5 Totally WTF Myths That Pop Up In Every Culture Worldwide

Take St. Basil's Cathedral (1561), aka that building people keep thinking is the Kremlin. According to a story that's widely repeated to this day, Ivan the Terrible rewarded architect Postnik Yakovlev for this feat of engineering by blinding him. If that's the case, Yakovlev must have been an even better architect than Ivan imagined, because he went on to design other buildings. And yet the myth has continued to spread, probably because of how well it fits in with Ivan's nickname.

This isn't the only tale of a European ruler paying his contractors by mutilating them. Supposedly, after Master Hanus finished Prague's famous astronomical clock in 1410, the city's councilors paid a group of goons to sneak into his bedroom late at night and blind him with a piece of iron. Again, there's no truth to this (the clock was built by Mikulas of Kadan and Jan Sindel), but every part of the story, down to the weirdly specific method of blinding the guy, is still repeated today. Why, there's even a jolly stop-motion film about it:

Skip ahead to 8:41 for the most horrifying stop-motion puppet show since the last one we showed you.

Lest you think this is strictly a European myth, the Beiteddine Palace in Lebanon (1788) has the same story. Emir Bashir Shihab II had the place built as the Lebanese version of the Playboy Mansion, with a grand apartment, a harem, and a guest house that dwarfed many castles. To make sure no other ruler copied his style, the emir reportedly ordered that the head architect's hands be cut off. The architect wasn't blinded, though, so at least he could see his brand-new stumps.

But the Taj Mahal (1653) has all of them beat for the sheer scale of its mythical cost. Unlike his wimpy other counterparts, this mythical version of Shah Jahan didn't merely mutilate the head designer. Supposedly, every single one of the craftsmen had their eyes gouged and their hands cut off to make double sure they never built anything similar (they could have worked with their feet, though). Considering there were 20,000 workers, this must have taken a while.

In this case, the message behind the legends seems straightforward: Craftsmen, always get paid up front.

The cultures that created these myths were separated by at least three oceans and a continent, so it's already weird that they'd both believe it -- but they're far from the only ones. You can find the legend of a trickster god stealing fire for mankind everywhere from the Ojibwe people of North America (the story of Nanabozho), to Georgia in the Caucus mountains (Amirani stealing a piece of the sun), to India (Matarisvan, who brought down the hidden fire from Heaven to Earth), to the Cherokee (Grandmother Spider hiding fire in a clay pot, giving it to people, then offering free pottery lessons). Even Jewish mythology claims this, saying that the fallen angel Azazel stole the knowledge of working the forge from Yahweh to give to humans, in order to corrupt us and turn us away from God and to sin. And that's why you see all those kids today forging things instead of going to church.

What's even weirder is that giving humans the knowledge of fire tends to be followed by cruel and unusual punishment, usually for all eternity. Prometheus was chained to a rock and had an eagle eat his regenerating liver forever. Amirani was tied to an iron pole that would sink deeper into the mountain every time he tried to free himself. Nanabozho had his fur set on fire as he ran back to the humans. Azazel was bound in a jagged rocky tomb in the desert until the Day of Judgement.

Jacob Jordaens"At least it's not a duck."

So what caused this myth? Maybe this is based off of a primitive fear of fire, knowing that it's necessary to survive, but also could burn an entire village down with a single stray spark. We give praise to the figure who gave it to us, even as we know the gods had a good reason to keep it to themselves. Or maybe a time traveler just hopped around to all these cultures with a lighter, and then got arrested by the time cops. We know which we choose to believe.

The earliest version of the story involves the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh. In a fragment dating from at least the 17th century BCE, Gilgamesh is buried under the Euphrates. Later, the Visigoth leader Alaric was said to have been buried under the Busento, after which all the workers involved were massacred. Attila the Hun was supposedly dumped under yet another river, after which the workers were also murdered, but probably twice as hard.

Yet another version involves Genghis Khan, with the added detail that the warriors who killed the workers were themselves killed by another group of warriors ... who were then killed by another group of warriors ... and so on, until the legend kind of tails off (presumably because everyone in Mongolia was dead).

Via Wikimedia CommonsSeems sort of overkill to protect his treasure of six cats.

Even the prophet Daniel got upgraded to a river burial in Medieval Islamic accounts, although they left out the traditional massacre. Maybe it was implied by then.

It's worth noting that none of the legends are considered credible by historians. They mostly don't even make sense. How does killing workers keep the location secret? Someone still had to be there to kill them. Also, a big pile of dead workers seems like kind of a giveaway.

In old-timey Europe, there was a whole slew of legends and fairy tales about brave heroes fucking up the giants who ostensibly went around eating cows and kidnapping women back then. In England, King Arthur cut one's balls off while Jack killed and outwitted a whole bunch.

Wiki CommonsIn this case, "outwitting" means removing the wits with a fucking pickax.

In Germany, the Brave Little Tailor tricked two into killing each other, then carved their hearts out for good measure.

Alexander Zick

In Norway, the stock boy hero tricks a giant troll into cutting his stomach open to win an eating match.

Theodor KittelsenThere's real thin line between hero of myth and serial killer of myth.

While these specific stories originated in the Middle Ages, anthropologists from Durham University claim the root of this tale is actually over 5,000 years old. Across the pond, some Native American tribes passed down tales about having to defeat the man-eating giants who were the original inhabitants of the land. And in Norse mythology, Midgard (Earth) was created specifically to protect our squishy human selves from evil giants. Thor himself faced them in both battles of wits and straight-up battles. If Thor: Ragnarok was more faithful to the source material, the movie would have ended with Thor smashing Hulk's skull with his hammer.

It's possible that all these tales are based on distant memories of early man prevailing over our uglier, stronger prehistoric competitors -- so by slaying those giants, we're truly getting rid of a part of ourselves. We suppose it's also possible that these stories were all based on a real, regular-sized dude, and they kept making the guy bigger with every telling until eventually he was the size of a skyscraper.

Greg Tuff is a writer and comedian. Follow him on Twitter @Decaps86. Alex Perry is a freelancer who wrote an adult novel about time-traveling stalker and a heartwarming kids' book.

For more on the vagina dentata mythos, we'd be remiss not to suggest the movie Teeth.

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For more check out 5 Ridiculous Ancient Beliefs That Turned Out to Be True and 40 Myths We Believe Now Due to Tiny Mistakes Years Ago.

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