Creation Mythology Research Articles

Creation Mythology and Enlightenment in Sanskrit Literature

Accounts of creation in Sanskrit literature include a number of hymns in the Rgveda principal among which are RV 10.72, 10.81–82, 10.90, 10.121, and 10.129. Later accounts appear in the Mānavadhārmaśāstra, the Mahābhārata, and purāṇas. Scholars generally describe these accounts as various, mutually inconsistent myths, or as superseded stages of philosophical thought. Even recent treatments of Indian cosmogony that praise the poetic subtlety and prowess of their composers consider their work as products of individual poetic imagination. Yet, despite the variety of expression in the various accounts, they appear to convey a consistent model of the origin of the world. Moreover, the model of the absolute and the first stages of creation mirror the descriptions of the development of enlightenment in foundational texts of Vedānta and systematic analyses of Yoga. The descriptions of creation may therefore rather be the result of the special insight of enlightened sages than the results of individual imagination.

Marginalization of Women in Islam: Problem Interpretation

This article aimed to find out the development of a view that tends to marginalize women is certainly not derived from religious teachings, but is more influenced by problems of interpretation. Although sourced from the same reference namely the Qur'an and Hadith, the interpretation of gender relations in Islam developed into diverse variants. Among the important factors that encourage diversity are the different perspectives on the inclusion of sociological and historical considerations in making interpretations. For interpreters who agree, historical elements, sociology must be taken into consideration in interpreting the verse. If the element is ignored, then the interpretation that appears will contain bias. That factor causes the interpretation paradigm of creation mythology, the involvement of women in the public sphere and several related issues about fiqh which seem contradictory to the main mission of Islamic teachings that puts forward the spirit of justice and equality. Therefore, reinterpretation of even the interpretation of interpretations is necessary. Therefore, it can easily reveal how far an interpretation correlates with the socio-cultural order of society when the interpretation is present. With this kind of paradigm, the discourse is distorted from the building of religious understanding which has been dominated by masculine interpretations, can be avoided.

Hermetic Influences on the Evolutionary System of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy

AbstractHelena Blavatsky (1831–1891) developed a program of salvation that she called “double evolution,” which was elaborated in a system known as root race theory. Human souls were seen as traversing through progressive reincarnation a series of seven “races,” or body types, ranging from gigantic amorphous and ethereal bodies and transitioning through hermaphroditic into gigantic gendered ape-like humans, modern humans, and thereafter adepts and divine beings. Although root race theory drew from the scientific racism of its day, it did not equate root races with human races, but to stages of human emanation from and return to divinity. The sources of root race theory have been sought in Eastern contexts due to its use of Hindu and Buddhist terminology, though scholars have noted its Western esoteric influences. This article argues that the primary structure of root race theory is based in the Corpus Hermeticum. It identifies some of Blavatsky’s Hermetic sources, showing that she referred not only generally to a perennialist “Hermetic philosophy” that incorporated Western esoteric tropes, but also to specific Hermetic texts. These texts provided the organizing matrix of root race theory, specifically its creation mythology, support for prior androgyne human existence, a “fall into matter,” and the initial ensoulment of humans with mind, ornous. It also provided a template for the future transformation of humans into divine beings. The article builds on the suggestions of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2013) and Brendan French (2001) to elaborate on the role of Hermetic influence in Blavatsky’s reconfiguring of evolution as a novel form of salvation for an empirically-oriented nineteenth century audience.

On Value Orientation in China and the West as Reflected in Man Creation by Nuwa and by the God

Value orientation refers to value tendency that people have when they take a certain action in a certain way on a certain occasion. It is an important part of culture. Studying value orientation in different cultures can help people understand the differences between cultures so as to facilitate the cross-cultural communication. Mythology is an important part of culture. Man Creation mythology is a category of mythology and it is about human beings’ thinking and interpretation of their origin. Value orientation in different cultures may originate from the Man Creation mythology of the respective cultures. In this paper, a comparative study of the value orientation between China and the west is made through comparing Man Creation by Nuwa in China and Man Creation by the God in the west and with regards to the characteristics of Chinese and western value orientation shown respectively in the two Man Creation mythologies. The study in this paper indicates that the two Man Creation mythologies reflect the differences in value orientation between China and the West on behavioral thinking, marriage relation and man-god relation. On behavioral thinking, Man Creation by Nuwa reflects emotionalism in China and Man Creation by the God reflects intellectualism in the West; on marriage relation, Chinese marriage is based on breeding offspring and western marriage is based on people’s emotional and physical needs; on man-god relation, it is praying for blessing and giving blessing in China, while it is showing repentance and accepting repentance in the West.

The Golden Code of the Bird‐Men: Iconographic and Social Interpretation of the Moñes I Diadem‐Belt (Asturias, North‐west Iberian Peninsula, First Century BC)

SummaryIf there is one piece of the Castro culture goldwork that stands out above the rest, it is the set of figurative gold diadem‐belt fragments from Moñes (Piloña, Asturias, Spain). Its uniqueness lies in its combination of local technological tradition with exogenous practices, like figurative representation. The figures that appear are armed characters, occasionally on horseback, and sometimes zoomorphic in appearance (especially as bird‐men), together with different kinds of animals, especially those from an aquatic environment. This iconography has been interpreted as emphasizing the warlike character of Celtic symbolism as expressed through an aquatic funerary ritual. My argument here, however, provides an alternative interpretation based on a context of dramatic social change, which warranted the reformulation of creation mythology such as that depicted on the diadem‐belt. This context must be viewed in relation to different social responses which developed during the first century BC, both before and immediately after the Roman conquest.

Achaemenid Creation and Second Isaiah

For many years, scholars have entertained the idea that monotheism appeared in Second Isaiah as a result of Zoroastrian influence. Since the issue of monotheism is inappropriate for either the Persian or the Judaean contexts, this paper argues that a more fruitful angle to pursue the Persian context of Isaiah is through analysis of the concept of creation. This paper takes the Achaemenid creation prologues in the Old Persian inscriptions as a comparator for the use of creation in Second Isaiah, and places these two in a broader ancient Near Eastern context of creation mythology. It is argued that both share distinctive features in the way creation is presented and understood. Given the novel and similar concepts visible in both corpora, it is argued that the vision of creation and form of yhwh as creator are the earliest attested instance of “Iranian influence” on the Judaean tradition.

Islands of the dead? Prehistoric occupation of Kangaroo Island and other southern offshore islands and watercraft use by Aboriginal Australians

Kangaroo Island has long been a source of creation mythology for Indigenous Australians. Over the last century, it has also been a source of creation mythology for Australian archaeology. The theme of the archaeological mythology has been the notion, based on culture-historical interpretations of stone artefact typologies, that the Island was occupied by people belonging to successive large-tool (“Kartan”) and small-tool “Cultures”. A fundamental tenet of the “Kartan Mystery” has been the notion that the Island was abandoned for several thousand years prior to the European colonisation of South Australia, and following the attainment of modern sea-levels, the Indigenous people of southern Australia lacked either the watercraft or the will to continue to inhabit Kangaroo Island and other offshore islands along the southern coastline. From at least as far east as Tasmania to as far west as Rottnest Island off Fremantle (Western Australia), there are islands which have a prehistoric archaeological record and/or an ethnographic status as uninhabited “Islands of the Dead” for adjacent, mainland or Tasmanian Aboriginal societies. This paper explores these notions and refers to evidence that Aboriginal Australians of the southern Australian coastal regions both used watercraft and visited offshore islands such as Kangaroo Island throughout the pre-colonial Holocene period.

The aesthetics of Utopia

This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process. Crucially, the Utopian dimension is not simply a matter of subject matter or utility. Rather, it lies in the act of formal arrangement and composition, and therefore can apply to visual texts with no apparent subject matter at all. The argument is grounded in Ernst Bloch’s critical theory of Utopia, which sees Utopia as a process rather than a destination. It is illustrated with a case study of Navajo weaving, in tandem with an analysis of Navajo creation mythology. It concludes by arguing that we need to go beyond creation theory to a critical theory of creativity. Utopia is not something that we can delegate either to nature or to the supernatural because, as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘Life has been put into our hands’.

Tell Us a Story from Before We Can Remember: Gnostic Reflections on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life can be considered in relation to the pansophic tradition of Western spirituality, especially Gnosticism. Malick explores humankind in a cosmic ambit that is imaginal, holistic, and deeply reverential, recalling the Gnostics’ use of mythopoesis in elaborating and evoking their revelatory experiences. This is exemplified by a haunting soprano voice within the void that is conspicuously Sophianic. Jung's observation that psychology (like Malik's film) is concerned with an act of seeing, not the construction of new religious truths, invites reference to the roots of perception suggested by the visionary experience of a child, the initiatory dream of a young woman, and the archetypal correspondence of such constellations to the germinal stars–scintillae motif in Gnostic creation mythology, alchemy, and the pansophic tradition generally.

Purusa Sukta

Purusha Sukta, hymn 10.90 in the Rg Veda, is a particular favourite for teaching about scholastic interpretations of Brahmanism; a topic often placed near the beginning of courses about Hinduism. This paper demonstrates how I exploit Purusha Sukta not only to teach about Brahmanical religion and society, but also to exemplify a range of different methodologies in the study of religion. A textual analysis of Purusha Sukta’s creation mythology provides an ideal model for examining substantive approaches, with an emphasis on the relationship between myth, ritual and society, and reductionist approaches, with an emphasis on the sociology of religion. It also provides a stark challenge to phenomenology. Conceptualising Purusha unlocks a philosophy of the type scholars of religion delight in and alerts us to our potential orientalism. Purusha Sukta is a crucible for methodological approaches in the study of religion. Purusha created the Vedic cosmos; in my classroom he also helps in mapping the religious studies tool kit.

Cultural studies of the East Asian civilization in the dawn: On the dating of the creation mythology period in East Asia

Based on a study of mythological literatures in China, Korea and Japan, this paper is intended to set up the coordinate axis which can estimate the time period of the Creation Mythology and therefore fix the period of the Myth of Origin in the Creation Mythology group in the three countries, and set up a time-platform suitable for East Asian mythology studies.

Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle

In this text, Sioui tells the story of his people, the Wendats, and provides readers with a look at Wendat society and its rich legacy for Canada and the modern world. He reviews the Wendats' creation mythology and explains their origins, theology, ethics, philosophy and sociology.

Los Angeles' Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space

Los Angeles' Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space 1* Olvera Street might not be authentic Old California or even authentic Mexico but it runs better than the bulldozer -KEVIN STARR INTRODUCTION In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Paseo de Los Angeles-later referred to as Olvera Street was created through the efforts of Christine Sterling and city boosters in the oldest section of the city. Olvera Street was an imagined Mexican landscape not unlike the renowned tourist districts of Mexican border cities (Arreola and Curtis 1993). The theme was Mexico, pitting a timeless, romantic, homogeneous Spanish-Mexican culture against industrialization, immigration, urban decay and modernity itself. The street featured rows of curio shops, house museums, and Mexican eateries staffed by costumed Mexican merchants. As a constructed place, Olvera Street was the product of a social and economic agenda established by civic elites to transform downtown Los Angeles through the removal of undesirable residents. The opening of Olvera Street and the preservation of the old Plaza also popularized an emerging creation mythology for Anglo Los Angeles stemming from the defeat of Mexican forces in 1847, a heroic birth legend in which Sterling emerged as a symbolic mother figure and guardian of the city's birthplace. Finally, the creation of Olvera Street stimulated a nascent movement to preserve the city's oldest adobe and brick architecture surrounding the street and the old Plaza (Starr 1990, 205).2 Today, the Plaza and Olvera Street site comprise the forty-four acre El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a department of the City of Los Angeles. El Pueblo Monument is at once the historic heart of Los Angeles, a popular tourist site, a Mexican-American cultural symbol, and a complex microcosm for shifting cultural and political agendas in Los Angeles. However, during this era when writings about Los Angeles are noticeably in among scholars-especially studies which probe the city's dialectical nature-the long and complex social history of the old Plaza and Olvera Street area as a case study in the competition over cultural and political power has been long overdue. This essay, which is part of a larger study, is intended to contribute greater understanding of the significance of this unique space as a center for the discursive images and perceptions about Mexicans in particular, and also as an enduring cultural symbol for the City of Los Angeles. Furthermore, I hope to contribute to the ongoing explorations of heritage sites, the production and representation of romantic notions of folk groups-Mexicans and Chinese in this case-that occur in these places and the simultaneous, contested nature of those spaces (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). HISTORICAL ORIGINS The City of Los Angeles was founded in September, 1781 by forty-four racially mixed settlers from the present-day northwest Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. The original town plan which was surveyed by Governor Felipe De Neve, in accordance with Spanish-colonial law and design, included a church and rectangular Plaza surrounded by house lots and planting fields (Guinn 1897, 247). The exact location of this first site is unknown, but it may have been several blocks southeast of the present location of El Pueblo Monument, along the banks of the Rio Porciuncula (Los Angeles River) (Mason and Duque 1981, 16). By the early 1800s, the town was moved to higher ground at least twice, due to the ravages caused by the Los Angeles River, and was finally placed in its present location (Mason and Duque 1981, 16). During the period of Spanish colonial rule, which lasted until 1821, the first streets, adobe buildings and the Plaza were constructed. During the period of Mexican rule from 1821 to 1848, the Plaza area was the heart of Mexican community life in Los Angeles and center of an economy based upon cattle raising and agriculture (Estrada 1996). …

The Passing of Anglo-America

The process of malting colonies out of other peoples' land involves, among other things, a certain amount of mythology, creation mythology, to overcome the moral revulsion of seizing property and deracinating an indigenous population. An ennobling aim is necessary, and the form such moves talce is usually the vision that a higher culture, a superior seed of human understanding, is being passed to an uncultured other. The notion lies close to rape, but one may find numerous parables about the divine rape of mortals in Homer and Ovid in which the offspring becomes the leader of his people. Aeneas, founder of Rome, was the result of Aphrodite's seduction of the mortal, Anchises. At any rate, this mythologizing of land seizure is the psychology of imperialism. Its western origins can be traced back to Virgil's Aeneid, which supplied Europe with a founding legend on which to base its own expansion into the Americas. A flurry of new translations of the Aeneid from Venetian printing houses in the sixteenth century made this epic a best seller at the height of European expansion into the New World. The work not only ascribed an ennobling genealogy to the European states that were once colonies of Rome, but provided the justification of natural Law for overthrowing indigenous societies and claiming their territories. Virgil's description of a people primed for colonization goes thus:

The Problem of Creation Mythology in the Study of Chinese Religion

The Problem of Creation Mythology in the Study of Chinese Religion