"From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go-and what might we find? I read George Eliot's "Middlemarch," sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation."
"Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me-except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot's grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation-a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus,"
Field research in remote regions combines ethnography with comparative linguistics, archaeology, and folklore to reconstruct lost myths and infer prehistoric religious ideas. Fictional exemplars warn against grand unifying schemes that ignore linguistic and cultural complexity and against theoretical overreach. Reconstructive work confronts fragmentary evidence, cultural diversity, and interpretive bias, requiring multilingual scholarship, methodological rigor, and humility about limits of inference. Empirical corroboration from local testimony and material remains can strengthen linguistic and comparative hypotheses. The aim is to reveal shared motifs and continuities across societies while avoiding forced single-source explanations and acknowledging persistent uncertainty.
Read at The New Yorker
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