[Aztlan] Re: mythology as textbook, astronomy

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Martha Noyes and others:

Yes, mythologies *are* textbooks.
And there are enormous amounts of information in mythologies,
much of it about seasons at least and sometimes about planets,
much of it practical lessons about plants and animals,
much of it moral lessons, etc. etc.

But there are lots of practical difficulties:

(0)   Much has been destroyed in cultural contacts and clashes,
but there is also more preserved than is often realized.
These polar opposites can of course lead to wasted breath,
more about the frustrations everyone may feel than 
effective at making progress in the fields of archaeoastronomy
and ethnoastronomy and mythology.

(1)   It is useful to learn from a large number of related mythologies,
from the same culture areas which shared these stories
(whether geographic or linguistic).   Because one can read several
versions in parallel, it may be possible to realize how one version
has been transformed for social or literary reasons, or to find a clue
in one version which is omitted in another version.   The process
of transmission through ethnographers both preserves information
sometimes later lost, but introduces its own distortions and inaccuracies,
not through anyone's ill will, that's just the nature of information
especially when conversing across cultural divides.   Information is
often still available from elders, but shared only within an ethnic
group.   Part of the reason for this is the history of past abuse and
misrepresentation.   We are I think in process of overcoming parts
of this past history, but the process is slow and difficult,
even with the best of intentions, and in the meantime much can be
lost which would contribute to our appreciation and respect for
the intellectual history of all peoples.
There is a great growth in the study of mythologies world-wide,
which is getting past the Stith Thompsen catalog of "motifs"
to much more fundamental work.   However, most of that is not
yet widespread in public media.   There are some correlations of
where myths are shared and where mitochondrial DNA is shared,
for example.   Some attempts beginning to see whether relatedness
of mythologies correlates with linguistic relatedness.   And no doubt
much more that I am not aware of.

(2)   The field of "astronomical alignments" is particularly subject
to wishful thinking, people often claim they have "found" significant
alignments without knowing how to check for pure chance.
There is a lot of "new-age" influence here, but also some who 
think they are being careful scientists are not aware of the problem
of chance.   There are also some critics who demand kinds of statistical
evidence which are simply not relevant, because they misunderstand
or misrepresent the phrasing of hypothesis they think they are testing.
Statistics is a notoriously difficult subject, because the measure of
"significance" is so sensitive to exactly how one formulates the
question.   One can very easily bias the results, and proponents of
particular hypotheses (fixations) often do this without realizing it.
Yet there *were* alignments used sometimes in some places by
ancient and still modern peoples.   How to recognize these?
Statistical measures have the inconvenient property that they
depend on two unrelated factors, (a) the skewing of the data,
the strength of patterning, and (b) the size of the data sample,
the number of items across which to search for patterning.
If we are necessarily dealing with small numbers, then we have
only the strength of patterning to measure.   

(3)   With small numbers, a much greater role comes to be played
by whether *independent* lines of evidence and reasoning
lead to the same conclusion.   Here also, many people, including highly
trained scientists, make the mistake of arriving at a hypothesis,
following out a number of consequences *if* that hypothesis is true,
making a *choice* to assume certain interpretations are factual
(when in fact they are only one of several possible *interpretations*
of some set of facts)
and then claiming that they have "independent confirmation"
of their hypothesis.   Actually, what is described above is 
a chain of reasoning which a person is led to in order
to attempt to maintain a hypothesis they arrived at early.
It is well known that we psychologically select information to 
confirm what we already believe.   The training of a *really* good
scientist involves a training to regularly *disbelieve* what one
wants to believe.   Few people manage that most of the time.
I think no one manages it all of the time.   And if anyone did,
they might be paralized.   So we need to recognize our fallibilities,
and be skeptical of our own ideas *part* of the time,
but know how to do that effectively and efficiently.
Recognizing truly independent lines of
reasoning and truly independent evidence is *very* difficult.

(4)   Translations of mythologies are a part of the problem.
If one realizes that they may have abstract meanings, may be moral
lessons, one may translate them in quite different ways.
One can translate with highly concrete terms or with abstract terms.
These different translations have gigantic implications for
how they will be perceived by members of a different culture,
whether they will stereotype a people as "simple hunter-gatherers"
or "simple pastoralists" etc. or whether they will recognize that in
most every society there has been a wide range of knowledge and
specializations, that there were almost always those who had much
greater knowledge than others (including knowledge of seasons
and of astronomy), who were much better narrators
or performers than others, etc.

(5)   In response to Martha Noyes's specific question about discussions
on Aztlan, on the one hand there are enormous amounts of information 
in the literature about mythology, ethnoastronomy, etc.
On the other hand, because of the complexity of the reasoning and facts
needed, in order to say anything significant which is likely to be valid,
as opposed to wishful thinking, it is very difficult to do that
on a discussion list like Aztlan, except in special cases or when
there are news items.

So I encourage all to keep up the interest, read as many mythologies
as you can, become deeply familiar with any culture whose mythology
you are trying to interpret, recognize the complexity of guessing
what earlier forms of myths may have been, when we only have
later ones preserved for us (this depends on explicit theories of
how myths can change through time and changed social circumstances)
and keep up with the newest work on mythologies around the world.
Learn a lot about the patterns of movements of planets,
how seasons are observed in the sky in various cultures, and so on.

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics



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