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Thunderbolts Forum
Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p6085>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=6085#p6085>by *David Talbott
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=58>* on Sun May 25, 2008 7:55 pm
[The summaries to be presented here presume the reader is familiar with
the background notes in the thread The Origins of Myth
.]
In the first two years of my research (1972-73), something extraordinary
struck me. I realized that the myths of “creation” have been profoundly
misunderstood. The reason for this misunderstanding is that the sky has
changed entirely. The original subject of the creation myth is no longer
present. In the intervening centuries, the myths were progressively
reinterpreted to “explain” the origins of everything visible to the
human eye, near and far. What emerged at the end of this process was a
story about “the creation of heaven and earth.” Whatever you might
naturally think of when hearing these words, that was not the subject of
the archetypal creation myth.
This realization from 35 years ago was subsequently adopted by all who
have worked with the Saturn hypothesis in any detail. But outside our
limited audience, the message is virtually unknown. And when most people
hear me say, “Creation meant events seen and heard by humankind,” they
can only scratch their heads. “How could humans have witnessed something
prior to their own existence?” How could the earth have been here before
“creation" of the earth?
What they do not realize is that the original story did not concern our
earth at all, but events in a celestial theater that vanished thousands
of years ago. The true subject of creation mythology is the construction
of a celestial dwelling--a cosmic city, temple, or kingdom--revered
across the millennia as the prototype of sacred space. It was a
revolving wheel-like enclosure. The enclosure rested visually atop a
cosmic mountain, the axis of the turning heavens. Its ruler was the
warrior-hero, regent of the primeval sun and the axle of the world
wheel. And it was the far-famed mother goddess who gave the cosmic wheel
its nave and spokes.
This place par excellence was divided by four luminous streams (spokes
of the wheel), marking out the four quarters of sacred space and
celebrated as four winds, or four rivers of life. These were the “four
rivers of paradise” remembered around the world. And the “beings” or
primeval “generation” created in these events did not occupy a place
“down here.” They were the denizens of the celestial realm, arising as
the explosive outflow from the creator god himself, or more specifically
as the discharge of his own eye or heart-soul.
The subject of the story was not geography but cosmography--the layout
of a divine habitation whose construction was told in dozens of
different ways.
The secret to resolving the contradictions is to see through the
competing mythical interpretations to the underlying forms, recognizing
that different words and symbols actually describe the same thing. That
is the value of the comparative approach. In this approach we can follow
the evolution of a story through its transmutations as, century after
century, storytellers progressively brought the gods down to earth. At
the end of the process the common result was that divine and later
semi-divine subjects of the myths looked very much like human beings,
and the former cosmic powers emerged as “ancestors” of the nations
telling the stories.
David Talbott
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Re: Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p6416>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=6416#p6416>by *David Talbott
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=58>* on Fri May 30, 2008 7:26 am
[For the sake of a rough "index" I'm formulating, I've split the
following from it's original placement in the post above.]
The Egyptian Creation Legend
It’s occurred to me that it might be useful to contrast popular
interpretations of creation mythology with a much more concrete
interpretation offered by our reconstruction. In another thread, Grey
Cloud inserted a quote from E A Wallace Budge’s Legend of the Egyptian
Gods. I’ll give the quote below and will use that to underscore the
contrast between two different ways of seeing creation mythology. Our
guide will be the comparative approach, because it's the archetypes,
brought to light by comparative study, that illuminate the reliable
substructure of human memory.
Here is the quote from Budge, summarizing one of the best known Egyptian
“creation” traditions:
The story of the Creation is supposed to be told by the god
Neb-er-tcher, This name means the "Lord to the uttermost limit," and
the character of the god suggests that the word "limit" refers to
time and space, and that he was, in fact, the Everlasting God of the
Universe. This god's name occurs in Coptic texts, and then he
appears as one who possesses all the attributes which are associated
by modern nations with God Almighty. Where and how Neb-er-tcher
existed is not said, but it seems as if he was believed to have been
an almighty and invisible power which filled all space. It seems
also that a desire arose in him to create the world, and in order to
do this he took upon himself the form of the god Khepera, who from
first to last was regarded as the Creator, par excellence, among all
the gods known to the Egyptians.
When this transformation of Neb-er-tcher into Khepera took place the
heavens and the earth had not been created, but there seems to have
existed a vast mass of water, or world-ocean, called Nu, and it must
have been in this that the transformation took place. In this
celestial ocean were the germs of all the living things which
afterwards took form in heaven and on earth, but they existed in a
state of inertness and helplessness. Out of this ocean Khepera
raised himself, and so passed from a state of passiveness and
inertness into one of activity. When Khepera raised himself out of
the ocean Nu, he found himself in vast empty space, wherein was
nothing on which he could stand. The second version of the legend
says that Khepera gave being to himself by uttering his own name,
and the first version states that he made use of words in providing
himself with a place on which to stand. In other words, when Khepera
was still a portion of the being of Neb-er-tcher, he spake the word
"Khepera," and Khepera came into being. Similarly, when he needed a
place whereon to stand, he uttered the name of the thing, or place,
on which he wanted to stand, and that thing, or place, came into
being. This spell he seems to have addressed to his heart, or as we
should say, will, so that Khepera willed this standing-place to
appear, and it did so forthwith. The first version only mentions a
heart, but the second also speaks of a heart-soul as assisting
Khepera in his first creative acts; and we may assume that he
thought out in his heart what manner of thing be wished to create,
and then by uttering its name caused his thought to take concrete
form. This process of thinking out the existence of things is
expressed in Egyptian by words which mean "laying the foundation in
the heart."
In arranging his thoughts and their visible forms Khepera was
assisted by the goddess Maat, who is usually regarded as the goddess
of law, order, and truth, and in late times was held to be the
female counterpart of Thoth, "the heart of the god Ra." In this
legend, however, she seems to play the part of Wisdom, as described
in the Book of Proverbs, 1 for it was by Maat that he "laid the
foundation."
Reconstructing "Creation"
What Budge translates as "Lord to the uttermost limit" (a modern
sounding phrase), can be practically understood as Lord of a radiant
enclosure, a citadel whose boundary separated the organized habitation
from the clouds of chaos threatening the kingdom from without.
What Budge interprets as the "Everlasting God of the Universe," a power
that "filled all space," was not a limitless being but an object in the
sky undergoing dynamic evolution as humans on earth watched in awe and
terror. Many of the object's attributes can be reliably enumerated by
simply following the archaic and literal meanings of Egyptian words, and
comparing them to core motifs from other lands.
To call the power "invisible" is to overlook all of the attributes of
the god set forth in early religious texts.
The "waters" of heaven, or "celestial ocean," having counterparts in
virtually all mythologies, can be understood as the way the ancient sky
looked, not the way our sky looks today. It was filled with dusty plasma
and cosmic debris, all electrically alive. And it indeed looked very
much like a watery abyss.
Khepera having "no place to stand" must be interpreted in terms of his
prior wandering (not mentioned in this particular summary, but implied
by various sources and stated explicitly in the Coffin Texts. It is this
nuance, plus the oft-stated creation of a resting place that gives the
language its meaning.
When the texts speak of the god bringing himself into existence, the
concrete reference is to visible, explosive outflow, subsequently
organized into his own external "limbs" or "attributes."
The words uttered by the god as creative speech were fiery ejecta,
called "words of power" [aakhut], constituting the "primeval matter"
from which the celestial habitation was constructed. Construction of the
god's dwelling and his acquisition of external attributes meant exactly
the same thing.
The crucial event was the god's spitting out of two powers-- the first
forms of the mother goddess and warrior hero.
The enclosure arose from the first activity of the mother goddess
(alternately Ma'at or Tefnut). Prior to this activity the goddess was
the creator's own feminine heart (Ma'at), or his central eye (Tefnut),
both meaning exactly the same thing.
Mythically and symbolically, the enclosure brought forth in this event
was the god's shining "name," constituted of the luminous words or
thoughts ("wisdom") shouted into existence. The name of Khepera himself
derives from a root meaning to form, to become, to turn, all suggestive
of the events of creation.
The resting place or foundation was the world pillar or world mountain,
also constituted from the primeval matter (sea of words).
It was the activity of the god Shu (the warrior god before he became a
warrior), or alternately Thoth, that brought forth the foundation or
resting place of the god. Shu and Thoth were simply competing mythic
interpretations of the same figure within different localities of Egypt.
Prior to his birth the god Shu sat as the pupil of the creator's eye,
while Thoth meant the innermost, masculine heart of the creator's
feminine heart (goddess). Again, both interpretations meant the same thing.
____________________
Well, I trust the reader will realize that clarifying these things will
take a little time. :) I'm going to be tied up for two days, but intend
to give this subject a priority. (Of course anyone arriving here without
an advanced orientation to our subject would do well to start with the
overview .)
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Re: Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p6421>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=6421#p6421>by *David Talbott
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=58>* on Fri May 30, 2008 9:19 am
[This will begin a summary of key principles for understanding the
creation myth, using the Egyptian story as a starting point for
comparative analysis.]
Primeval Chaos
In numerous creation accounts the earliest-remembered condition is one
of pervasive cosmic waters. This condition can be called “chaos,” but
the meaning of the term needs to be appreciated. We often think of chaos
as implying “violence” or disorder of some sort, but neither violence
nor disorder are implied in the first uses of the world (though once
things become more active the situation is reversed). What is implied by
descriptions of the first condition is a watery expanse, an
undifferentiated state, timelessness, darkness, and inactivity preceding
the activity of creation. In the global mythology of creation, that
pattern is sufficiently established to call for an explanation.
In early languages the words used to describe primeval chaos will tend
to be words implying a negative--not in the sense of “evil” or of
calamity but in the sense of absence, the state of “not.” The story of
the creator-king (father of kings, the one from whom kingship descended)
means the transition from chaos to order, from undifferentiated unity to
diversity, from formlessness to form, from inactivity to activity, from
no-time to time, from a primordial “darkness” (a pre-dawn glow, not
“dark” in today’s usual meaning of the word) to a clearly defined cycle
of day and night. That is what the archetypal "creation" myth is about,
and in the early astronomies the planet Saturn is named as this
creator-king.
But the meanings of the ancient words need to be clarified. What does
"formless" mean, for example? What does "chaos," or its "yawning"
aspect, mean? (Our own word for "chaos" derives from a Greek root
meaning "to yawn, to gape.") Present experience offers no basis for
visualizing any of the words or symbols in the archaic story itself.
In its first appearance, the state of chaos must be interpreted by
contrast to what followed. Indeed, our reconstruction will invite
experts on the ancient languages to ask one question in particular. Do
the roots of negatives within archaic languages reveal certain nuances
that would be expected under this vision of the past, but not expected
under the usual theories of language formation?
In the Egyptian creation accounts, for example, the negative condition
is applied to both the creator and the primeval "waters" of chaos. The
god emerges from the waters and from a state of inactivity. The waters
from which he appears are his own essence, but they are also his own
creative outflow. The creator (Atum, Ra, Khepera) recalls his original
condition of “inactivity” and the “inert watery mass” of his “father” Nu
(with which he himself was closely identified). He was "alone" in these
cosmic waters. He "had no companion" to work with him and he had "no
resting place." The relationship of Atum to this original state of "not"
is emphasized by the fact that the hieroglyphs used for his name Tem
mean (among other things) "not".
You see this relationship most prominently in the use of the n-sound in
the hieroglyphic system. The essence of the formless god is "water",
which appears in both a singular and a plural sense. The waters are the
undifferentiated "plurality" of the original state, signified by a
simple wavy line, the common Egyptian glyph for the n-sound. The same
glyph signifies the condition of absence. The meanings are expressed
quite explicitly through virtually all of the common n-roots in the
hieroglyphic system-n, ni, an, nu, nun, na, enen, nini, nenu, and a
large number of variants: primeval waters, undifferentiated plurality,
state of formlessness and inactivity prior to "creation,” the original
condition of “not.”
When we interpret this negative condition with the help of other themes
within and outside of Egypt, we discover an underlying idea--of a
primordial god acquiring a clarified presence in the first activity of
“creation.” And if we think entirely in terms of things seen by
observers on earth, the creation legend will come alive in its rich detail.
David Talbott
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Re: Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p6454>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=6454#p6454>by *David Talbott
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=58>* on Sat May 31, 2008 2:54 pm
Primeval Unity and "Great Conjunction"
Here are two vitally connected mythic themes, or archetypes, concerning
the nature of primeval “chaos”:
1) In the beginning, a unified power emerged from cosmic waters to
become the ruler of the sky. His name was Heaven, the self-created,
all-encompassing god “One” from whom the secondary powers of creation arose.
2) At the time of creation, the primal powers were gathered together in
one place--a congregation of gods in an enduring conjunction (the
condition we’ve called the “Great Conjunction of the Golden Age”) .
The two themes are really just two different ways of describing the same
thing. To see that this is so, it’s only necessary to think visually, in
terms of things witnessed by observers on earth. It can also be helpful
to take note of deep patterns born in an ancient past but echoing across
history into the present, thousands of years after the original events.
The patterns pose an unanswered question: is it possible to comprehend
them, either in terms of what we think we know about the past, or in
terms of anything that would make sense today?
Consider the two words “Saturnian” and “saturnine.” For many centuries
the word Saturnian meant “pertaining to the Golden Age,” though that
meaning has almost disappeared from the contemporary lexicon. The word
saturnine means dark, grave, morose, or glum. It may seem impossible to
reconcile the two meanings, but in fact both meanings are reconciled in
the ancient story of Saturn.
For a telling clue, consider the human response when several planets
(particularly Jupiter and Saturn) move into a loose alignment within a
30 degree arc in the sky. In the popular lexicon this is called a Great
Conjunction or Grand Conjunction. The two most common responses are:
“The Golden Age returns!” and “Doomsday is at hand!” How curious that
the paradoxical Saturnian and saturnine motifs arise simultaneously. No
one has ever explained why a planetary conjunction should provoke such
incompatible expectations.
The answer comes from the archetypal patterns of human memory. Ancient
cultures were driven by two overriding motives: 1) the desire to recover
the lost age of gods and wonders, particularly its opening chapter, the
Golden Age; and the Doomsday anxiety, the fear that what happened once
will happen again. This was no accident in the evolution of
consciousness. The two motives were inseparably connected, because
Doomsday, the “mother of all catastrophes,” was nothing else than the
violent end of the Golden Age, a devastating interruption of the age of
the gods.
And here is the punchline that gives meaning to the paradox. The
condition that held the Golden Age in place was an alignment of planets;
Doomsday was immediately preceded by an exemplary conjunction, one that
had no counterpart in later movements of the planets. This alignment was
not something simply dreamt up by later storytellers, then holding
humanity in its grip for thousands of years.
In today’s language, a “Great Conjunction” requires planets to stand
together within a 30 degree window in the sky, which means an arc 60
times the diameter of the Moon. In contrast, the “conjunction” described
by the Saturn hypothesis, supported by thousands of pictures carved on
stone and by countless myths and symbols of the gods, was a “perfect
conjunction.” In its phases of “perfection,” the planets stood on a
straight line or shared axis.
Nothing of this sort ever occurs with three or more remote planets in
our own time, and even one planet occluding another is extraordinarily
rare because the planets do not all move on the same plane around the
Sun. Computer simulations say we will not see Jupiter actually occlude
the sphere of Saturn for thousands of years. And three planets so
aligned can be ruled out entirely.
So the contrast between the modern meaning of the "Great Conjunction"
and the powerful, mythically-rooted theme is profound. The myth of the
Great Conjunction could not have been inspired by observations of
planets on their present orbits.
As readers familiarize themselves with the archetypal underpinnings of
the reconstruction, it will become clear that the principle of
conjunction was expressed through myriad symbols and mythic
interpretations. Apart from the principle of planets in an enduring
alignment, the themes are not even comprehensible. When we speak of
Venus as the central eye or heart-soul of a celestial power
astronomically identified as Saturn close to the Earth, we are speaking
of a perfect conjunction unthinkable in our time, and made "all the more
so" by the smaller sphere of Mars, stationed in front of Venus and on
the same axis, as the mythic "pupil" of the eye.
Step into this reconstruction, and it should not surprise you that
ancient stargazers continually looked to the heavens for some sign of a
restoration of the Great Conjunction--or a sign that Doomsday, the
culminating event of the Great Conjunction, was drawing near. In the
third century BC, the Babylonian astronomer-priest Berossos described
the condition that preceded the destruction of the world by fire, saying
that a similar condition preceded the destruction of the world by flood.
The Berossos account, given by Seneca in his Naturales Questiones,
describes the planets “so arranged in the same path that a straight line
can pass through all their orbs.” (I’ve placed the full quote below.*)
When seen through the lens of present experience, a perfect conjunction
of this sort is patently absurd, raising the question as to how the idea
could have registered so deeply. By what reasoning did ancient priests
or astronomers conjure a connection either to a "golden age" or to the
arrival of Doomsday?
The connected traditions are exactly what we should expect if the
reconstructed events did indeed occur. I’ve spoken repeatedly of the
primeval Unity, the state of the ancient “sun” god before the events
remembered as “creation.” That first condition has nothing to do with
the Sun we know today, but describes a great sphere hanging stationary
in the polar sky and invoked as “heaven” when “heaven was close to the
earth.” Of course, there are many variations in the language of these
events, but the archetypal theme is of an ancient god conceived as ”the
One, the All”-- whose very identity arises from the Great Conjunction.
No abstractions are involved. The celestial bodies standing in
conjunction--in the very terms described by Berossos--are the Unity. By
their alignment or juxtaposition, they are visually united within the
sphere of the all-containing god. Thus, the word conjunction, Latin
conjunctus, from the root jungere, means "to unite", "to be joined or
yoked as one." The language of myth and the "language of language" are
completely coherent.
And need I add that this radical meaning of conjunction lends no
credence whatsoever to the popular idea of a loose or fragmented
alignment of remote bodies?
David Talbott
______________________
*Quote from Seneca, Naturales Questiones:
“Berossos, who interpreted the prophecies of Bel, attributes these
disasters (the end of the world and its aftermath) to the movements of
the planets. He is so certain of this that he can determine a date for
the Conflagration and the Great Flood. He maintains that the earth will
burn whenever all the planets, which now have different orbits, converge
in Cancer and are so arranged in the same path that a straight line can
pass through all their orbs, and that there will be a further great
flood, when the same planets so converge in Capricorn.”
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Re: Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p8201>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=8201#p8201>by *Tina
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=65>* on Wed Jul 16, 2008 4:33 pm
David Talbott wrote:
The Egyptian Creation Legend
Here is the quote from Budge, summarizing one of the best known
Egyptian “creation” traditions:
.....The story of the Creation is supposed to be told by the god
Neb-er-tcher, This name means the "Lord to the uttermost limit," and
the character of the god suggests that the word "limit" refers to
time and space, and that he was, in fact, the Everlasting God of the
Universe.
Why do you begin with the Egyptian Creation Myth when there are earlier
Sumarian writings pertaining to these matters which influenced the later
Egyptian writings?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GiPUFW ... re=related
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Re: Revisiting the "Creation" Myth <#p8207>
New post <./viewtopic.php?p=8207#p8207>by *Grey Cloud
<./memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=212>* on Wed Jul 16, 2008 6:28 pm
Tina,
I'm not speaking for DT but see my response to your other post where I
said that the Sumerian stuff is fragmentary . It is also not as abundant
as the Egyptian stuff. Beside which, the Vedic stuff is older than the
Sumerian.
Try this:
http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/
And for the record, I take what this guy says with a large pinch of salt.
See aslo:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=600&start=15
the Budge passage crops up there too.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
I Ching, 53.
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