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The Origins of the World's Mythologies
This remarkable book is the most ambitious work on mythology since that of the renowned Mircea Eliade, who all but single-handedly invented the modern study of myth and religion. Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years. Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths--recounted by the communities of the "African Eve"--are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions. Witzel's book is an intellectual hand grenade that will doubtless generate considerable excitement--and consternation--in the scholarly community. Indeed, everyone interested in mythology will want to grapple with Witzel's extraordinary hypothesis about the spirituality of our common ancestors, and to understand what it tells us about our modern cultures and the way they are linked at the deepest level.
688 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 29, 2019
The work is not academically valid, but rather a recycling of racist notions common in German scholarship before World War 2, on which the author largely relies.
See the academic review by eminent scholar of myth Bruce Lincon. His review ends by calling the work "ill-founded, ill-conceived, unconvincing, and deeply disturbing in its implications."
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
This is in line with my scholarly review, available here: www.jfr.indiana.edu/review.php?id=1613
See the academic review by eminent scholar of myth Bruce Lincon. His review ends by calling the work "ill-founded, ill-conceived, unconvincing, and deeply disturbing in its implications."
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
This is in line with my scholarly review, available here: www.jfr.indiana.edu/review.php?id=1613
May 30, 2017
The author makes a good attempt to establish a family tree of myths and myth complexes. He uses techniques analogous to the way linguists know things about proto languages. He also draws from genetics, archaeology, and linguistics as a sanity check against his ideas.
This book was published in 2012 so must have been written and compiled earlier. The author was unaware of the current consensus that H. Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals. He doesn't seem to have heard of Denisovans either. There have been more archaeological finds since then that shed more light on early human migrations. I don't think any of that invalidates this work but could inform follow up work.
This work is a great first stab and I hope more researchers add to it.
This book was published in 2012 so must have been written and compiled earlier. The author was unaware of the current consensus that H. Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals. He doesn't seem to have heard of Denisovans either. There have been more archaeological finds since then that shed more light on early human migrations. I don't think any of that invalidates this work but could inform follow up work.
This work is a great first stab and I hope more researchers add to it.
abandoned
January 26, 2018I try not to be one of those guys who thinks the things studied by science-adjacent humanities like history or folklore should and will be colonized by quantitative methods and disciplinary standards. . . but if I were one of those guys this book would be a great case study. The thesis and topic of this research overlaps heavily with recent work by Julien d'Huy and Jamie Tehrani, inferring the phylogeny of individual folktales using quantitative cladistics developing in genetics. Witzel is essentially arguing the same thing, but for a whole pattern of myths rather than any one story. That's cool, and intriguing, but there's no earthly excuse for this book to honestly be even half as long as it is. Where a scientific paper would briefly review the existing evidence on its question, Witzel explicates every relevant guess, hypothesis, and quack theory anyone has ever advanced on comparative mythology. Say what you want about scientific writing, but at least they're not going to try to present Carl Jung's work as a serious and relevant piece of scholarship.
That's an annoying writing trait, but it's not fundamentally an issue. The bigger problem is that, for whatever reason, Witzel isn't interested in quantitative analysis. Maybe the reasons for this are good, maybe they're not, but instead, he proceeds to try to do that analysis "manually." That, of course, magnifies the potential problems rather than making them irrelevant. So what the book seems to be composed of is a list of data points, linked by narrative connecting them to his hypothesis. That may well be correct, but first of all, nobody needs to see those datapoints to get to the conclusion, and second of all, damn that's a lot of text. It's so much text. Just summarize the stat output and move on, sheesh.
That's an annoying writing trait, but it's not fundamentally an issue. The bigger problem is that, for whatever reason, Witzel isn't interested in quantitative analysis. Maybe the reasons for this are good, maybe they're not, but instead, he proceeds to try to do that analysis "manually." That, of course, magnifies the potential problems rather than making them irrelevant. So what the book seems to be composed of is a list of data points, linked by narrative connecting them to his hypothesis. That may well be correct, but first of all, nobody needs to see those datapoints to get to the conclusion, and second of all, damn that's a lot of text. It's so much text. Just summarize the stat output and move on, sheesh.
December 23, 2012
Original in concept, groundbreaking in ideas, but wordy
July 9, 2020
Stunning read,rewrites all we knew and believed about origin of mythologies,and while going back +120 000 years, still offers myriad of proof for such thesis. Shines light on who we are as humans , and why we believe what we believe. Only negative about the book is its extensive, maybe not for everyones beforethesleep reading.... but again - rewrites story of humanity as we know it. Amazing book.
July 21, 2013
3.5 I think the author put a lot of time and effort into this but he still didn't convince me of his hypothesis.
April 25, 2016
A work that employs methods honed in comparative linguistics to make the case that common mythological themes found throughout the world have their origin in a common religion of our latest common ancestors. I was always suspicious that the flood story being everywhere was more than happenstance. Like the visual observation that South American and Africa fit together, but people a priori didn’t accept that the continents could move, this book gave me permission to take more seriously what I always thought was the most reasonable explanations for these common themes: aspects of the religion adhered to by our ancestors as they emigrated out of Africa still exist in some forms today. Also, as a Mormon, I was fascinated by the fact that multiple generations of Gods, pre-existing earths, sacrifices, and some version of the Fall made it onto the common mythological motif list.
May 9, 2016
Illuminating and well researched, but unnecessarily long.
March 25, 2016
A dry, academic read, but that's to be expected. If you can manage to push through it, you will find a long string of gems that make for a compelling case.
December 8, 2022
Only on page 47, but the frequency of mind-numbing repetition suggests that he needed only 15 pages max so far, but most likely 10.
Second, in order for other scholars to accept and promulgate his work, he needs to sound very academic, because the smarter you sound, the more likely people believe what you say, largely because either people inherently correlate smartness with being right, and/or because there are few that possess enough understanding to even be able to refute what he wrote.
If this is the kind of work that is in line with Harvard, then I am not disappointed that I never went there. Sure, the idea is novel, and it's good that he is honest in saying all previous attempts to explain common mythology fail with time, and so perhaps his will too.
Will update more when finished on the merit of the idea.
Second, in order for other scholars to accept and promulgate his work, he needs to sound very academic, because the smarter you sound, the more likely people believe what you say, largely because either people inherently correlate smartness with being right, and/or because there are few that possess enough understanding to even be able to refute what he wrote.
If this is the kind of work that is in line with Harvard, then I am not disappointed that I never went there. Sure, the idea is novel, and it's good that he is honest in saying all previous attempts to explain common mythology fail with time, and so perhaps his will too.
Will update more when finished on the merit of the idea.
May 31, 2023
A good, scholarly, look at the development of mythology. It is a bit out dated in the DNA stuff. For example, the author says no Neanderthal dna, but we now know that everyone Out of Africa has 1-4% Neanderthal or Devonian DNA. I wish the author would go back and update some sections as there has been a lot of new stuff since 2012.
March 18, 2022
Fascinating topic, with some great insights but unfortunately not very well handled by Witzel. This book should be rewritten with better planning, without ended repetition and needless verbosity.
October 29, 2022
An absolute epic about all the epics out there.
Must read and re-read.
Must read and re-read.
October 27, 2022
Fascinating overall but not fully.
October 9, 2023
Somebody or other has compared the similarities among myths around the planet to the fact that South America and Africa look like separated jigsaw pieces. Both are obvious, but for a long time both lacked a reasonable explanation. In the latter case, it had to wait for geologists to come up with plate tectonics. Witzel believes he's done something similar for mythology, drawing on ancient texts, reconstructions of beliefs that predated literacy, and insights from archaeology, historical linguistics and population genetics.
Academics can decide if his view of myths' common origins deep in prehistory is plausible -- I've been told many linguists aren't persuaded by Merritt Ruhlen's efforts (cited here, incidentally) to trace humanity's protolanguage. Anyway, for me this was a hard slog, including a couple of nearly impassable swamps of linguistic and genetic data meant to support the case that:
(1) Our species left Africa with a body of myths that can still be detected in Melanesia, Australia, Africa itself, and isolated populations elsewhere (like the Andaman Islanders). The myths include the origin of humanity, relations between humans and the high and lower-ranking gods, and a great flood.
(2) Around 40,000 years ago, probably in Southwest Asia, people expanded on these myths in ways that, thanks in part to migration, came to characterize Eurasian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Amerindian civilizations -- with direct descendants in the major religions. They pushed back the origin story to include the creation of the universe and added successive "ages" of history -- and the eventual destruction of the world, in the form of a narrative that Witzel is pleased to call the "first novel."
The idea is as appealing as (if possibly more testable than) Julian Jaynes' theory about the origin of religion. Sadly, Witzel isn't half the writer Jaynes was, or that David Lewis-Williams is (he's the scholar who popularized the view that Paleolithic art was the product of our ancestral religion, shamanism). Leaving aside the bits I could barely plow through, Witzel's writing is awkward and endlessly repetitive. Still glad I read it, though; the repetitions hammer home the conclusions to the ignorant (me). Someday, maybe I'll find the ideas developed and debated in something closer to plain English.
Update: If you have jstor access, there's a clearly written, skeptical review at https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl..... But the author's a philosophy professor and couldn't understand the genetics chapter, either.
Update #2: I've now seen Witzel denounced for venturing outside his specialty (early India, and particularly the Vedas). His accounts of New World and African myths are supposedly extra-suspect, partly because the original ethnology was done long ago by amateurs, some of them very incompetent. It reminded me of the apocryphal story about the American anthropologist, out to collect Polynesian folklore just after WWII, who never realized the locals were feeding him versions of movie plots and fairy tales they'd heard from GIs during the war.
Academics can decide if his view of myths' common origins deep in prehistory is plausible -- I've been told many linguists aren't persuaded by Merritt Ruhlen's efforts (cited here, incidentally) to trace humanity's protolanguage. Anyway, for me this was a hard slog, including a couple of nearly impassable swamps of linguistic and genetic data meant to support the case that:
(1) Our species left Africa with a body of myths that can still be detected in Melanesia, Australia, Africa itself, and isolated populations elsewhere (like the Andaman Islanders). The myths include the origin of humanity, relations between humans and the high and lower-ranking gods, and a great flood.
(2) Around 40,000 years ago, probably in Southwest Asia, people expanded on these myths in ways that, thanks in part to migration, came to characterize Eurasian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Amerindian civilizations -- with direct descendants in the major religions. They pushed back the origin story to include the creation of the universe and added successive "ages" of history -- and the eventual destruction of the world, in the form of a narrative that Witzel is pleased to call the "first novel."
The idea is as appealing as (if possibly more testable than) Julian Jaynes' theory about the origin of religion. Sadly, Witzel isn't half the writer Jaynes was, or that David Lewis-Williams is (he's the scholar who popularized the view that Paleolithic art was the product of our ancestral religion, shamanism). Leaving aside the bits I could barely plow through, Witzel's writing is awkward and endlessly repetitive. Still glad I read it, though; the repetitions hammer home the conclusions to the ignorant (me). Someday, maybe I'll find the ideas developed and debated in something closer to plain English.
Update: If you have jstor access, there's a clearly written, skeptical review at https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl..... But the author's a philosophy professor and couldn't understand the genetics chapter, either.
Update #2: I've now seen Witzel denounced for venturing outside his specialty (early India, and particularly the Vedas). His accounts of New World and African myths are supposedly extra-suspect, partly because the original ethnology was done long ago by amateurs, some of them very incompetent. It reminded me of the apocryphal story about the American anthropologist, out to collect Polynesian folklore just after WWII, who never realized the locals were feeding him versions of movie plots and fairy tales they'd heard from GIs during the war.
December 10, 2013
Very interesting and well researched, (the notes and bibliography is actually a third of the book), the author does not force his hypothesis on the reader with absolute certainty, referring points which need further research or those which might be either proved or disproved by further research.
As for the backbone of his hypothesis, it is fully established by the author. I believe it to be the most comprehensive (focusing no only in myths, but in genetics, archaeology, etc.) and, therefore, better suited to explain the origins of myths.
The reading is not fascinating, as the author repeats himself a lot, but the subject as presented is not easy, so this is also a good strategy to help readers fully understand.
He refers other scholars hypothesis and approaches, explaining his own in comparison to the others.
As for the backbone of his hypothesis, it is fully established by the author. I believe it to be the most comprehensive (focusing no only in myths, but in genetics, archaeology, etc.) and, therefore, better suited to explain the origins of myths.
The reading is not fascinating, as the author repeats himself a lot, but the subject as presented is not easy, so this is also a good strategy to help readers fully understand.
He refers other scholars hypothesis and approaches, explaining his own in comparison to the others.
October 5, 2020
This is a very comprehensive and mind-blowing hypothesis about the ultimate origins, patterns and structures of all the world's mythologies. It posits a "family tree" of mythological structures that points to some ultimate common origins for many of humanity's cultures. There are some doubts about its validity and while I am aware of the criticisms, I think at the very least it is a mighty attempt that should lead the way for further work.
August 29, 2024
This is an incredibly fascinating journey. The concepts of mytheme and of phylogenetic tools to track them to common sources are just mindblowing, as well as the potential implications. I don't know if everything actually holds, but it's worth a read. Recommended!
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July 29, 2014Reviewed by The Independent (29 Jul 2014)
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June 13, 2014201.3 W833 2012
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews