Features of Creation Myths

These brief extracts, from the start of a long and complex story, illustrate several features of creation myths in general. First, Ogotemmeli’s account is told as a story. This may be simply because narrative is the most powerful and

Memorable way of explaining and transmitting complex, important truths. “Like myth, memory requires a radical simplification of its subject matter. All recollections are told from a standpoint in the present. In telling, they need to make sense of the past. That demands a selecting, ordering, and simplifying, a construction of coherent narrative whose logic works to draw the life story towards the fable” (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 8).

Second, origins are explained as the result of conscious actions by spirits or gods. That spiritual entities created the basic structures of the world is a default hypothesis in many traditional cosmologies. However, it is not universal. Many origin stories rely on metaphors of birth, positing the existence of a primordial egg or a primordial sexual act, whose meaning can be understood more or less literally. Some origin stories explain creation as an awakening from sleep, a reminder that our own personal origin stories all have the quality of awakening from preconsciousness. Some creation myths face the paradoxes of origins squarely, positing a realm preceding that of the gods, which was balanced precariously between existence and nonexistence. According to the Rig Veda, the ancient sacred hymns of northern India, “There was neither nonexistence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred?

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. • Thomas Jefferson C1743 — 1826)

Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse” (O’Flaherty 1981, 25). Such language hints at the paradox present in all stories of ultimate origins—how can something (whether a god or an entire universe) come out of nothing?

Third, all creation myths are more complex than they may seem at first sight. Because they deal with ultimate realities, with truths so complex that they can only be referred to using richly metaphorical or poetic language, their tellers are usually well aware of their paradoxical, even provisional nature. At one point, Marcel Griaule was puzzled by a detail in Ogotemmeli’s story, according to which large numbers of creatures appeared to be standing on a single step, only one cubit deep and one cubit high. How was that possible? Ogotemmeli replied: “All this had to be said in words, but everything on the steps is a symbol, symbolic antelopes, symbolic vultures, symbolic hyenas. Any number of symbols could find room on a one-cubit step.” Griaule adds that the word Ogotemmeli used for symbol literally meant “word of this (lower) world” (Sproul 1991, 64).

Fourth, embedded within cycles of creation myths there is generally much hard empirical information about the real world, information about animal migrations, about technologies of hunting and farming, information that younger members of society needed to learn. Such information is often of little interest to outsiders, who may thereby miss the practical, empirical nature of most cycles of myth, but it helps explain their fundamental role in informal systems of education. Ogotemmeli’s story, for example, contains a long list of important animals, much lore about procreation and sexuality, details of the major grains farmed in his region, and symbolic accounts of human anatomy and the world’s geography.

Finally, partly because they contain so much familiar information, creation stories have the feeling of truth for insiders, just as modern science does for those educated in the early twenty-first century. To those brought up with them, particular creation myths represent the best available guide to reality and much of what they say fits in well with commonsense experience. This does not mean that creation stories are necessarily treated uncritically by insiders—it is always possible to argue about details of a creation story or express skepticism or even confusion about certain aspects of the story. As Griaule comments of Ogotemmeli, “Ogotemmeli had no very clear idea of what happened in Heaven after the transformation of the eight ancestors into Nummo” (Sproul 1991, 59). But it does mean that familiar creation myths are felt to be the best available guides to reality and therefore to conduct; in some sense, they hold society together. And this makes them extremely important, not to be told lightly or carelessly, and to be treasured and passed on with care by those who keep the knowledge they contain. Creation myths contain potent information, which is why Ogotem-meli lowers his voice when discussing the first blunder of the God Amma.