Is There Truth Behind the Myth? The Field of Geomythology

Timothy J. Burbery

Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, human-eating birds, and “fire devils” from the sky—such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional. Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. In turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the discovery of bizarre animal bones.

Throughout history, there have been many famous battles and wars in which, for hours, days, months, even years, neither side was able to gain the upper hand. Among those are the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Battle of Verdun (in World War I), the Battle of Waterloo, and the Siege of Leningrad (in World War II). Yet before these events, there was the Titanomachy. The mother of all stalemated conflicts, it featured the upstart Olympians against their forebears: the Titans. It dragged on for ten years, with no clear victor. Finally, Zeus, the All-Father, enlisted the help of the Cyclopes and the so-called “Hundred-handers” (Greek: Gyges), springing both groups from Tartarus where they had been imprisoned by their father, Uranus. When the two armies readied for battle yet again, the Gyges were holding massive rocks in their many hands—and Zeus was packing Cyclopean lightning and thunder.

However, the Titans had not been idle during the hiatus. On the contrary: they had mustered into ranks and left their home base of Mt. Othrys to penetrate deep into Olympian territory. Their progress climaxed with a furious charge up Mt. Olympus. At this point, the clashing of the armies became so intense that the mountain itself was shaken. Desperate to repel the attackers, Zeus initiated a furious counter-charge, surging forward with his lightning and bolts. With this bold move, the Olympians finally gained the upper hand and soon routed the Titans. The vanquished gods were banished to Tartarus, with the exception of Atlas, who was sentenced to hold up the sky for eternity. Never again would they rise from this ignominious defeat.

This thrilling tale is one of the oldest in western culture. It has been recounted down through the centuries, beginning with Hesiod, whose epic poem Theogony (“The birth of the gods”), was written around 730–700 B.C., and, most recently, by young adult novelist Rick Riordan. His version of the war, The Battle of the Labyrinth, was published in 2008.

Of course, unlike Vietnam, Korea, Verdun, Waterloo, Leningrad, or any number of other real-world, protracted wars, the Titanomachy is the stuff of pure legend, without a trace of factuality.

Or is it?

The field of geomythology, which blends insights from geology and mythology, suggests that, in fact, there may be some truth to the tale. Geomythology sheds light on many other fables and stories as well and shows how they often contain striking pre-scientific intuitions. These include many iconic narratives such as Odysseus and the Cyclopes, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and the fall of Troy, as well as equally rich Aboriginal and Native American legends.

As for Zeus and the Titans, while it is true that they never existed, the conflict between them may have been inspired by a real-life, extremely violent natural event, that is, the eruption of the volcano Thera, which occurred in or around 1628 B.C. on the Greek archipelago of Santorini. The event was truly epic: the eruption probably reached a measure of 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), the volcanic equivalent of the Richter Scale, which is used to categorize earthquakes. A 7 is classified as a “super-colossal” eruption; only a handful of explosions in history have been labelled as such. The largest officially recorded eruption in modern history, which occurred in 1815 when Mt. Tambora (Indonesia) blew its top, was also a 7 on the VEI. Thera released the energy of several hundred atom bombs in less than a second,¹ and its blast was of the Plinian variety. That is, it resembled the notorious eruption of Italy’s Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, an event described by Pliny the Elder. The Thera explosion was marked by massive columns of debris and was so cataclysmic it sent hot gasses through the troposphere (the first layer of earth’s atmosphere) into the next one, the stratosphere, which extends from 9 to 31 miles high. It also wreaked havoc on the small Greek island, fragmenting it into several smaller islands, and leaving a massive caldera, or cauldron-like depression, mostly submerged, where the island once stood.

A historian of geology, Mott Greene, argues that the main events in the Titan-Olympian war correspond closely to the phenomena of the Thera eruption. For instance, according to Hesiod, during the battle, the ground rumbled loudly, an effect that may correspond to the sounds often made by harmonic tremors, the small earthquakes that produce hums, or other sonic effects, just prior to an eruption. The impression of the shaking and groaning of the sky might have been inspired by the shock waves in the air created by this particular eruption, and Zeus’s charge could have been based on a combination of ignimbrites, which are rocks formed by ash cascading down a mountain,² and volcanic lightning.³ Unlike non volcanic lightning, which originates during thunderstorms, volcanic lightning is created by the “electrification of ash,” and “occurs in eruptive plumes,”⁴ particularly the type that are common in Plinian eruptions.

As geologist Stephen Marshak notes, “[n]o two eruptions are exactly alike,”⁵ and every active major volcano has what Greene calls an “eruptive signature”: a pattern of characteristics that enables scientists to distinguish this eruption from all others.⁶ In the case of Thera, its principal elements parallel the Titanomachy very closely. In a sense, then, there was a “Titanomachy” in ancient Greece long ago, if not between deities, then between contending natural elements.

A similar example, taken from a different mythology (Norse legend) is Ragnarök. The term, traditionally translated as “the twilight of the gods,” refers to a time in which the Norse deities—Thor, Odin, Loki, and others—are nearing their demise. This period culminates in a kind of Armageddon, in which the entire pantheon fights to the death in a civil war, the sun and moon are shrouded, and the world ends. Ragnarök is heralded by a time called Fimbulvetr (Old Norse for “terrible winter”), when extreme cold sets in and winter persists unbroken for three years.

Again, such scenarios might seem purely imaginary, and indeed well-known fantasy texts like Game of Thrones and the Narnian Chronicles feature periods of long, continuous winter. But once more, geomythology raises the possibility that the Norse legends and their modern successors preserve a modicum of truth. For as it happens, the seasons were, in fact, seemingly disrupted during the related extreme weather events of A.D. 535–36 and A.D. 539–40. Both episodes were probably caused by massive volcanic eruptions, which spewed tons of ash into the atmosphere, and blocked the sun for months, even years, plunging the Earth into volcanic winter. That trauma was recorded by contemporary historians, who noted widespread crop failure and unseasonably cold weather. The event is also indicated in tree-ring samples⁷ and ice-core data.⁸ In addition, it may have influenced the Norse tales, which circulated orally in pre-Christian Iceland (first settled in A.D. 874 by Norwegian explorers), and were then set down in writing in the 13th century.

Studying the ways legends and myths may contain nuggets of scientific truth is the prime activity of geomythology. The founder of this discipline, American geologist Dorothy Vitaliano (1916–2008), was a long-time faculty member at Indiana University. The idea of geomythology was sparked for her in 1961, when she read an article by seismologist A.G. Galanopolous. He argued that the Thera blast might be linked to the fable of Atlantis. In response, Vitaliano invented the term geomythology in 1966.

Defining Terms

To grasp the concept of geomythology, we should first note what it is not. Geologist Luigi Piccardi points out that the term has been used to mean “false ideas supposedly based on geological data.”⁹ Presumably notions such as the flat earth and geocentrism would fit in this category. By contrast, Piccardi and other practitioners of geomythology define it in terms of scientific truth. Its prefix, “geo-,” is a variation on Gaia, or Gaea, the Greek earth goddess (Tella, in the Roman pantheon), and appears in other hybrid scientific terms such as geography (literally, earth writing); geomatics (the storage and transmission of geographic information); geology (the study of the earth); and geohydrology (the study of groundwater), among others.

When used in geomythology, “geo” primarily refers to geological phenomena, particularly large-scale events like earthquakes and eruptions. Yet it is worth noting that today geology, or geoscience, approaches the study of the planet as a network. In fact, this paradigm is known as the Earth System, and it includes not only the geosphere (the rocks) and the atmosphere, but also, in the words of a widely-used geology textbook, “the hydrosphere (surface and near-surface liquid water), the cryosphere (surface and near-surface ice and snow), [and] the biosphere (the great variety of living organisms).”¹⁰ For this reason, geomythology can be applied not only to stories about well-known occurrences like eruptions, floods, and quakes, but also to events such as asteroids and comets, the formation of sinkholes, the digging up of strange animal bones, and many more.

The terms “myth” and “mythology” are harder to pin down. As Bruce Masse et al. note, “there is no universally accepted definition of the word [“myth”], nor is there a consensus view of its nature and how it should be studied.”¹¹ As for “mythology,” the Oxford English Dictionary, notes that the term can mean both “mythical stories, or traditional beliefs collectively” or “the study of myths.” Yet using the same word to explain both the thing itself as well as reflections on that thing is potentially confusing, a bit like using the term “sport” to denote both a game or contest as well as the running commentary on that game. A further complication is that “virtually all traditional knowledge keepers believe myths (and legends) to be historically true, whereas nearly all scientists presume they are not”¹² [my emphases].

There is a dizzying variety of theories on myth. For simplicity’s sake, we will consider four that have been influential in the 20th century. One is the psychoanalytic approach, derived from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and popularized by Joseph Campbell. In it, myths function as subconscious projections that manifest archetypally within cultures. For instance, in his well-known book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell sees a connection between frogs and dragons, the former being a smaller version of the latter. He then analyzes fables such as The Princess and the Frog, regarding them expressions of “that unconscious deep . . . wherein are hoarded all the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized . . . elements of existence.”¹³ Another is the sociological view of myth, set forth by Emile Durkheim in works such as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He contends that myths are invented by primitive societies “to establish genealogical relations between man and the totemic animal,”¹⁴ that is, the animal (such as a bear) worshipped by a given society. Here, myth serves a ritualistic function in helping to bind societies together. In contrast to geomythology, although this approach does include animals, “Durkheim rejected the notion that myth arises out of extraordinary manifestations of nature.”¹⁵

“Although geomythology’s main value might seem to lie in the sheer pleasure of the detective work of gleaning scientific data from old sources, the method has other uses as well.”

In this sense, Durkheim’s views are similar to the study of structuralism, as seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. As its name indicates, it concentrates primarily on the structure of myths and legends rather than its subject-matter. If myth in this view has any truth to it, that truth has to do, not with content, but with the relations of the mythic structures to one another. As literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes, structuralists might compare two myths, one about the sun, and one about the moon, for example, and would claim that “the meaning of each image is wholly a matter of . . . the relation of one to the other. The images do not have a ‘substantial’ meaning, only a ‘relational’ one.”¹⁶ Finally, we may note the historical or contextual approach. Its apparent link with history might seem to make it more congenial to geomythology. Yet, in fact, it does not consider the possible history that might have inspired a given myth, but rather the contexts, or “the impact of the social and historical environment in which the myth is told”¹⁷ [my emphasis]. For example, folklorist Laurie Honko deploys this theory when she considers whether a Finnish cosmogonic myth (one about the creation of the world) remains a myth when it is part of a ballad that is recited by young girls, as part of a ritual dance.¹⁸

These four approaches have been updated and fleshed out by more contemporary studies. Still, for all their variety, what is striking about these paradigms is that “none is seemingly willing to suggest that ^{a real observed natural process or event} may lie at the core of myth storylines”¹⁹ [my emphasis]. By contrast, when she invented geomythology, Dorothy Vitaliano contended that some myths have served as relatively accurate, explanatory stories for natural events throughout history, particularly before the scientific method was established.

Although geomythology was new, it had ancient roots. In fact, in her 1968 article on the subject, Vitaliano harked back to antiquity, defining geomythology as “the geological application of euhemerism.”²⁰ To unpack this definition, we can begin by observing that the term “euhemerism” derives from Euhemerus, a Greek thinker who lived in the late 4th century B.C., and who served King Cassander of Macedonia (in northeast Greece) as a mythographer, that is, as one who compiles and writes mythic stories and tales. Euhemerus was also a traveler, and one day while visiting the island of Panchaea (probably modern-day Socotra Island, Yemen), he claims to have made a shocking discovery: on a golden stele (a monument) was posted a list of birth and death dates of various gods.

The discovery appears to have destroyed his religious faith. As a result of this experience, Euhemerus founded a rationalistic approach to myth, indeed, we might say, a demythologizing one, which sought to uncover the roots of natural events behind claims that the gods were supernatural. This approach has a long history. Since Euhemerus’s time, it has been used both to bolster and debunk Christianity. In addition, it was applied by the Icelandic mythographer Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) to explain the natural origins of figures such as Odin. The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) also applied the method in his excavation of Troy. Philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and poet Robert Graves (1895–1985) were influenced by this approach as well.

In formulating geomythology, Vitaliano turned to euhemerism, applying it geologically as a way to uncover real natural history behind some myths. In doing so, she differentiated between two types of geomyths: one is etiological legends, invented well after the fact “to explain the end results of processes which were not witnessed.”²¹ These include narratives of North American folklore such as the exploits of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. For instance, the lumberjack and Babe allegedly created both the Grand Canyon, when Bunyan dragged his ox behind him, as well as Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes, by leaving behind their colossal footprints, which gradually filled in with water. In fact, the Grand Canyon was formed millions of years ago, long before any humans were alive. The 10,000 lakes are more recent—they were created by melting glaciers during the Pleistocene era—but still much earlier than any lumberjacks were in the area. (The earliest reference to Bunyan appeared in 1904, in the Duluth News Tribune.)

The charm of these and other etiological stories is undeniable, but our primary concern here is Vitaliano’s second type, the euhemeristic fables. As she remarks, these tales “seek to explain certain specific myths and legends in terms of actual geologic events that may have been witnessed by various groups of people”²² In other words, while modern people may regard mythology as essentially a millennia-long game of Telephone, with crucial information being lost or distorted in transmission, in fact a number of these stories preserve traces of real information obtained first-hand. Many have to do with occurrences that would have been memorable, even traumatic, for those who experienced them. As noted, they include natural disasters and the uncovering of weird animal remains.

Although geomythology’s main value might seem to lie in the sheer pleasure of the detective work of gleaning scientific data from old sources, the method has other uses as well. One is that geomythology has what might be called an implicit “social justice” element. As historian and folklorist Adrienne Mayor demonstrates, one important chapter in the history of the discipline is the numerous discoveries and creative misunderstandings of large, fossilized animal bones in many areas of the world. For instance, the ancient Greeks appear to have routinely encountered animal bones weathering out from storms or quakes, or when they were plowing their fields. These remains, such as those belonging to woolly mammoths, were creatively misread as the skeletons of giant heroes such as Ajax, Orestes, and Achilles.

Yet these misconstruals were, at times, not far off the mark, based as they were on careful, if fanciful, observations of the skeletons. By contrast, such bones were overlooked by Aristotle and other philosophers of the time; the bones appear to have been too anomalous for such “establishment” thinkers to take seriously. Aristotle, for instance, tended to label them as outliers, “monstrous” exposures that had no place in his method of seeking of normal, regular specimens.²³ As a result, it was often the common people, reflecting on their discoveries, who took these important first steps toward what eventually became the discipline of paleontology.

In a similar manner, geomythology has brought recognition to marginalized groups such as First Nation tribes, Aboriginals, and African slaves by showing that their narratives and observations of nature, which were often dismissed by western scientists, in fact anticipated genuine discoveries and theorizing in science. Notions of infinite time, for instance, were set forth in western thought in figures such as the farmer-turned-geologist James Hutton (1726–97), yet the Native American tribe known as the Pit River nation, or Achumawi, had an ancient creation story that suggested that the universe is 10 billion years old.²⁴ This is an impressive conjecture, relatively close to the figure of 13.7 billion years old now held by physicists. In addition, Aboriginals may have observed first-hand a rise in sea level some 7,000 years ago, and recorded the observation in their myths. Furthermore, a recent paper raises an even more astonishing possibility that Aboriginals witnessed and memorialized the formation of a volcano, a staggering 35,000 years ago.²⁵

Because of such narratives, some scientists are now turning to geomyths to supplement their research, particularly when the legends deal with events from the past that pre-date written records. Geomythology adopts, as it were, a binocular vision, with one eye firmly on scientific procedure (careful observation, replication of experiments, peer review), and another on stories from outside the scientific mainstream. It does so by proceeding cautiously, making sure to separate the wheat from the chaff, the Wegeners from the Velikovskys. Both men were mocked for their theories, but Alfred Wegener’s notion of continental drift, first published in 1912, eventually became a mainstream geological view. By contrast, in his book Worlds in Collision (1950), Immanuel Velikovsky argued that in or around the 15th century B.C., Venus (the planet) was ejected by Jupiter, and made a near-miss of Earth while causing all sorts of catastrophes on our planet. This theory has been vigorously rejected by virtually all scientists.

Is Geomythology a Science?

The Scientific Revolution, generally dated as beginning in 1543 with the publication (on his deathbed) of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, inaugurated a period in which thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and others initiated an empirical, systematic study of nature. Yet it is also true that prior to 1543, oral cultures also carefully observed nature and made informed guesses about its workings.

For example, the griffin, a legendary hybrid creature with an eagle’s head and a lion’s body, has engaged writers from Aeschylus to J. K. Rowling. The animal is reputed to be a fierce guardian of gold treasure and is clearly fanciful. Yet historian/folklorist Adrienne Mayor makes a strong case that in antiquity, artistic and literary depictions of the griffin may have been influenced by real-life encounters between travelers in central Asia and the skeletons of the dinosaur Protoceratops found in the Gobi Desert. She also shows how the griffin, with its quadruped morphology, quickness, and warm-bloodedness, presages the Dinosaur Renaissance, which began in the late 1960s and sought to leave behind outdated views of dinosaurs as sluggish and cold-blooded.²⁶

Is it possible, then, to regard geomythology as a science, having the same status as other hybrids such as geochemistry or geohydrology? At this point, the answer is no. For one thing, the old stories are often murky, anonymous, and extant in varying, sometimes contradictory, versions. For another, it is an unresolved, and probably unresolvable, chicken-or-egg question as to whether myths were inspired by the discovery and misidentification of physical evidence, or whether the stories came first and were then “confirmed” by the evidence, creatively misconstrued. Indeed, it is entirely possible that some geomyths are purely fanciful, the result of imagination, nothing more. That being said, there are also contraindications, particularly when we focus on geomyths that appear to be closely linked to physical remnants and/or eyewitness accounts.

In sum, while geomythology is not regarded as a science, it has proven to be an invaluable ally to researchers over the centuries and has helped to confirm a number of scientific discoveries.

Excerpt adapted from Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events by Timothy J. Burbery, published by Routledge, 2021. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. © 2021 Timothy J. Burbery.

TIMOTHY J. BURBERY received his Ph.D. in English Renaissance Literature from Stony Brook University in 1997. He is currently Professor of English at Marshall University, where he teaches, among other subjects, Shakespeare, scientific and technical writing, science fiction, and ecocriticism/literary theory.

ENDNOTES

1. “The 11 Biggest Volcanic Eruptions in History.” LiveScience. 23 Feb. 2016. paragraph 25.
2. Marshak, Stephen. Earth: Portrait of a Planet. New York, London: W.W. Norton, 2015, p.292.
3. Greene, Mott. Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 62.
4. Cimaerelli, C., M. A. Alatorre-Ibargüengoitia, K. Aizawa, A. Yokoo, A. Díaz-Marina, M. Iguchi, D. B. Dingwell. “Multiparametric observation of volcanic lightning: Sakurajima Volcano, Japan.” Geophysical Research Letters 43.9. 23 February 2016. p. 4221.
5. Marshak, ibid., p. 289.
6. Marshak, ibid., p. 56.
7. Baillie, M.G.L. “Dendrochronology Raises Questions About the Nature of the 536 AD Dust-Veil Event.” The Holocene 4.2 (1994): 212-17.
8. Larsen, L.B. et al. “New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil.” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008): 1–5.
9. Piccardi, Luigi and W.W. Masse, eds. Myth and Geology. London: Geological Society Special Publication, 2007, p. vii.
10. Marshak, ibid., p. 43.
11. Masse, W. Bruce, et al. “Exploring the nature of myth and its role in science.” In Piccardi, Luigi, and W.B. Masse, eds. Myth and Geology. Geological Society: Special Publication London, 2007, p. 9.
12. Masse, ibid, p. 10.
13. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 44.
14. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 105.
15. Masse, ibid., 13.
16. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 94.
17. Eagleton, ibid., p. 13.
18. Eagleton, ibid., p. 52.
19. Eagleton, ibid., p. 13.
20. Vitaliano, Dorothy. “Geomythology: The Impact of Geologic Events on History and Legend with Special Reference to Atlantis.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5:1 (1968), p. 1.
21. Vitaliano, ibid., p. 10.
22. Vitaliano, ibid., p. 1.
23. Mayor, Adrienne. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 217.
24. Mayor, ibid., p. 150.
25. Barras, Colin. “Is an Aboriginal tale of an ancient volcano the oldest story ever told?” Science/NAAS 11 February 2020.
26. Mayor, ibid., pp.15–53.