![]() So these, as should be clear, are the cosmogenies of Platonism, Gnosticism and Buddhism respectively. It is to be understood as being like an illusion conjured up by a magician. We fabricated the cosmos ourselves out of ignorance. It is to be understood as a trap or a prison.ģ. An evil or ignorant god made the cosmos but he (or she) made a big mistake. God made the cosmos and it is good, but it is only a shadow or a copy of the real thing.Ģ. They can be summed up succinctly like this:ġ. I have chosen to look at three ancient systems that I believe between them cover the main possibilities for cosmogenic myths. Then briefly I will attempt to compare their subjective effects with the ways in which the dominant modern paradigm regarding the cosmos and its origin may be influencing, indeed moulding us all. From this necessarily rather tentative and impressionistic exploration – for it is a task of extreme difficulty, to isolate the effects on a culture of one particular strand from the total body of understanding, lore, fable and fact maintained overall – I will draw some conclusions about the continued relevance of these ancient stories. With this in mind, in this essay I will look at three of the most influential cosmogenic myths that human beings have devised and make some attempt to consider their spiritual and psychological ramifications. We are dealing here with thousands of years of cultural history, spread over a vast continent, and must be wary of glib generalisations but equally clearly, images and ideas of this kind are not neutral things – they will certainly have had a profound effect on those who held them. A degree of simple serenity and cheerfulness unusual in monotheistic cultures? Perhaps. In the past at least they have tended to go along with a cyclical view of time, articulated in terms of vast time scales, and to have bred… what? Resignation and political passivity is too extreme a diagnosis. Such naturalistic laws may be purely material, or, as in the Buddhist East, conceived more broadly in psycho-spiritual terms. Then there is the view that the universe simply arose from impersonal natural laws, which, in the West, goes back to the pre-socratics. Such a view can survive external disasters – famine, plague and war – so long as an optimism about the overall teleology of history is maintained. On the other hand many other cultures, throughout history, have seen the entire cosmos as the creation of a beneficent deity, well adapted to our needs if only humanity will make good use of it. In the ancient world it seems to have thrived mostly as a minority view, and almost certainly indicates some kind of despair or disillusionment with the wider culture and its values. This ancient cosmogenic view appears to have made a remarkable comeback in the obsessions of some of the more extreme modern conspiracy theorists. For example, there have been groups of people in the past, in hellenistic Egypt, in the middle East, and elsewhere, who maintained that the physical universe was to be likened a gigantic prison, created by an evil and demented being to trap its unwitting inmates in an illusory reality. To borrow a word sometimes used by modern scholars, in appreciating the myths of origin maintained by a culture one may come to understand a great deal about its imaginaire – that is the underlying views and images about the world and how it functions that underpin, and to a significant extent determine and construct, people’s everyday experience. I would suggest that such stories and images contain, in a highly condensed, implicit manner, the fundamental views that a people or a culture hold in common. Whilst this treasure store can contain humour, satire, even rabelaisian farce, it is fundamentally a serious matter, and myths of creation especially so. Myths concerning the origin and purpose of the universe are certainly amongst the most fascinating to be found in the world’s ‘myth-kitty’ – to borrow Larkin’s memorable phrase. ![]()
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