🍄 Legends Only

The plot thickens. As scientists read more into myths, predictions and prophecies, the ingenuity of Indigenous stories, orators and oracles reveal some hidden truths.

Apr 12, 2024

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‘When you see the Earth from the Moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come.’ - Joseph Campbell, writer

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Fable has a seat at the table. At COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in December, storytellers and policy-makers from Indigenous and Traditional communities were invited to discuss the role of story in navigating our way out of the climate crisis. Guest speakers at ‘Listening Before Speaking: Centering Indigenous Storytelling and Lived Experience in a Just Transition’, were Wiruunngga Dunggirr, Elder, Namba Gumbaynggar Nation, Eric Terena, Journalist and Co-Founder, Midía Indígena, and Grand Chief Judy Wilson, Knowledge holder from the Neskonlith Indian Band.

Their presentation was part of the Storytelling for Action Pavilion, hosted by The Bellona Foundation in partnership with BAFTA, albert, Futerra, and Think-Film Impact Production. ‘Stories are core to human nature,’ says change agency Futerra. ‘We are moved by narratives with meaning and relate to one another through engaging characters. In the face of the dramatic shifts in the global climate and global economy, people are seeking truly authentic and engaging stories to provide understanding, empowerment and hope. Stories that can enable meaningful climate action.’

Chamber of secrets

Remember the 2012 Doomsday phenomenon – surely the greatest myth of modern time? The world never ended and the end is not nigh. ‘There's only one [Maya] monument that even has the 2012 date on it,’ Maya scholar Ricardo Agurcia told National Geographic at the time. ‘It's about rebirth, not death.’

According to archaeologist William Saturno, ‘the ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this.’ Saturno led the discovery of the oldest Mayan astronomical tables ever found at a Maya complex in Guatemala, 2011, a cacophony of calculations painted on walls that include dates far into the future. ‘We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset.’ Renowned for their advanced understanding of astronomy and mathematics, the Mayan civilization actually kept numerous calendars, including a 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.

Now the focus is shifting, as archaeologists wonder not just about the cultural extinction of the Mayan civilisation, but at what propped it up for so long?

Believe in yesterday

‘Instead of focusing on the final stages of Classic Maya civilization, society can learn from the practices that enabled it to survive for nearly 700 years as we consider the effects of climate change today,’ writes Kenneth Seligson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, California State University, in The Conversation. ‘Many people believe that the ancient Maya civilization ended when it mysteriously “collapsed.” And it is true that the Maya faced many climate change challenges, including extreme droughts that ultimately contributed to the breakdown of their large Classic Period city-states.’ However, he points out that Maya did not disappear: over 6 million Maya people live mainly in Eastern Mesoamerica today. ‘I believe Maya communities’ ability to adapt their resource conservation practices played a crucial role in allowing them to survive for as long as they did.’

Seligson says they adapted to dry conditions by maximizing water efficiency and storage, timing the planting season correctly, and developing elaborate terrace and irrigation networks. They created fuel-efficient technologies, such as burnt lime pit-kilns, to sustain environmental resources.

‘The Classic Maya proactively addressed climate challenges by adapting their ecological practices to a changing environment. This helped many communities survive for centuries through waves of intense drought. Their experience, and the persistence of other ancient civilizations, shows the importance of knowledge, planning and structural flexibility. There also is an important difference between natural climate stresses on ancient societies and the human-induced challenge we face today: Modern humans can have a far greater impact on the survival of future generations. The Maya could only react to climatic conditions, but we know how to address the causes of climate change. The challenge is choosing to do so.

Megadroughts

In the 2012 documentary Quest for the Lost Maya, University of Florida scientist Dr. Mark Brenner produced data that suggests climate played a key role in the decline of ancient Maya civilization. War and political factors have been considered causes for the collapse, but Brenner’s research suggests severe drought could be the reason. When evaluating sediment layers from the bottom of a lake, he found minute snail shells, which can act as tape recorders and provide precise climate history. He discovered a series of droughts with “off-the-scale intensity” that aligned perfectly with the Maya collapse.

Sunken treasure

In Hawaii, analysing an ancient myth led has actually to the modern managing and restoring of local fishponds. The short documentary, Decoding Ancestral Knowledge [2023], shows how Kiana Frank, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, deciphered the meaning of an Indigenous myth handed down through oral tradition, led her to a modern ecological breakthrough. Frank says that “my kūpuna, my ancestors, were natural scientists,” and that for her, “science is how I learn about and connect to my spaces.” Frank uses contemporary techniques of empirical data-collection to decode the layers of meaning in some of our traditional knowledge.

“One of my favourite stories is at He’eia Fishpond. It’s an 800 year-old fishpond, and their Kia’I, their steward protector, her name is Meheanu, and she’s this fierce mo’o wahine,” she says in the film, which uses paper puppetry, lab and in-field footage. “Her job is to make sure that the fish in the fishpond are well taken care of. Are you mixing the waters? Are you making sure that predators are outside rather than inside? And if you, as stewards, do not do your job to take care of these fish, she has the capacity to hide them from you. They know when Meheanu is in the pond when the hau, a canoe plant used for cordage, hibiscus-like, turns yellow, and they say it turns yellow because she’s relieving herself in the back of the pond. When I heard this story I started thinking, ‘huh, yellow, urine. I wonder if this story has something to do with nitrogen cycling?’”

What Frank finds out is fascinating. Watch the short doc here.

A rock and a hard place

Scientists in Sicily have also been bridging the gap between fact and fiction. Ancient Greek mythology tells the tale of two monsters working in tandem across the narrow channel that separates mainland Italy from the island of Sicily. Scylla was an angry six-headed monster on one rocky side, while Charybdis created a deadly whirlpool on the other. Research from the University of Oregon shows that ancient sailors really did face such stressful seas in the Strait of Messina. And it’s still causing problems.

There are seismically active faults on either side of the strait interacting to create a narrow passage filled with geologic hazards. New information however, now explains the myth and informs plans for the world’s longest suspension bridge. ‘Previous researchers have noted that there are two sets of faults that dip towards each other, but the implications for fault mechanics, transfer of strain, and regional tectonic processes hadn't been put together," said UO geologist Rebecca Dorsey, who published alongside Italian colleagues Sergio Longhitano and Domenico Chiarella, in the journal Basin Research, last year.

Understanding the interactions between faults on opposite sides of the strait is important for considering what might happen to a bridge in the event of an earthquake. "Active fault interactions and strain transfer need to be included in seismic risk analysis," said Dorsey. "This is a shifting, dynamic landscape, and the stakes are high."

Same script, different day

Some well-weathered stories keep rising from the ashes. ‘In room 55 of the British Museum, tucked high beneath the dome of the Great Court, is a table display case containing a broken clay tablet about the size of your outstretched palm – like a phone, when they were big,’ reports the London Review of Books [7 March 2024]. It’s a fragment from The Epic of Gilgamesh – a Mesopotamian myth about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk who ruled in the 27^th century BCE - often considered the oldest piece of literature in the world. And written in cuneiform, the earliest known writing system using intricate indentations. The tablet dates from the seventh century BCE and reports that the gods sent a flood to destroy mankind, and that one of the gods, Ea, warned Utnapishtim, king of Shuruppak in southern Iraq. The king built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. ‘The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh in northern Iraq in the early 1850s. According to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.

No-ah problem

Great story arc Noah, but geologists have their doubts about this one. The Genesis flood narrative tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah’s ark. It’s ruled out as fact because there’s not enough water in the Earth system to cover all the land, but some geologists think that the story may have been influenced by a catastrophic flooding event in the Black Sea around 5,000 B.C. “It may well be that Noah’s flood is a recollection of a large wave that drowned for a few weeks a particular piece of land and on that piece of land there was nowhere dry to live,” geoscientist Patrick Nunn, of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, tells Smithsonian Magazine. “There’s a natural tendency for people to exaggerate their memories, to turn a bad event into a far worse one,” adds Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science at Stanford University. “And a global flood is one explanation for something like the discovery of fossil seashells on the side of a mountain. We now know, though, that plate tectonics are responsible for lifting up rocks from the ocean floor to high elevations.”

Written in the stars

Eclipses have a mixed mythology. “Nowadays it is a spectacle of nature, but in the past it was interpreted both in the Maya region and in the rest of Mesoamerica as an omen of something,” Jesús Galindo Trejo, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico told the New York Times, ahead of annular eclipse last year.

Dr. Maryboy Nancy Maryboy, a Cherokee and Navajo cultural astronomer is president of the Indigenous Education Institute. “Some will see it as a rebirth, a rebalancing,” she said, while other tribes consider an eclipse a bad omen. Traditional Cherokee beliefs view it as a giant frog trying to swallow the sun. Semira Crank, a Diné program director at the Bears Ears Partnership in southeast Utah, was taught during her upbringing to not look at an eclipse because the sun can damage your eyes, and disrupt a person’s Hózhó, or spiritual harmony. For some Guarani people (Indigenous South American people of Paraguay and adjacent regions), eclipses are seen as caused by an evil spirit that is embodied by a jaguar constellation, reports the NYT. When the sky darkens, the Guaranis shout and clamor in a bid to scare away the jaguar, believing that the end of the world will occur when the constellation devours the moon, the sun and other stars.“Science looks at these explanations and often ridicules them,” said Yuri Berri Afonso, whose father, the Guarani astronomer Germano Bruno Afonso, developed an Indigenous solar observatory tool. But the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous people “is what has helped them survive. And one view of the universe doesn’t have to cancel out the other.”

Geoscientist Patrick Nunn has extensively studied the links between natural hazards and stories told in the Pacific. ‘One afternoon last year, we sat in a village hall in Fiji chatting to residents about traditional ways of forecasting tropical cyclones,’ he writes in The Conversation. ‘One man mentioned a black-winged storm bird known as “manumanunicagi” that glides above the land only when a cyclone is forming out to sea. As the conversation continued, residents named at least 11 bird species, the odd behaviour of which signalled imminent changes in the weather. As we were leaving later that evening, an Elder took us aside. He was pleased we had taken their beliefs seriously and said many older Pacific people won’t talk about traditional knowledge for fear of ridicule.’

Nunn and his peers reviewed evidence on traditional knowledge in the Pacific for coping with climate change, and found much of it was “scientifically plausible.” ‘This indicates such knowledge should play a significant role in sustaining Pacific Island communities in future.’ He also notes that ‘traditional knowledge has its own intrinsic value. Scientific explanations are not required to validate it.’ ‘People have inhabited the Pacific Islands for 3,000 years or more and have experienced many climate-driven challenges to their livelihoods and survival. They have coped not by luck but by design – through robust systems of traditional knowledge built by diverse groups of people over time.’

What else we are wandering…

🔍 Never ending story
Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Tufts University, MA, believes that ancient Greek stories of humans transformed into plants can teach us about fragility and resilience. ‘By acquiring a new form through metamorphosis, the people in these stories attain a stable life that resolves the misfortunes they have gone through,’ she writes in The Conversation. ‘For instance, Cyparissus, mourning for his deer, finds a reprieve from his grief by becoming a cypress. In this way, metamorphosis offers relief from painful experiences by integrating the sufferer into the eternal and stable cycle of nature, while commemorating the transformation through stories.’

Beaulieu picks the example of Ivy surviving cruel winter, which represented Dionysus’ power to spread happiness. And the ancient rose, which portrayed the fleeting beauty of youth, that only bloomed briefly in spring. ‘The hyacinth recalls the beautiful boy Hyacinthus, who was killed while he trained with the discus. His lover, the god Apollo, grew a flower on the spot and inscribed the letters AI on it, representing the Greek exclamation for grief “Ia! Ia!” … Greek mythology suggests that human sufferings, though painful, eventually come to an end because they are part of the broader and everlasting cycle of nature.’

📘 Stories to Save the World
Humans are 22 times more likely to remember a story than any other communication. They weave through our neurology - we are hardwired to enjoy telling and hearing them. Change agency Futerra has put together a tool kit for the film and television industry to help rethink the way they tell climate stories.

✨ Rise of Indofuturism
In video games, sci-fi and music, creators are turning to folk customs and ancient mythology to imagine new futures, writes Nyshka Chandran for the BBC. ‘Combining Indian mythology and architecture with science fiction, Indus Battle Royale is one of the latest manifestations of a philosophy known as Indofuturism – an aesthetic, a genre and a narrative that envisions what India could look like in the future. These visions, whether expressed through science fiction, music or art, are rooted in staples of traditional Indian culture such as spirituality and folk customs. But they're also universally appealing, thanks to provocative design, cutting-edge technology, captivating sonics and their emphasis on diversity and self-reliance.’

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