Creation Stories / Epics
We’re going to be starting with a few creation stories and myths, along with part of an epic (Gilgamesh).
We want to think about what a creation story is, and what a myth is, as well as what an epic is.
Myth comes from the Greek word muthos, which just means word, or story. Among other things, myths provide explanations. They are an attempt to get to the truth of why something happened, or how things came to be.
There are different sorts of myths. For instance, we can have aetiological myths. These are myths that explain the origin of certain culture practices, or landscapes, or peoples.
An aetiological myth might explain, for instance, why we have winter (because of Persephone ate those pomegranate seeds) or why people speak so many languages (because of the Tower of Babel); or it might explain why those cliffs over there are made of black rocks (because Coyote got to messing around and burned them up); it might explain where our people’s names came from, or why we celebrate certain holidays the way we do (because we were slaves in Egypt).
Myths often explain why people die, or what people are for – why we exist. And myths can transmit guides to ethos and moral behavior.
There are cultural myths – myths meant to instruct those in a given culture about proper codes of behavior. These are sometimes called fables, or fairy tales – think of Aesop’s fable. Sometimes they’re called history – think of George Washington and that cherry tree.
We also have Creation Myths – these are myths about the creation of the world and the universe, as well as humans and our place in it. Some cultures separate humans from other creatures; some don’t.
And there are Trickster tales. These are stories of ambiguous characters – Loki, Anansi, Coyote, Enkidu, Prometheus – who act against or outside the culture’s stated rules, sometimes for the good of the culture (but often not), in stories that are usually intensely interesting to us. (The serpent in the Garden of Eden is a trickster figure.)
The role of the trickster isn’t just to be funny and make us laugh. They don’t just break rules to be breaking rules. Tricksters break rules – lie, transgress, steal, make rude jokes – in order to teach us what the rules are.
Further, tricksters (maybe even more importantly) break the rules to change the rules.
People get attached to their rules – fixated on them, even. Given long enough, people can start to think that rules are real things, and not (in fact) what they are, which are social constructs.
What does that mean, rules aren’t real? Rules are social constructs? Well, you know this. You just haven’t thought about it.
Why do we stop at stop signs? That’s not a real rule, right? I mean, it’s not like the law of gravity. Try breaking the law of gravity sometime, if you want to see what a real law is like, rather than one we have just made up.
Laws like don’t steal and don’t shoot your neighbor and don’t run stop signs are made up laws. We don’t break them because we have agreed not to break them, because we think it’s a good idea not to break them. But they can be broken, and we all know that.
Most of our rules and laws are like this – don’t marry your uncle, don’t cuss in church, don’t hit a policeman, don’t go outside the house naked – and most of them are good rules and laws.
But if we start to think these rules are real things, like the law of gravity is a real thing, we can run into trouble, because sometimes these rules need to be changed, like when the world changes. What if we don’t realize these rules can change? What if we’re convinced these rules are real and fixed? That’s when we need tricksters.
What happens when people begin to think that rules are real and fixed, rather than things we happened to have made up because having rules makes it easier to live together? Well, the trickster comes and breaks the laws. He breaks the rules.
Coyote, for instance, turns himself into a woman, dresses up all pretty, has riotous sex with his father-in-law (a terrible taboo) and – nothing happens. The world does not fall apart.
In fact, it’s hilarious. This is the lesson Coyote (and all tricksters) teach us: that when you break the rules, sometimes, nothing terrible will happen.
That’s an important lesson, because everyone else in our lives is teaching us exactly the opposite. Everyone else in our lives – parents, bosses, teachers, the police – they are teaching us that if we step one step out of line, make one mistake, OMG, our lives are finished!
Anyway! Creation myths!
Creation myths look at how the world (and sometimes the universe) came to be. Different cultures have different explanations. Almost all of them look at certain things, though:
· Where the earth came from
· Where the heavens (or sky) came from
· Where humankind came from
· (Sometimes) where sex came from
· And how it came to be that people have to die
All of them are set outside of time – that is, they don’t take place (despite Bishop Usher’s lovely calculations, which says that the world began Sunday evening, October 23, 4004 B.C.) in real time, but in a mythic time, in Once Upon a Time Land.
In a real sense, most creation myths are also aetiological myths (since they explain origins) and are often cultural myths (since they will have embedded in them cultural rules /ethos).
Most of us are familiar with the creation story in Genesis – there, God speaks everything into existence, from the sky and the water, to the bugs and the trees, to men and women. And then he creates the rules for men and women – be fruitful and multiple. Finally, he creates death, as a curse, after Adam eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Many creation myths deal with these issues – where did the world come from? Who made it? Where did we (humans, we creatures) come from? Where did sex comes from? Why do we die?
Different myths give different reasons for death. In Genesis, it’s because we disobeyed. In the fertile crescent of the Mideast – as with Enuma Elish, for instance – myths commonly ascribe the origin of death to gods being angry at how noisy humans got – they were so many and so noisy, they kept the gods awake, and so the gods introduce death in order to get some sleep.
In other mythologies, death is a choice: the gods offer humankind two sorts of life, one which is eternal, but without children; and one which is short, but with children, and humans choose the latter.
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