How your Religion's Creation Story Affects Your Outlook on Life

[Frigga]

I believe that a religion's creation story, or myth if you prefer greatly affects a person's outlook on life, albeit, subconciously.

For example.

The Christians, have the Garden of Eden belief. They believe that a single entity had a plan for how things would come about in this world of ours. It (because God is supposed to be male and female, and be the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) created the world we see, and the animals we eat, and us in six days, and then it rested. God, when it made Adam, formed him from the earth. Adam was made in the image of God, and the breath of Life was breathed into him, and he lived. Now, Adam was made as one person. Eve was made after Adam was already an independent person. She came from Adam, as it clearly says that God caused him to fell into a deep sleep, and took a rib from Adam, and made a woman, Eve. She was supposed to be his partner, his helpmeet.

Now, how would this belief system affect how someone who is a Christian in their daily lives? You are taught this story all the way from preschool age Sunday School, so it creeps into your subconscious, and lives there your whole life. What would an outsider think? Well, they might think that human beings are being told that they need a lot of direction in their lives, and that they might not have much, if any control over their lives. When faced with adversity, the sterotype, (not that sterotypes are correct, but they are there) is that Christians will say "Well, that is God's Will, and He knows Best." and "The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways." Many could say that they don't get mad at the cosmic, and just "turn the other cheek" when Life hands them the shit end of the stick. If you look at the teachings of Jesus, he himself said "I am the potter, and you are the clay." He then is saying, that he knows what is best, and is forming you at every step of the way. Almost like you don't have to make any decisions, as He's guiding you, and molding you into what He wants you to be.

Now, the Norse have a different view.

In the Eddas, it says that our world was formed from the action of the realms of fire and ice meeting over a great void, and eventually making our world. Chaos made the world of the Northern Europeans. In the Heathen perspective, there wasn't a single entity driving the creation of the world. The world, became. There is more to the creation story, where Ymir is formed from this chaos, and wanders the area formed from the chaos of fire and ice, and is nourished by the cosmic cow Audumla. From his sweat while sleeping, male and female frost giants emerge. From the action of Audumla licking the salty ice, she exposes a man, who then becomes the father of Odin. Now, we all know who Odin is, he is the greatest of the Aesir. Odin had two brothers, Vili, and Ve. Many have speculated that they are all part of the same god, but, I'm not going to get into that here. Eventually, Odin and his brothers killed Ymir, and used his body to create the earth. His bones were the mountians, his eyes the stars, and his blood the lakes and seas. What this symbolises is order being brought out of chaos.

The creation of the human race is also outlined in the Eddas. Odin, Vili, and Ve were walking along a stretch of beach, and came upon two driftwood trees, an ash tree, and an elm tree. They created man from the ash tree, and named him Ask, and made a woman out of the elm tree, and named her Embla. All three gave different gifts to make them human.

How does this differ from the Christian view? Simple. We as heathens believe that we came from trees, and not the earth. Trees are nutured, and tended to, but you really can't control the form of a tree. A tree will grow according to what type of tree it is. A redwood will grow straight and tall. An oak will grow thick and mighty. A willow will grow graceful, and pliant. An apple will grow to give nourishment. Trees are magical and mystical. They inspire grace and beauty. Trees grow, and become their own entity, and follow their own path, but within the guidelines of their genetic codes. But they do express their own individuality. They do not rely on a all knowing deity up in the sky to form their every curve of limb, as they grow as the situation calls for.

I believe then that humans who have not discovered their true potential can then be ascribed to being seeds. Instead of being pliable dirt, which can take any form, I believe that the Heathen thought system believes that you take your potential, and nuture, and nourish it, and it will blossom accordingly. But, you are able to stunt, or even kill what you could be, whether it is with religion that is not right for you, or too much alcohol, or mind altering drugs. Or even poor nutrition.

This is what I think.

Discussion?

[Baron Samedi]

I think the heathen view of the beginning of time was written for people that could not understand such vast, cosmic things such as the "Big Bang" theory and all.....

But of course, that too might be oversimplifying it, because maybe they did understand......

[Skandi]

The Heathen view would include a "big bang" when Muspelheim and Niflheim meet in Gunungagap :)

I think the main difference between the two stories is that God created everything, where as the gods were created themselves. it is therefore much easier to reconcile modern Heathenry with Science than Christianity with science.

I consider the "nurturing of your potential" to stem from other parts of the eddas which tell us that although our Wyrd is already set (similar to the Celts here) our actions are our responsibility and we can change the direction of our lives and afterlives.

[Lyfing]

Hey Frigga'sSpindle,

You are really onto something here..:thumbs up

I think of myth and religion in a very symbolic way. Odin is the god of poetry and he is a coiner of new ideas..

I think Carlyle put this very well with this..


Thought does not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and the third man;—nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

Campbell went on and on about Bastain's notion of elementary and ethnic ideas. Simply put, the elementary ideas are those centers inherent in us all as humans which are activated within us in a language of symbols peculiar to each ethnicity. In other words, the elementary ideas are like open instincts subject to imprinting, and the symbols of the different religions are what imprints on them.

I don't think though that we start with some blank slate. I think nature continually refreshes itself by way of this imprinting..for example.. (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1703&highlight=lamarkism)

...

If I were to compare and contrast us and them I'd go with this first..


A distinction must be drawn, through all our studies of mythology, between the attitudes toward divinities represented on one hand by the priest and his flock, and on the other by the creative poet, artist, or philosopher. The former tends to what I would call a positivistic reading of the imagery of his cult. Such a reading is fostered by the attitude of prayer, since in prayer it is extremely difficult to retain the balance between belief and disbelief that is proper to the contemplation of an image or idea of God. The poet, artist, and philosopher, on the other hand, being themselves fashioners of images and coiners of ideas, realize that all representation—whether in the visible matter of stone or in the mental matter of the word—is necessarily conditioned by the fallibility of the human organs. Overwhelmed by his own muse, a bad poet may imagine his visions to be supernatural facts and so fall into the posture of a prophet—whose utterances I would define as “poetry overdone,” over-interpreted; wherefore he becomes the founder of a cult and a generator of priests. But so also a gifted priest may find his super-natural beings losing body, deepening into void, changing form, even dissolving: whereupon he will possibly become either a prophet or, if more greatly favored, a creative poet.

Three major metamorphoses of the motifs and themes of our subject, therefore, have to be recognized as fundamentally differing even though fundamentally related, namely: The true poetry of the poet, the poetry overdone of the prophet, and the poetry done to the death of the priest. Whereas the history of religion is largely a record of the latter two, the history of mythology includes all three, and in doing so brings not only poetry but also religion into a fresh and healthily vivified relationship to the wellsprings of creative thought. For there is a tendency (“poetry underdone”) to rest in the whimsies of personal surprise, joy, or anguish before the realities of life in a universe poets never made; whereas in religion the opposite tendency may prevail—that of rendering no personal experience whatsoever, but only authorized cliches.

Occidental Mythology, pages 518-519

…

In the Garden of Eden there is The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are Yggdrasil. We are half-alive and half-dead...


In the fields as I fared, ( for fun ) I hung
my weeds on two wooden men;
they were reckoned folks when the rags they wore:
naked a man is naught.

Havamal 49, Hollander trans.

With this there must be brought up the differing views between matriarchies and patriarchies...


The patriarchal point of view is distinguished from the earlier archaic view by its setting apart of all pairs-of-opposites—male and female, life and death, true and false, good and evil—as though they were absolutes in themselves and not merely aspects of the larger entity of life. This we may liken to a solar, as opposed to lunar, mythic view, since darkness flees from the sun as its opposite, but in the moon dark and light interact in the one sphere..

Occidental Mythology, pages 26-27

Die Sonne..??

Campbell called it ( Wyrd, I take it ) Mother Right..


In fact, even in the late Celtic legends many startling traits are revealed of brazen dames who preserved the customs of that age up to early Christian times. They were in no sense wives in the patriarchal style. For even at the height of the Celtic heroic age, c. 200 B.C. To c. 450 A.D., many of the most noted Irish noblewomen still were of pre-Celtic stock; and these bore themselves in the imperious manner of the matriarchs of yore.

There is, for example, the episode of the pillow colloquy of Queen Meave of Connaught with her Celtic spouse, Ailill of Leinster, in the bezarre epic known as “The Cattle Raid of Cooley.”

…

The rest of the tale can wait; for the only point to be made now is that both the archaeology and the ancient literature of Ireland demonstrate that the patriarchal, iron-bearing Celts, who gained the masterly during the last three or four centuries B.C., overcame but did not extinguish an earlier, Bronze Age civilization of Mother Right.

Occidental Mythology, pages 35...40


For in Greece the patriarchal gods did not exterminate, but married, the goddesses of the land, and these succeeded ultimately in regaining influence, whereas in biblical mythology all the goddesses were exterminated—or, at least, were supposed to have been.

Occidental Mythology, pages

And Tacitus said..


More than this, they believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and prophecy, and so they do not scorn to ask their advice or lightly disregard their replies. In the reign of the deified Vespasian we saw Veleda long honoured by many Germans as a divinity, whilst even earlier they showed a similar reverence for Aurinia and others, a reverence untouched by flattery or any pretence of turning women into goddesses.

Germania, chapter 8

...


In the Garden of Eden, on the other hand, a different mood prevails. For the Lord God ( the written Hebrew name is Yahweh ) cursed the serpent when he knew that Adam had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and he said to his angels; “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of lie, and eat, and live fore ever'--therefore Yahweh sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim [i.e., lion-birds], and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

The first point that emerges from this contrast, and will be demonstrated further in numerous mythic scenes to come, is that in the context of the patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium b.c., the mythology adopted from the earlier neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations of the lands they occupied and for the time ruled became inverted, to render an argument just the opposite to that of its origin. And a second point, corollary to the first, is that there is consequently an ambivalence inherent in many of the basic symbols of the Bible that no amount of rhetorical stress on the patriarchal interpretation can suppress. They address a pictorial message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal message addressed to the brain; and this nervous discord inhabits both Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism, since they too share in the legacy of the Old Testament.

Occidental Mythology, Pages 16-17

In our world there is none of this “nervous discord” …


But that the mythology presumed the existence of such a world follows already from the fact that Urd's fountain, which gives the warmth of life to the world-tree, must have had its deepest fountain there, just as Hvergelmir has its in the world of primeval cold, and Mimir has his fountain in that wisdom which unites the opposites and makes them work together in a cosmic world.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/078.php

For, we are Beyond Good and Evil, and our eye, like Odin's, is in Mimir's Well..

Later,
-Lyfing

[Liffrea]

Pretty much confirms my view that science and mythology are, largely, one and the same.

Many mythologies describe the creation of order from chaos, Scef-Heimdal came to the English, and other Germanic peoples (but mainly the English because we’re superior and we smell nicer!:D) lifted him from chaos and taught him order.

The Gods “weaved” laws/energies into the fabric of the cosmos; they ordered it within and without themselves.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics, all energy eventually dissipates into heat, i.e. returns to chaos (entropy). Life is the opposite of entropy, it’s motion prevents (for a time) the decline into entropy, matter is “pinched” energy, essentially that’s what life is.

The Vedas describe the Gods as poet-priests they “sung” the world into existence, raised it up from the “ocean” (space). Pythagoras was onto a similar notion with his music of the spheres, today quantum science teaches us of the “vibration” of strings as the possible foundation of all existence.

Our ancestors were far smarter than we realise.

[Tabiti]

"Big bang" is just the scientific explanation of the divine creation of the living world, the might of energies called God/s, Reason and so. But I cannot agree 100% with the creation of the whole Universe, since there are no evidences of absolute beginning and absolute end, only transformations. Before the beginning there should be Nothing. And what is Nothing? It's not the Chaos, neither the Black holes. Life and Chaos are two poles, like the Black hole and the Sun, so the Chaos is Something itself. Nothing means the lack of poles, from which polarity various energies are born.
Stars are born from death of other stars, the whole Universe is an endless cycle. The thing controlling whole order and balance of this cycle is the so called Universal reason.

[Cato]

The only bit that I accept at face value is:

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth."

The various creation myths are entertaining, but fall flat on their face because they present an often convoluted tale as to the origin of creation. The story of Hesiod's Theogonia or the story of the world's creation in the northern sagas, while interesting, are a bit too unstrucuted while the statement above merely implies:

1) There was a beginning.
2) More importantly, there was a God before the beginning.
3) This God called heaven and earth into existence.
4) At the very least, I owe this God my respect and thanks.

I can read further into the Genesis text, but I'd deviate from the simple creed of Genesis 1:1.

Moderator's Note: The resulting discussion of Abrahamic creation myths and their theological implications was moved to the Christianity (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7767) forum.