Origin Myths
“Among the most basic questions raised by human beings are those of origins. How did the human species arise? How was the earth created? What about the sun? The moon? The stars? Why do we have night and day? Why do people die? No human society lacks answers to such questions. While these answers vary in detail, they were, for primitive peoples as a whole, similar in their basic form: people and the world exist because of a series of intentional creative acts. Moreover, this creation is usually regarded as the work of supernatural beings or forces. Explanations to how these supernatural agents formed the earth and peopled it are known as origin myths. ”Until the rise of modern science, origin myths provided the only answers possible to such questions. Thus, myths embody the state and limitation of human thought about origins for more than 99% of human history.
“Origin myths should not be thought of as the work of a few creative geniuses. They are, instead, the product of untold thousands of narrators who, in telling and retelling a myth, have embellished it here, dropped a character there, transposed two incidents, amplified a cryptic part, given greater motive or justification to an action, and so on. Because they continuously change, then, there is no “official” version of a myth. Indeed, even in the same village one may readily obtain half a dozen versions of the same myth.
”Beliefs about the origin of human beings fall into three main types: (1) they have always existed on earth, (2) they did not always exist but were created in some way, and (3) they previously existed, but in another world, and somehow brought to this one.
”Primitive myths tell of a Golden Age when life was utopian, discord was unknown, tools worked themselves, and sickness and death were nonexistent. But something went wrong, knowledge was gained (or sin discovered), and ever since, travail, misfortune, and death have been the lot of mankind. This notion of a Fall of Man is familiar to readers of the Bible. There is little doubt among anthropologists and Biblical scholars that many of the creation stories in the Bible are pre-Biblical, going back thousands of years.
”Not until the rise of modern science in the last few centuries has a different account of human and cosmic origins emerged. Applying newly developed concepts and instruments, science has given us a fuller and truer account of the origin of man and his universe than ever before possible.” (Excerpted from “Origin Myths” written by the American Museum of Natural History’s Robert Caneiro for the National Center for Science Education)
Filed under: Earth and Life, religion
