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Myths of Creation
By Philip Freund, Milton Charles Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 2003 Philip Freund
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1807-5
CHAPTER 1
A GENESIS
Some thirty years ago and more, when I was enrolled at a university, I studied astronomy. One night each week I went to a little domed observatory that stood on a knoll, and afterward on cold winter nights I walked back to the campus and my dormitory room, along a path through woods beside a frozen lake. Like everyone else, I found it exciting to gaze through a telescope at the moon and the rings of Saturn. Even more thrilling was that snowy walk back from our evening class. Overhead the stars burned with frosty clarity in the winter sky and the crisp and sometimes stinging air. I was eighteen, and when I looked up at the white points of light in the dark sky, a sense of poetic wonder flooded my mind. This was very close in feeling, I'm sure, to the primitive sense of wonder of a child or savage, peering heavenward, with all the world and night about him empty and still.
An astronomy course consists of more than trips to an observatory; our professor chalked abstruse mathematics on the blackboard, and there were excursions into physics with which a youthful intelligence was hardly able to cope. But the ingenuity of astronomers greatly impressed me, as did their staggering statistics. It is not without cause that we speak of any very large figure as "astronomical."
A young man who sat alongside me in class was a good mathematician and often helped to explain the complex equations to me. He was quiet, well behaved, serious in aspect. Often we walked back together from class across the glistening, snowy campus. One day I spoke with enthusiasm and respect of the lecture we had just heard, on the origin of the solar system.
He smiled. "Yes, it's all very interesting. But of course I don't believe any of it."
"What do you mean?" Everything I was told in the classroom, I accepted without question.
"I'm a Christian. I read the Bible, and I believe what's written there."
"That God created the world in six days?"
I learned that my friend was deeply religious. He hoped to go to a theological seminary and afterward become a missionary in distant Africa. This was in the days when a religious movement called Fundamentalism was popular in America. The Fundamentalists believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible; indeed, at their urging, a science teacher named Scopes in Tennessee had been removed from his class and fined for having taught that man was descended from monkeys. The findings of science were heresies to such orthodox religionists. If my friend belonged to them, that in itself was not too startling.
But how could he sit beside me in an astronomy class and follow the blackboard demonstrations, and peer through a telescope, and yet not believe anything he heard from our professor? Every time I saw my friend taking notes on the lectures, I asked myself that. To me, his attitude was highly irrational.
At the end of the term, when we wrote our final examination, I barely won a passing grade, but my unbelieving friend — due to his mathematical skill — had the highest mark in the class.
Our professor had no inkling that his best student was a quiet skeptic. My friend's religious faith continued to puzzle me. How could anyone be exposed to the dazzling proofs of science and yet close his eyes to them?
At eighteen, I thought that the theory presented in our astronomy class was the "truth," and that my friend's belief, the Biblical one, was mere fantasy. It should have given me pause, however, that the theory propounded in college was not the one I had learned in high school, only three or four years earlier. My high school teacher had told us about the Laplace nebular hypothesis to account for the origin of the earth and the solar system; whereas now, in college, I was being given the Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal hypothesis.
If the Laplace hypothesis was no longer scientifically sound, in what respect was it different from a "myth"?
II
It happened more recently, perhaps fifteen years ago, that I had occasion to read the Hindu Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad in Yeats's splendid translation. In it, I came across this vivid tale of the origin of life:
As a lonely man is unhappy, God was unhappy. He wanted a companion. He was as big as man and wife together; He divided Himself into two, husband and wife were born.
God said: "Man is only half himself; his wife is the other half."
They joined and mankind was born.
She thought: "He shall not have me again; he has created me from himself; I will hide myself."
She then became a cow, he became a bull; they were joined and cattle were born. She became a mare, he a stallion; she became a she-ass, he an ass; they joined and the hoofed animals were born. She became a she-goat, he a goat; she became a ewe, he a ram; they joined and goats and sheep were born. Thus He created everything down to ants, male and female.
He put His hand into His Mouth, and there created fire as if He were churning butter. He knew that He was this creation; that He created it from Himself; that He was the cause. Who knows, finds creation joyful.
When they say: "Sacrifice to this or that god," they talk of separate gods; but all gods are created by Him, and He is all gods.
Whatever is liquid He created from His seed. Every-thing in this world is eater or eaten. The seed is food and fire is eater.
He created the gods; created mortal men, created the immortals. Hence this creation is a miracle. He who knows, finds this miracle joyful.
This world was everywhere the same till name and shape began; then one could say: "He has made such a name and such a shape." Even today everything is made different by name and shape.
Later in this book, I should like to refer to that Hindu tale and analyze it in some small measure, in the light of what we shall have learned about the significance of myths. We shall not be able to probe it fully, but in part, at least; and I am certain that we shall discover something about ourselves in so doing.
Most of us contrast in our mind only two stories of the creation, the Biblical one and the scientific one. We assume that one or the other is right. Either my friend the Fundamentalist had the answer, or my professor of astronomy had it.
But it occurred to me, as I read the lively yet allegorically profound tale in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, that mankind provides many other stories of creation besides the Old Testament one.
I became curious about the creation myths of other religions and races, the tales of how the world began. Whenever possible, I took note of them. I was fascinated by the myths because of their poetic quality and accordingly collected them for my own pleasure. Of all kinds of primitive and natural poetry, this particular myth-subject has the most grandeur and scope and seems to be chronologically at the very start of man's speculations.
Here is a tale of the Shilluk, a tall and stately race in the African Sudan:
In the beginning was Jo-Uk, the Great Creator, and he made the Sacred White Cow. Out of the Nile that Cow came up. The White Cow gave birth to a man child whom she called Kola, whose grandson was Ukwa. Ukwa took two wives, dark virgins who also rose out of the holy river. One of Ukwa's sons, Nyakang, a tall blue-black warrior, went south to the marshes of the Upper Nile; there he founded the Shilluk nation and became its first ret, or ruler, and a demigod. All this happened when the world was new, about four hundred years ago.
Then I came upon this story of "the beginning" recounted by an Andean race, the Aymara people of Pacajes in Bolivia:
The Snow God Kun destroyed all life on earth. Only the cruel supaya — devils — dared to roam the thin air of the icy highlands. This happened ages and ages ago. Then the Fertility Gods, the Pacha Camaj, sent down their very own sons, the Eagle Men. They created a new race of people, to take the place of those who had been snowed under by the angry Kun. The children of the Eagle Men, the Paka-Jakes, settled on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where they are today.
These myths sound very unlike, yet one begins to discern strange patterns in them ... and from this a new curiosity entered my search. All the "origin" myths, though from scattered regions, have haunting similarities. How to account for that?
I think that a study of myths for their own sake would be an idle affair, a species of dilettantism, for which I have neither the time nor the temperament. What held my interest, almost from the very start, was the hint that I might learn something fundamental and permanent about the mind of man — about myself — by contemplating mythology, and especially man's always daring stories of "the beginning."
As my pleasure continued, and my hope for this quest sharpened, I finally began to think of creating a character in a novel, whose interest would parallel my own — an anthropologist who would be a collector of creation myths — and I finally did this in my philosophical romance, The Volcano God, which has outraged some of the more conservative critics. To prepare for the novel, my search for material became more systematic. Later I was also convinced that I should write a separate book about my findings, to develop my ideas and guesses further than the fictional form allows. I am not an anthropologist. Instead, I am a poet and novelist venturing into a special field, which, by the nature of his calling, is akin to his own. Any storyteller is something of a mythmaker.
What follows is a voyage of exploration which is serious and, in my opinion, important. I have greatly enjoyed compiling this book, because it is filled with poetry and color, articulated in some of the world's most superb allegory. Early man's gift for fantasy is astounding. One never ceases to wonder at it. And, so far as I know, this is the first time that so many creation stories have been brought together in one volume. But to share my delight in this spontaneous poetry is not my only purpose. How does man's mind work? Where can we look to find a clue more clearly than here? In these stories we can see how man reasoned when he looked at the world and first tried to explain it to himself. Let us examine his answers, his earliest and latest attempts at understanding the universe, not only in primitive myth but in recent science. In what ways do they vary? Or is man's explanation always very much the same? If there are fixed modes of thought, which have lasted since the beginning of humankind, an exciting prospect is open to us: we can learn a bit more of how we think, by an analysis of these creation epics, and thus further increase our store of self-knowledge.
CHAPTER 2
FIRE AND DELUGE
According to some Australian aboriginals, Old Man Pundyil opened the door of the Sun; thereupon a stream of fire poured down upon mankind.
The Eskimos tell a similar story. At the time of the great blaze, the waters of the Arctic Ocean became so hot that they finally evaporated.
Savage man's imagination is cruelly vivid. But that reflects — or symbolizes — the daily danger of his existence, the threat of natural accident.
The Ipurinas, a tribe in northwestern Brazil, relate that long ago the Earth was overwhelmed by a hot flood. This took place when the Sun, a caldron of boiling water, tipped over.
The Yurucaré, of Bolivia, say that Aymasuñe, the demon, was responsible for the fall of fire from heaven. Everything below died: bushes, creatures, the human race. Only one man, who had foreseen what might happen, had provided food and shelter for himself in a cave. When the fire hail began, he hid himself there. Now and then, to learn if the fire still raged, he held a long stick out of the mouth of his cave. On two occasions it came back charred, but the third time it was cool. Still cautious, however, he kept himself safe four more days before venturing out. And then, the sole survivor, he beheld a dreadful sight. The whole forest was ashes, the rivers and springs had boiled away, the very mountains were blackened.
These are not creation myths, but catastrophe myths. But they are a necessary background for the creation stories and nearly always coupled with them. They tell of a terrible fire, both cosmic and earthly.
In Hindu mythology, creation is destroyed at the end of each Kalpa, or day of Brahma, by flames belched forth from the fangs of Sesha, the serpent. Some savants have interpreted this as referring to the appearance of a blazing comet. In the ancient Babylonian epic which describes the adventures of Gilgamesh of Erech, we learn of a fire rain spread by the Anunnaki, who rush across the heavens with their torches aloft. The Anunnaki are underworld spirits and might have escaped from spouting volcanoes.
When we leap from the Eskimos and the Yurucaré to the Hindus and Babylonians, we are turning abruptly from savage story to highly sophisticated myth. But for our purpose at the moment that makes little difference, since we are merely stressing the universality of certain themes in all ages and places.
The Greeks have the famous fable of Phaethon, Apollo's son, who extracted from his father a promise to let him drive the Chariot of the Sun. The youth could not hold the reins tightly enough and, zigzagging through the sky, scorching the constellations, almost destroyed our planet. Clouds vanished; Libya became a desert. The Nile, in terror, hid below the earth, where its head still is; the Ethiopians were blackened for all time. The molten landscape was changed; mountains were heated and burst into flame. Only the intervention of Zeus, toppling the unhappy Phaëthon by a well-aimed thunderbolt, saved the world from a crisped end.
Or back to savages again:
The Washo Indians, in California, have a legend about a terrible volcanic upheaval. So great was the heat of the blazing mountains that the very stars melted and fell.
In the Northern Urals, the nomadic Voguls recount the story of a holy fire flood which swept over the earth for seven years and consumed almost everything; it even charred the raft of the few men who survived. It was sent by Num Tarem, the Fatherly, as a means of destroying Xulater, the Devil. Yet this fire scourge was in vain, for the indestructible Xulater eluded it.
The catastrophe myth, then, is a universal one.
In many of the stories, the world-wide blaze is caused by man's theft of fire from the gods. Maui, of the Maoris in New Zealand, was in need of it. His old blind grandmother advised him how he could steal it from Mahu-ika, the giant who guarded the flame. Maui spoke jokingly and tricked the giant into wrestling with him. With magical words, Maui hurled Mahu-ika into the air time and again, until at last the giant fell head foremost and broke his neck. Maui quickly cut off Mahu-ika's head and seized the precious flame, but it was new to him and got away and the world began to burn. Maui and his wily old grandmother were endangered. The Fire Thief jumped into the ocean, but even the salt water was boiling. He raised his voice to Ua, the Rain God, but in vain, for the fire burned on. He pleaded with Nganga the Sleet God; with the Storm Gods Apu-hau and Apu-matangi; he sought the help of the God of Hailstorms Whatu; but none of them could prevail. The ocean was nearly gone. Only when all the gods, joining together, let all their deluges pour down at the same time, was the world fire quenched.
The Tuleyome Indians, of California, tell of Wekwek, the falcon, who stole fire but lost it from beneath his wings in flight. It set the world aflame. The Yana Indians, nearby, also have a fire-stealing myth; five men were sent to obtain the treasure, but on their way back the Coyote, who had offered to carry the fire, dropped it, and instantly it blazed around them. The rocks glowed with heat, the waters evaporated, a dense pall hung over everything, and the very existence of Earth was threatened.
The Fire Thief, indeed, is a figure shared by many races. He may be the better-known Prometheus; or he may be the Irish Prince of the Lonesome Island, who bore away a flame from the well of the Queen of Tubber Tintye. In the lore of the Hassidic Jews, too, is preserved the story of man dangerously discovering fire and letting it escape his grasp.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Myths of Creation by Philip Freund, Milton Charles. Copyright © 2003 Philip Freund. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
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