Creation Tales

Creation tales attempt the impossible: imagining something outside the world we know.

The key metaphor used by King James’ translators of Genesis was formlessness:

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

They shared Francis Bacon’s view, mentioned in the last posting, that nothing was true until verified. The discovery the world wasn’t flat had shaken their faith in absolutes. They were willing to consider what once had been unthinkable.

The English College at Douay assumed a familiar world, one that had form but simply was vacant:

"And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters."

In both translations, God created light on the first day, the firmament on the second, and land on the third. When He created man on the sixth day, He placed Adam in a garden.

San Juan divided the primal world into "a big lake, Ohange pokwinge, Sand Lake" and the world underground. When humans emerged, they came through the water.

Morris Opler heard two versions from Jicarilla. In the first, Black Sky and Earth Woman created the Hactcin who lived in the underworld. In the second, there was nothing but darkness, water and cyclone. The spirits existed and they created the male Sky and female Earth, the one lying above the other.

Spirits in both versions created the sun and moon. When shamans amongst the group asserted they were the true creators, Black Hactcin threw the sun and moon out of the underworld. When those who would be human missed the light, the Hactcin created a mountain with a hole through which they climbed.

Some would say Native American groups borrowed the idea of primal water from the Roman Catholics, who translated Saint Jerome’s version of older Latin texts that came from Greek translations of Hebrew and Aramaic.

Biblical scholars have argued Jews borrowed their ideas from the Enuma elish epic of the Mesopotamians. The word "deep" in Hebrew is thought to refer to their evil ocean goddess, Tiamat, who was fighting for control with the supreme god Anu. Marduk slew her, and slit her body to create sky and earth.

Early Jewish codifiers weren’t as interested as San Juan or the Jicarilla in imaging a time before the present. They lavished more detail on Noah than they did the first chapter of Genesis. They wanted to establish their line of descent from the beginning, and were willing to accept the then current definition of that time. They kept the Persian narrative of the first seven days, but replaced references to a pantheon with a single god.

Freudian analysts would argue each group created a similar tale by extrapolating from a shared human experience, emergence from the watery, dark womb. Jungians treat water as a universal symbol for the unconscious each individual must explore to become fully human. For them, the general is a reflection of the inner life of the individual.

A few would simply say the similarities in origin tales arose from some common cultural core passed on since the stone age. Others would argue the shared parts were trivial compared to the differences that expressed the unique cultural heritage of each which had survived interactions with others. It doesn’t matter if people borrowed their visions of the unimaginable. What matters is how they conceived human experience.

Notes: P is generally considered to be the transcriber of the first two chapters of Genesis. He is thought to have been a priest around 500 bc, after the Jews returned from exile in Babylon where they would have been exposed to current Mesopotamian ideas.

Douay College. The Holy Bible, Holy Family edition of the Catholic Bible, Old Testament in the Douay-Calloner text, edited by John P. O’Connell, 1950. Sons of the Holy Family are responsible for the churches in Santa Cruz and Chimayó. Genesis 1:2.

Hamilton, Victor P. The Book of Genesis Chapters 1-17, 1990.

James I. The Holy Bible, conformable to that edition of 1611, commonly known as the authorized or King James version, The World Publishing Company, nd. Genesis 1:2.

Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians, 1938. His sources were Cevero Caramillo, John Chopari, Alasco Tisnado, and Juan Julian.

_____. "A Summary of Jicarilla Apache Culture," American Anthropologist 38:202-223:1936.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Tewa Tales, 1926. She did not name her source for tale 1, but described him as "a man of about sixty" and added "his sister’s daughter, a woman of forty, was a good interpreter."

Speiser, E. A. Genesis, 1964.