In 2025, I’m researching myth as a further test of the ROBA Hypothesis. The literature is too vast to get a holistic view of myth, let alone even a single domain of myth. Indian mythology alone can’t even be summarized into a coherent hierarchy or chain of events. There are tons of nature gods, tons of hero gods, many of them overlapping, with millennia of histories detailing their exploits.
Nor can I ever hope to improve upon the scholarship of myth itself. Greek mythology has been analyzed and broken apart more times than perhaps any other. (Maybe only the Bible has had more scholarship done, but the Bible is unique because its characters are inoculated against further mythologizing in ways that Greek mythological figures are not. For instance, it would probably be impossible to make a new Dreamworks Joseph adventure where he fights with the gods of Egypt, or a new Marvel film about Samson avenging himself on ancient Arabian gods. Greek, Egyptian, and generally all mythology is simply cast through a totally different lens than the Bible is. But making a new adventure of Kratos or Thor, as we’ve seen, is totally acceptable; it is even seemingly accepted as canon.)
However, what I hope to lend to the study of myth is a new interpretation through the lens of the ROBA Hypothesis. If humankind’s unique capacity to use reciprocal, object-based aggression (ROBA) is what instantiates recursion as a core human ability (and fundamentally separating us from animals), then you basically have a very simple origin of all human behavior, which is principally geared toward deferring the apocalyptic nature of human combat. All cultural forms emanate immediately from the capacity for ROBA: kinship, religion, language, myth, sacrifice, etc.
One subject on which I’ve read fairly extensively over the past few years has been kinship. (Here’s an earlier writing on the ROBA interface with kinship.) Kinship is not a very interesting subject in and of itself, but when combined with ROBA and myth, it becomes a very useful cipher. Let’s take a simple, blink-and-you-miss-it moment in Greek mythology when Zeus hires the Hecatoncheires (meaning “hundred handed”) cyclopes:
Then from Earth and Sky came forth three more sons, great and strong, unspeakable, Cottus and Briareus and Gyges, presumptuous children. A hundred arms sprang forth from their shoulders, unapproachable, and upon their massive limbs grew fifty heads out of each one’s shoulders; and the mighty strength in their great forms was immense1.
Wikipedia seems to reflect the most common interpretations of such stories; once upon a time, these were other gods, but they are now co-opted into Greek mythology. However, ROBA sees kinship as beginning at the origin, and likely the first kinship was matrilineal descent (MLD) whereby kingship and clan markers went through the female (being the most obvious candidate, since women appeared to make children) and the husband was largely ignored. Hesiod’s Theogony describes both the pre-Zeus and Zeus eras as both rife with incest, with brothers marrying sisters. For our purposes, we will focus on Kronos marrying his sister Rhea. Kronos’s reign, per MLD rules, would have passed through his sister’s children. But since he married Rhea, his biological children inherit the reign. Such incest was done to retain inheritance and kingship within the patriarchal line when marriages still had to conform to MLD standards.
The transition to Zeus indicates that there was a major shift in inheritance and kinship, since he and his biological son Apollo become the new combined force to be reckoned with. We see a similar shift in David and Solomon against Saul. But the transition has to completely subdue the old MLD-based royal family. Even Zeus is beholden to it to some extent, since he married his own sister Hera, but he would marry a cousin Leto to bring forth Apollo.
At any rate, Zeus hires the three Hecatoncheires, which are these cyclopes-like beings with 100 hands each. That’s a total of 300 hands. What’s the significance of this? Lewis Morgan noted in Ancient Society (1877) that there were 360 Grecian genos (or family lines): the Ionians of Attica were divided into 4 tribes (Geleontes, Hopletes, Aegicores and Argades). Each one had 3 phratries, each phratry having 30 gentes, so 360 gentes across 4 tribes. Dorians were divided into 3 tribes (Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes) with various nationalities like Sparta, Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Epidaurus and Troezen. Sparta itself had 10 subdivisions in tribes called obes. This indicates that the Aegean city-state had to assimilate all these various genos lines, which were almost assuredly structured around matrilineal descent laws. William Ridgeway devotes a chunk of his Origin of Tragedy (1910) to the theme of Greek mythology commemorating this transition from MLD to patrilineal descent (PLD) through authors like Aeschylus.
To complete this transition, a PLD king must still ally himself with the barbarian clans which still operate on the old MLD lines. This means dealing with dozens, perhaps hundreds (300, in this case) of families, all of whom have elders who all have hands in the matter. The number 300 isn’t exactly the same as the 360 cited by Morgan, but even he said this number was just a shorthand. In other words, the Hecatoncheires were likely 3 legions of matrilineal clans of 100-120 people, perhaps each unit operating under one military general each, all of whom were commanded by Zeus in this case in his war against the previous establishment.
Mythology makes far more sense under the ROBA framework, but to really get to the baseline where ROBA makes sense, we have to dispel all kinds of myths that have pervaded mass culture, especially since the early 90s. One is the Myth of the Kinless caveman. Ancient humans never existed in nuclear families; they were either in groups of 20, or 150, or somewhere in between. Men could not go and just take women willy nilly; women would have mothers, sister, and of course brothers who would rebuff any foreign man’s incursion into their territory. If marriages were made for men’s sexual gratification only, then it still had to be done in a very political way; the man had to buy his way in. In fact, he might have to sell himself as a worker, as Jacob did with Laban. All ancient society, from Australian Aborigines to Native Americans to Africans, operated on this exchange basis.
Currently I’m reading Dudley Young’s Origins of the Sacred (1991) which is, by the author’s admission, an attempt to build a new mythology based on Darwinism. Young makes many scientific claims, all of which smell of mythology already. One such claim is that humans acquired our aggression from chimpanzees, which serves to mask violence behind some strange evolutionary construct, of which there’s no origin. And yet humankind’s unique capacity for ROBA is ignored, or unknown. The myth of the weaponized ape renders human violence totally incomprehensible, and we’ve been stuck in this rut for too long.
I’m excited to debunk these and many others, such as the myth of “protolanguage” or even the myth of the “protohuman.” The first I debunk is the myth of the weaponized ape in If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence which is available January 2025 on Amazon.