The Birth of Mythology with jon turk

A short contemplation on Mythos and abstraction.  Language is abstraction and it leads us directly into manipulating abstraction.

Jon inspects this across know human existence and we can grasp artistic intemt.

To leave something in that cave that speaks to another human anytime else.

The Birth of Mythology

Jon Turk

Sep 18

I spoke last week about art being an abstract concept, and abstract concepts being critical to our evolutionary survival.

Once again, it is important to remind ourselves of the cognitive powers of our animal friends. A dog sniffs a hydrant and the scent is an abstraction, an idea of a neighborhood dog and not the dog itself. A bird responds to another bird’s song, even though it may not be able to see the singer. Elk appear to understand when it is hunting season and when it is not. Insects follow scent trails, (pheromone trails), without the apparently unnecessary step of caring for and feeding a big brain. In many cases, the animals not only recognize the abstract tracks left by others, but create their own abstract messages, by peeing on the hydrant, singing in the morning sunrise, or leaving their own pheromone trails. These abstractions involve a representation of something that is real. But humans took another huge step to adapt art as a means to create and communicate abstractions of something or some event that is not real: Storytelling. Fiction. Myth.

While the message in the geometric patterns in the Blombos Cave art remains obscure, some of the European cave art created around 40,000 years ago unequivocally represents mythology. In one of my favorites, the artist drew a bison facing a man. The man is tilted backwards, balancing on his heels at a 45 degree angle. He has a bird’s face and sports a giant erection. The bison has a huge wound, its intestines are spilling out, and a spear is drawn across it’s rear flank.

Clearly the artist knew that people do not have bird’s faces. Story. Fiction. Myth.

Just to keep the record straight, animals also create fiction. One chimpanzee in a study group learned to utter the cry “A leopard is in the vicinity,” when he found a food source. The other chimps ran away and the cheater feasted. A lie. A simple story. Fiction.

Ravens have been observed to play-act that they are sick when they realize that humans will feed a sick raven. Ha, ha said the trickster.

But humans are especially good at creating elaborately complex fiction, called mythology in some circles and lies in other circles. Just read the newspaper today.

Ah, yes, so I have let the cat out of the bag and introduced the link between the art that jumpstarted our survival to the evil trickster in the White House. But I need to explain myself more explicitly, which I will initiate in the next post.