In a myth such as the Assyrians’ “Another Version of the Creation of Man” (c. 800 B.C.), for instance, the initial scene, in which Anu, Enlil, Shamash, Ea, and Anunnak—all great gods—are sitting in their heaven discussing the progress of creation, makes little sense unless you recognize its symbolic meaning. If you understand what these deities represented to the Assyrians, if you realize that Anu symbolized the power of the sky, Enlil that of the earth, Shamash the sun or fire, Ea the water, and the Anunnaki destiny, you begin to see that the Assyrians understood creation as a process in which air, earth, water, fire, and time all evolved together. Reading further, you will see that people are to be made out of the blood (the essence, the life force) of slain gods (great concentrations of power) to serve their creators with festivals and to maintain and increase the fertility of the earth. That is the Assyrian faith—a celebration of the wondrous natural forces that created the world, a recognition of a particular mission for people, and a perception of their essential relation to the forces that created them. Understanding the symbols—seeing what they meant to their authors—eliminates confusion from our reading of them and permits what were intended as timeless truths to be freed of their limited and temporal expressions. Or, to be more precise, by such “translation,” we come to understand these truths in expressions more fitting our own equally but differently limited perception.
Sometimes this sort of reinterpretation involves the perception of facts. Since cultures use facts, as they understand them, to build their metaphors and express their values, occasionally you must allow for real differences in levels of science available to mythmakers. You have to think about what the “facts” meant to the people who used them and find equivalent modern “facts” to substitute for them. The first Genesis myth, for instance, declares that God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. It is difficult to know if the Hebrew authors of this text intended this claim literally and actually thought of a six-day creation as “factual” or whether they hoped merely to use it symbolically to represent a completed amount of time, a sacred week that matched and therefore sanctified their own work week. (Myths usually use factual statements in this way; rarely do they attempt to be scientifically comprehensive in their descriptions of what was created.) But if they did mean the claim literally in this case, then to be comprehended today it must be revised, translated into our current (and still changing) scientific understanding of cosmology in the same way we translate the words themselves from one language to another to make them relevant to new listeners. To be sure, when we do this and speak of a creation taking billions of years rather than six days, we have to sacrifice the structural similarity between the time of God’s divine work and that of our ordinary labors. But the main point of the myth is not lost. On the contrary, it becomes more available to us in our situation. To think that myth is tied to such “facts” and to defend their literal interpretation is to confuse myth with science and to miss the point. Myth seeks to proclaim values and to declare meaning. To the extent that it requires facts to do this, it is aided by science. Pitting the two against one another reveals a profound misunderstanding of the intentions of both.
Nowhere is the need for such translation more apparent than in the myths’ descriptions of how the absolute reality is related to the relative. The moment of creation itself is almost always highly metaphoric. “God created the world” is the general claim—but what do the myths mean by this? How do they envision such a creation? And what do they understand to be the subsequent relation of creation to creator?
Rarely are myths as straightforward as the Hopi Indian one that begins with Taiowa and endless space (being and not-being) existing together:
The first world was Tokpela [Endless Space].
But first, they say, there was only the Creator, Taiowa. All else was endless space. There was no beginning and no end, no time, no shape, no life. Just an immeasurable void that had its beginning and end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.
Then he, the infinite, conceived the finite. First he created Sotuknang to make it manifest, saying to him, “I have created you, the first power and instrument as a person, to carry out my plan for life in endless space. I am your Uncle. You are my Nephew. Go now and lay out these universes in proper order so they make work harmoniously with one another according to my plan.”
Sotuknang did as he was commanded. From endless space he gathered that which was to be manifest as solid substance, molded it into forms.
The point that the infinite conceived the finite is made in most of the myths, but they depict this wondrous event in different ways. Those metaphors easily understood speak of the unknowable in terms of the most commonly known: they speak of the creation in terms of procreation. In this scheme, a sky father god and an earth mother goddess—(active, masculine, “being” and passive, feminine, “non-being”)—lie close together and, with rain as the divine fertilizing agent, produce as children all the natural forces and creatures.
The usefulness of this metaphor for describing the origin of the many from the two is demonstrated by the fact that it is used even when only one god is envisioned. In these instances, the polar oppositions (reduced here to a male–female duality) are just internalized in the one. Thus, when the power of being is characterized overtly as feminine, an earth mother goddess gives birth spontaneously and independently, without need of a mate. If the sole deity is seen as male, either he externalizes the duality—imagines a mate into being and produces the creatures with her—or he keeps the duality inside and uses aspects of himself as the feminine “other.” These myths maintain exactly the same principle of distinguishing a directing agent (manifest being) and the raw material of creation (unmanifest not-being) as more abstract myths do in speaking of the original Chaos as self-dividing. Only here, personalized as they are, the myths are more dramatic and involving. Some tell how the god sacrifices a part of himself, cutting off a piece of his “body” and fashioning it into the world. Others describe him vomiting or excreting the world or giving birth to it in some other related manner. In the Aranda myth from Australia, for example, the great totemic ancestor gives birth to people through his armpit.
Some myths hold to the procreative metaphor more closely and describe instances of divine masturbation. The “Egyptian History of the Creation of the World” affirms that the god Neb-er-tcher contains all duality—manifest and unmanifest, masculine and feminine, physical and mental—within himself. These aspects interact with each other as the god has union with his clenched hand, pours the semen into his mouth and, having fertilized it in that womb of words and ideas, spits it forth as creation. What seems to us initially only a story of masturbation, strange to use as a model of behavior, becomes sacred and revealing about the nature of reality if only we understand what was meant by it.
All the myths that use procreation as a way of understanding creation stress the extraordinary fertility, the overabundance of the power of being, that qualifies gods as symbols of the absolute ground of being. This is what the myths celebrate when they talk about an endlessly productive earth mother goddess or, more graphically, as in the Aborigine myth of the Djanggawul gods, about deities with enormous genitalia. They are also showing how the relation of the creation to the creator, so ambiguous and difficult to pin down precisely, can be understood if put in terms of the relation of a child to its parent. How much more powerful it is to use this kind of metaphoric illustration than to define abstractly the complex relation of constant structure and changing form.
Myths also use other metaphors to describe the creation. Sometimes they conceive the primary duality of being and not-being in terms of an order-chaos opposition and envision god as a kind of great administrator. Often identified as good, this sort of god takes on chaos (evil) as a challenge and, like any of us trying to get our houses in shape, begins by establishing basic principles. Light over here, dark there; solids in this place, liquids in that; and thus day and nig
ht, earth and water, come into being. Occasionally in such myths a part of chaos—not the fruitful whole that is pre-order but the negative part that is dis-order, which threatens to overcome the order—is symbolized as a terrible monster, and the dragon or snake, like the bull in the china shop, has to be slain or at least sufficiently controlled. All over the world, in the Babylonians’ Enuma Elish and in the earliest creed of the Celts, in the books of Job and Psalms from the Old Testament, in the myths of the Hottentots of Africa and those of the Mandan and of the Huron Indians of North America, valiant defenders of the principles of being and order do fierce battle with the forces of not-being and chaos and finally subdue them so that order and life can be established.
In yet another kind of metaphor, myths represent creation as a mental activity. Just as our environments result from our relative dreams and plans, so the world here is understood as the product of an absolute imagination and intelligence: it is dreamed, thought, or spoken. The Mayan Popol Vuh (c. 1600 A.D.) describes creation in these terms:
There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light…. By nature they were great sages or thinkers. In this manner the sky existed and also the Heart of Heaven, which is the name of God, and thus He is called.
Then came the word. Tepeu and Gucumatz came together in the darkness, in the night, and Tepeu and Gucumatz talked together. They talked then, discussing and deliberating; they agreed, they united their words and thoughts.
Then, while they meditated, it became clear to them that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then they planned the creation, and the growth of trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and the night by the Heart of Heaven.
Myths like this argue that gods are endlessly powerful: they only have to command something and it is accomplished: what they think or say becomes a physical reality. In this sense, their potency is both mental and physical. (As the Koran says of Allah: “It is He who giveth life and death; and when he decreeth a thing, He only saith, ‘Be,’ and it is.”)
How words establish realities becomes clear if you remember the child learning the names of things, and it becomes clearer still if you consider how we change people’s names when they marry or join religious orders or how we make up new names for countries when we declare their independence. We create new identities, new things, by giving them new names. Gods too create by naming—man, woman, tree, animal—these terms announce values, functions, and identities as well as establishing facts of being. And even if they have not used the naming metaphor to describe the creation of the whole world of being, most myths still apply it to the creation of specific parts of being. They still insist that names must be assigned very carefully. Some underscore the creative function of naming by showing the relation of the powers of speech and procreation; both are thought so sacred that only the god can teach people how to use them. In the Hopi myth, for example, a lesser goddess (Spider Woman) makes people with all abilities except these two; only the manifest god (Sotuknang) can complete them:
“As you commanded me, I have created these First People. They are fully and firmly formed; they are properly colored; they have life; they have movement. But they cannot talk. That is the proper thing that they lack. So I want you to give them speech. Also the wisdom and the power to reproduce, so that they may enjoy their life and give thanks to the Creator.”
So Sotuknang gave them speech, a different language to each color, with respect for each other’s difference. He gave them the wisdom and power to reproduce and multiply.
In procreating and speaking, we act like the gods—we create worlds of being and meaning—and therefore have to learn how to do so properly by keeping the absolute principles of creation in mind.
Many myths use a more direct metaphor and describe creation in terms of forming. Here the emphasis is on the physical side of the mind-matter duality, and the god is portrayed as an artist or craftsman: taking some unmanifest raw material, he fashions it into a specific shape, animates it, and instructs it in the appropriate way of being. In many Eskimo and North American Indian myths, the creators bring up a little mud from the bottom of the chaotic waters and stretch it out into the earth, and gods all over the world use clay or dust to make people and animals. Myths that speak of the creation in this way usually think of the world as an expression of the creator. What is made still shows the traces of its maker; the known reveals the unknowable or, as the Old Testament puts it, “The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”
One of the most profound metaphors myths use to describe creation involves divine sacrifice. Here the absolute, symbolized as a great loving God, dies to become the relative world. The Chinese myth of P’an Ku is typical:
The world was never finished until P’an Ku died. Only his death could perfect the universe: From his skull was shaped the dome of the sky, and from his flesh was formed the soil of the fields; from his bones came the rocks, from his blood the rivers and the seas; from his hair came all vegatation. His breath was the wind, his voice made thunder; his right eye became the moon, his left eye the sun. From his saliva or sweat came rain. And from the vermin which covered his body came forth mankind.
In such myths the polar opposites of being and not-being are connected by a single act. When he becomes manifest and dynamic, as the world, P’an Ku dies to his unmanifest and static state of perfection as God.
Sacrifice is a rich and subtle metaphor because it not only expresses this fact but so much of the ambivalence we feel in understanding the creation and facing the life that springs from it. On the one hand, the metaphor celebrates the glory of the gift of being. The world, after all, and all life within it is sanctified by this act, sacrifice: sacer—holy, facere— to make. On the other hand, myths that speak of such sacrifice recognize the enormous cost of this gift. “God” has died to the world; the static perfection of the absolute is lost to the dynamic change and flow of temporal reality. The ground of being and not-being, that holy and mysterious unity, has dissolved into flux. Now, in the created world we experience that unity only through its duality in the polar oppositions of being and not-being, life and death, and so on.
All creation myths express this ambiguity in some way. Usually they stress the difference between the creator and the creation, between the absolute that is the ground of being and the relative beings (people, things, forces) that are dependent on it. Now, most myths, as we have seen, emphasize the fact that the absolute is still perceivable in the relative. They show how the world can be experienced as holy if it is understood properly. Other myths, however, stress the loss of perfection resulting from creation. They envision that timeless, unchanging, and absolute reality as sullied by time, change, and relativity. They concentrate on the difficulties involved in recognizing the absolute through the relative and encourage their followers to reject everything that is temporal.
It is a bit like the difference between the optimist and the pessimist: the first delights that his glass is half full, while the second complains that his is half empty. Most religious sytems contain some of this pessimism, but few are so starkly despairing as Gnosticism, which thinks of creation almost entirely in terms of the loss of (absolute) reality and perfection. Hope, in Gnostic myths, takes the form of a messenger from the absolute who reveals how all being is under the limitation of not-being, how all life leads to death, and who instructs his listeners to renounce the manifest world and escape back into the unmanifest purity. You have to read through a great deal of symbolism to get the point, but few scenes of loss and despair are so powerful as that in the creation myth of Mani (215–275 A.D.) in which Adam (mankind) suddenly realizes how he has become trapped in relativity, how his eternal soul has become ensnared by the temporal matter of his body. Longing to return to the perfection of the ground of being and not-being, to the
unmanifest absolute, he “cried and lamented; terribly he smote his breast and spoke: ‘Woe, Woe unto the shaper of my body, unto those who fettered my soul, and unto the rebels that enslaved me!’”
AT THIS POINT we can begin to see how myths constitute structures of value. First, they consider the nature of reality so profoundly that they pierce its limits. When they describe these limits physically (and thus spatially and temporally), they speak of a “creation,” and when the limits are defined metaphysically, the myths proclaim the relativity of our reality. They understand that each thing that has life and being and the totality of all such things are limited and conditioned by their opposites, death, nonexistence, and not-being. As the myths that use the physical model come to understand a “creator” as the source of creation, myths that speak metaphysically claim the absolute as the ground of being and not-being. Being-Itself (or Not-Being-Itself), the Holy, the Unknowable—these are the terms that myths employ to describe this indescribable and absolute ground.
Recognizing how difficult all of this is to understand abstractly, myths use symbols and metaphors to make their point concretely. They temporalize and personalize and dramatize the argument so people will comprehend it. They talk about our relative world as dependent on the absolute as a child is dependent for being on his parent or a word is dependent on its speaker for reality. Through these dramatizations, it becomes clear that myths are also making value judgments. Immediately you can see that they stand in awe and wonder before the Holy. If the reason for this is still not clear, if these essentially religious responses are difficult to comprehend because of their religiosity, forget religion and put yourself in the place of the mythmakers who invented it. Just think about the universe and about the fact of existence. It is difficult, because to do this you have to think beyond and through all the relative values you ascribe to things. But think grandly, consider yourself and the land you live on; the continent and the earth (imagine that reality just being in space!); and then the solar system and the galaxy and the universe. All that reality! All that matter and energy and mind! The very fact that it is is wondrous. And religions go beyond the universe of change to consider the changeless structures basic to it. They describe a cosmic dance between being and not-being: matter coalescing and disintegrating; suns being born or blowing up; waters solidifying gradually into land or land dissolving into water; new trees growing out of the rotting wood of their own kind; generations of people bearing and giving way to the next; and societies, like clusters of cells, growing and dying to others.
Primal Myths Page 4
