Creation is what we have in common.

Creation myths are the most common form of myth found in cultures from across the globe. The creation myth is story that symbolically describes the beginning of the world and the beings that inhabit it. They do not necessarily follow a historical or literal sense of truth but they are often thought to be sacred and therefore not to be questioned. For many cultures creation myths provide answers to big questions such as how humanity began but also provide role models and customs which cultures followed for centuries. In this way creation myths establish long senses of tradition and also obedience. Creation myths appear in almost every religious tradition, from the Christian Bible to Chinese folklore, what I am curious about is why people from different cultures have common themes in their myths when there is no obvious connection between them. When looking at Native American creation myths it is obvious that any common themes could have been translated across the continent but how does a myth from Finland have similar ideas to one from South America?

Now Sigmund Freud is a man who I respect as an academic but I cannot agree with many of his theories. In my opinion he was too focused on the sexual desire of humans so I find him confusing and to be frank a little strange. One of his theories which I find hard to believe is his idea that the plots of myths were in fact long standing memories from when humanity was in its infancy. In the case of Oedipus Freud proposed that a real situation of parricide and incest took place and the myth is a representation of that memory deep within the human brain. I find this ‘myth from primitive man idea’ hard to believe. For one thing if this situation had occurred; that a primitive man had murdered his father and slept with his mother then surely there would be a myth like this in every culture, and as far as I am aware there isn’t And to have this memory in the human mind their must have either been so few humans in existence that they all knew the people involved or there must have been a means of communicating this to one and other. It is generally believed that humans broke away from apes around 6 million years ago, at best we believe humans to have begun communicating with language complex enough to explain this situation about 1.8 million years ago. I think in the roughly 4 million years in between the sheer number of humans born would mean that this story of parricide and incest could not have been communicated to all of them in a way that it would be imbedded in the memories of people in the last several thousand years. 

In my opinion there are common themes in creation myths because these myths originated from a need to explain the world and the objects within it. In all creation myths there is an explanation of how the world was formed and a justification for the order of life by attributing it to the design or will of a sacred force. Even today with our more superior knowledge trying to explain the hardships of the world, the life cycle or how reality came about are concepts that are still debated and struggled with. But they are themes that people from all across the world try to answer and understand. It would be absurd to think that four thousand years ago people from opposite sides of the world would not question the same things.

There are different ways of classifying creation myths but one system divides the main themes into five categories:

         

1.     Creation from chaos

2.     Earth-diver

3.     Ex nihilo

4.     World parent

5.     Emergence

Now I find it no coincidence that in this classification system the creation myths from the Sumerian Empire (modern day Iraq) and the Jamshid creation account (from modern day Iran) are both classed in the same category. They are from the same area of the world and the ideas could have easily influenced each other. Ideas from a different culture infusing with the local ideas are common, look at the Romanisation of local religions in newly conquered parts of the Roman Empire or Kumu-Honua and Lalo-Honua in Hawaiian mythology who were given a garden by Kane (the highest of the four major Hawaiian gods) and forbidden from eating fruit from a certain tree, a story that has obviously been Christianized. But there are also myths from Japan (Ainu) and the South-East United States (Cherokee) which both follow the Earth Diver category with striking similarities between the plots, characters and forming of reality. Looking more closely at the myth of Prometheus that has been the focus of this module there are myths of deities or animals stealing fire from the gods and giving it to men from Greece, India, North America and even the Polynesian Islands. In my mind fire being from the gods is because of the wonders of fire, its destructive and beneficial qualities and the way it completely transformed life after it was discovered.

The myths that we know about today deal with everything from death, passing of night and day, childbirth, the seasons, just about anything we can think of but whilst we know today that the earth rotates on an axis exposing different parts of the world to sunlight and not to others three thousand years ago the sun being swallowed and reborn would have been just as plausible. The passing of night and day is obviously something that everyone is existence has seen and questioned so of course there are different ideas as to why it happens. Similarly the growth of crops and the creation of the world were investigated with the level of understanding present at the time. Today we apply the knowledge we have discovered to these questions and come out with different answers. But in another two thousand years time there could well be classics students studying the way that people from the 21^st century believed that the solar system was created in a ‘Big Bang’ and how to them that seems implausible and ridiculous. At least we can all agree that we have been created.

Bibliography

Myth & Knowing

Leonard, Scott A; McClure, Michael

McGraw-Hill, 2004

Myths and Fairy Tales Collection

Retold by Philip, Neil

Dorling Kindersley, London, 1999

Helen Morales

Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford, OUP, 2007

The problem with women is...

It is interesting when looking at creation myths the role that women have played in these stories. In some cultures women are a positive force; life givers not only in the sense of giving birth to children but also of creating the world and its inhabitants. For example in Aboriginal mythology the first woman was called Waramurungundi and she was celebrated as the woman who gave birth to all living things and taught language to the Australian people. On the other hand the introduction of women can be a negative concept, an explanation for the problems of the world; Christianity has long blamed women for the “fall of man”. What interests me is why different myths portray women in different ways and how they are portrayed.

                                         

From the reading I have done I have found that the representation of women differs due to the type of civilization (agrarian, mercantile, nomadic etc) but also the role of women in that civilization’s society.  The Wyandot (or Huron) people of America were farmers who added to their diet by fishing and hunting. They held the world around them and its animals in high regard and moved every decade or so to new, more fertile land. Whilst the men did most of the hunting and fishing it was the women who did most of the farming. The importance of women is reflected in their creation myth which has a woman falling from the sky into the water below. She then, with the aid of animals that lived in the water, built the world on the back of a turtle. Without the help of a man the woman had twin sons, one of whom killed her as she gave birth to him and when she was buried all the plants needed for life grew from her grave, including maize which grew from her chest. In the Americas maize was the key crop that was grown due to it being a hardy and dependable crop; it is a crop that has been celebrated by different cultures from the Mayans to the Moche. In fact in Mayan oral traditions maize is often shown as a woman.  With this myth it is important to note that not only did a woman create the world, give birth to the sons that populated the world with humans and other animals (some of which were of use to the humans) but also she gave them maize. She is shown as the provider because of the female role of providing the harvested crops from the farmed land.

In some other civilizations women were not held in such high regard and had less power and status as men did, which is reflected in their myths. In the myth Gilgamesh, the Sumerian culture showed women to be a hindrance or as a temptress. The women are either untrustworthy, such as Ishtar the goddess of love who slept with and broke the hearts of many men, or when faced with a challenge weak and needy; Ishtar is confronted by Gilgamesh and she turns to the Bull of Heaven (a powerful male character) to defend her. In Sumerian society women had next to no power outside of their role in the family and in law were dominated by men.

This is a similar image to how Pandora is portrayed in the myth of Prometheus. Hesiod talks of Pandora and women in general in both Works and Days and Theogony. She seems to have been created in retaliation for Prometheus’ theft of fire. Zeus and the other gods create her to punish men, and due to his love of men also punish Prometheus. The descriptions of Pandora are that she is beautiful and finely adorned but also that she is malevolent within. She punishes men because men are attracted to her beauty but she will cause them nothing but problems due to her “shameless mind” (Works and Days, lines 65-70). This draws a good comparison with the sacrificial meat that Prometheus used to trick Zeus in the first place. The portion that Zeus picked was bones covered by skin; it looked good on the outside but was useless and undesirable within. Pandora is shown in the same way, a beautiful woman with inherent evil inside.

Men were already in existence when Pandora was created by the gods giving her a degree of separation from men, which reinforces the separation of men and women in Greek life. Women in ancient Greece spent most of their lives indoors at home dealing with family and domestic responsibilities. Men would go out, working, trading or farming for example while women remained at home. Women were kept at home to protect them and also to guard them from meeting other men who, in the minds of ancient Greek men, would easily seduce the women and therefore potentially disrupt the flow of inheritance by illegitimate children. This opinion of women being weaker and deceitful stems from Pandora. Hesiod’s account of Pandora warns men of the dangers of women, that women are trouble who cause mischief and sorrow for men.

In Theogany, Hesiod demonstrates this sorrow for men in the comparison of women and bees in a hive. He talks of women as if they are bees who stay in the hive and feed off the hard work of the male bees. He mentions the bees in the hive piling “the toil of others in their own bellies”. Hesiod is drawing on the opinion that women did not work hard in their domestic duties but lazed around while the men did all the hard work in the fields. When he writes about the women piling the toil into their bellies he is alluding to women eating the produce the men have harvested. He says it as though women are eating the men’s hard work for their own gain and greediness but when drawing the food into their own bellies the women would also be feeding a child in their bellies if they were pregnant, which without contraception would be a fair amount of the time. Hesiod is very quick to portray women as being selfish but there is no mention of the hard work it is to run a home, a family, be pregnant or actually give birth. He talks of how wives, and the children they produce, are useful in your old age to look after you (a rare positive side to a woman) but not the actual process by which those children appear. Of course being a farmer in a hot place like Greece must have been incredibly hard work but I am sure that more women have died of childbirth than men in a field with a plough.

In this respect it is a very selective opinion of women and their function in life. It is though Hesiod and men in general were displeased with their lives and were looking for a scape-goat. Not only is this opinion a chance to make women inferior to men but it takes the responsibility for an unsatisfactory life away from the man, even though he is ignoring the fact that without a wife and children he would still have to work to feed, clothe and house himself. Zeus gives men a clever punishment with the gift of Pandora and all her female descendants. By giving men a choice of being alone without a wife and being in “unrelenting pain” (Theogany line 611) with one he is showing his superiority and that despite Prometheus’ best efforts it is impossible to outsmart him as whatever you do he is punishing you.

Hesiod has a few inconsistencies in both his accounts of this myth. In Theogany and Works and Days Hesiod calls Prometheus cunning and clever while Pandora is deceitful and knavish. These adjectives have similar meanings but Prometheus’ tricks are seen as good and Pandora’s mistakes as bad. This may simply be because Pandora is the evil of the myth but also could reflect that male mistakes were seen less harshly than female ones. In lines 91-95 of Works and Days Hesiod says that Pandora ruined the world by releasing “harsh toil” on men when she opened the jar. But in lines 43-49 he says that Zeus concealed food which required no work to grow or harvest from men because of Prometheus’ trick with the sacrificial meat not a by-product of Pandora’s existence or her opening the jar. Now, of course, Pandora didn’t help matters with all the evils she let out but it wasn’t her fault in the first place. And from what I have read I haven’t seen that anyone told her not to open the jar. Prometheus warned his brother, Epimetheus, not to accept a gift from the gods but he doesn’t appeared to have rushed around and told anybody to leave the jar alone. Pandora was made in such a way that she was meant to be a punishment, she wasn’t meant to be a nice gift, if Prometheus was so smart then why didn’t he take the jar away so that only Epimetheus would have to deal with her “doglike mind”? If Pandora didn’t know what was in jar or the fact that it was evil then why wouldn’t she open it. It is the same with Eve and the forbidden fruit. God told Adam to leave the tree untouched and then he created Eve. No one ever told her to leave it alone so she didn’t. In this respect if we try to learn about a culture’s views on women by looking at their representation in myths then it seems here that men were angry at women for making mistakes that the men knew could happen but failed to communicate that to the women. 

In this myth I think there are three male characters who are at fault a lot more than Pandora. Firstly, Prometheus for thinking he was cleverer than Zeus and not knowing his place or when to stop with the tricks and power-plays. If he had piped down then none of the following problems would have happened. Secondly, Epimetheus. He had been warned by his much smarter brother to not accept any gifts from the gods and he ignored that advice. If he had sent Pandora back then she would have languished about somewhere still with her jar and then men would have been fine and without the hassle of having or not having a wife. And finally Zeus, if he had punished Prometheus personally after the first trick rather than being sly and punishing Prometheus via man-kind then it would have been settled much more simply without all the collateral damage that left men with negative feelings about women for generations. 

Hesiod

Theogony, Works and Days trans. M.L. West

Oxford, OUP, 1999

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Assyrian International News Agency

Books Online

http://www.aina.org/books/eog/eog.pdf

"Huron Creation"  

A Dictionary of Creation Myths.

David Adams Leeming and Margaret Adams Leeming.

Oxford University Press 2009 Oxford

24 October 2010  

http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t279.e135