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PARALLEL MYTHS Stories, Folktales, Folklore, Fairy Tales, Legends, Myths, History, Nursery Rhymes, Fantasy & Facts Scroll down or click on your choice below: • SOS-Searching Out Stories/Info - Parallel Myths Advice, Comments and References from Storytellers, Teachers and Librarians

SOS - SEARCHING OUT STORIES AND INFORMATION - PARALLEL MYTHS
Advice, Comments and References from Storytellers, Teachers and Librarians
(excerpts from Storytell posts plus original research)

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1) You need to start reading Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, David Leeming and James Hillman among others. This is an entire field of study in the disciplines of both Mythology and Depth Psychology. David Leeming has several books of myths which compare them as categorized by various symbolic motifs such as the Hero's Journey, Creation Stories, Flood stories, Animals as Mentor stories, et al. Another couple of books you might find helpful are: Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman and Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton Mack. Also, you might want to read anything by Maureen Murdock and Jane Shinoda Bolen. In Who Wrote the Bible?, Friedman presents a fascinating phrase-by-phrase analysis of the two versions of the flood story which appear side by side in Genesis, although rarely noticed by most bible readers. Most bible readers also do not notice two contradictory versions of creation in the first three chapters of Genesis. If you read The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics), the world's oldest myth that we know of, from 3rd millenium BC clay tablets, you'll find the exact same story as appears in the 1st millenium BC Genesis. Gilgamesh's ark captain Utanapishtim has become Noah in the ensuing two thousand years.

I've used Bierlein's Parallel Myths in my college mythology course and I like it very much. The stories are complete and compared very well. If you read Joseph Campbell (The Hero WithaThousand Faces, The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God, Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology and The Masks of God, Vol. 4: Creative Mythology) you would get a sense of the patterns of mythological stories and you'd soon be able to see the similarities for yourself as you collect stories.

Alexander Eliot's The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others (Meridian) is okay. I've tried to use it in my course, but the students don't find it very readable (which may say more about the students than the book), but I would still go to David Leeming's The World of Myth: An Anthology. Another excellent collection recently reissued is Padraic Colum's Great Myths of the World (Dover Books on Anthropology and Folklore), although unlike Leeming and Campbell, Murdock and others, Colum does not offer any discussion. Colum also has done a series of wonderful books of myths for children.


2) Jo Sherman's books:
Jewish-American Folklore (American Folklore Series)
Rachel The Clever (American Storytelling)
Once Upon a Galaxy (American Storytelling): fantasy, SF and folklore/mythology
Trickster Tales (World Storytelling): 40 from around the world
Merlin's Kin: World Tales of the Heroic Magician (World Storytelling from August House): World Tales of the Hero Magician
Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood (American Storytelling).

Especially Jo's Once Upon a Galaxy -- which has a number of great comparisons. I remember especially the parallels to the Moses story.


3) Most of Joseph Campbell's work is based on finding the similarities between different myths and cosmologies etc. He's written umpteen books, so take your pick. And many later writers have picked up on the Jungian analytical path and written books finding parallels in myths, following Campbell's example. Alwyn and Brynley Rees wrote Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales which briefly goes into some of the identical parallels between the old Vedic myths and Irish myths, even down to identically named characters doing identical things. Some say that the Celts originated in India, and there is certainly a strong Indo-European thread running through stories across half the world between the two lands. Frazer, who wrote The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions (Oxford Worlds Classics) also brought out a book called Folk-lore in the Old Testament (it might even be an extract from the full Golden Bough) which examines folkloric origins of the stories.

If you want to delve deeply into the whys and wherefores, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, by de Santillana and von Dechend, explores a great many parallels of a particular myth and related stories using parallel cosmological symbols. It is a staggering work, and of great insight though somewhat veiled. It goes much deeper than the standard Jungian ideas of symbols in the collective unconscious producing similar stories. Not that it gives all the answers.

Middle Eastern Mythology by SH Hooke is a useful book. For instance it gives blow by blow parallels of the biblical Flood myth in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Yahwist and Priestly accounts - the latter two being specific ancient writers. In general there are lots of parallels in ancient middle eastern mythologies.

More precisely, the Yahwist and Priestly accounts are different Biblical writers whose works have been identified as among the sources for Genesis (and other books of the Pentateuch?). Scholars have gone to great lengths disassembling the Biblical text to reconstruct the separate strands -notably, the Yahwist writer (J) refers to God as YHWH, and the Eloist (E) as Elohim. Some internal contradictions in e.g. the Flood Story can now be seen as coming from different versions; whether this is a problem depends on whether you see the Bible as History, Plagiarism or Story. (But it does show a disadvantage of reading multiple versions of the same story, then making your own)There was certainly a common heritage of myths in the Middle East, including Hittite ideas reaching the Greeks (particularly Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (Oxford World's Classics)). It's also worth looking at the differences as well as the parallels.


4) Parallel Myths by J.F. Bierlein, 1994. The blurb reads: "A fascinating look at the common threads woven through the world's greatest myths—and the central role they have played through time."


5) The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others (Meridian) by Alexander Eliot with contributions by Joseph Campbell & Mircea Eliade. Quote from The Washington Post: "The myths of all nations, beautifully retold... suggestive and stimulating."


6) Alan Dundes (at UC Berkeley) has edited a number of comparison books including The Flood Myth, 1988, which compares the flood myths all over the world.


Created 2003; last update 2/14/10