The Origins of the World’s Mythologies

688 Pages·2013·14.64 MB·English

by  E.J. Michael Witzel

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Th e Origins of the World’s Mythologies
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Th e Origins of the
World’s Mythologies
E . J . M ichael Wi tzel

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3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Witzel, Michael, 1943–
Th e origins of the world's mythologies / E.J. Michael Witzel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-536746-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-19-981285-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mythology. 2. Myth. I. Title.
BL312.W58 2011
201'.3—dc22 2010050957
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
■ For: Yayoi
Manabu
Meimei
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F O R E W O R D
Most interesting fi ndings usually result
from . . . hypothesis formation
based on preliminary data analyses.
C. C. Ragin
On a cold February night in 1990, I rushed down a steep Japanese hill to bring
fi re to the world of the living. Along with some 2,000 men, all dressed in white
and carrying burning torches, I ran down some uneven 500-odd steps to bring
fi re, Prometheus-like, to the women assembled below in the small town of
Shingu in Wakayama Prefecture. Th is was a men-only aff air: that day, women
were forbidden to go up to the Kamikura Shrine, where a Shintō priest kindled
the fi rst fi re of the lunar new year and distributed it to us. Th e town’s men, stray
acquaintances, whom I had asked for help, were somewhat surprised about the
foreigner who wanted to participate. Th ey nevertheless accepted and embraced
me warmly, helped me to buy the special clothes and dress up properly, tying the
thick straw cord around my waist, gett ing my t aimatsu torch inscribed with tra-
ditional good wishes. Like other small groups, loudly greeting each other and
clashing our torches, we roamed the town during the aft ernoon, accepting all-
white food like radish and rice from the town’s women, who had put up stalls
along our path, and fortifying ourselves in various pubs with a lot of rice wine—
so as to strengthen us for the ordeal. Th e crowded run downhill, my companions
said, was very dangerous: some people break their legs each year. I got away with
a litt le singeing of my ceremonial dress.
Th e experience was moving: the mad rush downhill in a community of men
with the same purpose, and their friendliness toward a stray stranger who had
merely dropped in from his sabbatical at Kyoto. Our small group included a
number of men who had come home from far away for the o tō-matsuri and its rites.
Our task of delivering the new fi re accomplished, we continued to an all-male
bathhouse and on to a private dinner party in one of my new friend’s houses. Next
day, back at the shrine, I interviewed the priest who had performed the churning of
the new fi re, and he readily answered, even though he was busy with an elaborate
private ritual. His counterquestion was whether I had felt p ure the evening before.
Th en, there was the stirring feeling of participating in an archaic ritual that,
people say, had been performed for some 1,400 years, always on the sixth day of
viii ■ Foreword
the fi rst lunar month. It was like taking part, as a Westerner like me would think,
in a pre-Christian ritual that symbolized the bringing of fi re by Prometheus (see
§3.5.3) and the simultaneous delivery of the sun deity, Amaterasu, from her
year-end and primordial rock refuge (§3.5.1).
B y 1990, I had been playing with fi re for quite some time: for some 25 years,
I had been involved in the study of ancient Indian and Iranian religious and ritual
texts, many of which deal with the sacred fi re. I had read a lot of the ancient-most
Indian mythology found in the Veda, and I had witnessed many Vedic and
Buddhist fi re rituals during my nearly six years in Nepal in the seventies.
Th e fi rst, traditional Vedic fi re ritual that I saw there was a secluded and secret
aff air. Th e agnihotra ritual was carried out by a Brahmin priest whose family had
done so for the Nepalese king for the past 200 years. Aft er that fi rst experience
I managed to witness many other solemn rituals. Active participation, however,
is not allowed for those not born as Hindus. It was deeply moving to see the
agnihotra performed exactly as our 3,000-year-old Sanskrit texts tell us. Its priest,
living in a compound next to the national temple of Paśupatināth just east of
Kathmandu, was very friendly and allowed me and even our NTV fi lm crew
ready access. Th e fi lm then helped me greatly in comparing ancient texts and
modern performance.
***
However, next to my experience of archaic Indian rituals, I had also read, since
my student days, some Japanese texts dealing with the oldest myths and rituals
of Japan. For this reason, I was interested in Japanese fi re rituals and made an
eff ort to witness a number of them, both Shintō and Buddhist, during my year-
long stay in Kyoto.
However, the one at Shingu is special: it is the ritual enactment of an ancient
myth, a combination that I had oft en encountered in Vedic rituals. A month ear-
lier, we had made a tour to Shio no Misaki, the southernmost promontory of the
Kii Peninsula, to greet the fi rst sun of our (common calendar) New Year, on
January 1. Again, there was a throng of people who had come to watch the fi rst
rising of the sun.
During my year at Kyoto, I had many other occasions to see the close interre-
lation between ancient Japanese myth and current rituals, performed by suppos-
edly irreligious (m ushinkyō ) modern citizens. Observing them rekindled my
long-standing interest in the oldest Japanese mythological texts of the early eighth
century. I was especially interested in the myth of the delivery of the sun (see
§5.3.1). It is found in the oldest, originally oral text, the Kojiki, which was writt en
down by imperial order in 712 ce . Th e myth has a very close resemblance to the
Old Vedic one of the delivery of sunlight from a cave of the Dawn, Uṣas.
I had noticed that correlation a quarter of a century earlier, as a graduate stu-
dent, but I did not seriously pursue it as I then saw no solution as to the historical
Foreword ■ ix
relationship between both myths, at least not one according to the methods of
philology and historical linguistics that I was trained in. We were used to expla-
nations such as immigration, whereby certain tribes brought their language, reli-
gion, and rituals with them. Pouring over ancient Kashmiri birch bark manuscripts
and discussing the fi ne details of the migration process in the seminars of my late
teachers Paul Th ieme at Tübingen and Karl Hoff mann at Erlangen, and much
later F. B. J. Kuiper at Leiden, the patt ern of the “Aryan migration” was foremost
in our minds. Th at means the movement of Indo-Iranian (Ārya) tribes speaking
the language ancestral to both Old Iranian and Vedic, moving southward
from the steppes around the Ural Mountains. Even allowing for some migrations
from the continent into early Japan, however, the country is very distant from
India and Iran, and its language belongs to a completely diff erent linguistic
family. A close relationship seemed excluded.
Nevertheless, the impressions gained from my training and especially the
experience of rituals and living myths in Nepal and Japan encouraged me not to
forget my earlier observations and to follow up on the topic of the underlying
myths from time to time, over the next decades, even though I did not publish
anything on this problem. Th is book, thus, has slumbered in my cabinet for
many long years.
■ ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF LAURASIAN MYTHOLOGY
As mentioned, the fi rst beginnings of the present study go back some 40 years.
As a graduate student I noticed a number of surprising correspondences bet-
ween the oldest Indian myths of the Ṛgveda (c. 1000 bce ) and those of Old
Japan (writt en down in 712/720 c e ). But I did not follow up on this topic for the
simple reason that connections between India and Japan, via Buddhism, were
established only in the mid–fi rst millennium c e . By then, it was too late for any
transmission of archaic, long-lost Vedic Indian traits. I concluded that, somehow,
common origin, a long-range relationship, may have been the source of such
similarities, but I could not explain how and thus left the question open. It sur-
faced again when I noticed many similarities between major Eurasian mythol-
ogies in the early eighties, while I was working on rebirth and cosmogony and
the Milky Way, 1 but again I did not pursue it in detail, though I thought that
common origin in southern Siberia was possible.
However, during a year-long blissful stay, in 1989–90, at the Institute for
Research in Humanities (Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyujo) of Kyoto University,
I could make many observations of living Japanese myths and rituals that were
fruitful in thinking about their roots. Th is was greatly helped by earlier observa-
tions of living South Asian myths and rituals, made during my long stay in Nepal
(1972–78), which I combined with studies of the most archaic Indian texts, the
Vedas. Returning to Europe aft er this long stay, I saw many “Christian” rituals
and local myths in a completely diff erent light: in many cases, it was relatively