Universe: Mythology

Universe: Mythology

Published: January 13, 2008, 12:00 am
Updated: April 21, 2009, 8:46 pm
Lead Author: Sten Odenwald
Topics: Cosmology

Introduction

The question that dogs humans in every age is to come to an understanding of how this took place. We know, now, that we do not need to worry about how every aspect of the universe came into existence. Some features of the world are clearly derivative from others. For example, the formation of stars, planets and galaxies seem to follow from the application of very simple physical laws to inert collections of matter. In many respects, the challenge we now face in developing a new story of the birth of our universe has been greatly simplified compared to the daunting challenge that our ancestors were faced with. We no longer require that our Earth, sky, oceans and the celestial firmament be created all at once. We, instead, recognize that all things have evolved over the eons from simpler forms of matter. It is the search for these primordial forms of matter and energy and the rules that govern them, that are the focus of the modern story of cosmogenesis.

Most mythological and religious stories are chiefly concerned with articulating the moral rules by which individuals in a society ought to abide. Not a single religion or mythology has resisted the temptation of explaining how the physical world came into existence. Although each of the ancient stories are in many respects very different, we see that they each begin from a remarkably similar initial state.

They begin with an undifferentiated primordial emptiness, perhaps having existed eternally, but certainly without light, and probably very chaotic. In this primordial state, matter, light and life were in a potential state of existence, or in a reduced state determined by their constitution as either Earth, Air, Fire or Water. Some agent called by the Egyptians Khepera, by the Zuni Indians, Awonawilone, or the "Spirit of God" by the Hebrews, then acted upon this primeval emptiness to bring into being the various elements of the physical world: either fully created or piecemeal.

Some civilizations such as the Babylonians, the Vikings and the Ionian School of Greece, see the moment of Creation as the interaction between pairs of qualities; sweet waters vs the ocean; hot vs cold, and from this is created various divine pairs of lesser deities.The creation process itself is described by analogy with common phenomena known to each civilization, often requiring male and female "principles" in an organic/ biological creation process, or the deposition of silt our of the conflict between fresh and salt water as in a river delta region. There are not many archetypes for generative processes that are easily viewed by humans, so it is no wonder that the process of creation in many of the legends and stories reads so similarly.

Yet, apart from the diversity of explanations for the method of Creation, what do we make of the commonality of the descriptions of the initial, primordial state? Clearly, no one has ever observed a "pregnant void" giving birth to trees, rocks and air? This, then, must be an intellectually inspired starting point onto which the rest of the pageant has been spliced. It is a construct of pure deductive reasoning, a free creation of the mind which had to be fabricated before all of the subsequent events of creation could be enumerated. In the 5000 years since these stories were created, we have not been able to innovate any radically new ideas about the pre-cosmic state. We seem to be habitually drawn to the same conceptual starting point of a "pregnant, chaotic void," only the cast of characters has changed.

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Citation

Odenwald, Sten, Ph.D. (Contributing Author); Bernard Haisch (Topic Editor). 2009. "Universe: Mythology." In: Encyclopedia of the Cosmos. Eds. Bernard Haisch and Joakim F. Lindblom (Redwood City, CA: Digital Universe Foundation). [First published January 13, 2008].
<http://www.cosmosportal.org/articles/view/138907/>

 

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