Gemini AI Assisted
The concept of cultural lore is fascinating, but don’t get hung up on facts. A mythical story is not just a story, and it is only true in one respect.
Lore Is Not True
Except when it is true. Here’s how the human memory works. Within the individual, the event which occurs contains a reduced perspective of the facts, tempered by emotional response and limited point of view.
However, when that person tells the story, there are now two stories: the facts as the participant perceived them, and the story as the person heard themselves tell it. Those two blend in the teller’s memory. As the storyteller matures and changes, multiple versions of the story morph down the time line to become today’s version.
Oral History
Now take this idea of human memory and pass the story through generations of storytellers. Every time the story is told, that version of it goes into the popular lore along with all the others. If one storyteller has a girlfriend with curly black tresses, that “truth” is likely to slip in and stick. If you add in the caveat that history is written by the winners, depending on lore for specific data is a mug’s game.
Cultural Editing
You might expect this to mean that cultural lore is a hodgepodge and none of it is “true.” But there is another factor well known to fans of popular culture. There are thousands of stories in the background of every culture. They get told over and over as the years pass. But not all of them survive. Cultures change, and stories that were once revered lose traction and disappear.
What remains are the stories that are true to the beliefs and ideas in the present time. If the society once had a good relationship with a neighbouring tribe their lore would be full of positive memories of that group. However, if the neighbours became greedy and started a war, those happy stories would disappear, and new stories about the evil enemy would gain precedence.
What Lasts
The really interesting part is when you look at a story and say, “Hey, people are like that today!” What does that mean?
There are qualities embedded in the human race that are very difficult to erase, because they don’t come from enculturation, but from the millions of times individuals have reacted to the same stimulus in the same way because of the way the human brain works.
Which brings us to Armageddon. (BTW, Armageddon is the venue. Apocalypse is the event) The source most of us are familiar with is the Book of Revelations, which was written in about 97 AD.
(Aside: it is interesting to note that probably very few people these days have actually read Revelations, which, appropriately enough, is the last book in the New Testament. Thus the knowledge of the Apocalypse possessed by most people today is a new set of lore developed by modern popular culture.)
It Sounds So True
When people look at the Apocalypse references in popular media, there is such a similarity between the predictions and the events of modern days, there is a temptation to say, “The prophesy is coming true!”
Of course, in the sense that a writer two thousand years ago had a mystical experience that gave him the facts which he wrote down, this is a bit of a stretch.
What is amazing is that before our history was written, the human race had experienced the rise and fall of so many empires (at least six that we know of) that the common lore had saved a pretty accurate version of what happened when they fell. Combine the knowledge from the academics of the day with the experience of the common people watching their own leaders rise and fall, and there’s a pretty good store of information to let an intelligent, educated group of people make some pretty reliable predictions of what is likely to go on in any society that allows its leaders to get too much power.
Look at Shakespeare’s Tragedies, for example. A superior leader gets too much power and he starts to get ideas of taking over completely. The only solution the Elizabethan culture could come up with was to kill him off.
I have to admit, the idea has a certain appeal, but our lore frowns on that solution.
The Bottom Line
The moral of the story is that men with too much power and money tend to act the same way and precipitate the same political crises. It doesn’t take a metaphysical episode to make a reasonable guess where the plotline is headed.
Which means, ironically, that the prophesy might be true after all.