Where does Greek Mythology come from?
A big question. You might as well ask where creativity comes from.
And, fool that I am, I’m going to try to address both questions here.
First, let’s talk about Greek Mythology. Here is a poetic answer to the Greek-myths-origin question quoted by Thomas Bulfinch in his insanely popular and influential Bulfinch’s Mythology, first published in 1855:
In that fair clime the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose,
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched
Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
This is a selection from a very beautiful and romantic poem by 19th century English poet William Wordsworth that assumes a lot of things about Greece and the ancient Greeks:
“fair clime” - Greece has beautiful summer weather.
“stretched on soft grass…indolent repose” - shepherds spent most of their time lolling on soft grass
“with music lulled” - shepherds, obviously bored from lolling on soft grass, used to sing or play musical instruments to pass the time.
“chanced to hear a distant strain” - shepherds hallucinated beautiful music in the distance.
“his fancy fetched/even from…the Sun” - shepherds immediately decided the sound had come from the sun.
“blazing chariot” - shepherds thought the sun was a chariot on fire.
“A beardless youth who touched a golden lute” - According to these shepherds, a god known as Apollo (said beardless youth) was not only responsible for driving the chariot of the sun, he also played a kind of guitar while he was doing it.
Of course, since this is poetry, not scholarship, we don’t perfectly know how much Wordsworth believed his own writing. But Bulfinch was quoting it as if it reflected a profound truth.
I wouldn’t say, however, that any of this is strictly what the ancient Greeks lived and believed.
Take being a shepherd. That was and is a dirty, difficult job. You didn’t spend a lot of time lying down, and in any case the grass was never soft in summer. The grass may have been somewhat soft in winter, because there would be rain and new grass (and mud, yuck), but by summertime the grass had dried out and was no fun to sit in.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
But here’s the real point: Wordsworth was implying—and Bulfinch believed him—that Greek Mythology came from the imagination of solitary shepherds stretched out on grassy hillsides.
In Chapter XXXV of his Mythology, Bulfinch deals with the origins of mythology and gives four possible theories of how it started in Greece. One of the theories was that the Greeks saw things in nature that they worshipped for some reason and dreamt up the gods and goddesses to explain them:
…[T]he elements of air, fire, and water were originally the objects of religious adoration, and the principal deities were personifications of the powers of nature. The transition was easy from a personification of the elements to the notion of supernatural beings presiding over and governing the different objects of nature. The Greeks, whose imagination was lively, peopled all nature with invisible beings, and supposed that every object, from the sun and sea to the smallest fountain and rivulet, was under the care of some particular divinity.
“The Greeks, whose imagination was lively” is the only thing that Bulfinch felt he needed to say about how the stories and characters of the myths came into being.
Apparently, it is a natural thing to assume first that things in nature are like people and then to develop those personalities.
So, for example, it is the easiest thing in the world to decide that the sun is a young man who plays music.
But this picture of Apollo is not even close to how the first Greeks originally envisioned him. The image of Apollo as the god of the sun and master of music emerged after a process of creativity that took hundreds of years.
The idea of gods and goddesses with personalities is not a particularly Greek invention, nor did the ancient Greeks themselves envision their divinities as having personalities in the earliest forms that we know them.
Instead, the idea of deities that act like humans, speaking, getting angry, having offspring, fighting amongst each other, and everything else, is an invention (in this part of the world, at least) mainly of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, whose pantheons are centuries older than the Olympian Greek. The ancient Greeks took great inspiration from these neighboring cultures to create the amazing personalities of Zeus, Hera, and the rest.
Shepherds sitting by themselves had a lot of time to think. But you can’t invent something without some previous content to think about.
That’s the big takeaway about creativity I’ve been learning and re-learning in the past year, with the help of a book called The Runaway Species, which is about the neuroscience of creativity.
Chapter 2 is titled “The Brain Alters What It Already Knows.” It explains the fact that what we create is never created out of nothing. It is always based on something we knew before we began to create.
Authors Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman give the example of Steve Jobs’ “invention” of the smartphone, which was hailed at the time as some kind of magical novelty—a “Jesus phone,” according to bloggers—that had sprung fully-formed from the genius brain of Mr. Jobs.
But in fact, they go on to document how Jobs came onto the scene of smartphone invention relatively late and explain that “innovations don’t come from nowhere. They are the latest branches on the family tree of invention.”
That’s a good metaphor: creativity as coming from a family of ideas, a genetic pool of notions that grow and develop over time.
Apollo, though he became the paragon of what many have considered to be the hallmark of Greek intellectual identity, started out as a god from the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, near what is now Lebanon. He was a warrior and bringer of plague, and his name was alternately Reshef or Mikal. There is an echo of the name Mikal in one of Apollo’s Greek nicknames, “Amyklaios.”
How Reshef, Mikal, and Apollo Amyklaios became the Apollo referred to in the Wordsworth poem is a story that would fill many books. I am trying to write one book that simply introduces the idea of diversity and collaboration in Greek Mythology. But I hope it is enough to say here that the “beardless youth” who drives a “blazing chariot” while playing a lute is the result of many, many branchings on the family tree of invention.
If you like what you read, consider subscribing to this newsletter. As subscriptions grow and my book takes shape, you will be one of the original insiders eligible to receive the limited-edition, signed hardback copy I plan to create once the text is set.
And as always, comments and questions welcome.
Do you have any resources on the origins of Greek gods? This info on Apollo is most welcome, I'm writing a story involving various world myths (depending on where the protagonist is travelling) and my great interest is to delve into the deities who begat the greek deities.