Hey. So here in our third video for
World Mythology we're leaving behind
some of that introductory work
and we're diving into our first
close reading of a whole bunch of
different world mythology from cultures
all over the place.
And we start our study with cosmic myths.
And cosmic myths can be divided into
three subcategories:
creation stories, flood stories, and
apocalypse
stories. And we'll get into all three of
those categories.
But for these next couple of
weeks let's sit with creation stories.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of them.
And there's a lot of stuff to chew on. A
lot of really good stuff.
So all I want to accomplish in this
little video
is kind of help you build a tool kit for
the work ahead.
And let's think about cosmic myths, again
specifically creation stories,
in kind of a general sense. And let's ask
some big questions
about what tends to go on in them.
What are some of the varieties and
approaches we're going to see?
And always the most interesting
question for me is:
What are they for? What's the real
purpose?
What question were these ancient people
trying to answer
with their creation stories? Were they
trying to answer the question
who made the world? When? And how?
Or were they asking deeper, richer
cosmological kinds of questions?
So let's tackle all that work here
in this first
video on cosmic myths? So
cosmic myths, uh, you hear the word 
kosmos in there, and and kosmos
k-o-s-m-o-s,
is the ancient Greek word for "order."
And it's what they called the universe.
You know, we use the word
"cosmos" to mean "the universe." Those are
synonymous terms right? The cosmos, the
universe.
But it's interesting to notice that for
the ancient Greeks that was their word
for order. It's like calling all of this
order,
or structure, or natural law,
or the pattern. And so
cosmos has
that power to it right? It doesn't
just mean
whatever the universe is. It makes a
claim about the universe. That it is an
organized, orderly, interconnected
whole. So right there in the very word is
a kind of cosmological argument.
A position is taken on the nature of the
cosmos right in the very word itself. So we're
we're living with that word in our
study of cosmic myths. And
in fact cosmology is the study of the
cosmos, the science or study
of the cosmos. Not quite astronomy right?
That's about like how stars and planets
and galaxies work.
But cosmology pulls back from that and
says, yeah,
but what is it and how does it
operate in total beyond astronomy?
And then there's a new word maybe to you
and I in this study:
cosmogeny. And you're reading that in the
Leeming book.
Cosmogeny, from cosmos and genesis,
and many of you know the Greek word
genesis means birth or beginning.
And so cosmogeny is an origin
story about the cosmos and an even more
specific
topic within cosmology. Cosmogenies
are creation stories. So that's the fancy
word for creation story or
creation myth that we're about to dip into.
We're going to study a bunch of
cosmogenies. So that's a word we learn and
use in this class, and we'll probably
never use again, but
hey, that's how college works right? We
want to talk the talk
of what scholars of mythology are doing
what they're up to
so we can enter into dialogue with them.
Yeah. That's all we need words like that for. And they
may work for you on some future
appearance on Jeopardy or something, I
don't know.
Now our book does a nice job -- and I want
to kind of sketch through these quickly
with you as well --
of delineating and defining the
different kinds
of cosmogenies or creation stories that
we're going to encounter.
So the first one is ex nihilo, that's
Latin
for "out of nothing, from nothing."
and so that's one kind of creation story.
Some argue, like in the Crash Course videos
we're going to be watching,
some argue that the Genesis story is an
ex nihilo story because in the very first
line, yeah,
God made the heavens and the earth. Like
there wasn't
anything, and then there was something
suddenly. God apparently existed before
all that,
but um and you see
those kinds of creation stories. Then
there's one called "chaos creation."
And chaos creation stories
tell a different, a little bit of a
different, linear narrative there, that
it doesn't, that the universe doesn't
come from nothing, but it comes from a
kind of big mess,
a kind of a big chaos of maybe
primordial waters, or some kind of
cosmic egg. You often see the cosmic egg
thing.
And I wonder which is Genesis? Is Genesis
an ex nihilo story, out of nothing?
Or is it a chaos creation story? Because
you know, it,
again, right in those first couple of
lines of Genesis -- which we'll study in
the next video by the way --
you see, you know, all was void and
formless.
And so there seems to be...God seems
to be working with something right? He's
bringing order out of chaos.
So it depends on which aspect of Genesis
you focus on.
Is it an ex nihilo or is it a chaos
creation story? Yeah.
We'll ask those kinds of questions as we
go on. There's three more types I want to
sketch with you.
"World parent" creation. Yeah, this is a big
one.
We're gonna see this in all the
Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Sumerian stuff,
the Greek stuff, Egyptian stuff. So here
there are some kind of world parents,
you know, the cosmic fathers and mothers
who
give birth to themselves and then they
have a bunch of kids and
out of those pantheons, those families of
gods, those houses of gods,
sometimes they're united, sometimes
they're separated, sometimes one of them
gets like slaughtered and ripped apart
and her body becomes the cosmos, you know.
Those are common creation
motifs for sure, the world parent
creation.
A fourth one is "emergence creation."
And these last two, "emergence
creation" and "earth diver creation,"
you see quite commonly here in the
Americas. So
among Native American creation stories,
from the North Pole to the South Pole,
all of it, when you dip into their
creation stories.
Emergence creation is that
an opening in the earth appears and then
everything crawls out of that.
All of the animals come out, people come
out, kind of an earth
womb, kind of a mother goddess vibe
obviously.
And then the "earth diver" creation story --
this is when there's a primordial sea
and then someone dives down and gets all
the stuff and brings it back up.
Brings up the animals, brings up the
people, brings up the sun, and moon, and
all of that.
So those are just some of the varieties
that we're going to encounter as we
study creation myths. Be on the lookout for
those. And now they're all in your notes,
which is good.
There's another piece I want to think
about with you. And just pulling back
even further now and looking at
all creation stories in general, look for
these typical elements. One.
Of course there is the creation of the
world, the creation of the universe. I
mean I guess that was too obvious right?
But that's what creation stories are
about -- the origin of all of this.
Also notice that this
is a constant theme right, bringing order
out of chaos.
And that's -- again as we talked about at
the top of this video -- that's packed
right into the word
cosmos. Cosmic myth,
cosmogeny, cosmology.
And we'll see it in the book of
Genesis when we study that in our next
video.
That God is taking disorder and out of
it
creating order. So that's always
one of the teachings of all creation
stories, that
the universe makes sense somehow,
there's a pattern here that we need to
kind of understand and figure out, maybe
even
come to master, and we of course are a
part of that pattern.
Also notice that this
this kind of
this waterfall effect is often in a lot
of these creation stories. And by that I
mean there is an original unity,
and from that singularity, from that
unity, comes
the two. You know, we'll see this in the
Egyptian creation story. Atum
is the primordial god, genderless,
who gives birth to himself and then
in the Egyptian myth Atum
gives birth to the primal mother-father
and from the primal mother-father, a male
female,
come all of the descendants. And then the
whole pantheon pours out of that.
So from unity into duality or into
multiplicity,
into many. And you see that especially in
the polytheistic mythological systems.
It's a little different in Genesis where
you have monotheism, one god right?
But it still has a sense in which
from God,
the Biblical God, comes Adam and Eve, male
-female again
from the singularity comes the duality
and from the duality
comes everything else. So look for that
kind of waterfall effect as well.
And also often present is the
interplay between
opposites, you know, often personified as
male and female
deities of course. Sometimes they're
unified and they get along great,
other times there's great battles. Like
look at the Greek myths from the
Theogony. We're gonna
see a lot of conflict. Gaia and
Uranus, you know,
it's not a good marriage. It's not a good
partnership. And it ends horribly.
And
that pattern gets repeated as we go on
down through
the generations that come from the
primal mother-father god
Gaia and Uranus. Finally,
in many of these creation myths,
especially in these big pantheons,
look for the war or the conflict in the
upper-realm.
To put a finer point on it,
intergenerational battle. Intergenerational battle.
Children or grandchildren going to war
against their parents or their
grandparents.
It's a big theme in the Babylonian,
Sumerian, Mesopotamian
stories from the Enuma Elish.
There is again...there are unhappy
families everywhere in mythology,
and it often ends in absolute mayhem, and
violence, and dismemberment, and chaos. And
so that gets us to a kind of a deeper
question, and that is, you know, what are
these creation myths
really for? What are they really asking?
What are they really trying to teach us
about the cosmos and our place in it?
Are these creation myths about questions
like "Who made the world,
why, and how?" 
That seems to be the answer that
creationists are looking for.
You know what I'm talking about right? A
subset of Christianity --
not all Christians are creationists but
all creationists are Christians.
So there is a subset of Christianity of
people who read
the Genesis story literally. And we've
already discussed that in our first few
videos, how
from Joseph Campbell's perspective, what
a misstep
that is. And how important it is to
learn how to read myth
metaphorically. We've spent a lot of time
working on that,
practicing that already. But
creationists, to give them their moment
here in the sun,
they decide to read their Genesis story
as a scientific paper, as a fact. And so
for them they're perfectly content that
the purpose of the book of Genesis
is to answer the questions: "Who made the
world, how?"
And that's it. But folks like Joseph
Campbell and other scholars of mythology
suspect that there's a lot more going on
in these creation stories
than just that. Were the people who
told these ancient stories, were they not
in fact asking
different questions, not "Who made the
world and how?" 
But "Who and what am I?"
And "What is all of this?"
In other words, if I can figure out the
origin of the universe,
maybe in doing that I would get
crucial information, important answers
to the question "What is my nature? What
am I supposed to be doing
with my life? With these with these
latent
powers? Where do I fit in?"
And so that gets us back to the
cosmological function -- remember again
Campbell's
four functions of myth: the metaphysical
or mystical function,
the cosmological function, the
sociological function,
and the pedagogical function. You all
have that in your notes and we've
discussed that at length
and practiced applying it, and we're
going to continue
practicing applying it like right now. So
let's ask that question: What is the
cosmological
function of a creation story? You know, if
I could know
what the universe's purpose is,
then I would know what my purpose is.
and you recall that's what the
cosmological function
mostly is. You know, a myth
has to explain how this
cosmos, this order, this universe,
how it interlocks with itself, how it
works together,
and therefore how I fit in. What's my
place in it?
What's my relative value? We'll see some
creation stories where human beings are
basically worthless.
In some of the Mesopotamian, Sumerian
stories human beings are just
designed as an afterthought, as workers
to bring the gods platters of, you know,
cheese and wine. Servants. Not a very
exalted vision of human purpose.
And then we'll see in the Egyptian myth
a very different sense in which
human beings have a kind of a loving
relationship with the
with the mother-father creators. And
and have a purpose. We are here to
maintain the order of Maat, of justice, 
of the, you know, the organizational
energy of the cosmos.
We are to collaborate in that
administration of justice in the
Egyptian myths. And look at Genesis, which
we'll look at quite closely, that we are made
from the essence of God. God picks up
dirt
blows his spirit into it and makes man.
So there's a sense in which human beings
have
a pretty elevated position in the
Genesis story,
compared to the Sumerian ones for sure.
So isn't that what creation stories finally
are about.
Not who made the world or how, but what
does it all mean and where do I fit into
it?
That's the cosmological function. And you
would expect to find
heavy doses of the cosmological function
at play in these cosmogenies,
in these creation stories. So keep this
in mind as you head into this
reading that we're going to be doing, and
and the videos that we're going to be
watching from the Crash Course series.
In all of these wonderful creation
stories from all
over the place look especially for the
cosmological function
and also some of the others too, you know,
the sociological,
the pedagogical, etc. So keep that in mind
and it'll really open up these stories.
Otherwise it's just a bunch of cool stories and
you're like, "What am I supposed to do
with this?"
So here in our study, now you
know what you're supposed to do with it --
look for these four functions.
Look for answers to the question, "Why did
they write these stories?
Why do they keep telling these stories
for thousands and
thousands of years?" They must have power.
They must have
purpose. They must have deep, vivifying,
nourishing value to the human beings who
love these stories,
who build religions around these stories,
and who tell these stories to their
children as soon
as they are able. So in our next video
we will dive into really the dominant
creation
story in our culture, and that is the one
found in the book of Genesis,
chapters 1 and 2 in the Hebrew Bible.
So I'll see you on the other side.
