Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
113. Exploring the Scientific Truths in Ancient Myths: Dr. Adrienne Mayor (Renowned Historian and Folklorist)
Have you ever wondered if the ancient tales of legendary creatures might have a hint of scientific truth? Dr. Adrienne Mayor, a renowned historian and folklorist, takes us on a riveting journey to uncover the possible inspirations for these mythical beasts.
But the adventure doesn't stop there. We venture further down the rabbit hole, examining how the tales we tell today predict the future we create tomorrow.
Topics:
- The scientific basis of legendary creatures
- Repeating motifs in folklore beasts
- How fiction influences future technologies
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Adrienne Mayor’s books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, and The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities (all Princeton). She is a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford University.
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Well, welcome Professor Mayer to the interview. Thank you so much for coming on.
Adrienne Mayor:Thank you for having me.
Taylor Bledsoe:Thank you. So you are a historian and folklorist and you study basically how the origins of myth, the scientific origins and what you think influenced how these myths were created, right, and is that a good way to represent your work? Yeah, well, great. So the thing that I found fascinating about it is, whenever you read about classical mythology and some of the other myths, you always wonder are these things that the cultures believe, or these things almost like bigfoot in our society, things that some people believe but the vast majority is questioning? So do you know what the relationship between these myths and their societies are?
Adrienne Mayor:That's a really fascinating question and I can tell you there are classical scholars who work on that very question and of course we don't really know, because so much literature and art from classical antiquity has been lost. I mean, we only have what tip of the iceberg, things that have survived, texts that have survived, and it's random whether or not they survived or not and it even the art which can really help us understand what people believed in or what kind of stories they like to listen to. Even that is really patchy and random. A curator of ancient vase paintings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles once told me that of the thousands of vase paintings that have survived that we have beautiful vase paintings of mythology, and he said that represents about 1% of what really existed in antiquity. So you can see the problem in figuring out what people really believed. I know there is a book. Actually I can't think of the author's name right now, but it the title of the book is did the ancient Greeks believe their myths? So we don't really know, but this guy has written an entire book on that topic, if you want to look further into that. We just don't really know.
Adrienne Mayor:I really am interested in mythology because I think it I'm more interested. Actually I should go back mythology about gods. I'm in antiquity. I'm not that interested in what I'm really interested in our legends and things that don't actually include the gods but actually talk about mysterious things in nature or things that seem like they could be true or have a little germ of truth or a little nugget of truth. That's what I'm always looking for just ferreting out Just sort of kernels of reality that are embedded in legends and popular folklore from antiquity, the myths all about gods and gods and demigods and heroes. That's not really as interesting to me because I don't really know whether people believed in the gods or not. I know they did the rituals. As a lot of people practice their religion today, it's the rituals that are most important. But I'm really interested in legends and popular folklore about nature, especially because I think those things would be perpetuated if people could see and touch something that seemed real to them, that confirm those stories. So that's actually what I'm mostly interested in.
Taylor Bledsoe:So then, let's get into that a little bit more. What are some of the origin? What are some of these legends? And then what are some of the origins that you've looked into? The one that your books named after that I read for this are the flying snakes and the Griffin claws. So I guess let's just start there.
Adrienne Mayor:Well, flying snakes has always fascinated me because it was first written about flying snakes, winged serpents, supposedly in Egypt or in the area bordered between Sinai Desert and Egypt. So Arabia, ancient Arabia, and Herodotus is the first to have written about this in the 5th century BC, so about 470 BC, 2,500 years ago. He actually traveled around the Mediterranean and went to Egypt and he was a really curious guy and he pestered priests and storytellers and elders and ordinary people about the folklore that he heard in all the various places he went to. And so he says in his book which I'll talk about later because you're going to ask me about what books influenced me and I love Herodotus he was so curious he said in his writings I went to Egypt and I went to specifically inquire about the flying snakes of Arabia, and so he actually went to a temple where he heard that was dedicated to a goddess of flying cobras. But he also wanted to find out if there were really flying snakes in Arabia. These snakes were supposed to hang out or be around the Frankincense bushes where people gathered Frankincense, which was a really costly, precious incense that only came from these certain trees in Arabia. So he was investigating the story. Were there really flying snakes around these trees, and one possible explanation is that the people who gathered the precious Frankincense maybe they made up that story just to keep people away from this really precious resource that they were in charge of. So there is that, but Herodotus' description of the flying snakes that he heard from various people in Egypt and the Sinai Desert. It's so detailed that I felt that this is a folklore about nature. That must have something real to it.
Adrienne Mayor:What could the flying snakes be? Some people have suggested that it was a kind of insect, really large, maybe a very large dragonflies. Herodotus says that as they migrated through Egypt, these flocks of ibis birds large water birds would actually eat these flying snakes. So that's a suggestion that it could be something like a dragonfly or insect or maybe some kind of snake. There are flying snakes in the other parts of the world, in the tropics, in Asia, but those don't exist anywhere in the desert. So unless there was some species of flying snake with a membrane, wings that we don't even know about, then it's probably not a living flying snake.
Adrienne Mayor:On the other hand, herodotus told us he was taken to a valley or a sort of gorge where he saw heaps and heaps of the bones, of remains, the skeletons of flying snakes. So what could that be? Is it some kind of fossil that he saw? Or was it maybe washed up by these lakes that would recede and then wax and wane over time and they would wash up skeletons of something that looked like flying snakes? So I don't want to have a spoiler for that chapter, but I think I propose about six or seven different ideas for what those snakes with wings could have been, and we'll never know for sure. And the other thing about my research is, I'll never know for sure. It's always circumstantial evidence, but some of it can be pretty convincing.
Taylor Bledsoe:So yeah, that's very interesting. I'm curious so when you're researching these ancient animals and these ancient, the other ancient creatures in biology that people have discussed, where do you draw the line between okay, maybe this existed, but they're extinct and that's why we don't see them today, and then maybe these are just takes on other animals? So how do you determine that in your research?
Adrienne Mayor:Well, one of the fantastic or fabulous creatures that I have researched is the ancient griffin, which I'm sure everybody knows what a griffin looks like now, since Harry Potter and various other griffins appear a lot these days. But in antiquity people believe that it was a real animal and that it had four legs. But four legs are like a lion or a wolf or something like a mammal, a quadruped but its head was like that of a raptor, an eagle or a vulture or some kind of raptor with a beak. So when I first started researching that I I found out that there is no myth about griffons. So that's one reason what I said earlier I'm not as interested in the official myths of antiquity, more interested in the folklore and the legends, and griffons were legendary, not part of myth. There is no myth about griffons, but there are lots and lots of griffons in ancient Greek art and they're always shown with four legs and a beak, sometimes wings and weird formations on the back of their necks.
Adrienne Mayor:They were said to live in the far, remote lands of Asia and that they made their nests on the ground and that they laid their eggs on the ground like a ground bird, but not like a mammal, because mammals, of course, have live birth, and that we even have some art that shows mother griffons with baby griffons. We have some art that shows griffons guarding their nest filled with golden eggs, and in the legends, griffons were said to guard or defend or be around the area where the nomads of Asia would gather gold, and that they were supposedly protecting those lands. So once again, it could be stories told by the nomads who gathered the gold. Right, they may be made up these stories just to keep people away from their precious resource. But the fact that the details we have, all these details that there are nests with eggs and that they guarded their nests with babies and that sometimes that you would come across them.
Adrienne Mayor:But one thing that made me believe in the story is that, first of all, no myths about them. It's legends about a faraway land and the kind of fauna that we live in that land. Also, all the details about their nests on the ground with eggs. And no one ever claimed. Over a thousand years of writing about griffons Greek and Roman authors no one ever claimed to see a live one. So that made me think. Is there some kind of evidence that made people believe in it, even though no one ever saw a live one, and I started thinking four legs and a beak. What living animals has four legs and a beak? Can you think of what? Taylor?
Taylor Bledsoe:There. I mean I would assume they're dinosaurs throughout all of the yeah Right once living right, but any living animal today that they might have seen?
Adrienne Mayor:no, the only thing I could come up with as a turtle. But a turtle has four legs, right, a kind of beak-like face, but that doesn't fit the griffon, right? These are supposed to be very fierce animals that preyed on stags and horses and humans. So it's not a turtle. So that just, I had the same impulse that you did. Maybe a dinosaur, because you can think of lots of dinosaurs that you've seen in natural history museums, that four legs and they have beaks, because they combine the features of a bird and a mammal in. But these things all went extinct 65 million years ago, except for birds, which still exist. They are dinosaurs and they have a beak, but they don't have four legs.
Adrienne Mayor:So I focused on dinosaurs. So that's basically how I sort of winnow it down to what could possibly be real about this story. And if people came across dinosaur skeletons in that area where those nomads were looking for gold, that might explain the evidence. That would keep the story perpetuating.
Adrienne Mayor:And sure enough, I found out that in the region where the ancient Greeks and Romans said that ancient prospectors for gold came across dinosaurs, that was a vast nesting ground of dinosaurs with beaks and four legs and they make their nests on the ground and they lay their eggs in the nests and you can find the nests there too.
Adrienne Mayor:In fact, paleontologists have told me you cannot walk through that area without coming across nests with petrified eggs and even hatching babies, and they're some of the most exquisitely preserved dinosaur skeletons in the world. So they're fully articulated and they erode out of the cliffs there, usually the beak first and then the rest of the skeleton, and some of them are standing up. So you can just imagine how eerie that would be for prospectors going through that area and early travelers. I think that's the evidence that kept the story going, and we don't know which came first the story of an animal with four legs and a head like a bird, because you can see those in ancient art, but we don't know the stories which came first the, the image and the idea of something that was a hybrid, or the observation of fossils. Never know which came first, but I think they might be related in some way, kind of a feedback loop.
Taylor Bledsoe:Yeah, that's, that's very fascinating. Have any of these Stories come to influence, influence us today and how we think about the world and how we think about new discoveries? I don't know if you've researched that, but it's kind of interesting because if you think about some of these ideas that have Gone throughout our cultures and the closest one now obviously this is not a fair comparison but Star Trek, and then how we kind of develop technologies around what we saw there, have any of these myths Influenced the ways we have innovated or the way we have thought about animals? I'm not sure.
Adrienne Mayor:It's the way we think about animals. But in a pre my previous book was called gods and robots and it was about ancient automatons and we have actually ancient Greek myths and stories about automatons and those in those ways of imagining making artificial life and and animated statues in mythology. It was really shocking to most people to to realize that people could imagine things like that. Building things like that with, with technology was built by the god of technology, prometheus and Hephaestus, who are the gods of innovation and technology, and yet they were mad. People in antiquity were imagining these things Long before the technology to make anything like that existed. But in antiquity, after those myths had circulated for Centuries or millennia, they began building Automated statues that could raise their arms, close their eyes, open their mouths, even make sounds move. They were inventing those things as early as the fourth and third century BC.
Adrienne Mayor:So many people have said where imagination, if you think of these Myths about automatons as the first science fiction stories. Many people have said where science fiction Leads, technology often follows. So I think that in the case of I mean we're not talking about my most recent book, about me, but the book before that was really did have that feature that you, that you just brought up, that it has affected. It affects technology later. So by the Middle Ages, people were making clockwork mechanisms and real robots and they were influenced by the ancient stories, ancient myths and even artistic base paintings of of the first robots in myth. So I think that I think it's very true that If you imagine Ancient science fiction in those myths, that really has affected how, how people have Tried to imitate nature, improve a nature and then even surpass nature. So it doesn't apply to, I think, how we think of animals. So much Thanks. But it certainly does for technology like Automation and AI.
Taylor Bledsoe:Yeah, the other. The last question I had before you wrap up is Sometimes throughout cultures you see these similar motifs of folklore and Legends, that kind of go around. So you have stories about dragons and you have stories about all different kinds of creatures that might have existed. How do you do you explain these? By saying that there are, that they discovered bones of dinosaurs that they thought were similar, or what do you guys, what do researchers in your area Say about these similar myths and these motifs?
Adrienne Mayor:and especially one. One Really outstanding example of that is dragon myths, and dragons are always like the sort of hybrid composite creature of many, many, many different living animals like birds, fish, sea creatures, land creatures, even insects a composite of that, and in some places, like in China, people can actually you can find links between Fossils that are found in China, fossils that are found in China, and you know of long extinct creatures and the way they drew dragons. But there are also dragon stories in places where there are no conspicuous fossils. So we don't wanna put down the storytelling imagination right.
Adrienne Mayor:Anyone can come up with a composite creature or monster just by a mishmash of all kinds of features of living creatures that you know about, and then you add some imaginary stuff too. So there are dragons around the world, stories that go back millennia of dragons, and sometimes you can say that discoveries of fossils perplexing fossils of creatures you've never seen, with bizarre features those might serve to influence or perpetuate the belief seem to confirm a belief in dragons. On the other hand, in places where there are no fossils, those stories are perpetuated. So I think that stories about dragons and monsters just arise in the storytelling imagination all around the world, in cultures throughout time and place. They don't always have to be influenced or inspired by my fossils. We have great imaginations that we always have so I think that fossils might help confirm the story, but you don't need that confirmation to keep telling the story.
Taylor Bledsoe:So, wrapping up here with the last two questions we ask all of our guests, the first one is what books have had an impact on you.
Adrienne Mayor:Well, it's a time on classical oriented person, I'm really interested in antiquity. So I have to say that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are really influential to me and I think that's those are two stories that you can read over and over again throughout your life. You'll always find something new in it. Some people read the Iliad for the great war stories and it has fabulous war stories but also people notice that when they read it like the third or fourth time, that Homer is really it's sort of an anti-war treatise about how awful war is for all generations, that you know she was talking before the parents, that kind of thing. So you always find something new in Homer.
Adrienne Mayor:And I mentioned Herodotus, my favorite author from antiquity. He's just sort of one of my heroes and guides in writing because he was just insatiably curious Greek historian. He traveled to exotic lands, interviewed local people. He was like the first anthropologist. He was always curious and he asked people about their histories, their languages, their customs. Then he would bring the stories back to Athens and we have evidence that he actually would read them out loud to the Athenians. And in the writings. When you read Herodotus, he sometimes ends a chapter by saying well, that's enough about that and you know that he's. You know it's almost like he's saying go ahead, ask me some more questions. So you know that they started as oral stories and he kept an open mind and he was often skeptical, but he could never let a good story go and I feel like that's a great model for me. So I really love Herodotus.
Taylor Bledsoe:Yeah, I haven't read any Herodotus, but we read the Iliad this year for school. Oh, yeah, it was very interesting because it was surprisingly readable. I thought it would be. I didn't know what I was thinking it was going to be, but I was surprised by how readable it was. I don't think a lot of people expect that with ancient works.
Adrienne Mayor:It depends on if you have an old translation or a new translation, and some of the new translations are really accessible and make it really readable. It's really fun to read it out loud too, and, as I say, there are so many stories there and you can take so many different messages from them. Besides just being good stories, they also have things that are just really significant and important, and that's why it's been perpetuated until now over the millennia.
Taylor Bledsoe:It's. They're all very interesting. And wrapping up now with our last question what advice do you have for teenagers?
Adrienne Mayor:Well, I guess I would say read. I think reading is one of the most important things you can rely on throughout your whole life. And as a child I lived in South Dakota and I could not wait until Fridays, when the book mobile it was like a van with books in it that would come to my little town and I would take out as many books as I could. We were allowed three and finally they let me take out five every week and reading just saved my life because you'll never really be lonely and there are adventures just between the covers of a book. So I would say read, and it doesn't matter if you're a slow reader or a fast reader, it doesn't matter what you read. I mean read poems, nonfiction, fiction, comic books, anything. If you can read, you will have adventures and escape whenever you need it. So that's my advice.
Taylor Bledsoe:Well, thank you so much, Professor Mayer, for coming on the podcast. I've really enjoyed our discussion. Thank you so much.
