Whence Phaethon?

                                 Phaethon, by Gustav Moreau

Where and how did the well-known Phaethon myth originate? This paper ...

The Fall of Phaethon in Context: A New Synthesis of Mythological, Archaeological and Geological Evidence in: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions Volume 16 Issue 1 (2016) (brill.com)

argues that the myth known by the early classical Greek playwrights and philosophers undoubtedly originated with a cosmic impact. The parallels are very clear. In my book, I also argue this, since the description by Plato in his Timaeus is such an accurate description of the drawn-out process of near-Earth comet disintegration.

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals...

Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times,

Of course, Wikipedia aligns with the uniformitarian viewpoint,

"Phaethon's tale was commonly used to explain why inhabitable lands on both sides of extremity (such as hot deserts and frozen wastelands) exist, and why certain peoples have darker complexions, while his sisters' amber tears accounted for the river's rich deposits of amber."

as it does on almost every subject. Not biased at all. 😕

Anyway, the authors of the above paper suggest otherwise, and they look for possible impact candidates in the Near East, from where the classical Greeks likely learned the tale. Perhaps, they suggest, it can be connected with the possible impact or airburst circa 2200 BC in Syria. This is the impact revealed by the work of Marie-Agnes Courty and co-workers.

Of course, the authors are unaware of the likely airburst that destroyed Tell El-Hamman, which might be the Biblical Sodom, circa 1650 BCE, as this discovery post-dates their paper. Perhaps this impact also played a role? Or perhaps Courty's dates are wrong, and they are the same impact.

However, the authors remain uncertain, since there are similarities in myths across the world, suggesting an even earlier origin. Perhaps, then, the Classical Greek version was simply a re-working of an earlier Bronze-Age Syrian version, which was itself a re-working of an even earlier global story.

Unfortunately, the authors seem to be unaware of the Younger Dryas impact research, which would have helped their cause. In their concluding remarks they say...

 "There were Phaethon-like stories, almost certainly memories of cosmic impacts, throughout prehistoric Europe—but also much further afield. The classical myth as it stands has demonstrable origins in Near Eastern precursors. The much wider problem, raised almost a century ago by Frazer, concerns the extraordinary matches found outside the Old World. Here only a wider approach towards the astronomical possibilities—beyond a simple meteorite fall—can provide a plausible explanation for both the similarities and the differences between the global traditions."

This is essentially the argument I make in my book about the time-scale of these kinds of myth, borrowing from Michael Witzel's excellent book, origin of the World's Mythologies, and Clube and Napier's coherent catastrophism.

The authors finish with...

"The additional hypothesis of a progenitor comet and possible impacts of other fragments in Estonia, Bavaria and elsewhere could elucidate their relationship to analogues from far more remote cultures, notably in Europe and the Americas. Such an explanation of the global parallels is preferable to the idea of (unexplained) diffusion."

With this last section they essentially agree with Clube and Napier's coherent catastrophism as the likely cause of these myths, but disagree with Frazer's Golden Bough and Witzel's "Origins" views on diffusion of an original myth across the Old and New worlds (i.e. from Asia to the Americas, or vice-versa).

But given the similarities in these stories that go beyond simply describing a cosmic impact, I find it hard to argue against diffusion from a source story that might be earlier even than the Younger Dryas impact. Although the YD impact is obviously the biggie, and sufficiently widespread that it might explain the global reach of these stories, it still would not explain their similar narratives. For that, diffusion is surely needed? In which case, an even earlier cosmic impact might be the ultimate origin. After all, the timescale for coherent catastrophism is likely to be 20-30 kyr, or even more.

We see similar timescales for other myths too, such as those connected with the Pleiades, the Great Bear, and let's not forget Hamlet's Mill, by Santilana and von Dechend, which proposes widespread ancient myths that describe the process of precession of the equinoxes. Possibly, then, we should look far back into the Palaeolithic.

In my view, the Lascaux Shaft Scene, which has strong similarities to Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe, could be a record of such an earlier candidate impact, circa 15,200 BCE. This impact seems to have decimated a Magdalenian culture in Southern France. See earlier blog posts about that. But even earlier events might be indicated in geochemical records elsewhere. In the end, we cannot know where these stories began, but in my view they are likely very old indeed.