Myths and legends have always fascinated me. Throughout history people everywhere have used stories to explain the events that happened around them. As a child I loved all the fairy tales and myths from different cultures. They were always filled with crazy situations, magic and some kind of lesson to be learned.
I've never lost my love of stories and as an adult I started to realize that all of history is really just a story we've told ourselves. Each event in history looks different depending on who is telling the story. For example, lets say we're telling the story of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In America we talk about the brave men who stood up to a tyrannical government. But imagine we were in England at the time, we would tell of the traitors and terrorists who were using guerrilla warfare and killing our loved ones overseas, and the convoluted manifesto they had signed. So history is much more subjective than we are led to believe.
This brought me back to the myths and legends, could these be ways that people told history? That through many different retelling's the stories had become more fantastic? Maybe, so I'm going back and trying to see if I can figure out what sparked the stories our predecessors told.
Recently a friend of mine told me a story of how mosquitoes came to be and why bears attack humans.
Long ago people and bears could speak to one another. They were two tribes occupying the same land and they had a pact that neither one would kill the other. For a long time there was peace. Then one year the rain didn't fall, the plants didn't grow and the animals that both tribes depended on for food became scarce. Everyone was hungry and members of both tribes were dying.
One day several of the men of the human tribe were out looking for food when they came across a bear. They were very hungry and hadn't eaten anything in days and the bear, even though they were friends, looked like food to the men. So they decided to kill the bear so they wouldn't starve. They skinned the bear and started a fire to cook the meat. But no sooner had they placed the carcass on the fire that the whole thing turned to ash. The wind blew the ash into the air and the ash turned into mosquitoes.
Now people and bears no longer speak to one another and bears will attack humans. As punishment for breaking the pact, mosquitoes were born to feed on us as we tried to feed on the bear.
At first look this story seems to be largely fictional. I mean, since when could we speak to bears and there is no logical way for mosquitoes to rise from ashes. But let's suspend our disbelief for a moment and look a little closer. Imagine that you were living in a tribe long ago and you had seen bears but they hadn't bothered you or your people and you stayed away from them. Then a famine struck and some of your tribe killed a bear and brought it back so your people wouldn't starve. Then bears started to attack the people of your tribe. There may not have been a literal pact but starving animals (including humans) do things they wouldn't normally do to survive. Prior to the famine bears didn't need to eat humans as they had plenty of food, but when they ran out, both the bears and your tribe had to turn to another source, each other. Perhaps once the rain started to fall and the famine ended the moist ground brought with it more mosquitoes than you had remembered. So, as you pass on the story of the famine to your children and they in turn pass it on to theirs, it's easy to see how this legend could have come about.
All history is, is a collection of stories about the past, and it's our job to keep telling them and passing them on so future generations can learn from them and adapt. We too should learn from the stories we are told so that we don't repeat the mistakes and failures of our ancestors. On the other side, we should also take hold of the lessons from history that speak of our predecessors successes so that we can also succeed as a people. History is important, whether it comes in the form of a myth or a text book, there is always something to be gained from it.
