Myths and Legends: Creation Myths ~ Ancient Egypt
How did it all came to be?
In my quest to become a better writer, I’ve decided to go back to the source, to the ancient myths, the first stories we told each other and see what I can learn from them. Myths deal with deep questions, questions we still ask today, questions like: Where did we come from? Why are we here? How should we live?
As you can imagine, there is a lot of overlap between myths and religion, but also, surprisingly, between myths and science. I won’t go into too much detail here, but to start off the best place to begin is at the beginning. How did it all begin?
Did the universe always exist, filled with stuff, and then one day, by accident, substances combined in such a way that it created life? And then these primitive life-forms developed into the dazzling array of creatures that fill our world? Or was it created by a sentient being or beings? Was it all planned? Are we all actors in some cosmic story, a story that is not quite our own?
These are some of the profound questions that myths tackle. You could study philosophy all your life and still not get to the bottom of these mysteries. Myths, on the other hand, offer some interesting, fun, and imaginative alternatives, and maybe, just maybe, one of them might be true. That is what C.S. Lewis, the great British writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, thought, anyway. He studied mythology and came to believe that one of them is the truth.
Myth overlaps with religion and theology and because how we relate to God or the gods affects all our other relationships, it is central to a person’s worldview. I studied politics, and after many years I came to realize that the differences that people fight so bitterly over are at heart, differences of religion, of theology, of how we relate to ultimate power. And that is why it is worthwhile to study the myths and religions of other people, because it helps you to understand them at the deepest possible level.
That’s enough rumination. Let’s get to the fun part:
The fancy word for a creation myth is cosmogony, which comes from two Greek words meaning “order” and “beginning.” Many creation affirm a culture’s values and practices. For example, according to the Carabaulo myth of Timor in eastern Indonesia the first people came out of the earth’s vagina and they took possession of the land. Those poor schmucks who came after them are forced to be commoners and tenants. In this way, the myth justifies the class differences in the society.
According to Mesopotamian myths the gods created humans to do their dirty work, while in the Hebrew creation story, the one that is most prevalent in the West and the myth upon which the West was built, God made humans masters over the rest of creation. That is a big difference in onus. The Hebrew myth, which became the Christian myth, is also different from the rest in that according to it God made humans so that He can serve and help us, not the other way around.
We can read myths in a variety of ways: According to one useful “toolkit” laid out by the mythographer William G. Doty, we can look at them from a social perspective and ask: what social function do they perform, a psychological perspective, a political perspective, which is my angle most of the time, its literary tradition, whether it comes to us from the oral tradition or whether it was written down long ago, and we can look at structural aspects of the myth. Mercia Eliade, a Romanian fiction writer and an historian of religion added that we should look at myths from a religious perspective too, since many of them carry or carried the gravitas of religious truth. Finally, we can look at the myths and read them as pure literature and just enjoy the story.
That is what J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings told C.S. Lewis when they were discussing Christianity. Tolkien told Lewis to read the Christian myth and enjoy it on its own terms, just like he read and enjoyed the mythology of other people.
There are many ways of classifying creation myths, but a useful one is to divide them into five different types:
First, there is ex nihilo creation, creation out of nothing. In them a deity usually creates the entire cosmos with its thoughts, dreams, words, or even from its seed or tears. So first there was nothing but this god or goddess and then they created our world.
Secondly, there are earth-diver stories, in which a deity sends an animal or bird down into the primal waters to bring up a bit of mud, from which they make the earth.
Third, a primal mass or entity is broken up and separated, for example Mother Earth is separated from Father Sky or form is separated from chaos. Perhaps all matter was compacted together and the tension became so much that there was a big explosion, a Big Bang which sent all the matter out into space, creating the cosmos.
Interestingly, our conception of time can also be influenced by our view of the creation of the universe. There was this big explosion, sending matter out into the universe at an ever-increasing rate. If you think this will continue, you will tend to take a linear view of time, but if you believe that eventually all that matter will slow down and eventually be drawn back together again, massing together until the pressure again becomes so big that it causes another explosion that sends the matter flying off into the wide blue yonder again, you might take a circular perspective of time: “what was will be” and there is an endless repetition of this process until some deity puts an end to it all.
That is the kind of insight you get from studying philosophy to impress an Italian girl.
Fourth, in some myths a primordial being, either the god itself or its creation, is broken up, dismembered and the universe is created out of the parts of its body.
Fifth, there is the emergence myth in which creatures travel through a series of worlds, transforming themselves during the journey before they emerge in our world. In that sense, the world is already created, but it is the story of how humans came to be. These myths are particularly prevalent among Native American Indians in the Southwest of the United States.
To start off this series, I want to look at the creation myths of one of our oldest cultures: The Egyptians.
The ancient Egyptian Heliopolis myth is a myth of the third kind that involves the breaking up of a primal entity to create the world. It dates from about 2300 B.C. and it goes like this:
Initially there was just water, a vast sea called Nun. Atum comes forth out of this sea, either generated by the water or by himself. If he created himself, this myth also contains elements of ex nihilo creation. Atum was later identified with a primeval piece of mud that first rose out of the waters, an early example of an axis mundi.
An axis mundi or a “world axis,” is a point where the natural and divine worlds connect, a portal between the sacred and the profane. When I read this I immediately thought about the interesting events on Skinwalker Ranch in Utah where it seems that the scientists have stumbled onto some kind of inter-dimensional portal. Whatever is happening on that farm, it seems to at least be some kind of magnetic anomaly that is causing their apparatuses to malfunction time and time again. It could of course all be one big psy-ops, designed to convince us all that there are aliens afoot, but either way it is a lot of fun to watch and it might actually be an axis mundi.
Every time we return to an axis mundi, it is sacred time in which we come into contact with the forces that we believe organizes our world. When Catholics go to Mass, Christians go to church on Sundays, or Muslims go to the mosques, the buildings perform the function of an axis mundi, but so can just reading a creation story: it puts us into contact with the divine.
There are Egyptologists who say the Egyptians built a temple on this primal mount and some even speculate that the pyramids were built to recreate this primal mount, this axis mundi, this holy place where Atum first emerged. The myth thus also contains elements of an emergence myth.
Every year the Nile flooded the area around the river and then the Egyptians watched for it to pull back, revealing mounds of mud that protrude out of the water. For them the very first mound would be the spot where creation started.
Eventually Atum got lonely so he masturbated or in another version he coughed up a brother and a sister named Shu and Tefnut. Shu is like the natural force of air while Tefnut is like moisture in the air. The brother and sister mate and produce Geb, which is male and the Earth, and Nut, which is female and the Sky, not the last instance of incest we will encounter in our journey through mythology.
In most other cultures with similar myths, the Earth is usually female and the Sky is male. Some mythographers argue that this is because in most places the sky sends down rain which fertilizes the earth, and this made it easy for people to think of the sky as male, inseminating the female earth. However, in ancient Egypt it did not rain much and most of their water came from the Nile river. In the Egyptian language Earth is also a male noun while Sky is a female noun, so perhaps they were just following the grammar. It is difficult to say whether the language or the story came first. Egyptians also traditionally had sex with the male under the female. No Kama Sutra here, so it could be that the Egyptians were saying: since the Earth is beneath the Sky just like the man should be beneath the woman, the Earth is male and the Sky is female. Boy, it sounds like they had some boring sex.
However, Geb and Nut lie together so tightly that there is no room for the children that they make to move. Their father Shu steps in and separates them by pushing the sky away from the earth. I hope he told them it is not okay for brother and sisters to copulate. Shu, which is air, in a way does separate the sky from the earth in real life too. This separation makes growth and development possible. Nut gives birth to the stars which rise up to be with her. Each morning she swallows them to keep them safe for the day and then she releases them again at night so that they can light the night sky, some beautiful poetic thinking.
The sun is also born after the separation and all the creatures now have room to move and breathe. However, the sun marks time and if it goes out, like it someday will, the entire cosmos will return to its initial entropy. Geb and Nut produce the next generation of gods, Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nephthys, two pairs of twins. Osiris and Isis mate and they create Horus, again born of incest. There seems to be a lot of incest going on among these gods (just saying). The living pharaoh usually claimed to be the incarnation of Horus. When he died he supposedly became Osiris, lord of the dead. The nine gods became known as the Ennead, the pantheon of Egyptian gods.
There were other versions of the Egyptian creation myth too. In another one, the mud that emerges after the Nile flood recedes gives birth to four male gods and four female gods. The male gods, poor things, are part frog, while the female gods are part serpent. Of course they are. These eight gods come together and form a cosmic egg out of which everything is formed.
According to a later Egyptian myth, the Memphis god Ptah, considered to be the main god, much like Zeus and Jupiter were the main gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons, Ptah was thought to be the spirit that emerged out of the axis mundi and all other gods came from him. All things in the world are first conceived in his mind and the he speaks them into existence. Ptah says the words and then it happens, similar to the Hebrew creation myth where Yahweh also creates the world through the word.
In another version, humans are born from the tears of the god Ra.
Creation myths often reflect our own creation as human beings. An embryo is surrounded by a watery fluid and like in the emergence myths, we also emerge from our mother’s womb into the world.
There are a lot of questions we can ask: where did the original water come from? If Atum emerged out of the muck, did he first have to undergo changes like the creatures in the North American myths? Did the fact that the gods supposedly practiced incest promote that kind of behavior among the Egyptian royalty? Is incest ever okay? Although we did not deal here with a myth where the creator dies and is hacked up to create the world, in those stories we can ask: so are we alone then? Since the creator, god, is dead in those stories, what are we to do? Are we left to our own devices? Does anything have meaning without a living God? How we answer those questions affect our entire take on life.
Whichever way you lean, according to these stories the gods launched us on this journey on a piece of rock racing through space and now there is no going back. This is how I launch the series of posts about what I learn about the myths and legends of ancient peoples. I have come to realize that they were a lot smarter than we think and that we mortals can learn a lot from them, even by just comparing ourselves to them.
I write it down so that I can learn from these ancient storytellers, make these myths my own, and hopefully recall them better so that I might use them in my own writing. I share them so that other writers who might find them useful can benefit from them, so that other people who are just interested in mythology can read them too, and of course it gives me the opportunity to write, because writers write and the more I write the better. Right?
I hope you come along for the ride, because it is a fascinating journey.
If you like what you just read, please follow me on Medium and share this with your friends. If you did not, I thank you for reading this far and I hope you will like my next post.
Thank you.
Bibliography
Voth, G.L. (2010) Myth in Human History. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.