The creation occurs when part, if not all, of this Chaos coalesces and forms internal divisions, like the internal mass of a cell dividing itself into nucleus and matter. The part that is formed and thereby distinguished from the rest of the unformed mass then acts upon it to produce further distinctions and thereby create the world. Which is the absolute reality here? The Chaos itself? Or the child of Chaos that acts on it? Both. They are one. At some point, the myths step back from the mystery and affirm the essential and unbreakable unity of the creator and creation. Ultimately they insist on the interdependence of being and not-being, and it is the inexplicable transcendent unity of these two that they recognize in wonder and awe as absolute and call Holy.
All creation myths that consider the nature of being and not-being at this most profound level reach this conclusion. Others less ambitious in their theorizing, however, avoid the issue by merely beginning with one or the other side of this polar opposition. “Being was first,” they say, and they never ask where it came from; or, with equal force, they say “Not-Being was first,” and they fail to consider whence Not-Being evolved. In some versions of the Myth of Ptah from Memphis (c. 1400 B.C.), for instance, the gods (powers of being) are born from the waters of chaos (fertile not-being). Do they mean that not-being is prior to being? No, for other versions of the same myth describe the gods giving birth to those waters. Sometimes you start with the chicken and sometimes with the egg. In most cases, both are already present and distinguished. Throughout the world, creation myths express and dramatize this primary religious proclamation of the absolute reality in its dual form of being and not-being. Eternal gods of every kind reach out over the equally eternal chaos of not-being and distinguish within it all the forces and realities of the world: light is separated from darkness, heaven from earth, water from land, good from bad, masculine from feminine, matter from spirit, life from death, being from not-being. And thus the world of “reality,” our world of oppositions, change, and development is established.
Not all religions describe this essential nature of reality by setting this issue in time and speaking consequently of a beginning, a moment of creation. Jinasena (c. 900 A.D.), a great Jain teacher, rejects this whole model and asserts there never was a creation:
Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world.
The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?…
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression….
Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.
And it is based on the principles, life and the rest.
Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature.
And Buddhism, like some current cosmological theories in science, insists that the universe expands and contracts, dissolves into non-being and re-evolves into being in an eternal rhythm.
Although it might seem that such a rejection of the idea of creation would set the myths of Jainism and Buddhism radically apart from those of other religions, in fact it does not. To be sure, most myths temporalize their claims and speak of the absolute reality as the first one, but such a connection is not necessary. Creation myths are not just interested in the “unknowable” because it is first; they are interested in it because it is always.
This sounds particularly complicated but is in fact rather simple and commonplace. Think about how, when you are becoming close friends with someone, you tell each other about your pasts. You tell all about your parents, your childhoods, where you grew up, who your best freinds were, how you succeeded and failed, what you liked to do, and what you were afraid of. Why do you say all of this? To provide historical facts? No, it is not the past but the present that is interesting. The point of these stories is to reveal who you really are now, to show how deeply (in the story, how “long ago”) you feel about stewed tomatoes or dogs or Harry or heights. It is the same with myths about the past of the world. Such creation myths are really revelations of essences, of realities that were not just true once and then but are equally true now and always. The Jains and the Buddhists manage to reveal these essences without speaking of a temporal limit for creation, without locating the primary reality at the beginning of time. What is timeless, what is eternal, is always real.
Whether they locate it at the “beginning” or not, creation myths proclaim an absolute reality that is both transcendent and immanent—true eternally and true in the moment. Certainly when the myths are describing what was before anything was, they are specifically talking about the transcendent side of that absolute, that “Holy.” They go even further than this: they invent gods. That is, they speak about the unknowable in terms of the known.
In order to communicate their apprehension of the Holy, the unlimited reality that is the ground of all being and not-being and that is, by definition, absolute, religions use the only words we have—relative words. Those who emphasize the positive or manifest aspect of the Holy call it God and claim it is eternal (absolute), self-created (independent), creative (active and not reactive), omnipresent (without limit in the physical world), omniscient (without limit in the mental world), and omnipotent (without limit in terms of energy and force). What is most important to notice here is that such gods are thought of, as much as is possible, within the limits of such relative terms, as prior to most polar oppositions; they are without qualification. “I AM WHO I AM,” such a god says to Moses. But as these kinds of descriptions gradually evolve, God takes on other and more limiting attributes. The ground of being eventually is depicted as human—it is anthropomorphized—to dramatize properly its various relations to the created world: it is shown as male (our “father”) or female (our “mother”), as seems appropriate; it is very, very old (an expression of its eternality) or very young (an expression of its vitality and potency); and it is very wise (an echo of omniscience), big (omnipotent), high (superior), and so on.
Such a god can also be one or two or many (and these distinctions can be internal to the god, as in Christianity’s trinity, or they can be external, as in polytheistic religions), depending on which aspects of the absolute reality the myth wants to proclaim. The Dinka in Africa worship innumerable deities and yet still affirm that “divinity is one.” What they mean is simply that there is one divine power, one absolute reality, perceived in many different aspects; like light refracted in many colors, it is all a matter of perception. We express a similar paradox when we speak of the power of the law under which democracy operates: there is one power, yet it is expressed variously and in different amounts by the president, governors, mayors, and citizens. When such an understanding is expressed religiously, the gods are thought to have only dependent reality; they “exist” only as people recognize them to be symbols of the absolute reality. That Holy itself, however, exists by definition and not only as an idea or symbol, but as the only absolute reality.
People commonly misunderstand this essential point and take literally all of these relative descriptions of the absolute reality. They think of “God,” for instance, as male, old, and fierce, and thereby limit what is unlimitable and forget its absoluteness. Because of this tendency to idolatry, some religions eschew all relative characterizations of the Holy and emphasize its negative and unmanifest aspect. They refuse anthropomorphism and deny any association of the Holy with a being or thing. “Not this, not that” claim the myths of these religions. As Lao Tzu (c. 600 B.C.?) writes:
There is a thing confusedly formed
Born before heaven and earth
Silent and void
It stands alone and does not change,
Goes round and does not weary.
It is capable of being the mother of the world.
I know not its name
So I style it “the way.”
The w
ay that can be told
Is not the constant way
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name….
And myths around the world echo his perception. The Incas’ hidden face of God; the Hebrews’ unspeakable name of God; the idea everywhere expressed that God is unseeable, a “spirit”—even religions that do characterize the Holy in relative terms keep trying to point out the fundamental inappropriateness, the misleading limitations of their descriptions.
Whether they do it positively or negatively, creation myths proclaim more frankly than any other kind of myth the absolute reality that religions recognize. But speculation about the Holy is not their sole intent. They not only consider the ground of being but go on to describe the relation of that absolute reality to all relative realities, the relation of the infinite and unknowable to the finite and known. They announce that the absolute permeates every instance of being, every thing. “You can’t kill time without wounding eternity,” as Thoreau declared. Religions realize that the infinite is not only the ground of the condition of finitude but through it the ground of everything finite. Thus the Holy is here as well as everywhere; it is now as well as always; it is the basis of this and that, of you and me, as well as of being itself. The Holy is immanent as well as transcendent. This is one of the central messages of creation myths.
Religions argue through their myths that all things that are—all things that exist and have being—partake of the Holy, just as all things beautiful partake of beauty. The myths show how such an eternal and absolute reality is connected to us in our very relative, changing world and affirm that there is a way in which each person and thing can be considered absolute, possessing dignity (absolute, nonexchangable value) and not merely worth (relative, exchangable value).
We are so used to thinking of ourselves “relatively”—in relation to others and to the societies in which we live—that this idea may seem a bit foreign at first. Commonly we characterize ourselves by function—parent, child, student, teacher, and so on—and each of these functions is real in a relative way; that is, each of these descriptions is true insofar as certain criteria are met. In order for you to be a parent, you must have a child; to be a child, you must have a parent. Teachers similarly require students, and vice versa. Other relative characterizations are equally dependent and temporal. There must be shorter people for you to be “tall,” black people for you to be “white,” males for you to be “female,” rich people for you to be “poor,” foreigners for you to be a “national.” For any of these terms to have meaning, their counterparts must also exist. In themselves, in isolation, these terms are meaningless; they have no absolute validity. And people who define themselves only in such relative ways are left with ascribing to themselves only relative and dependent worth. They can even put a price on it and frequently do by taking out insurance policies: if a parent dies, $100,000 will pay for a substitute.
But through myth and ritual, religion makes the claim that this is not the entire case. It argues that in all these relative ways and aspects of being an absolute aspect, a dimension that is unique, independent, and of eternal validity is revealed. That is what religions mean when they affirm that people are “sacred,” that they have dignity as well as worth. Religions see that people are not only relatively valuable as parents and children but that they are absolutely valuable as themselves; your parents could have had another child, but never another you.
This absolute dimension of the self is often named and called soul (or jiva, or ka, or some other term). Problems arise only when we forget its formal nature and come to think of it as material, as a thing, something we have in addition to our other physical organs. Having misunderstood soul in this fashion (just as we often misunderstand God), we become disappointed when we cannot find it and dismiss it as an illusion, another fraud perpetrated by religion. But soul is not a thing; it is a dimension of depth in a thing. Like justness in a judge’s decision or beauty in a painting, soul is a quality of absoluteness revealed in something relative. And myths argue that, understood profoundly, people are connected to the holiness of the world in such a way that they reveal a dimension of holiness in themselves, a dimension of depth that is absolute.
WE HAVE SEEN how myths have to speak of the transcendent and immanent aspects of the unknowable in terms of the known in order to speak of them at all, but we have not really seen how far they go in doing this. Myths are not merely static pronouncements; they are not just pictures or images that might be meaningful to the already convinced but that would be meaningless to the unenlightened. Rather, they are whole stories, dramas placed in the familiar world of time and space that attempt to reveal, through their common details and particulars, truths that are uncommon and universal.
What is most evident when you read them is that myths use symbols to express their truths. This is not so peculiar in itself: all language uses symbols. When you say the word friend and apply it to the person closest to you, you are using a symbol. The sound friend and the letters you form when writing it out are all symbols; they are not your friend himself but are representative of him. The successful use of such symbols requires a certain kind of consent by other people. They have to know what you are talking about; they have to understand both the fact of the person you are referring to and the value you ascribe to him, or else the symbol is meaningless. At the simplest level, friend means nothing to people who do not understand English; more profoundly, it means nothing to people incapable of loving, of sharing with you the experience of valuing a person in that way.
But symbols are not always this easy to understand. They may be related to their referents in very complex ways. Based on common experience and shared history, we build up a wide range of conceptual associations and use these to enrich language and suggest more involved relations between things. Eventually we perceive underlying similarities in the structures of such relations and create metaphors to express them. Justice, for instance, is “blind” because, like a person who cannot see, it is unimpressed with superficial factors of wealth and class; it determines its findings on the sole basis of the weight of the arguments brought before it. Metaphors like this also require a certain amount of consent from their hearers. Without it, they are taken literally and misunderstood. Heard wrongly, even such a common metaphor as “justice is blind” leads us to believe the speaker thinks justice is a living creature with eyes that cannot see.
Such misunderstandings seem obvious and silly when you understand the metaphor, yet it is precisely because people so often do not understand that there is so much confusion about myths. Because in reading them you deal mostly with material from other cultures and other times, material belonging to people with whom you share no common history or outlook, it is easy to mistake the metaphors of the myths for literal statements. This is particularly true if you adopt a parochial mentality and define the relative sophistication of all cultures by criteria recognized only by your own. People who consider technology the only indicator of a society’s wisdom, for instance, often think that those with it are “advanced” (intelligent, rational, and sophisticated) while those without it are “primitive” (stupid, irrational, and innocent). It rarely occurs to them that this standard of judgment may not be universal and that other, nontechnological cultures may worry more about the ends of life than about the means to them. It is wrong to conclude that some people (“sophisticates” like us) can use metaphors creatively while others (“primitives” like them) cannot.
In a discussion between Marcel Griaule, a French ethnologist who recorded the Dogon myth included in this collection, and Ogotemmeli, the Dogon wise man who related it, Griaule became curious about just this point. How sophisticalled was Ogotemmeli in his use of language and metaphor? How literally did he intend his myth? Not sure, Griaule inquired about the number of animals crowded onto the steps of a celestial granary that Ogotemmeli claimed descended from heaven. Griaule had calculated that, given the overall dimensions o
f the granary, each step was less than a cubit deep, hardly big enough to accommodate several large animals. “How could all these animals find room on a step one cubit wide and one cubit deep?” he asked. And Ogotemmeli carefully explained, “All of this has to be said in words, but everything on the step is a symbol, symbolic antelopes, symbolic vultures, symbolic hyenas…. Any number of symbols could find room on a one-cubit step.” And, as Griaule reports, “For the word ‘symbol’ he used a composite expression, the literal meaning of which is ‘word of this lower world.’”
This is not to say that in all cultures all people understand the sophisticated use of symbols as Ogotemmeli did. There are various levels of understanding even in our own culture. Those who put religious statuettes on the dashboards of their cars to protect themselves against accident are missing the point. And those who presume a physical place called “heaven,” pearly gates intact, floating around somewhere in the sky have misunderstood a metaphoric rendering of the absolute as surely as any literalist from another culture. But there is no reason to define ideas by their misunderstanding simply because they can be and often are misunderstood. To really comprehend myths, you have to grant other cultures in other times the same freedom with language we grant ourselves. And to grasp their meaning, you must see what kinds of associations are being made and used by the myth in its metaphors.
Primal Myths Page 3
