A Short Story
One day Hades, God of the Underworld, saw Persephone and instantly fell in love with her so he caused the ground to split underneath her.
Persephone slipped beneath the Earth and Hades stole her to the Underworld where he made her his wife.
After finding out, Demeter, mother of Persephone, vows that she won't set foot on Mount Olympus and that she won't let anything grow on earth until she sees her daughter again.
So Zeus convince Hades to give Persephone back, he agrees, but before doing what he promised he tricks the girl giving her 6 pomegranate seeds to eat.
Demeter after seeing her immediately asks Persephone if she ate anything while in the underworld, because if you eat something while you're down there, you have to stay there forever.
After soap opera events, it is decided that Persephone should stay in the underworld for 6 months every year, but Demeter says that when Persephone is in the underworld, nothing on earth will grow.
And there you have seasons!
We are accustomed to this kind of myths, we probably read them when we were in school, in a novel or we found them in movies. We also probably consider them to be imaginative stories and no more, but they hide the human desire of explanation and answer.
The myth of Persephone explain in a comprehensible and “reasonable” way why we experience the four seasons and why some are more productive than others. Without the tools necessary to understand the world, humans tend to rely on “the knowledge of the past” which, for the majority of the recorded history, has its roots in the supernatural. In fact, a supernatural reason seems to be the most obvious to explain thunders when your society doesn’t even have developed the idea of the electron.
But even though these myths were not representing the truth they were the product of collective experience, maybe the most powerful tool humans have. It may surprise you, but unlike other mammals, humans can speak and this is the skill that allows us to share ideas and to solve problems in ways that other species can’t.
Animals, such as the orangutan, can learn to solve problem through a process of trial and error or, in some cases, through observation.
This image was taken in Borneo on the island of Kaja and, YES, this is an orangutan fishing with a spear after he watched locals doing it in the Gohong River.
The process with which animals learn limits their skills to their lifetime because they cannot hand over their knowledge in a productive way to their offspring, but humans can!
After the invention and perfection of written language, ideas outlasted their conceivers and remained intact through the centuries. Philosophers alive thousand of years ago still speak through their words and contributed to our collective knowledge of the world.
Being mortals limit us, a lot! But being able to pass our ideas and work together on finding a better explanation of the world makes us limitless, and in a way let our thoughts live forever.
The technology we have today, the scientific discoveries, the medicines we consume are not the product of individuals, but the result of centuries of curiosity and questioning based on the work of thousands who just wanted to understand the “Why of nature”.
Coming soon in the fourth chapter we will talk about the scientific method, how we developed it and how we transitioned from the supernatural to it, see you there!
If you missed the previous one you can find it here!
Super-Duper Important Footnote
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