A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science – Ars Technica
Credit: Princeton University Press
G is for geomythology
A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science
Folklorist/historian Adrienne Mayor on her new book Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore
By Jennifer Ouellette – Dec 29, 2025 7:30 AM |
Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian “endless winters.”
Mayor’s work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano’s 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.
Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of “folk science” in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.
When her editor at Princeton University Press approached her about writing a book on geomythology, she opted for an encyclopedia format, which fit perfectly into an existing Princeton series of little encyclopedias about nature. “In this case, I wasn’t going to be working with just Greek and Roman antiquity,” Mayor told Ars. “I had collected very rich files on geomyths around the world. There are even a few modern geomyths in there. You can dip into whatever you’re interested in and skip the rest. Or maybe later you’ll read the ones that didn’t seem like they would be of interest to you but they’re absolutely fascinating.”
Mythopedia is also a true family affair, in that illustrator Michelle Angel is Mayor’s sister. “She does figures and maps for a lot of scholarly books, including mine,” said Mayor. “She’s very talented at making whimsical illustrations that are also very scientifically accurate. She really added information not only to the essays but to the illustrations for Mythopedia.
As she said, Mayor even includes a few modern geomyths in her compendium, as well as imagining in her preface what kind of geomyths might be told thousands of years from today about the origins of climate change for example, or the connection between earthquakes and fracking. “How will people try to explain the perplexing evidence that they’ll find on the planet Earth and maybe on other planets?” she said. “How will those stories be told?”
Ars caught up with Mayor to learn more.
Credit: Princeton University Press
Ars Technica: Tell us a little about the field of geomythology.
Adrienne Mayor: It’s a relatively new field of study but it took off around 2000. Really, it’s a storytelling that has existed since the first humans started talking to one another and investigating their landscape. I think geomyths are attempts to explain perplexing evidence in nature—on the Earth or in the sky. So geomyth is a bit of a misnomer since it can also cover celestial happenings. But people have been trying to explain bizarre things, or unnatural looking things, or inexplicable things in their landscape and their surroundings since they could first speak.
These kind of stories were probably first told around the first fires that human beings made as soon as they had language. So geomyths are attempts to explain, as I say, but they also contain memories that are preserved in oral traditions. These are cultures that are trying to understand earthshaking events like volcanoes or massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches—things that really change the landscape and have an impact on their culture. Geomyths are often expressed in metaphors and poetic, even supernatural language, and that’s why they’ve been ignored for a long time because people thought they were just storytelling or fiction.
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