Primal Myths

by Barbara C. Sproul

  Holding literally to the claims of any particular myth then, is a great error in that it mistakes myth’s values for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of religiosity. Such literalism requires a faith that splits rather than unifies our consciousness. Thinking particular myths to be valuable in themselves undermines the genuine power of all myth to reveal value in the world; it transforms myths into obstacles to meaning rather than conveyers of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doctrines come to describe a world removed from and irrelevant to our timely one; its followers, consequently, become strangers to modernity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sacrifice intellect, emotion, and the honesty of both to the safety of their creeds. And this kind of literalism is revealed as fundamentally idolatrous, the opposite of genuine faith.

  Looking at many myths inhibits this sort of religious provincialism and its attendant dangers of dogmatism and false faith. Indeed, one of the benefits of considering myths is that we come to understand them (and by analogy our own) as myths. We become conscious of the power of myth itself to generate attitudes toward reality and, along with ritual, to win acceptance for these attitudes. The faithful literalists fear that, by admitting their myths are myths and by comparing them to others, they will implicitly be describing their myths as untrue, mere projections of the mythmakers’ relative and particular situations into imagined absolute and universal realms. And the literalist unfaithful—those who mistakenly disparage all myths as false—agree (happily) with this presumption. Both groups are convinced that when the claims of various myths are known and compared their disagreements will cause all myths to be thought untrue. After all, how can all myths be true if each claims different things? If one culture envisions a good god forming a world out of a watery chaos, a second depicts a host of deities fighting for divine control of a world they have fashioned piece by piece, and a third describes the universe as the outgrowth of a cosmic duel between principles of good and evil, how are we to distinguish between them and find truth in any of their imaginings? And if we find that each myth reflects the social, historical, and political situation of its adherents, they argue, that further demonstrates the nature of myths as false.

  But both groups are wrong. Not only do they confuse theoretical and existential truth but also each forgets that, while languages may differ, the meaning expressed in them may be the same. This collection of creation myths does not show any essential disparity in understanding; rather, it reveals a similarity of views from a rich variety of viewpoints. To be sure, comparisons among the myths demonstrate that the way things are seen is dependent on the seers, their cultures and circumstances. In that sense, this collection provides a useful argument against dogmatism and idolatry. But, as the Buddhist parable counsels, one must not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In discovering that myths are human products, we are freed equally of blind faith and blind disbelief. We can understand that creation myths are not merely projections into a vacuum. Rather, they are responses to a real world that seek, in their various conditioned ways, to reveal to their adherents an unconditioned reality. Recognizing this, we can reach beyond the variety of languages to their common meanings, beyond the disparity of religions to their common revelations. We can shift our sight from the pointing fingers to the moon itself.

  ONE OF THE drawbacks of our piecemeal introductions to mythic ideas is that each one—from the most particular attitude toward pennies or puddles to the most general considerations of the proper role of women in society or humanity in nature—is taught and even debated out of context. Although we often treat such issues apart from their mythic sources, it is really only within the myths that we can properly understand them. For myths do not just reflect random attitudes toward reality. Rather, they begin with a perception of reality as a whole and in its light construct an integrated system for understanding all its parts.

  Myth is an integral part of religion. As such, it proclaims a central reality and then builds a structure of valuation around and in relation to it. We commonly understand a similar, although secular, manner of organizing attitudes when we say that someone has made a “religion” out of, say, tennis. What we mean is that the person thinks the game is all important and as a result makes all his choices on the basis of playing it: when considering new friends, he inquires about their game; when deciding whether to go to a party, he considers the shape he will be in the next morning when he could be out on the courts. Anything that brings him closer to the game is judged good; anything that takes him away is bad. When asked about himself, our athletic friend tells of his history in terms of tennis; when he learned to play, how he developed his backhand—these become the significant factors. He has created a myth, an attitude toward reality that makes his past sensible, present meaningful, and future possible. Around its central value, he constructs his life.

  The problem with all of this, of course, is that the game of tennis is not an absolute reality. It is highly dependent on fitness, ability, equipment, and so on, and as a viable center of religion it is severely limited. The meaning it offers for one’s life is equally circumscribed. While it provides a certain amount of satisfaction in terms of bodily health and sporting fellowship, it does not really address itself to more far-reaching concerns. The tennis devotee, then, is reduced in our estimation to a “jock,” and we consider him somewhat limited in his understanding of himself as “tennis player” only, and not more broadly and deeply as “human.”

  Regardless of what we think of the athlete’s “religion” of tennis, to the extent we understand how he constructs his life and determines his values around what is for him the supreme reality of the game, we can comprehend the basic structure of all religion. All religion posits such a supreme reality and subsequently builds an entire system of valuation around it. The difference between pseudo-religions like the athlete’s and real ones is that genuine religions proclaim an absolute reality as the centerpoint of their structure. That is, religion insists that what is essentially real and important to you subjectively must also be that which is essentially real and important in the objective world of fact.

  This is what distinguishes the religious point of view from all others. It proclaims an absolute reality that is both transcendent (true for all times and places) and immanent (true in the here and now). This reality is not relative; it is not dependent on changing factors of time and space. It is a reality of absolute value in relation to which all other values can be established.

  To be absolute, this reality cannot be a thing or a being, because all things and beings are dependent on others for their existence. They all have beginnings and ends, temporal or spatial limits, and they are all subject to change. Limited in these ways, things have a relative, but not absolute reality. To be absolute, the reality that religion proclaims through its myths must be eternal (not temporal), independent (not dependent), active (not reactive), and unchanging (constant). Specific religions characterize this reality in different ways and call it by different names, but they all agree on its absoluteness.

  While all myths assume this absolute reality and proffer a structure of value relative to it, creation myths do so more frankly and obviously than others. Only creation myths have as their primary task the proclamation of this absolute reality and description of its relation to all other, relative realities. Only creation myths establish the basic structure of all valuation based on the supreme value of the primary reality. Creation myths are required to do this by both the range and depth of their questions. Although these myths are of varying degrees of profundity, at their best they consider the essential structure of the whole of reality: matter, spirit, nature, society, and culture. They consider the origin and nature of being, the very fact of existence. Thus the Rig-Veda (c. 1200 B.C.) begins:

  Then neither Being nor Not-Being was

  Nor atmosphere, nor firmament, nor what is beyond.

  What did it encompass? Where? In whose protection?
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  What was water, the deep, unfathomable?

  Neither death nor immortality was there then,

  No sign of night or day.

  Not all creation myths are this wide-ranging in their questioning. Some ask only how a specific instance of being came to be—how this universe was formed, how the earth and sky were made, or how the land or the people or the society was fashioned. The second myth in Genesis (c. 900 B.C.), for instance, displays little interest in the origin of the universe and begins:

  (2:4) In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; (6) but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—(7) then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

  But even in myths such as this, which are limited in the range of their considerations, the same profound depth of questioning is apparent. They are still concerned with creation, with the relations of death to life, nonexistence to existence, not-being to being. Whether the myth addresses the issue of creation in its broadest sense as the origin of all being, or in its narrowest sense as the origin of a particular being, the same mystery is central: the nature of reality itself.

  In this respect, creation myths do not merely deal with the known or even seek to make determinations about the unknown. Rather, their real concern is with the relation of the known to the unknowable. They push at the limits of all thinking, reaching to the very edge of the world of matter and ideas. The creation of the universe, for instance, represents the limit of being in time and space. Beyond it, or at its edge, begins the unknowable. This is true regardless of the size of the universe being described: the relation of the finite to the infinite is mysterious whatever the relative size of the finite. Before the creation, there was nothing, and even “nothing” is too definite a term. You can still seem to be saying something by it. (In Alice in Wonderland, the Red King asks Alice, “What do you see?” “Nothing,” answers Alice, and the Red King comments with a certain degree of admiration, “My, what good eyes you have.”) But religions go beyond this: they think about a “nothing-that-was-not” and focus on this unknowable because they believe it the key to determining and valuing everything that flows from it, the known and the unknown.

  Creation myths reveal this religious concern most clearly. They ask, essentially, what was before anything was, what is the source, the ground of being? The word ground is a useful here because it helps to demonstrate the unknowable nature of the source of being; it points to the fact that we have no independent position from which to scrutinize and know that source. Imagine trying to see the underside of the ground you are standing on. If you dig it up and turn it over, you will have exposed the ground you were standing on, but not that which supports you while you are digging—that ground is unknowable; there is no perspective from which you can study it. This is the kind of problem religion faces when it attempts to describe the ground of being.

  This point is well demonstrated in the Book of Job in the Old Testament. Barely surviving a plague of misfortunes, Job calls upon God to justify his suffering. He thus challenges God; he asks God to account for his actions. But when God finally speaks he does not reply to Job’s charges. Rather, he questions Job’s power and right to make them. Appearing in all his majesty as the source of being, God demands to know how Job could have defined himself sufficiently independent of the creator to make such a challenge in the first place. “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.” And God shows in the following speech how Job is a dependent creature that requires God merely in order to be. In himself Job has no solidity, no place to stand which is not God’s, so his challenge is hollow. It is as if your own words were to speak back to your tongue: what voice of their own would they have? Finally understanding this, Job repents in dust and ashes.

  In creation myths, the ground of being is not only physical but also metaphysical. The ground they speak of is the source of mind as well as of matter. The Indian Kena Upanishad (800–400 B.C.) tries to make this clear when it asks:

  Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who first drives life to start on its journey? Who impels us to utter these words? Who is the Spirit behind the eye and the ear?…

  We know not, we cannot understand, how he can be explained: He is above the known, and he is above the unknown.

  And then it proceeds to describe this “unknowable” as “what cannot be spoken with words, but [is] that whereby words are spoken…what cannot be thought with the mind, but [is] that whereby the mind can think…what cannot be seen with the eye, but [is] that whereby the eye can see.” This unknowable, this ground of being, this spatial and temporal limit of reality is what religions consider to be the absolute reality or, for want of a better term for the moment, what they call “God.” Forget all of your own religious conceptions of the word “God” for a little while, and think about this ground of being. It is purely definitional: you will inevitably come to it if you think enough about the limit of any finite thing. Where did you come from? Your parents gave birth to you. And your parents? From their parents; and so on down through the animals to micro-organisms and chemicals and elements and matter and energy to what? To the moment of creation and the “creator,” if it is possible to name such a force. And that is the same place that religions end up in their speculation. Everything within the created universe of matter and mind is derived from something else and therefore has existence that is dependent or relative. (You are dependent on your parents for your being; your “reality” in physical terms is relative to theirs.) Only what stands as the source of all existence, the ground of all being, is self-derived and independent; only that reality is absolute.

  Now, religions have a great deal of trouble describing this absolute reality because they have no absolute perspective. They cannot stand outside the universe with the Holy and encompass the world of time and space; they are inevitably within that world. Like fish in water, they have no way to stand aside and describe the sea objectively. Since the absolute reality that religions strive to understand is the ground of all thinking, it cannot be known. Since it is beyond any subject–object distinction, being by definition the ground of both, it cannot be objectified.

  Part of this problem is that our whole way of understanding operates with the use of polar oppositions. We categorize things by how much they are like any one part of such a pair of opposites, how unlike the other they are. It is as if we imagine a multidimensional grid in which each of the oppositions has a line: tall–short, here–there, high–low, old–young, hard–soft, red–green, good–bad, matter–mind, life–death, existence–nonexistence, and a million others. We understand things when we have decided where to place them on each of these lines in the grid; finally we see how they fit into the whole. Now the most basic of such pairings is being and not-being, the positive and negative alternatives expressed in terms of existence. And, as with all polar oppositions, the parts of this primary one require each other. What “is” derives from what “is not”; what “is not” comes from what “is.” Which came first, being or not being? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

  1. In the beginning, my dear, this world was just Being, one only, without a second. To be sure, some people say: “In the beginning this world was just Not-Being, one only, without a second; that from Not-Being Being was produced.”

  2. But verily, my dear, whence could this be? said he. How from Not-Being could Being be produced? On the contrary, in the beginning this world was just Being, one only, without a second.

  This is how the Chandogya Upanishad (c. 700 B.C.) tried to resolve the problem. But
of course the solution must finally be more profound than this. To pick any part of the opposition is to remain within it. “The egg came first!” announces the child when he first hears the question. “But who laid the egg?” And back he plunges into the ultimate riddle.

  The only solution lies in asking about the ground of the polar opposition itself. What should we call that which produces both being and not-being? What is prior to both the positive and the negative? Thus the language of creation myths reaches beyond itself to absoluteness.

  Some religions characterize the holy ground of all in seemingly positive terms. They call it Being-Itself and rush to qualify the statement by saying that Being-Itself incorporates both being and not-being. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; praise be the Lord!” Both life and death, existence and nonexistence, are controlled by such a power. And, as the Rig-Veda says, “Neither Being nor Not-Being was there then…. Only the One breathed, windless, by its own energy.”

  Other religions, however, favor the negative side of the polarity and proclaim in effect that Not-Being-Itself is the source of all being and not-being. The Maori of New Zealand chant:

  From nothing the begetting

  From nothing the increase

  From nothing the abundance

  The power of increasing

  The living breath….

  Because both of these solutions are obviously open to misunderstanding, many religions try to transcend both positive and negative characterizations by describing the original reality as divine Chaos. In this primordial stew, all distinctions are blurred but still potentially present; such Chaos is the potentiality and not the actuality of being. It should not be confused with the sort of chaos that is merely negative, the destroyer of order. Rather, this is the happy sort of Chaos out of which both order and dis-order can be made. It is like raw clay before some clay has been made into pots and the rest has been discarded as unnecessary. In one sense, the Chaos is ultimately positive: it is all, everything, the totality of Being, in that there is nothing else besides it. In the other and equally valid sense, it is ultimately negative: it is Nothing (no-thing), in that it has no internal distinctions. Solid and liquid, spirit and matter, good and evil, light and dark—all the oppositions through which reality exists are not yet delineated.