Category Archives: Myths

Conspiracies II

July 12, 2014 6:24 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Filibustering is defined today as long-winded speeches by politicians mainly done to annoy opponents from rival political parties.  Back in the 19th century it was much different.

Filibusters were adventurers, men right of a comic book legend that went out and founded empires and made their own destinies.  Today we will review two of them from American history.

Aaron Burr

In 1805 former vice president Aaron Burr was a broken man.  He had dueled and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the most popular men in America.  He was shunned by society, he was out of office, and he was nearly bankrupt.

But 19th century America was a land of opportunity and new beginnings and Burr sought his new beginning out west.  Back then of course out west meant Ohio and the Louisiana purchase.

Burr met with two men.  One was General James Wilkinson, a crooked army officer in charge of the army post in New Orleans, the other man was Harman Blennerhasset, an exiled Irish lord that set up an estate on an island on the Ohio river.

The three men decided that they would invade Mexico, which was then much larger and included Texas, California, and the southwest.  Using  a small army they would seize the frontier and set up their own country.  They began gathering men and weapons on Blennerhasset’s island and had nice little army ready by 1806.

However, fate stepped in.  Wilkinson as well as being crooked, was a spy for hire and he decided to cash in by telling the Spanish about the plot and to tell his own government as well and make himself look good in the process.

So the governor of Ohio called out the state militia and captured the island.  Burr was put on trial for treason.  Using every political favor he was owed and his own brilliant legal mind (he was after all one of the best lawyers in North America at the time) he was able to get an acquittal.

In his later life as he lay dying in Staten Island he heard about the Texas revolution taking place in 1836 and said “What was treason in my heart 30 years ago is now patriotism”.

William Walker

One of the most amazing and capable Americans ever, was born in Tennessee in 1824.  William Walker was a gifted student.  He excelled in all his studies and graduated from the University of Nashville (a precursor of Vanderbilt University) at age 14.  He then went on to study medicine and received a medical degree in Philadelphia.  Later on he traveled to New Orleans and studied law.  He soon got bored with these pursuits and in 1849 he joined the gold rush in California.

But soon even this adventure was not enough for him and he was soon working as a reporter in San Francisco,  One night sitting in a bar and talking to friends he came up with the idea of invading the west coast of Mexico.

With 45 men he invaded Baja California and captured the capital and declared the free republic of Sonora.  The Mexican government took notice and sent a force to kick him out.  Back in the US he was charged with inciting a war but such was his charm that a jury took only 8 minutes to acquit him.

He wasn’t done yet.  He had a bigger bolder plan.  Nicaragua was in the middle of a civil war and needed mercenaries.  Walker assembled a force of 300 men and landed in Nicaragua.  Once there he defeated the federal army and set up a local as president.  Walker ruled in all but name.

He angered the locals by re-establishing slavery and trying to impose English as the official language.  Walker’s idea was to expand his newly won empire around the Gulf and establish what was known in the South as the “Golden Circle”.  A ring of slave owning states and countries around the Gulf Of Mexico that included the Old South, Mexico, Cuba, and northern South America.

The local Nicaraguan people resented being made unwilling pawns in Walker’s grandiose plans.  This resentment soon boiled over and a rebellion to oust Walker soon began to take shape and got support from other Central American nations.

Walker got in contact with Cornelius Vanderbilt to set up a route to cross passengers from ships in the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean.  This would make millions for Vanderbilt.  But Walker got greedy and tried to offer the same deal to Vanderbilt’s rivals.

Angered by this, Vanderbilt got the US government to declare Walker a pirate and he also funded the Nicaraguan rebels to kick Walker out.  Soon an army of Central American troops banded together and kicked Walker out.  In fact the Anniversary of this battle is still celebrated in Costa Rica.

Walker decided to try his luck once more and with a force of men invaded Honduras.  This time his luck ran out.  The British had a colony next door called British Honduras (now Belize) and did not like Walker causing trouble.  So the Royal Navy seized Walker and turned him over the Honduran government who promptly had him shot.

It’s hard to imagine that men with such grandiose dreams once dared to act on these dreams and nearly got away with it.  How might the present look like if these empires had been allowed to flourish.

Posted in: life in general, myths

conspiracies I

July 6, 2014 7:31 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Most people in the world see only the surface of events.  We can accept simple explanations of events and be satisfied and indeed most news is as reported.  The But throughout time there have been groups and individuals that have tried to change the course of events by acting in secret.  Then of course there are events that don’t seem to fall into a simple category and beg for a more elaborate explanation.  These are the conspiracies that I will address in this series.

So, lets start with some conspiracies that are actually real and did happen and later on we will discuss some more contemporary unproven conspiracies.

Lets start 400 years ago with the Guy Fawkes conspiracy.

At the beginning of the 17th century Britain was a religious powder keg.  Catholics and protestants were openly fighting and jockeying for power.  King James I had just ascended to the throne and angry Catholics plotted against him and the English parliament.  Feelings were still raw over the reign of Tudor Dynasty.

when James ascended to the throne there were immediately 2 plots to remove him and to put a catholic monarch on the throne.  Both plots failed and the Spanish became reluctant to continue plotting.  So the CIA was not the first spy agency to try to subvert a foreign government.

Oddly enough most of these plots failed due to the efforts of Francis Walsingham who ran Britain’s first intelligence service and who made current efforts by the NSA to intercept private communications look benign by comparison.

So we have a case of one spy agency trying to do some very unethical things aimed at removing a lawful ruler from power, being foiled by another spy agency doing some very unethical things concerning privacy rights to stop them.  weird.

Guy (or Guido) Fawkes was a catholic convert that along with the Wright brothers formed a plot to overthrow the government.  Guy had been a soldier in the continental religious wars and was an expert with explosives.

Fawkes appealed to the Spanish to invade England but got no support.  Along with the Wrights and Roger Catesby, he formed a plot to strike a shocking blow and force the Spanish to act.

They rented a building next to parliament and began mining a tunnel under parliament and got into the basement and filled it with explosives.  This was in the carefree days when one could dig mines in the middle of London for no reason at all and purchase large quantities of gunpowder.

One member of the group however (unknown to this day) wrote a friend, a Lord Monteagle, to stay away from parliament on November 5th.  This Lord was no fool and alerted the proper authorities.

Guards arrived just in time to see Guy with torch in hand about to blow up the building.  He was caught, tried, and basically tortured to death.

For years this event has been celebrated as Guy Fawkes day in Britain, and the more serious aspects of the event have been forgotten or glossed over.  Until its become almost a joke.

I have to wonder what history will make of the current round of religious wars sparked by 9/11.  Will we as a species gloss over, and forgive each other and look back on this as a series of misunderstandings or will we keep these wounds open and fresh.

Posted in: life in general, myths

Comparative Myths II

June 14, 2014 6:58 AM , Leave a Comment ,

It’s been a while since my last post on myths.

The great flood.  Why is it so universal?  What makes it stand out among other shared myths?  Surprisingly the flood myth is even more common among cultures than creation myths

The simple answer would be that it does recall the biblical flood mentioned in Judeo-Christian religious texts

Genesis 6:5

“The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.  The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.  So the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air for I am grieved that I have made them.”

But really you must look past the superficial similarities and look behind the story as to what caused the flood and how it came to be.

The version of events we know as the great flood can find parallels in earlier stories from Babylonian sources such as the epic of Gilgamesh wherein King Gilgamesh is told the story of Utnapishtim, the only man to survive the great flood, and who tells him how the gods became concerned that mankind had grown too numerous and after trying to cut down human numbers by fire, famine, and disease the gods turned to flood to wipe out mankind.

This story in turn is an almost word for word copy of an earlier Accadian story written down about 1700 BC.  Morality tales about what can happen if man doesn’t mend his ways.

But floods themselves carry different messages.  In Indonesia, the story tells of Naga-Padoha, the great snake that carries the world on its back, and one day gets tired of carrying that load and shrugs everyone off its back into the sea.  The gods saved one woman and later returned the earth onto the snakes back.  Possibly this is a reference to the many earthquakes and tsunamis in the region (see the Indian ocean tsunami of 2006)

In Australia the aborigines tell of a great frog during the dreamtimes that drank up all the water and caused a drought.  The other thirsty inhabitants made the great frog laugh and it released all the waters out at once causing great floods.  Most probably an allusion to the extreme drought and rainy seasons of parts of Australia.

The Germanic tribes speak of Ymir the first giant being killed by the Norse gods and that he bled so much that most of the other giants drowned in his blood save for one couple.  Most people don’t know that the part of the North sea known as Jutland was in fact at one time dry land and that it was indeed inhabited by early humans.

In the Americas we have flood myths ranging from Canada down to Peru.  The twist here is that some relate to their creation stories.  There is a theme among these cultures that there have been worlds before ours and that they were destroyed before ours came into creation.  One such example is the Navajo story of flood.  Coyote was a trickster and one day he kidnaps a child of the great sea serpent Tieholtsodi.  The great serpent desperate to find its child floods the world.  The people discuss what to do, so they piled 4 great mountains on top of each other and climb, as the flood increased, they planted a great vine and climbed out of their world into the 4th world, but the waters kept rising so they climbed up to the 5th world.  Finally tired of climbing they forced coyote to return the child and the flood stopped.

This idea of emergence and multiple worlds is also found in other cultures, but well explore that at a later time.

So why floods?  Well flooding it IS nearly universal.  Unless you live on Mt Everest, any part of the world can flood.  What better symbol of the displeasure of a deity is there than the horrifying destruction caused by a flood?  Cast your minds back a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina and how some religious leaders claimed it was divine retribution on New Orleans for all its wicked ways.  If anything it was retribution for decades of neglect and mismanagement at all levels of government.  But that’s politics and not mythology.

There are two other possible explanations that do seem to hold a kernel of truth.

Humanity arose just as a great ice age was waning.  Sea levels had been much lower and early humans had settled on land that today is submerged.  As the ice melted and sea levels rose they would find a lot of land being threatened by the sea.  There is some evidence that this happened in particular around the Black sea area where many early communities had settled and that indeed a great flood did occur.

The second explanation is more mundane.  As the earth has shifted and moved due to plate tectonics a lot of fossil beds have ended up on dry land.  Fish, shells, reptiles fossils are found in the rock.  The natural assumption to early man is that the land had been flooded sometime in the past and this is the proof.

However its explained or viewed the universality of the flood myth is one of those shared cultural traits that shows how similar we all are in some very basic ways.

Posted in: culture, myths

the black cauldron of science

March 26, 2014 6:56 AM , 2 Comments ,

“Can you find my lost shoes?”

“Do you have 24 hour a day video monitoring over my cheating boyfriend’s house?”

“Is there treasure buried under my farm?”

I get these questions all the time.  People seem to be under the impression that there are squadrons of satellites overhead and that they watch each and every one of us with minute detail every minute of every day.  What’s more these satellites can see everything.

I blame Hollywood for part of it.

We’re not quite there yet.  But this post really isn’t about the dangers of the surveillance state.  I will save that for another day.  It has more to do with the public’s relationship with science and the perception that science is the modern-day equivalent of magic.

It really isn’t a modern phenomena either.  Particularly in our country’s history we’ve fallen under the sway of science’s siren call.  Look at the 19th century traveling medicine show, or all the quack applications of electricity or radiation (electropathy, the X-ray shoe sizer, magnetic therapy).

In the middle ages we had the promise of alchemy and magic to capture the public’s imagination and promise solutions to even our most conventional problems.

Seems that little has changed.  The general public is little interested in the inner workings of science or magic.  Just as long as it works, they’re satisfied.

If you look at the above examples you see problems and concerns that really don’t need science to address.  The public could easily solve or sidestep these problems themselves but instead they choose to try to find the easy and convenient way out.

I suppose what really irks me about this attitude is that there is a total lack of understanding about the mechanics of science.  Not only that but there is a total lack of desire to understand the mechanics.  This is more than just willfully ignorant, it’s dangerous.

This sets the public up for all manner of abuse, fraud, and manipulation.

In my line I run into this problem quite a bit.  “Companies” based out of basements or boiler rooms and promising to locate oil, gold, and other valuable resources underground for clients and then collecting hefty fees and disappearing.

Not only damaging to the client who just wasted money but also damaging to companies that do honest work.

I tell people to take the time to double-check these promises and try to teach and inform them about what we can and cannot do with our technology.  I can’t outright call these other companies frauds and con-men but I do tell these potential clients to ask for references, to read up on the subject, and to just use common sense.

I don’t expect every person to become a scientist or read science journals but I would hope that they would use a little more common sense and look for the practical solution rather than the easy way out.

Posted in: culture, myths, science, thought

Omens and symbols

December 16, 2013 9:03 PM , Leave a Comment ,

I suppose that in some ways I am superstitious.  But only because these things really happen to me.

I’m a precog, someone who can see into the future, but like most precogs it’s a fairly useless power and not at all reliable.  I will get an image in my mind.  Something pops up for no reason at all.  No trigger mechanism, no casual mention by anyone, just appears in my head.  Within a week an event relating to that image will occur.

In the past this mostly this took the form of predicting TV show reruns.  I would see a scene or character from a TV show and sure enough within a week, there’s the episode.  Now that I have for the most part abandoned TV watching this type of precognition has for the most part faded.

Now it takes the form of omens in my life.  Good example, this week.  I thought about my car’s extended warranty less than a week ago.  No reason at all.  My car’s in the shop right now for transmission work.  Hopefully the warranty will cover it.

Not at all a useful power.  It’s hard to sift between the real omens and the random thoughts and it’s not something that can be accessed at will.  I’ve discussed this phenomena with some of my more philosophically and metaphysically minded friends and acquaintances.  Their thinking points mainly to the writings of Jung and his concept of synchronicity and meaningful causality.  That these are not just random events but an expression of some sort of deeper organized pattern.  I just try to ignore it as best as possible.

Symbols are another matter.  I suppose they’re an expression of those things in life that I’ve come to sort internally as good/bad, better/worse, positive/negative.  They can range from the rather inane and pedestrian to esoteric and deeply personal.

Take some of the more banal symbols out there.  Coca cola for instance, not the drink but the logo, the colors, the font.  Comparing that to the Pepsi symbol.  When I was growing up the Coke symbol was good and Pepsi was bad just based on the logos.  Bizarre I know but that’s how a kid thinks.  My universe was sorted along strict lines and things like coke and pepsi were well and truly separated by an unbridgeable gap.  Of course now that I am free from my cola and fructose addictions I see all of these as “bad” symbols.

Over time I have added and disregarded symbols as time passed and as situations changed.  As much as I try to disregard these symbols and keep an open mind about things I find that they do sneak in and flavor my thinking about some things.  All I can do is to try to remain vigilant and keep my mind as open as possible.

 

 

Posted in: ideas, life in general, myths, psychology, thought

Introspection

September 7, 2013 2:07 PM , Leave a Comment ,

The act of looking within oneself and examining your thought process or how you live your life.

Many Peoples around the world have this as part of the culture.  For some it merely took a quiet place and time to look within.  Others required more complex rituals.

Among some native Americans it took deprivation and extreme physical duress to reach this state.  They would either starve or thirst or endure harsh conditions in isolation until a revelation was made.  Sometimes hallucinogenics were used.

Some early indo-europeans believed the opposite to be true.  A state of extreme bliss usually brought about by alcohol or poppy derived substances could lead to profound revelations.

The idea was an is to separate the mind from the body. To disengage the physical world from the mind and allow it to operate independently.  Have you ever been in pain? hungry? sad? cold?  You know how distracting this is to your mind.  When you’re at work and you have a headache or you ate something bad or you’re worried about your home life.  You can’t get anything done because your mind is preoccupied.

But beyond that is something else.  When you go past simple hunger, beyond thirst, beyond pain.  When the mind becomes so saturated by these that it no longer accepts stimuli from these then the mind disengages.  It exists in a space all its own.  A mind free to think just for the sake of thinking.

I suppose some use meditation techniques to do the same thing.  Others exercise and let the repetitive motion lull them.  I wonder though if the results are the same.

All I need is some “quiet” time which is basically some time to myself to think.  No “distractions” and the reason I use the quotes is that sometimes I will go into a noisy hectic bar and find a corner to myself and start thinking.  I tune out the noise and lights and let people do their thing while I do mine.  I could sit in my room and do the same but there I wouldn’t have the guarantee that someone wouldn’t come looking for me needing me to do something.  In a noisy crowded place like that I can be by myself.  It’s like hiding in plain sight.

Haven’t had much time for this lately and I desperately need to.

Posted in: myths, thought

Why we need myths

May 26, 2013 2:36 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Gilgamesh was probably some illiterate brutish thug that raped women and smelled terrible.  Noah was probably some religious nut babbling on about the end of the world when he happened to stumble into the middle of a local flood.  King Arthur was also probably another plunderer on horseback that killed and maimed for profit.  Joan of Arc would be sedated and locked up in today’s world.

Does it really help us to know these things?  Do we profit somehow in knowing that George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree or that the Washington family never even had cherry trees and that Washington lied all the time.

I understand the need of historians to get the facts straight.  Everyone wants to do their job right.  But i question the thought process that decides that myths are not important to future generations.

Myths are the way we make sense of the world around us.  Or so said Joseph Campbell.  Where do these myths come from?  They derive over time from faulty history, from details glossed over, from dates misremembered, and from wish-fulfillment.  Myths are symbols and humans desperately need these to make the world work for them.

Cold dry facts are just that.  They neither breathe or live in the mind, nor do they serve any purpose but to record.  Statistics, time lines, records.  We might as well use accountants to tote up the numbers and write-up a ledger.

Myths inspire, they drive on unborn generations to think what is possible to achieve and to strive to better that achievement.

What myths will our modern age inspire?

Posted in: life in general, myths

Apocalypse lost

April 28, 2013 3:37 AM , 2 Comments ,

Throughout history humans have had a fascination with the end of days.  Like all good myths this originated from the time before the written word existed.  This seems to be a polygenetic invention without regard to religion, language, or geography.

Some psychologists opine that this obsession indicates a deep-seated disaffection with the status quo and a desire to begin anew.  Others feel that it is a way of exposing particular dissatisfaction with certain aspects of life and the need to reform those aspects lest they lead to disaster.

American culture is no different from any other about this fascination but we may have cornered the market on this peculiar pass time.  The Millerites of the 1840s was one of the first of these movements in America to predict the end of times and the first to fail (The event was aptly named the Great disappointment).

And it’s not just devout christians.  In my lifetime we have had three great non religious predicted end times come and go.  As I grew up in the 1980s everyone around me knew that World War III was a certainty.  It was only a matter of time.  We were all suddenly taken aback in 1989 when 40 years of cold war just crumbled away with a wall.

Y2K was the next secular doomsday.  The prediction that faulty computer coding along with the change of the millennium would lead us to a stone age existence as all computerized machines suddenly failed.  This turned out to be nothing but a sales bonanza for bottled water companies and freeze-dried food makers.

2012 was the latest and greatest of the doomsdays.  At least two cable TV networks spent the last five years basing the majority of their programming around a vaguely defined end date of December 21, 2012.  Survivalists cropped up again, buying up land in far off places and stocking up on supplies.  The local museum even had a special exhibit on the Mayan 2012 predictions that extended its tour long past the alleged doomsday and just recently closed.  The date came and went without a hiccup.

My question is what now?  We have seemingly run out of these expiration dates.  Some dates still exist out there to be sure, but none are as powerful or in the near future.  The world situation is arguably less volatile than the worst days of the cold war.  Global warming seems to be a somewhat ill-defined and unsatisfactory bogey man.  Will we create another date just because there is an unconscious need for doomsday?  Can’t we instead just begin to work on living and making the world a better place?

Posted in: myths, pop culture

Comparative Myths I

April 24, 2013 3:25 PM , 2 Comments ,

(This is an updated and edited version of a post that I did years ago.)

Mythology defines who we are.  It is the way we explain and justify the way that we live not just to others but also to ourselves.  In its way it helps make sense of our world.  Myths have been there with us before written language was even developed.  They help define what themes and messages are timeless and can relate down the ages to those that come after us.

To understand myth it helps to understand a little about how humans spread across the globe.  Modern humans burst out of east Africa about 70 to 45 thousand years ago.  Why so vague?  Like most things that people do it was an unplanned.  Tribes, bands, families, sometimes just individuals went out from East Africa.  Some up the Nile River, some crossed the then accessible red sea land bridge across to Yemen and some across through Jordan.  A few settled in the lush green Sahara and eventually watched their dreams turn to dust.  This exodus deposited groups of peoples everywhere it touched creating the seeds of future cultures and languages

(Writer’s note: I seem to be out of order in these stories but I am saving some myths like the creation of man for a future post)

It’s interesting to note in the book of Genesis the tower of Babel story

 “The Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”  Genesis 11:9

One could make an argument of this being a perfect description of the scattering of mankind across the old world.

This also compares well to the Hindu myth of language in which a proud tree grew up to the heavens and scorned the gods telling them that its branches would cover all mankind and protect them from the gods.  Brahma, the god of creation, cut the proud trees branches and tumbled them down on mankind forcing them to scatter all over the world and confusing their language.

The Bantu of east Africa have a story of extreme drought and famine causing people to scatter looking for food and as they scattered their languages changed.  This may be the closest to the truth as the ancient savannahs of east Africa probably didn’t have enough food to sustain the growing numbers of early humans.

The common thread in all the stories is how an outside agent forces mankind to split up forcing a change in their languages.

Now, during this time humans are still simple hunters and gatherers.  They carry their belongings on their backs, and they’re not much better off than their immediate predecessors like Homo erectus or homo rhodesiensis.  The archtypal hero is going to be the wanderer, the nomad, the man of action that doesn’t think before acting.

The initial exodus east finally gives out in Pakistan or northern India.  Further smaller waves would continue east towards Asia and Australia but western culture would be founded in three vital areas, the Nile River, the tigris-euphrates basin, and the Indus valley.  These three valleys had the things that early humans wanted, a good source of food (both meat and vegetable), fresh water, and almost as important a moderated climate.  Moderate at that time anyways.

In time these valleys would spring up the first villages and towns and people began telling stories of what they knew.  One of the first would be a story about sibling rivalry and the rivalry between professions.

Cain and Abel.  On the surface a story of jealousy and the first murder.  But it illustrates the concerns of those early cultures.  We have the herder with his flocks, and on the other side the farmer with his fields.  Both need water, both need land, so conflict is inevitable.  Herding is the older of the two professions (probably adopted as humans traveled out of east Africa), so Abel the older brother is the herder and Cain, the younger brother, is the farmer.  In the story the farmer dispatches the herder signaling the rise of settled farmer over nomadic herding lifestyle.

The story itself has an almost direct parallel in the Sumerian story of Enkimdu (god of farmers) and Dumuzi (god of herders) trying to win the hand of Innana (goddess of fertility).  In that story however the herders win.  This possibly signifies that the Sumerian story was created earlier and during a time when herding was still a very important occupation.

The same story crops up again in roman times.  This time in the guise of Romulus and Remus the twin brothers that founded Rome.  Curiously though in this story both brothers are herders.  Possibly this relates to the fact that the Latin tribes that founded Rome were themselves migrants into this part of Italy and they still depended on their livestock.  Both brothers offered sacrifices to the gods to see who should be king, Remus seems to be favored but Romulus uses a land boundary dispute as a pretext and slays his brother to become king.

Among other topics that people knew well would be life, death, floods, disaster and I will cover these in another post.  I will end it here but I will note that these people were not all that different from us at all.  They lived in different times but they had the same basic concerns we do.  That they can perfectly relate to us how they dealt with issues in their lives shows us how similar we are.

Posted in: life in general, myths