Fortuitously, the urge to learn from some myths has surged within me. In an age where rulers of the world seek trophies of human history—Bush sought to conquer cradle of civilization, the Levant; Putin is now invading the birthplains of the Proto-Indo-European culture, the homeland of the Aryans; Soviets and Americans tried and failed to possess Afghanistan, the royal stag of mountains—perhaps my interest in ancient cultures of Eurasia is quite timely. Who knows the depths behind the motives of rulers?

In my searching, I will take some footnotes, for myself and for others. Mostly to summarize and record interesting areas of mythology and history.

A (somewhat) quick aside on the importance of mythology. Our behavior comes from our mind-body complex (which for convenience and historical efficiency I call a “soul” or a “life”), and myths are among the most direct means to understanding, accessing, and altering the structure of our souls, especially when we’re looking at broad strokes of humankind. It is much easier to address a wide audience through a mythic story than a personal narrative. I do not buy into the empiricism of many, in which actions are real and myths/stories/dreams are not real. My mother, for one, told me growing up that my dreams were not real. Whenever I’d have a nightmare as a young child and looked to her for consolation, she would assert “It’s not real.” The problem with that line of thinking is that dreams are in fact real. Dreams portray what is real to an individual person. Yes, they’re internal realities, but they are often the imaginative recombinations of what affects us outside in waking life. Dreams are what we gather from the day and sort through at night. Such are myths and stories of any kind. Rather than being unreal for being stories, they can be super-real for connecting many parts of life together.

This is a good way of onboarding people into the importance of spirituality and fiction. Some people run to religion or fantasy as an escape from the empirical world. That’s not what I’m advocating here. I’m advocating a turn to mythology as a way to access reality better than going through day-to-day life without reflecting on it. Spirituality is not the realm of the unnatural, the immaterial. Spirituality is the realm of the meta-natural, the meta-material. This is the truest meaning of “supernatural.” Supernatural should not be used to mean that which is not physical, but rather that which is beyond a moment-to-moment depiction of nature. Along these lines, supernatural can be used to refer to what is beyond perception, but in this context, I want to focus on super-natural as a word for a heightened experience of the world, a rich, reflective experience of life. In this manner, a powerful meaning of the word “spirit” becomes apparent. Rather than existing in some other realm, “spirits” can be understood as the entities that exist diffusely in our world, spread out across moments in time and points in space. Spirits are patterns that seem to exist on their own right. Spirits have gravity in the world like themes do in a story. Spirits are characteristic features of life that have a weight of meaning which is hard-to-remove.

Interestingly, there is something powerful about the etymology of words. Sometimes nearly identical words with identical meanings pop up in totally distinct languages/people groups, called false cognates. I think that the form of a word itself can connect concepts related by means of etymology. Just the other day, my girlfriend connected baleen whales to mystics without realizing that baleen whales are given the taxa name mysticeti. For me, that strikes me as too strong a correlation to be mere coincidence.

And so now I will begin documenting the spirit world in myths. I’ll be beginning with Mesopotamian myths and maybe some tie-ins to Judaism, the Greek pantheon, and others.


St Patrick’s Day
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