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The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go—and what might we find? By Manvir Singh in The New Yorker
October 13, 2025 The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.” The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German).
Casaubon’s quest stands as both an indictment of overreach and a warning about the senselessness of such sweeping comparisons. But is this entirely fair? The patterns are out there. Floods, tricksters, battles with monsters, creation and apocalypse—sometimes the resemblances are uncanny. |
"Before time began . . ." — Optimus Prime
