🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (23 tweets)
Primeval waters Chaos Primal void Wide-bosomed Earth Darkness before creation, inhabited by Death Endless mud sea Sad dark Earth Death as universal constant Sky and the sea appear vast, unknowable, eternal “The Word” Feathered serpents
Speech, The Word, endless sea, eggs, seeds, glitches and software patches, furnace, ex nihilo. Bantu: water, Mbombo, terrible pain, vomited up the sun. Heat of the sun dried up the water. Vomited up the moon and stars. Solitary man creating the world using his body
Duality as a principle of of creation. Chinese: cosmic-egg, yin-Yang, female-male, dark-light. Giant who separated chaos into the many opposites. Phan Ku, hair, horns, tusks, chisel and mallet, carved out mountains, rivers, valleys, oceans, mountains. His skull became skytop
Earth bedded with Heaven (Uranus), bore up Oceanus and a bunch of giants. Mother as analogy – childbirth, breastfeeding (nurturing). Mothers of myths aren’t always doting, often powerful, often love their children more than apocalyptically horrible husbands/lovers
Repeated prophesy of Son overthrowing/killing Father. Cronus was nervous about his kids. Incest very common in cosmology. He swallowed his kids! His wife Rhea was not thrilled about this. She snuck off to Crete and gave birth to Zeus + handed him to grandma Gaia
Norse: Prose Edda: Frost Giant Ymir, created man and woman from his sweaty left armpit, and family of Frost Giants. Three grandsons(?) – Vili Ve and Odin. Theme of dad-hating. Killed him and used his body to make the world. Skull-sky here too. Rainbow bridges.
Enuma Elish, Babylon: primordial waters, angry mother goddess, big bad creator dad. Crazy kids kill dad. Mom makes monsters.Marduk defeated sea Monster Tiamat, took her, divided her like a shellfish to create the world. Parental sacrifice, anger/tension between family members
Men/women, women frequently set as subordinate to men. Man often created “to till the earth”. Misogyny in myths – Pandora as conniving & untrustworthy – Hermes’ hateful vision of women. “Men lived in paradise until a woman opened up a cask & scattered pains and evils among men”
I think it’s very interesting to contemplate how technology and living conditions shaped mythology – humans needed to learn/discover sculpting before they could conceive of a creator as a sculptor, for example. Farming metaphors would be meaningless to nomadic hunter-gatherers
Earth Diver myth: Iroquois Indians. Humans lived in the sky. Daughter of great chief became sick. Fell through the sky onto the primal sea. Great turtle took her, and water birds and toads etc helped, and got tired and bored, and created land to support her
Gods as personification of nature, of human nature – pantheons are metaphors for the human attempt to make sense of existence. To ‘read’ a pantheon is to read a culture’s sense of itself. Oldest known pantheon: Sumer, from Ancient Mesopotamia
Earth-goddess, Ki Sky-God, An Primal-waters goddess, Nammu Trickster God Enki Moon God and Goddess Sun God, Utu Ereskigal, Goddess of the underworld Pantheon includes Sheep and Bull, rather than harvest God/Goddess – more herding than farming?
Egypt was complicated, many different versions in different times and places. At Heliopolis, Pantheon headed by Atum or Ra. In Thebes, Pantheon led by Amun. Attempted monotheism with Akhenaton. Sources for Egyptian myths are fragmented and spread out over thousands of years
Osiris was teaching civilisation to the world – laws, how to grain, etc. Younger brother Seth was jealous, put him in a box, sealed it shut, and threw it in the river. In some versions he’s revived, in others he’s not. Ruler of underworld, etc.