The Science of Discworld IV

Although world-bearing elephants appear in later Sanskrit literature, they are conspicuously absent from the early epics. Wilhelm von Humboldt has suggested that the myths of world elephants may have arisen from confusion between different meanings of ‘
naga
’, so that stories about the world-bearing serpent becamecorrupted into myths about world-bearing elephants. This is, in any case, an attractive idea for a culture that routinely used elephants for heavy lifting.
    Classical Sanskrit writings include many references to the role of world elephants in Hindu cosmology. They guard and support the Earth at its four cardinal points, and the Earth shakes when they adjust their positions – an imaginative explanation for earthquakes. They variously occur as a set of four, eight, or sixteen. The
Amarakosha
, a dictionary in verse written by the scholar Amarasinha around AD 380, states that eight male and eight female elephants hold up the world. It names the males as Airavata, Anjana, Kumunda, Pundarika, Pushpa-danta, Sarva-bhauma, Supratika and Vamana. It is silent about the names of the females. The
Ramayana
lists just four male world elephants: Bhadra, Mahápadma, Saumanas and Virúpáksha.
    It may or may not be significant that the name Mahápadma is mentioned in
Harivamsa
and
Vishnu Purana
as a supernatural snake. Like dragons in the mythology of other cultures, it guards a hoard of treasure.
Brewer’s Dictionary
describes a ‘popular rendition of a Hindu myth in which the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma, which in turn supports the world’. This variant spelling seems to come from a misprint in a 1921 edition of one of the stories of the
Mahabharata
by the Indian freedom fighter and poet Sri Aurobindo:
    On the wondrous dais rose a throne,
And he its pedestal whose lotus hood
With ominous beauty crowns his horrible
Sleek folds, great Mahapudma; high displayed
He bears the throne of Death.
    However, this creature is clearly a giant cobra – unless you think the lotus hood is the elephant’s ears.
    Our main interest in these stories, in the present context, is comparative mythology. The creation myths of many ancient cultures contain very similar elements. It is tempting to explain these similarities in terms of cross-cultural contact. It is becoming increasingly clear that the ancient world, at various times and in various places, was more advanced than we have previously imagined, and there is good archaeological evidence for trade over much longer distances than used to be assumed. However, temptation should probably be resisted, even so, because other explanations are more plausible. One is cultural convergence driven by human psychology and common environments.
    Images such as the Earth rising from a primal ocean seem to be the sort of thing that naturally occurs to intelligent but uninformed human beings who try to explain where their world came from using human-centred thinking. Seas rise and fall with the tides, rocks appear and disappear. Floods drown low mounds, and then reveal them again as the waters recede. We take inspiration from nature, make it larger than life, and use our own invention to explain what we can’t understand. Creation myths open up windows into the human psyche. Ubiquitous natural phenomena, such as seas, mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes, suggest similar supernatural explanations. All ancient cultures were greatly influenced by the animals and plants that existed in their vicinity. If you live in a land full of possums and jaguars, it is no surprise if you develop possum gods and jaguar gods.
    In many ways the
differences
between mythologies in disparate cultures are their most significant features. They suggest that the similarities may often result from some kind of convergent evolution, in which the same general supernatural explanation turns up independently because it has a certain logic – often of the Discworld kind – that appeals to the human mind. Explaining thunder as the gods throwing things, for example.
    It is also interesting to see how myths evolve, like Chinese whispers, when they are passed on by oral tradition. Snakes becomeelephants. When the myths were preserved in written form, they still underwent dramatic changes before the invention of printing made it easy to mass-produce books. Even today, many of us can remember the general outline of a joke, or a story, but not the names of the characters. In mathematical circles, there are