Reclaiming the Myths

This post is partly in response to some comments on the theme of Reclaiming the Myths, which I saw in the chat session of a CMI presentation a few weeks ago. Although a case can be made that some mythology goes back as far as the creation story, e.g. Egyptian Atum might be a garbled recollection of Adam, in my opinion most of the myths relate to the period between the Flood and Babel, as the dispersed peoples tried to retain some oral memory of their history. I’ve read that Plato attempted, but failed, to derive etymologies from Greek for the names of characters in Greek mythology. I believe this is an indication that the original names made sense not in Greek, but in the pre-Babel language. Some have proposed that that language would have been an early form of Hebrew, in order for Moses to be able to read and make use of ancestral written records passed down from before Babel, while he was compiling the early chapters of Genesis.

The example which brought this to my attention was that the Roman deity Bacchus might conceivably be a distorted memory of pre-Babel Bar-Cush – son of Cush. The person presenting this was trying to pin the label onto biblical Nimrod, which didn’t make sense to me because one was a dissolute drunkard and the other was a mighty hunter. But later I learnt that Bacchus is considered to be equivalent to Rama in the Hindu myths, and if you go to the table of nations in Genesis, Raamah (sic) is indeed listed as a son of Cush. I’ve since figured out a few other possible derivations of mythological names from supposed Hebrew originals, but they would come with spoiler alerts.