#Call of myth origin series

Ancient Norsemen believed the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) were reflections of light off the shields of the warrior maidens the Valkyrie modern astronomers tell us they are caused by solar winds interacting with the earth’s magnetic field and atmospheric gases. Acceptance, not verification, is what is called for. An origin myth offers an explanation that is to be believed. Not only does science propose answers, it proceeds to test these answers, and if the answers prove incorrect, they must be rejected or modified. What distinguishes science from mythology is verification. Science shares explanation with mythology. Explanation, then, is not unique to nor did it begin with science. While moral lessons may be scattered here and there throughout them, origin myths are basically ways of accounting for things as they are. Thus, myths embody the state and limitation of human thought about origins for more than 99% of human history.Īlthough origin myths are usually assigned to the province of religion, they contain one element of science: explanation. Until the rise of modern science, origin myths provided the only kinds of answers possible to such questions. The accounts of the ways in which these supernatural agents formed the earth and peopled it are known as origin myths. Moreover, this creation is usually regarded as the work of supernatural beings or forces.

#Call of myth origin series

While these answers vary greatly in detail, they are, for primitive peoples as a whole, similar in their basic form: people and the world exist because they were brought into being by a series of creative acts.

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. Thus the Navajo accounted for creation.Īmong the most basic questions raised by human beings are those of origins. Earth Surface People, mortals, were created, and First Man and First Woman were formed from ears of white and yellow corn. Changing Woman gave birth to the Hero Twins, called 'Monster Slayer' and 'Child of the Waters' who had many adventures. A great flood underground forced the Holy People to crawl to the surface of the earth through a hollow reed, where they created the world. In the beginning there were Holy People, supernatural and sacred, who lived below ground in 12 lower worlds. These deities created the earth and its creatures and the Sun, Moon, and Stars. On this floated a Cosmic Egg, from which arose Gaea (Earth) and Uranus (Sky). In the beginning there was a period of Chaos, when air, water, and matter were combined in a formless mixture.