real data about the original event.
As for specifics, the Atlantis story is so beguiling, and everyone seems to love it. I can’t think of a culture that doesn’t have some version of it somewhere. But it’s lacking the hallmark of geomythology, which is, there’s some kind of eyewitness quality to it, someone on the ground who either saw the actual event or its results not long after the event.
I touch on Doggerland in my book. Perhaps you know it—it was/is a big chunk of land in northern Europe, now submerged following the Storrega Slides about 8K years ago.
Could this be the inspiration for Atlantis? I doubt it, though there are websites making the claim.
Hayes: Like this one, though to be fair the author seems pretty skeptical.
Burbery: Anyhow, that’s the hallmark of good geomythology: eyewitness evidence. By contrast, stories like, say, Paul Bunyan’s “creation” of Minnesota’s lakes are fanciful, after the fact, “just so” stories. As far as we know, such lakes and other landforms were created millions of years ago, and we have no evidence that there was a person around to see it happen and come up with a myth to “explain” it.
So, Paul Bunyan’s not a real geomyth. Atlantis may fall into the same category.
Hayes: I'm a fan of Emily Zarka's Monstrum on PBS Digital, where she occasionally includes a modern creation like the Mothman, or Slenderman, or Siren-Head.
Burbery: As a resident of West Virginia, I’m a Mothman fan. I hadn’t heard of Monstrum but dipped into the Mothman segment, and enjoyed it.
Hayes: As a lifelong lover of comics I feel validated when academics call them "modern mythology." How would you respond to that, as someone who studies historical traditions? Is pop culture folklore? Can we even tell? The Grimms professionalized the fairy tales they collected. Does that make them something else? Or should we think less about static categories and more about dynamical systems with feedback loops?
Within fandom, people love to argue the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, horror. I generally have very little time for those endless lumpings and splittings.
Burbery: About comics as modern myth, sure, I buy that. For one thing, many comics, such as the Avengers, recycle the traditional myths of Thor, Loki, and others. Also, at times, they help to create modern myths: Wikipedia notes that the Mothman’s name may be based on the Killer Moth, one of Batman’s enemies. But comics are also mythic in the sense of being pre-“literate,” if not in fact, then in sensibility or resonance. They’re the kind of stories you can tell and re-tell pretty easily, without reference to a text. In an essay on mythology, C.S. Lewis made this point, that myth ultimately isn’t nearly as tied to words as literature is. And a great myth can morph from one shape or genre to another pretty easily—including, Lewis noted, into non-verbal ones like pantomime.
Regarding the Brothers Grimm, by extending some of the tales, omitting violence and sex from some, adding dialogue and Christian elements, and so on, I’d say, yes, they did make the stories into something else, in a way. Closer to literature, maybe? As you probably know, it can be jarring to read myths that aren’t far removed from their original oral forms. They can seem, frankly, crude, jumbled, and vulgar if we approach them with literary expectations. Then again, as you suggest, these boundaries may be more porous than might appear at first glance.
Hayes: Do you have a personal taxonomy of folklore genres? How does it compare with something like the old Motif Index of Folk Literature?
Burbery: I have one I’ve labelled a “geotable,” with stories from around the globe that may have geomythical aspects. These are organized into sub-groups such as giant tales, flood stories, dragon legends, and so on, as well as categories I called universal and regional geomyths. Floods and dragons are an example of the first, while the griffin legend, gold-mining ants, and “killer” lakes are regional fables, all linked with specific areas of the world, where geological events/discoveries may have inspired the stories. That said, my geotable’s nowhere near the size or depth of Stith Thompson’s.
Hayes: Is there anything more than human tribalism driving all this argument? Sometimes I think it's the fact that we have three-pound brains, and we have to simplify any real phenomena in order to fit them in.
Burbery: The question about tribalism is really interesting, but I want to be sure I’m fully grasping it. I personally don’t see mere tribalism in play in myth/geomyth, since there seems to be considerable overlap between and among the stories. For instance, nearly all cultures, excepting perhaps Egypt, have flood myths, or at least myths about floods that are destructive rather than beneficial, which suggests that they all experienced dangerous floods of some sort/degree or another. So, are what seem like local myths actually phenomena of deeper structures? I’m certainly not the first to offer that idea.
Lévi-Strauss, among others, did so.
As for the limits of human perception, I’m sure there’s something to what you’re saying—per Kant, perhaps our brains can only process a simplified version of a thing, rather than the thing-in-itself. At the same time, though, I’d like to give more credit to, well, I’ll call them pre-literate societies, but reluctantly, heeding Lynne Kelly’s excellent caveat.
Both she and Patrick Nunn rightly laud these seemingly primitive cultures for their very impressive feats of memory.
Indeed, Nunn critiques today’s prevailing attitude (towards orality) as the “tyranny of literacy,” and Kelly contends that we should honor the ancients, not for what they didn’t do (that is, write) but rather, for what they did, which is, invent and leverage mnemonic tools from landscapes, skyscapes, rock art, and lukasas (memory boards).
I would add that Daniel Ogden, a scholar who researches what he calls “Dragonscapes,” looks at parts of the landscape that appear to register battles between the gods and dragons. Serpentine riverbeds, for instance, such as that of the Orontes River, suggested to the ancients that the draconic Typhon fled underground after being worsted by Zeus. In another version, a dragon dripped blood on the mountains during one of these cosmic clashes, staining them blood-red. And so on. I don’t know if Ogden would agree with this or not, but I wonder if there was a significant memory element here for ancient story-tellers, who could have recalled various tales about the dragons when they viewed certain aspects of the landscape.
Hayes: I think one of the first iterations of the idea of fossils driving myth was the dinosaur-dragon connection, which I think started well before Adrienne Mayor’s griffin book, or Dracorex (which was new to me), or the Creation Museum’s exhibits about dinosaurs on the ark. I remember suggestions of the possibility in any number of dino books I read as a kid in the 1970s. I always thought old Dimetrodon was pretty dragonlike.
Burbery: Back to Nunn: his Aeon piece touches on what’s become an icon in geomythology, that of the Klamath legends about the eruption of Mt. Mazama, an event that created Crater Lake. While there does indeed seem to be a collective memory of that event, it’s also been pointed out, by Vine Deloria, Gesa Mackenthum, and other scholars that that eruption appears to have been so cataclysmic, no one within 50 miles of the mountain would have survived. The closest thing we have to eyewitness evidence is the 1938 discovery of about 100 sagebrush sandals, covered by the ash layer, about 55 miles north of Mazama, at Fort Rock Cave. That is, people may have seen it, but would they have survived to tell the story? Or did they move out of harm’s way in time, but too far away to see the event? It’s hard to say for sure, for an event this far back (about 7,700 years). Don’t get me wrong: with Nunn and the others, I believe the Klamath tales preserve some kind of memory of the eruption, but it’s just hard to know to what extent it was an eyewitness memory.
In addition to memory feats, the ancients were capable of pretty accurate observations. We might think of them as, say, supersizing their heroes, and some of that happened. On the other hand, Adrienne Mayor notes that when the alleged bones of the hero Ajax (who fought in the Trojan War) was uncovered, the eyewitness remarked that the kneecaps were about the size of the type of discus thrown in the boys’ pentathlon, that is, about 16-23 cm in diameter. Likely, these bones were actually from a mastodon or rhino. The fact that the informant chose a known object for comparison, and did not succumb to the temptation to inflate the numbers, indicates that, contrary to modern-day prejudices, the ancients could be relatively precise with their measurements.
This was a really fun conversation, despite the clunkiness of e-mail. Definitely going to have to come back sometime for a round two. In the meantime, here’s a link to the book Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events, which includes a free intro chapter on “What is Geomythology?”
Interesting.
The proximity of the petroglyphs to the fossilized footprints reveals “active engagement with the fossil material,” the team wrote, “suggesting that these traces not only caught the attention of the native community but were meaningful and became integrated into their knowledge repertoire.”
https://qz.com/ancient-humans-drawings-dinosaur-footprints-brazil-1851370945?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us