The Myths
... a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil …
There was no letter for Sophie the next morning. All through the interminable
day at school she was bored stiff. She took care to be extra nice to Joanna during the
breaks. On the way home they talked about going camping as soon as the woods were
dry enough.
After what seemed an eternity she was once again at the mailbox. First she
opened a letter postmarked in Mexico. It was from her father. He wrote about how
much he was longing for home and how for the first time he had managed to beat the
Chief Officer at chess. Apart from that he had almost finished the pile of books he had
brought aboard with him after his winter leave.
And then, there it was—a brown envelope with her name on it! Leaving her
schoolbag and the rest of the mail in the house, Sophie ran to the den. She pulled out
the new typewritten pages and began to read:
THE MYTHOLOGICAL WORLD PICTURE
Hello there, Sophie! We have a lot to do, so we’ll get started without
delay.
By philosophy we mean the completely new way of thinking that evolved
in Greece about six hundred years before the birth of Christ. Until that time
people had found answers to all their questions in various religions. These
religious explanations were handed down from generation to generation in the
form of myths. A myth is a story about the gods which sets out to explain why
life is as it is.
Over the millennia a wild profusion of mythological explanations of
philosophical questions spread across the world. The Greek philosophers
attempted to prove that these explanations were not to be trusted.
In order to understand how the early philosophers thought, we have to
understand what it was like to have a mythological picture of the world. We
can take some Nordic myths as examples. (There is no need to carry coals to
Newcastle.)
You have probably heard of Thor and his hammer. Before Christianity
came to Norway, people believed that Thor rode across the sky in a chariot
drawn by two goats. When he swung his hammer it made thunder and
lightning. The word “thunder” in Norwegian—“Thor-d0n”—means Thor’s roar.
In Swedish, the word for thunder is “aska,” originally “as-aka,” which means
“god’s journey” over the heavens.
When there is thunder and lightning there is also rain, which was vital to
the Viking farmers. So Thor was worshipped as the god of fertility.
The mythological explanation for rain was therefore that Thor was
swinging his hammer. And when it rained the corn germinated and thrived in
the fields.
How the plants of the field could grow and yield crops was not
understood. But it was clearly somehow connected with the rain. And since
everybody believed that the rain had something to do with Thor, he was one
of the most important of the Norse gods.
There was another reason why Thor was important, a reason related to
the entire world order.