Each of those roles has a different set of emotional labels for money, for priests, for sex, for nakedness, for death, and for birth. Most people, until quite recently, underpinned that unexamined set of beliefs with a theist (personal, humanlike) God or gods, or a deist (Something Up There with Extraordinary Powers) god-structure, so the emotional tags on important memories have been strongly Godflavoured. When we remember them they may be sins, atonements, redemptions or trials. They may be mitzvahs (blessings) or revenges or charities. Religions, in bringing us into our cultures via their Makea-Christian or Make-a-Maya kit, put different-strength labels on, for example, human sacrifice, so that it has a whole host of associations in adult life. Our adult prejudices, and our scientific theories, go in on top of this crazy mishmash of historical errors, badly understood schooling, mathematics and statistics that barely make sense to us, God-stories of causality and ethics, and educational lies-to-children that permit the teacher to disengage his brain in response to children's questions.
This mental mishmash is well illustrated by our changing attitudes to Mars. Mars was known to the ancients as a `wandering star', a planet; its reddish colour had bloody associations, so the Romans associated it with their god of war. It also acquired a connection with war in astrology, where the visible stars and planets all had to mean something. We're going to look at a lot of different associations with Mars,[1] as myth and rationality engaged with the red planet, as stories by the hundred employed Mars and Martians, and as the scientific picture of Mars changed over the centuries.
We shouldn't ask `which is the true Mars?' We become larger humans by considering all of these aspects; from that stance there really isn't a true, real, objective planet for our minds to engage with usefully. Our simple, thin causal lines can't comprehend a real astronomical object, even a world which is actually out there so that we can see it. The `it' we see can be the disc whose apparent lines Giovanni Schiaparelli called 'canali', which excited Percival Lowell (whose grasp of Italian seems to have been slight, since the word means `channels') to see them as engineered canals. He wrote Mars as the Abode of Life, and this laid the foundation for the folk Mars of the twentieth century.
Between the World Wars, everybody in the West, and many in the East, looked into the night sky and saw inimical Martians, a mental residue of that 1920s picture of a drying, dying Mars. The image was overlaid by the War of the Worlds picture of envious, grim, disgusting tripod Martians invading Earth (or at least England). There was a more romantic overlay for many of those out camping, or sleeping out under the stars: Barsoom. Edgar Rice Burroughs, familiar because of his Tarzan stories, invented a Mars whose dried-out seabeds were home to green Martian warrior hordes, six-legged centaur-like creatures whose egg-incubators were visited regularly. John Carter, an American ex-confederate army officer, had wished himself on to Mars, been captured by the green warriors but soon found himself married to a red Martian princess.[2]Stanley Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey added more dimensions: the Martian called Tweel,
[1] Not quite including the confectionery, which was the surname of the originator; he came to England from the USA, and invented M&Ms too. That stands for 'Mars and Mars'.
[2] Also egg-laying. Jack, reading Burroughs when young, was disturbed by the idea of their marriage bed ...
who made long hops and landed on his nose, the hypnotic predator that showed you your most desirable images, and attempts at a gosh-wow desert ecology. Then there were stories of Martians coming to Earth, pretending to be human ... and humans attempting to interact with a more or less mystical ancient Martian civilisation.
The best known, perhaps the best crafted of these romanticmystical portrayals of crude, lumbering Earthmen, insensitive to the ethereal beauties of the Martian crystal cities, were Ray Bradbury's. In the 1950s and 1960s his tales were read by many outside the fantasy/SF world, and they appeared in widely read magazines like Argosy as well as in SF pulps in railway station bookstores. They laid the mystical ancient Martian foundation for Robert Heinlein to build the most potent of all these Martian tales, Stranger in a Strange Land. Michael Valentine Smith had been a foundling on Mars, brought up and trained in their culture by the ancient Martians. He came to Earth, founded a commune of friends -'Water Brothers'- and started a religion whose 'grokking the fullness' of everyday events, from sex to science to swimming, spread to communities of readers. There was a tragic, well-publicised association with the murderous Manson killers, who had used this book as their mantra, but this didn't harm sales, and the ancient mystical Martians became the standard image.
Then we learned that Mars has no atmosphere to speak of, that it is cold, dry, laden with frozen carbon dioxide, to the extent that the 'icecaps' were probably dry ice. Our machines visited Mars, looked for `life', and found strange chemistry because we inevitably asked the wrong questions. The `canals' died in the public mind, replaced by craters and gigantic volcanoes.
We have now visited again, and it seems that ancient, wet Mars may have been a reality, there may be at least bacterial life forms under the sand ... Much is not yet clear, but what is clear is that our image of Mars has changed yet again.
Each of us has a variety of associations with Mars. When we weave these many different interpretations and imaginations together, we become a different, wiser kind of creature. As for all of our different Marses ... well, those are toys of our imaginations, as we grok the red planet's fullness.
If Mars seems a bit of a digression, consider those twin icons of evolution, the archaeopteryx and the dodo. In folk-evolutionary thinking, the archaeopteryx is the ancestor of all the birds, and the dodo is the bird that went extinct about 400 years ago. `As dead as a dodo.' Again, our thinking about these iconic creatures is heavily daubed with unchallenged assumptions, myths, and fictional associations.
We mentioned archaeopteryx in Chapter 36 (`Running from Dinosaurs') of The Science of Discworld, second edition. We think of it as the ancestral bird because it is a dinosaur-like animal with birdlike feathers ... and it was the first one to be found. However, by the time of archaeopteryx there were plenty of genuine birds around, among them the diving bird Ichthyornis. Poor old archaeopteryx arrived on the scene far too late to be `the' bird ancestor.
The recent amazing 'dinobird' discoveries in China - transitional creatures part way between dinosaurs and birds - have totally changed scientists' view of bird evolution. At some stage some dinosaurs started to develop feathers, though they couldn't then fly. The feathers had some other function, probably keeping the animal warm. Later, they turned out to be useful in wings. Some dinobirds effectively had four wings - two at the front, two at the back. It took a while before the standard `bird' body-plan settled down.
As for the dodo - we all know what it looked like, right? Fat little thing with a big hooked beak ... Such a famously extinct creature must be well documented in the scientific literature.
No, it's not. What we have is about ten paintings and half a stuffed specimen.[1]' We have more specimens of the archaeopteryx than we
[1] Rajith Dissanayake, 'What did the Dodo look like?' Biologist 51 (2004), 165-8.
do of the dodo. Why? The dodo went extinct, remember? And it did so before science really got interested in it. So few people recorded it, or studied it. It was there, not requiring special attention, and then it wasn't, and it was too late to start studying it. It isn't even certain what colour it was - many books say `grey', but it was more likely brown.