by Bryce Van Buren

Created on: April 19, 2009   Last Updated: August 13, 2009

The Mythology of Natural Disasters

Since the beginning of humanity, great tales were handed down from generation to generation about what created monstrous, unexplainable, natural disasters. Why do great mountains spew fire into the sky? Why do tsunamis batter coastlines and destroy whole villages? Why does the earth quake with great wrath at times? In today's day and age, we know the answers to all these questions, but in the ancient days, the secrets of nature had not been discovered.

Most myths came from individuals a long time ago, who had very active imaginations. We know this because of cave paintings from humans thousands of years ago. They depict stories of great beasts or the wrath of some terrible entity. If you go back to the age of the Romans, you would see that myths about natural disasters varied by region in the ancient world. The Romans for instance had an abundance of gods to explain things, such as Hephaestus god of fire, Poseidon lord of the sea, and Zeus god of storms. The Romans could conveniently blame volcanoes on Hephaestus, tsunamis on Poseidon's displeasure, and dangerous storms on the wrath of Zeus.

Although most people assume ancients invented gods to explain away things such as natural disasters, I tend to disagree with this. The Greeks and Romans were intellectual and open-minded peoples with an intelligent group of philosophers and thinkers. To say that they could do no better than make up stories to explain things is ludicrous. The only people who would have bought the myths would have been peasants and perhaps the middle class. There was a strategic positive to creating these myths though. Even though the scholars of the day probably didn't know what did cause natural disasters, using the gods as an excuse would have been a good way to calm the public and explain things away.

There are always two sides to a story. As I mentioned earlier, myths about natural disasters varied by region. If the Romans and Greeks were at the skeptical end of mythology, then the Gauls and and the people of the north were at the other end. The Gauls, tended to be less civilized and more superstitious in nature. In other words, the gods would have dictated a large portion of their lives. The Gauls were polytheistic like the Greeks and Romans, and so were even more susceptible to blaming natural disasters on having angered the gods.

So, when did humanity begin to discard mythology and accept the truth? The answer is that we will never have all

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>