Barbara C. Sproul - Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World

T HE MOST PROFOUND human questions are the ones that give rise to creation myths: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the purpose of our lives and our deaths? How should we understand our place in the world, in time and space? These are central questions of value and meaning, and, while they are influenced by issues of fact, they are not in themselves factual questions; rather, they involve attitudes toward facts and reality. As such, the issues that they raise are addressed most directly by myths.

Myths proclaim such attitudes toward reality. They organize the way we perceive facts and understand ourselves and the world. Whether we adhere to them consciously or not, they remain pervasively influential. Think of the power of the first myth of Genesis (12:3) in the Old Testament. While the scientific claims it incorporates, so obviously at odds with modern ones, may be rejected, what about the myth itself? Most Westerners, whether or not they are practicing Jews or Christians, still show themselves to be the heirs of this tradition by holding to the view that people are sacred, the creatures of God. Declared unbelievers often dispense with the frankly religious language of this assertion by renouncing God, yet even they still cherish the consequence of the myths claim and affirm that people have inalienable rights (as if they were created by God). And, further, consider the beliefs that human beings are superior to all other creatures and are properly set above the rest of the physical world by intelligence and spirit with the obligation to govern itthese beliefs are still current and very powerful. Even the notion that time is properly organized into seven-day weeks, with one day for rest, remains widely accepted. These attitudes toward reality are all part of the first myth of Genesis. And whether people go to temple or church, whether they consider themselves religious, to the extent they reflect these attitudes in their daily behavior, they are still deeply Judeo-Christian.

But the power of a specific myth is not as important to realize as the power of myth itself. Indeed, each of the claims made by the first Genesis myth has been attacked from some quarter. What is essential to understand is that they have been challenged not by new facts but by new attitudes toward facts; they have been challenged by new myths.

There is no escaping our dependence on myth. Without it, we cannot determine what things are, what to do with them, or how to be in relation to them. The fundamental structures of understanding that myths provide, even though in part dictated by matter and instinct, are nevertheless essentially arbitrary because they describe not just the real world of fact but our perception and experience of that world.

This is true even when we try to understand our selves. How do we approach the most basic question of personal identity? Who is the I who is perceiving and experiencing the world? Initially, we presume identity is a physiological reality evident in a bodys ability to distinguish between me (affirmed and protected by my bodys defenses) and not-me (denied, attacked, and rejected, as happens in transplant operations). But, even though it rests on so firm a physical foundation and is so settled in instinct, the fact of identity is still variously determined by people. With growing intelligence and the progressive freedom that results from it, people construct other than purely reactive, physical ways of responding to and interacting with their environments. I is no longer synonymous with body. Indeed, the question is instantly complicated as time enters into consciousness with memory and imagination and you ask which body you identify with. Todays? Yesterdays? The body you will have a month from now if you go on a diet? The body you had as a child? And, as people add more factors to the structural grid of understanding, identity grows to include other matters. Gender, race, profession, nationality, age, position, and the like all become relevant as the I in all those bodies comes to think of itself as something constant and essentially connected to larger social realities. In many cases, such identifications are so powerful that they overcome the initial one of I equals body. People begin to make distinctions between various aspects of a complex I; they value some as higher selves and others as lower, and they make choices emphasizing one at the expense of another. This is what happens in wartime when people who have come to identify themselves not only physically but also nationally willingly sacrifice their body selves to their citizen selves.