We all have the experience of confusing the events of a holiday one year ago with those of the same holiday several years ago. When this happens, I realize how very old stories get mixed up, and how one character in such a story can represent many individuals who lived in different time periods.
A long time ago, people were much more prone to confusion of this type. They thought differently from the way we think today. To illustrate my point, I will take as examples two ancient cultures which have very old stories. Although they were closely related, and similar in many ways, I will show you how very different they were in their understanding of a fundamental concept –the passage of time. One culture had been isolated for a long time and retained its ancient ways, while the other had been forced to adapt to a changing environment, and was much more like our own.
The two cultures belonged to the Faan and the Athenians who lived in Britain and Ireland respectively, and their stories come from the fourth and fifth millennia B.C. The Faan had no chronology, and at first sight their entire surviving mythology looks as if it took place in one lifetime. They had no concept of duration, only of sequence. However, the mythology of the Athenians mentions the passage of years. While I suspect that their information is misleading, it does give the reader some idea of longer and shorter durations between events.
The clue to the difference between these two cultures is as follows: The Faan had spread across northern Europe (south of the Baltic, that is) in peace and tranquility. There had been lots of room, I suppose. The Athenians arrived when the Faan were already established as a poky, insular culture. And by this time they themselves were established as a culture of people who had fought hard for their place on the Mediterranean seaboard, which had recently become somewhat overpopulated.
To summarize the difference between the two, the Athenians compared themselves to others and the Faan did not. In consequence, Athenian heroes were very different from Faan heroes. As time went on they were seen as godlike, so that their courage would be emulated by a people intent upon holding their own. The Faan had no time for such things. They were far less interested in glorifying the heroes of a crisis than in finding out what had disrupted their perfect peace in the first place, for they were strangers to this type of situation. In one case they even downplayed a war in order to establish peace with their former foe. While the Athenians retold the story of that war in detail, portraying the enemy as inexcusably unjust and predatory, the Faan barely devoted a sentence to the matter and declared that peace had been arranged as if there had been only a petty dispute. While the Athenians proudly traced their descent from Noah, the Faan seem to have forgotten it.
But the Athenians still held something in common with the Faan, something which has become lost in our complex society. A hero did not seek to be identified as such, and his or her glorious deeds were subsumed under an archetype. They became the latest among the accumulated glorious deeds attributed to that figure. In a small society the individual did not lack for praise and reward, and did not even consider submitting his or her name for special mention. And in the struggle for survival, it was enough that the deeds had been done, for they brought about their own reward. The ancients were still tapped into a great truth which we have forgotten: the deed is more important than the identity of the doer. Would that we could understand this truth as they did. For while we have gained much understanding since their time, we have lost some as well.
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