What is Mythology: An Astronomer's Perspective

By Moiya McTier Ph.D.

Mythology is science, or at least humanity’s earliest attempt at it. Both seek to answer all of the big How and Why questions that can only be asked by keen observers of the world around them. Both admit that their truth isn’t perfect—science through the error bars on its measurements and myth through the shifting otherworldly nature of the divine. Both are built on foundations of pattern recognition and communal cooperation. Myth and science have their superficial differences, but they are two sides of the same coin, one that buys us a working understanding of our universe.

personified Phenomena

In mythology, natural features and phenomena, from clouds to dreaming, are personified as or associated with gods. Before we built wet labs and observatories, before there were academic societies and journals to share discoveries with the community, our ancestors told stories about those gods to enshrine knowledge about how nature functions. Gods of the Sun were reliable and influential, though they may be harsh (Inti to the Inca) or gracious (Amaterasu to the Japanese) depending on regional climates. Far in the north where the daylight may barely peek above the horizon in the depths of winter, the sun (Päivätär to the Finnish) might be vulnerable to capture by wicked forces. To stay together and survive, our ancestors learned how to predict weather, cultivate crops, and heal the sick—all through trial and error. They may have explained their findings in terms of gods and magic, but their strategies were the same as the modern scientific method, albeit less regulated for safety.

There may be no beakers or forceps in the making of myths, and the ancient humans who first gained this wisdom didn’t conduct experiments in lab coats, but astronomy doesn’t have any of that stuff, either. We astronomers practice an observational science — we can’t dissect the stars we study and we have to make control groups for our statistical “experiments” out of what the universe is kind enough to show us, but knowledge isn’t more valid when it was gained through direct interference and manipulation. We can learn so much by watching.

observational Myth Making

Indeed, that’s the first step of both myth making and the scientific method: make an observation. Notice that the Sun moves in the same westward direction every day, but moves north to south and back over the course of the year. Keep records of when and where specific points of light appear above the horizon. See that the ocean tides are highest at full and new moons. It is no trivial matter to recognize some of these patterns, especially the millennia-long astronomical cycles like the wobbly precession of Earth’s axis, which rotates through North Stars every 26,000 years. That same precession causes the Sun to appear in front of a different constellation on the Spring Equinox every 2000(ish) years, a westward slide that Vedic astrologers knew to account for over 3000 years ago. Modern astronomers are lucky if we get 10 years worth of data for a single object; myths were built on generations’ worth of observational baselines.

In my training as a scientist, I learned how important it is to ask the right questions lest we find irrelevant answers. Myths were made to answer those right questions, and we can see in the myths who got their answers wrong, at least at first. The planet Venus is the 3rd brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon. Luminous Venus zips closely around the Sun so quickly that sometimes it rises in the morning just before sunrise, and sometimes in the evening just after sunset. To the Babylonians, Venus and its dual appearance represented Ishtar, their beautiful yet deadly goddess of love and war. The ancient Greeks, however, initially split Venus into two figures, the Morning and Evening Stars, before they learned it was one and adopted its association with their goddess of love Aphrodite. The Babylonians asked the right questions about their most attractive wandering star—what does she really look like compared to the others? How fast does she move? What shape does her dance trace on the sky?— and were thus able to accurately share its secrets.

fundamental to be that flimsy

See, the myths our ancestors made weren’t pure imagination; they were working theories about the world’s natural laws. Stories as small as fables and folktales can stand to be unproven, but myths are sacred, too fundamental to be that flimsy. Like gravity and evolution, they’ve been tested against existing knowledge and worldview over and over again, and repeatedly demonstrated that whatever information the story holds is correct. Or at least correct enough for the story to be told one more time. Consider it a form of narrative natural selection: only the strongest, most impactful myths survive. The ancient Egyptians had a mythical theory to explain why the Nile River flooded every year, bringing nutrients to their fields to nourish the next year’s worth of crops. To them, the extra waters that flowed over the sacred river’s banks were tears cried by their goddess Isis as she mourned the death of her husband Osiris. They associated Isis with the bright star Sirius, which re-emerged from behind the Sun and was visible again in the predawn sky every July or August, shortly before the river flooded from monsoon rains in the south. Their theory about the Nile didn’t involve any of the coordinate geometry or climate physics necessary to understand the science of it, but their myth served them well enough to plan their planting and harvesting seasons year after year.

Don’t let my personal bias towards the celestial fool you. Mythology can be domains of science besides astronomy, too. Take, for example, the story of the death of Baldur, the Norse god of light. The death was foretold by a seeress, and fore-felt by Baldur himself. Baldur’s mother, Frigg, traveled across the nine worlds of the cosmos asking every object, living and not, to swear an oath not to harm her endangered son. They all did, except for the unassuming mistletoe plant. During a game where the gods were celebrating Barldur’s seeming invulnerability, Loki tricked a blind god into throwing the mistletoe at Baldur, who died instantly. Nestled within this myth is the very real botanical fact that all parts of the mistletoe plant are toxic to humans and our common pets. The ties between folklore and folk medicine have long been securely knotted.

Code Switching Myth

In my opinion, the most salient difference between modern science and ancient myth is that the lessons learned today are communicated in technical jargon difficult for the uninitiated to understand, and those learned millennia ago were encoded in stories young children from their culture could follow and remember. We in the present become the uninitiated, the hard won wisdom that used to be obvious now hidden behind the fantasy of myth. That’s why so many people today look back on ancient humans as stupid or simple: they don’t know the myth jargon; they can’t parse the code. They hear a story about a genderless giant being the first life born in the space between worlds of fire and ice, and don’t appreciate it as a stunning parallel to habitable zones around stars where planets receive the right amount of energy to maintain liquid water on their surfaces. The squint-eyed accuracy of the Norse creation myth could be a coincidence, or it could be the consequence of encountering the biodiversity that exists between volcanoes and ice fjords.

Since I learned to code switch between the vernaculars of myth and science, I’ve come to prefer the latter explanation. Even if it’s not true, it’s a valuable reminder that our ancient ancestors were just as (if not more) adept at learning from the world around them as we are; they just didn’t have the millennia of accumulated knowledge we do. And that lesson, which might not be factually accurate but is still important to know, is exactly the kind of Truth myths are meant to convey.