www.mythopedia.info

 

MYTHOPEDIA

 

introducing ‘plasma mythology’

 

 

‘Could the prehistoric ‘sky’ have been much more active than now?’

Mark Bailey, astronomer at the Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

research interests

 

 

From the second half of the 20^th century, cosmologists and geophysicists have made great advances in modelling the electromagnetic environment of the earth in response to the solar wind and other external features impinging on the earth, such as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and, far less frequently, cometary intruders into the inner solar system. Our purpose is to consider how knowledge of this kind might aid our understanding of traditional ideas about cosmology and the recent history of the earth, as documented in the history of astronomy, archaeoastronomy and certain classes of mythology and ancient ritual. Auroral phenomena, the zodiacal light and various transient atmospheric events have been recorded throughout history.

 

 

 ‘plasma mythology’

 

 

Beginning with some of the classical philosophers, scholars have pondered the nature and origin of mythology for centuries. Yet while the disciplines of geology, astronomy or biology gradually accrued a theoretical bedrock on which an entire edifice of thought could subsequently be built, no similar consensus core was ever reached for the subject of mythology. Mythopedia’s concern is to establish a theoretical foundation, consisting primarily of peer-reviewed articles and books, on which a future discipline of comparative mythology can be constructed.

 

A decade’s research suggests that, as a guideline, whatever induced our distant ancestors to produce the central themes of myth had to be:

 

(1) external to the human mind in origin,

(2) cosmic, often celestial, in nature, and

(3) attractive in character, both because it was

(3a) rare or unusual in terms of frequency and

(3b) awe-inspiring and frightening in terms of appearance.

 

These three key points, in unison as in isolation, serve as a watershed setting the present approach apart from most preceding theories of myth. In a revival of catastrophism, it is argued that the most credible hypothesis for ‘mythogenesis’ invokes extraordinary and extremely impressive transient and cosmic events observed by human beings and often taking place in the sky. Conspicuous candidates for such extraordinary events are the following:

 

 

The nascent subdiscipline of geomythology studies the potential presence of geologically relevant information in mythical material, concentrating on possible mythologised reports of historical tsunamis or volcanic eruptions and the idea that ancient discoveries of fossils, such as Dinosaurs, could have contributed to the formation of dragon mythology. Important names in this fast-growing field include Elizabeth and Paul Barber, Luigi Piccardi and Bruce Masse. Other specialists in the humanities draw attention to short-lived celestial events, such as the passage and possible impacts of comets, meteor showers, or aurorae. Apart from Bruce Masse, recent contributors to this line of investigation include Victor Clube, William Napier, Mark Bailey, Duncan Steel, Peter Bobrowsky and Hans Rickman.

 

Insofar as the findings of geomythologists and ‘cometary mythologists’ appear to complement rather than exclude each other, it would seem useful to find an embracing term to define this recent movement. The common denominator in lightning, cometary tails, aurorae, and some more contentious phenomena such as ball lightning and earthquake lights is plasma; as is well known today, all of these are formed of plasma or ionised gas that responds with great sensitivity to changes in the earth’s magnetic field and the influx of charged particles from the solar wind or the interplanetary medium. A strong electromagnetic component, if not a direct correlation to geomagnetism, also appears to underlie the geological phenomena listed here: the laws of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) help to model tornadoes and tsunamis, magma and lava flow; electrophonic bolides are a class of meteors displaying strong electromagnetic properties; and meteorites, tectites, fulgurites, small spiralling fossils such as Ammonites, Belemnites, or Echinoderms, and prehistoric implements were in traditional societies typically confused with each other and interpreted as ‘thunderstones’, descended from the sky amid thunder and lightning. Optical phenomena such as the zodiacal light and crepuscular rays have no electromagnetic causes themselves, but are secondarily affected by the quantity and distribution of debris in the inner solar system, suggesting that increased cometary ‘dusting’ would enhance these effects as well as meteor showers significantly.

 

Considering the dominance of electromagnetic principles in these phenomena, plasma mythology seems a convenient umbrella term for this branch of mythological theory that explores in what ways ‘plasma phenomena’ in near-earth space are reflected in human myths, rituals and artefacts ranging from stone circles and petroglyphs to pyramids, sculptures and mythical writings.

 

Within the history of ideas, ‘plasma mythology’, with its emphasis on transient natural phenomena, can be seen as a modern successor to the ‘introspective’ and structuralist psychosociological models preferred during most of the 20^th century, that were championed by thinkers such as Freud, Jung, Campbell, Durkheim, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. The exploitation of cutting-edge scientific knowledge of geological, atmospheric and astronomical events such as listed here as potentially the ultimate inspiration for numerous mythical themes can be regarded as a modern continuation of the old ‘nature school’ of mythology, which – beginning in the late 19^th century and eventually supplanted by the ‘psychosociological’ theories – sought to invoke the behaviour of the sun, the moon, vegetal life, and so forth as the inspirational source of prominent mythical themes. Yet unlike the old school, the modern interdisciplinary approach places far less emphasis on elaborate metaphors and the linguistic aspect of the names of mythical characters, concentrates on short-lived, dramatic events instead of less ‘awe-inspiring’ spectacles such as the sunrise or the lunar cycle, and benefits from the immensely improved state of geophysics, plasma physics, climatology, and related scientific disciplines. Before the Space Age, scientists still described the solar system as a relatively eventless ‘vacuum’, in which only planets, asteroids and the occasional comet moved on fixed courses with Aristotelian precision. As a consequence, scholars in the humanities investigating the reflections of astronomical concepts in ancient traditions were very much restricted to this straightjacket. The modern understanding of the solar system as a highly complex web of combined gravitational and electromagnetic forces, in which the solar wind interacts with interplanetary space and planetary magnetospheres, injects a new lease of life into the obsolete pre-1950 understanding of the solar system, allowing theorists to account for a much greater variety of traditional observations at a higher level of intellectual satisfaction.

 

Plasma mythology operates on a fluctuating scale of events. Relatively common events such as the observation of megalightning, earthquake lights, an auroral pillar or the fall of ‘thunderstones’ occupy one end of the scale and provide a limited challenge to the mind. Such events will only have inspired local traditions. On the other end, the unparalleled and drastic cosmic changes collectively remembered in traditional societies as the ‘creation of the world’ call for consideration of the possibility that these encapsulate an event that is extremely uncommon on a human scale. Such universal and archetypal themes require atmospheric events on a cosmic scale.

 

The ‘plasma-physical’ approach to a number of myths, notably creation myths, does not simply deny or ignore older mythological theories such as those of Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim, Jung, Eliade, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss, but merely places them in a different perspective by incorporating them in a larger overarching framework:

 

 

In each case, the external, visual experience will have been primary and will have informed the psychological, sociological and artistic dimensions of myth. The celestial provenance of the myths’ original contents may account for the remarkable uniformity of human tradition. And unlike many previous theories of myth, the interdisciplinary connection with plasma science adds the invaluable benefit of testability: controlled laboratory experiments are capable of testing the theory by replicating the structures presented in myth and traditional art. Another test might consist in a comparison of the geographic distribution of specific mythical motifs to the way a hypothetical prototype in the sky would have appeared to terrestrial stargazers, allowing for latitude, longitude and altitude, local climates, and the orbital motion of the earth and other objects possibly involved. The element of testability adds considerable plausibility to this theory of myth.

 

 

an intense auroral storm in the Holocene?

 

 

Recent interdisciplinary studies raise the possibility that the earth experienced a high-energy-density auroral storm towards the end of the Neolithic age, possibly peaking at around 3100 BCE, which human cultures have recorded in the form of petroglyphs, geoglyphs and a class of rituals and myths conveniently described as ‘creation myths’. The spectacular lively shapes caused by the instabilities in the plasma could have been remembered by the ancients as gods, ancestors or dragons, whose mysterious antics in the celestial world constituted the destruction and creation of worlds. This idea rests on the combination of two independent theories:

 

(1) Plasma experiments have revealed that an increased solar wind would produce an aurora in the form of a high-current z-pinch or Birkeland current undergoing complex instabilities that have only recently been understood and analysed.

 

(2) Independently from this, specialist studies in the humanities – including archaeology, mythology, anthropology, and the history of art, astronomy, religion and literature – lead to the view that human ‘memories’ of creation, as enshrined in numerous ancient myths, rituals and art forms present a remarkable uniformity worldwide, allowing the reconstruction of a detailed chronologiqual sequence of ‘creation events’ that were arguably observed in the sky. If human traditions of this sort are allowed to speak for themselves rather than to be straightjacketed into Jungian, Frazerian or Durkheimian paradigms, an economic explanation is that people from many parts of the earth witnessed a stupendous pillar of light reaching from the horizon to the highest region of the sky, the so-called axis mundi or ‘cosmic axis’, that defined the apparent ‘centre’ of the sky and blotted out the comparatively dim light of the moon, the stars, and even the sun.

 

In an ambitious interdisciplinary research programme, these data sets – the plasma-physical theory of an intense auroral pillar and the mythological theory of creation, centred on the axis mundi – may be combined. The scientific possibility that such an auroral pillar was observed at some time during the Holocene then implies an attractive explanation for the ‘protomyth’ derived from the comparative study of mythology and ancient cosmologies. It seems possible, then, that spectacular events transpiring in that ‘alien sky’ inspired many defining forms of religion, art, and architecture, the remnants of which are still with us today. These forms could have been faithfully recorded on stone in thousands of petroglyphs all over the world, enacted in thousands of rituals celebrated until the present day, and narrated in thousands of myths now baffling scholars and laymen alike. During intervening and subsequent centuries, the sky could have remained filled with debris and only in the 1^st millennium BCE would it have cleared up sufficiently for planetary astronomy to emerge and for modern philosophy to embark on ‘sanitising’ the traditional mindset.

 

So, could many of the most influential myths be based on eye-witness accounts of a very intense and sustained aurora, accompanied by meteor showers and the formation of a bright zodiacal light, as allowed by cutting-edge discoveries in plasma science?

 

Although to date an abundance has been assembled of palaeoclimatological evidence for environmental disasters taking place at various times during the Holocene and of archaeological evidence that human societies suffered heavily from these, the occurrence of the auroral storm hypothesised on the basis of comparisons between the morphology of plasma instabilities, petroglyphic data and mythological data has not been confirmed scientifically, so the model remains no more than a possibility. Needless to say, it is inherently difficult to confirm the occurrence of past aurorae forensically, but concomitant effects of the physical cause of such an enhanced aurora, such as an excessive influx of cosmic debris or geological and biological responses to increased cosmic radiation might be traceable. Yet even if an enhanced aurora of this type were feasible, its physical cause remains to be established. Data culled from the humanities at best inform about what was seen, felt and heard, but are principally unfit to identify astronomical objects or mechanisms. This means that, while the theory as a whole is interdisciplinary in outlook, the hard sciences alone have the last word on what exactly transpired in astronomical terms. Could extreme solar weather have resulted in an increased solar wind of such magnitude as to provoke auroral phenomena on this scale? Was such an auroral storm triggered by the disintegration of a large comet arriving in the solar system, such as the giant Proto-Encke whose history of orbital dynamics has been reconstructed in recent decades by cometologists Victor Clube, William Napier and Mark Bailey? Extreme solar weather, passage through a gigantic molecular cloud, the disintegration of a giant comet in the inner solar system, or a combination of these hypotheses – at the present stage of investigation, the wisest thing to do is surely to keep asking the right questions and remain as open-minded as possible.

 

 

is this science? - a note on epistemology

 

Where exactly does ‘plasma mythology’ stand from a philosophical or science-methodological perspective? The answer to this question depends on one’s general stance in the philosophy of science. Sir Karl Popper’s theory of critical rationalism is widely seen as the most feasible theory of epistemology at the present time. In at least three respects, we prefer a different epistemological framework than the one advocated by Popper.

 

Firstly, Popper displayed a great disliking for the traditional fact-based approach to science as exemplified in the work of Francis Bacon. In Bacon’s approach, scientific hypotheses are derived from collected data through inductive reasoning. Popper’s point was that induction itself is not a logical, but a psychological process, that is not vital but circumstantial to the process of generating hypotheses. While we basically agree with this position, our impression is that Popper has downplayed the practical role of induction as an often indispensable accessory to the human imagination in the formulation of new hypotheses. We have arrived at our detailed reconstruction of the internal chronology of the mythical axis mundi not through ‘wild and unfettered speculation’, but through the traditional painstaking process of data-gathering on a large scale, comparative analysis of these data and the identification of recurrent patterns by means of induction.

 

Secondly, our opinion is that Popper’s theory about the monopoly of falsification in scientific theory is only valid for one particular class of hypothetical statements – namely, for general statements imputing a certain quality to an entire group of phenomena. To this class belong the ‘nature laws’ of lightning, aurorae, earthquakes and so on as modelled by physicists. But there are other classes of hypothetical statements that evade Popper’s comments. Hypothetical statements concerning past or future events can neither be conclusively verified nor conclusively falsified, but must be ranked according to relative probability only. To this class of statements belongs the hypothesis of an intense auroral storm at the end of the Neolithic age. Factors that might reduce the probability of this hypothesis include evidence that a high-energy density auroral storm could not produce forms detected in myths and ancient artefacts, that human beings could not possibly have seen such forms, that a storm of this magnitude could not possibly have happened or did not happen, and so on.

 

Thirdly, Popper proposed to exclude from the definition of science all statements that are not falsifiable. For the reason stated above, we disagree that falsifiability of claims is the only criterion to science. Science is primarily a lexical term, the definition of which must be described (by lexicologists), not prescribed (by logicians). As such, we define science in the traditional, Baconian sense as the entire intellectual process from the acquisition of ‘raw’ data through the recognition of patterns and the systematic organisation of these data (via a balanced combination of ‘splitting’ and ‘lumping’) to the formulation of general theories with the capacity to test or predict the data. Science is simply the ‘art’ of reducing a large amount of data to a smaller set of ‘laws’, ‘tendencies’ or principles that add comprehension to knowledge.

 

In conclusion, geophysical and plasma physical models of earthquakes, lightning and aurorae are falsifiable exponents of hard science; our comparative analysis of traditional cosmologies and myths, partly resulting in our reconstruction of a near-universal template of creation mythology, is a falsifiable exponent of ‘soft science’; and the interdisciplinary hypothesis that many creation myths can be explained in terms of past geophysical and atmospheric events, as a theory of past events, is neither conclusively falsifiable nor conclusively verifiable, but is a scientific hypothesis that must be graded relative to other theories of myth according to probability. The plasma-physical model of creation mythology and art-historical data, such as geometric petroglyphs, is simply a working hypothesis for a large set of ancient data that we consider the most convincing, the most complete and the most economic theory of the nature of traditional mythology in general.

 

This position is not fundamentally different from the work of archaeoastronomers who ‘reconstruct’ past observations of comets and meteor showers on the basis of textual records. In each case, the impetus to produce a ‘scientific’ model is given by historical data, including human artefacts or writings.

 

 

 

 

 

what the experts say

about the connection between myth and early disasters in the sky

 

now available:

 

 

bibliography