The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

the very moment when, as they believed, Demeter is at her saddest, they could have inferred that there was something wrong with their explanation of seasons.
    Yet, when myths were altered or superseded by other myths over the course of centuries, the new ones were almost never any closer to the truth. Why? Consider the role that the specific elements of the Persephone myth play in the explanation. For example, the godsprovide the
power
to affect a large-scale phenomenon (Demeter to command the weather, and Hades and his magic seed to command Persephone and hence to affect Demeter). But why those gods and not others? In Nordic mythology, seasons are caused by the changing fortunes of Freyr, the god of spring, in his eternal war with the forces of cold and darkness. Whenever Freyr is winning, the Earth is warm; when he is losing, it is cold.
    That myth accounts for the seasons about as well as the Persephone myth. It is slightly better at explaining the randomness of weather, but worse at explaining the regularity of seasons, because real wars do not ebb and flow so regularly (except insofar as that is due to seasons themselves). In the Persephone myth, the role of the marriage contract and the magic seed is to explain that regularity. But why is it specifically a magic seed and not any other kind of magic? Why is it a conjugalvisits contract and not some other reason for someone to repeat an action annually? For instance, here is a variant explanation that fits the facts just as well: Persephone was not released – she escaped. Each year in spring, when her powers are at their height, she takes revenge on Hades by raiding the underworld and cooling all the caverns with spring air. The hot air thus displaced rises into the human world, causing summer. Demeter celebrates Persephone’s revenge and the anniversary of her escape by commanding plants to grow and adorn the Earth. This myth accounts for the same observations as the original, and it is testable (and in fact refuted) by the same observations. Yet what it asserts about reality is markedly different from – in many ways it is the opposite of – the original myth.
    Every other detail of the story, apart from its bare prediction that winter happens once a year, is just as easily variable. So, although the myth was created to explain the seasons, it is only superficially adapted to that purpose. When its author was wondering what could possibly make a goddess do something once a year, he did not shout, ‘Eureka! It must have been a marriage contract enforced by a magic seed.’ He made that choice – and all his substantive choices as author – for cultural and artistic reasons, and not because of the attributes of winter at all. He may also have been trying to explain aspects of human nature metaphorically – but here I am concerned with the myth only in its capacity as an explanation
of seasons
, and in that respect even itsauthor could not have denied that the role of all the details could be played equally well by countless other things.
    The Persephone and Freyr myths assert radically incompatible things about what is happening in reality to cause seasons. Yet no one, I guess, has ever adopted either myth as a result of comparing it on its merits with the other, because there is no way of distinguishing between them. If we ignore all the parts of both myths whose role could be easily replaced, we are left with the same core explanation in both cases:
the gods did it
. Although Freyr is a very different god of spring from Persephone, and his battles very different events from her conjugal visits, none of those differing attributes has any function in the myths’ respective accounts of why seasons happen. Hence none of them provides any reason for choosing one explanation over the other.
    The reason those myths are so easily variable is that their details are barely connected to the details of the phenomena. Nothing in the problem of why winter happens is