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I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read.
Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. 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. The people I worked with in Indonesia, the Mentawai, would occasionally point out affinities between Jesus and their own legendary hero, Pageta Sabau, who was also said to have been born without a father and resurrected from the dead.
Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” lingered with me less as a cautionary tale than as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s much younger, idealistic wife and the novel’s protagonist—I found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the seduction: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course, my method was different. I was mud-caked and by myself on a remote island, chasing a crocodile spirit; Casaubon was at his desk, trying to map out myths he barely knew. But, amid all the pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.
I’m hardly alone in feeling the pull. However much “Middlemarch” mocks Casaubon’s obsession, the urge to find patterns in myth runs deep and wide. In the Victorian era, scholars like Max Müller and, later, James Frazer tried to systematize the world’s myths. Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” (1890), a sprawling, scandalous synthesis, plotted cultures on a trajectory from magic to religion and then to science, and argued that many myths and rites—including the pillars of Christianity—were the residue of primitive fertility cults and sacrificial kingship. It left its mark on everyone from William Butler Yeats to Jim Morrison, though its absence of rigor has not aged well. Decades later, Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess” (1948) enchanted a generation of poets and novelists with its vision of mythic unity; Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949), a meandering treatise on the universality of the hero’s journey, inspired “Star Wars.” Meanwhile, Freudians and evolutionary psychologists trawled folktales for evidence to shore up their theories. “Stereotypical stories stay at home, archetypal stories travel,” Robert McKee declares in “Story” (1997), his classic screenwriting guide, keeping alive the hope that mythic comparison can be commercially, as well as intellectually, rewarding.
The key that Casaubon craved is particularly alluring. He wasn’t just tracing similarities; he was hunting for a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants. He happened to believe this original tradition was Christian truth, but set aside the apologetics and there’s still something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers. Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.
Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Could we finally recover the legends of our earliest common ancestors—the ur-myths that Casaubon so desperately pursued?
If any field lends credibility to the dream of a Casaubonian key, it’s Indo-European studies. Where Frazer’s method was freewheeling, Indo-Europeanists are exacting. The discipline is usually said to have begun in 1786, when Sir William Jones, a colonial judge stationed in Bengal, addressed the Asiatic Society. Years of studying Sanskrit had convinced him that it closely resembled Greek and Latin—“indeed,” Jones said, “no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He suggested that Germanic and Celtic languages, as well as ancient Persian, might belong to this same lost family. Others had glimpsed such affinities before, but Jones did more than notice; he set off a scholarly chase, and a popular fascination, that has yet to run its course.
Today, it’s broadly accepted that languages as different as English, Welsh, Spanish, Armenian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, and Bengali descend from a single ancestor: Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have mapped how words spoken five thousand years ago have branched into the webs of vocabulary we know now. My first name, Manvir, for example, fuses two Sanskrit roots with clear European cousins: “man,” meaning “thought” or “soul”—related to “mental” and “mind”—and “vir,” meaning “heroic” or “brave,” as in “virtue” and “virile.”
But reconstruction didn’t end with nouns and verbs. Gods dance on our tongues, and, as scholars compared Indo-European languages, they found striking mythological congruences, too. The British journalist Laura Spinney, in her recent book, “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,” begins with a paternal sky god. Sanskrit speakers worshipped Dyaus Pitr, or Sky Father. In Greek myth, Zeus Pater ruled the gods. North of the Alps, Proto-Italic speakers likely revered Djous Pater. Among the tribes that settled near Rome, this name became the Latin Jupiter. With further analogues in Scythian, Latvian, and Hittite, many researchers now think that the early Indo-Europeans prayed to a sky father known as something like Dyeus Puhter.
