The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

STORIES OF CREATION

In stories of creation we have the imagination of primitive man at work, trying to answer questions which it was no more prepared to answer than a child of seven is in a position to understand higher mathematics. The savage has an answer for every question because he has no idea of the difficulty of the problems involved. A name or a story will completely satisfy him because he is uncritical. Now the stories of creation, or cosmogonies, as they are technically called, are peculiarly interesting because they give us an insight into the concrete terms which the imagination was forced to use in its attempt to picture the past and the origin of things. Moreover, we can trace the changes these naïve stories underwent as man's experience broadened and he was able to think more abstractly. We can become acquainted with the materials with which the poet-priest of the pre-scientific past worked to build himself a marvelous and soul-satisfying tale; and we are able, as history unrolls, to watch myth gradually pass into theology.

The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was well-nigh universal. Everywhere we find accounts of a distant past when the gods walked on earth. Egyptians, Hindoos, Greeks, Japanese, Polynesians, Hebrews and American Indians had tales of the origin of things to tell. This desire to account for origins is not hard to understand. The same psychological tendency is at work to-day and gives zest to the theory of evolution. Why did the Descent of Man awaken such a storm throughout the Western World if not because it shook the story of man's first coming, which had been handed down from generation to generation since the mists of antiquity? Man wants to know about himself, how he came here, and whither he is going. The vogue of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful and longer lived. All agency was for him personal agency. And there are, even now, a surprisingly large number of people who can think in no other terms. The universe is for them the playground of spirits who work their will upon it. Matter and energy and the slow growth of years are ideas which strike them cold. Their view of the universe is dramatic and even melodramatic; it is personal, mythical.

Let us glance at some of these attempts to account for the world. We shall not find them very coherent or deep, but we shall always find them instructive for the light they throw upon man, himself, and the limits set to his theories about origins by the concrete agency to which he perforce appealed. We shall then realize how natural were the questions which man asked and which he sought to answer, and how impossible it was for him to offer any other solutions than those imaginative ones which grew up in folk-lore and which have been developed and re-cast in the various religions.

No early race had the idea of an absolute beginning. The attempt made was simply to carry things back to different conditions, to a less developed state of things, and then to trace the larger steps by means of which the later world, as they saw it, came about. Those races which had little power for abstract thinking and had achieved few impersonal ideas kept very near to concrete phenomena and explained their own origin in terms of a mythical ancestor, or animal magician, while they left the earth and the sky very much as it was. The Iroquois Indians, for instance, believed that their original female ancestress fell from heaven. There was no land to receive her, but it suddenly bubbled up under her feet and waxed bigger, so that ere long a whole country was visible. Other branches of the tribe held that otters and beavers hastened to dig up enough earth from beneath the water to provide her with an island on which to dwell. The Athapascans of Northwestern Canada asserted that a raven, whose eyes were fire, whose glances were lightning, and the clapping of whose wings was thunder, descended to the ocean. Instantly, the earth arose and remained floating on the surface of the waters. It was from this Being that the tribe traced its descent. We must remember how near akin are animals and men at this stage of human development. Once throw oneself into the atmosphere of myth and it is not difficult to comprehend how such stories grew up.

But we are more interested in tracing the development of stories of creation from primitive types to subtler and more abstract forms; and a collection of savage folk-lore on the subject would, therefore, be of little value. Let us pass, then, to the accounts given by races which have played a part in history.

The Egyptian account is as follows: In the beginning was the primitive ocean, a wild waste of waters. From this tossing chaos sprang land and sky, and it was from their embrace that other things arose. The general idea present in this account was probably derived from the Nile floods or from glimpses of the ocean. The lifting of the watery mists which are seen rising each morning from the Nile, the parting of them from the earth and the raising of them to the sky was a work variously attributed to Ra (the sun) or Shu (the atmosphere). Gradually the Egyptians developed ideas of various deities all of whom derive from objects and activities in nature. To these were then assigned the work of creation. At first this work was thought of as a shaping or fashioning in a literal sense. Ptah, the Great Artificer, shapes the sun and moon eggs on his potter's wheel; Osiris, the god of vegetation, formed with his hand the earth, its waters, its air, its plants, all its cattle, all its birds, all its winged fowl, all its reptiles, all its quadrupeds. Is this view very far different from the account given in the so-called second story of creation beginning with verse four of Genesis? There it is written: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Somewhat later developed the more priestly, or theological, account; just as it did for the Hebrews. Creation was then conceived more mystically as an act of will issuing in a word of command. We should remember that, for primitive thought, words were not mere verbal signs, useful to man as means of communication, but were conceived, more realistically and naïvely, as essential parts of things, bound up with their existence. This same fact will explain much of the ritual of magic. When God says, "Let there be light," light is selected and, as it were, coerced into existence by the name. As time passed man became reflective and critical. He had nothing essentially new to offer, yet he felt dissatisfied with the crude imagery of tradition. Step by step with the growth of society, we always find the passage from creation myths built around the idea of spontaneous generation to the idea of a god who molds men as a potter does his clay, and thence to a fiat in which the creative will of a supernatural and transcendent deity finds expression. There is a remarkable similarity in creation stories, just as we would expect. The same few motives repeat themselves with local variations.

The oldest of the Greek myths of creation are to be found in Homer and Hesiod. For Homer, Oceanus is the father of the gods, while Tethys, called the suckling or nursing one, is the mother. Back of these august, generative powers, however, lies Night whom even Zeus is afraid to offend. We must remember that darkness is a presence for early man, as real as water or air, and that man feared it as mysterious and threatening. Always we must put aside the knowledge which science has given us and sink down into this vague world of the past, filled with tremendous shapes and forces. Hesiod's view is best given in his own words: