Chapter 167. In the Beginning: Cosmologies, Creation Narratives and the Cycles of World-Time Compared

Every tradition examined in this study answers three linked questions: who or what made the world, what the world is made of and whether that stuff is good, and where time is going. Part 17 opens by setting these answers side by side. It gives the creation accounts as their own texts or their editors present them, from the Pahlavi Bundahishn to the Knowledge Seekers Workshops. It then compares the shapes of world-time, linear, cyclical and spiral, and closes with a table that brings the results together. The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics states the common ground: “The idea of creation is common to practically all religious systems”, whereas the doctrine of a series of world-eras broken by cataclysms “is peculiar to a high degree of religious development” [ERE, “Ages of the World”, #60381, “Primitive and American”].

1. Creation as a weapon: the Zoroastrian Bundahishn and the Zurvanite myth

In the Greater Bundahishn as translated in Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, creation is a strategy rather than an overflow of goodness. “Before creation Ohrmazd was not Lord. And after creation He was Lord”, and “when He pondered upon creation, Ohrmazd saw by His clear vision that the Evil Spirit would never turn from the Assault; the Assault would not be made powerless except through creation” [Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, Bundahishn ch. 1]. The material world appears while the Evil Spirit lies “helpless in prostration … for 3,000 years”. First Ohrmazd “created the Sky as a defence; second, He created Water, to defeat the demon of thirst; third, He created the all-solid Earth”, and so on through plants, cattle and man [Textual Sources, #55116, Greater Bundahishn ch. 1a]. Boyce places these creations under the heptad: each is under the guardianship of an Amesha Spenta, so the sky, “the first creation, of stone”, is under Khshathra Vairya and man, “the sixth creation”, belongs “especially to Ahura Mazda” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch. 2 and index]. The world is therefore the battlefield and the armament of a cosmic war (see chs. 11 and 17).

A second Iranian cosmogony is known mainly from Armenian and Syriac Christian polemicists. Eznik reports that “when nothing at all yet existed … there existed the great god Zurvan, whose name is to be interpreted as ‘fate’ or ‘fortune’. For one thousand years he offered sacrifice in order that he might perhaps have a son who would be called Ormazd”. Doubt then came upon him, and “Ormazd and Ahriman were conceived in the womb: Ormazd through the offered sacrifice, Ahriman through the doubt” [Textual Sources, #55116, §8.2]. Later Zoroastrian Rivayats keep the debate going: one party holds “that Time has power over all things”, another that Time “created Ohrmazd and Ahriman so that it might mingle good and evil” [Textual Sources, #55116, Rivayat extracts]. Söderblom, writing in the ERE, judges that “‘Time without limits’ was made later on, in order to weaken the dualism to an eternal Divine Being, from whom the two opposite spirits emanate” [ERE, “Ages of the World (Zoroastrian)”, #60381]. That verdict should be read alongside the scholarly positions on Zurvanism set out in ch. 16.

2. Waters, dragons and the Word: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Genesis

Chapter 3 gave the epic in the Assyriologists’ terms. At first only Apsu and Tiamat exist, “their waters commingling as a single body”. Marduk accepts the gods’ championship at the price of supremacy over them all, splits Tiamat’s body into sky and earth, sets the stars and the calendar, and makes humanity from the blood of the rebel Kingu so that men “would serve the gods” [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš]. Black and Green note that in Atra-hasis the slain god’s blood is mixed with clay, while the Epic of Creation uses blood alone [Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, #70458]. The cosmogony was also a charter of rule. Most scholars date it to the Second Dynasty of Isin, after Marduk’s statue came back from Elam, and late Assyrian copies put Ashur in Marduk’s place [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš] (ch. 3). Whoever ruled the leading city took over the making of the world.

Moore summarises Enuma Elish, preserved in Ashurbanipal’s library, as a theogony in which “the gods and goddesses are also natural objects”: Tiamat “was a saltwater ocean and Apsu a freshwater ocean”, and Mummu was probably mist [Moore, From Genesis to Genetics, #27071, “Mesopotamian Creation Myths and Genesis Parallels”]. He lists the shared features: “both Genesis and Enuma Elish accept that there was a creation—the universe as a whole was not eternal. Creation in both accounts starts with a watery chaos … followed by separation of the water into sky and land. Light forms before the sun.” From these parallels “scholars … pose four hypotheses”, which are that Genesis borrowed from Enuma Elish, the reverse, a common source, or independent origin, and Moore notes that scholars “do not completely agree” [Moore, #27071]. Avise treats the biblical accounts as shaped by their setting: the desert world of the Canaanites “may have prompted the Genesis metaphor of the Garden of Eden as a fruitful oasis, humanity’s womb” [Avise, The Genetic Gods, #33561, ch. 2].

Day traces a Canaanite conflict myth behind several Old Testament texts. In the Ugaritic texts there is “the conflict between Baal and Yam, the god of the sea, in which Baal is victorious and exalted as king”, and the seven-headed dragon Litan has its counterpart in the multi-headed Leviathan, the “twisting serpent” of Isaiah 27.1. “Leviathan’s defeat by Yahweh is clearly associated with the time of creation in Ps. 74.14” [Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469, ch. 4, “Yahweh’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea”]. On this reading the calm, spoken creation of Genesis 1 stands at the end of a process that demythologised the older combat (ch. 28).

Egypt starts from the same primeval waters but has no single canonical story. Mercatante writes that “the Egyptians did not have one widely accepted creation myth but many explanations that were often in conflict with one another”, each interpreted by the priests of a cult centre [Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology, #72968, “Creation Myths”]. The shared elements are the lifeless waters of Nu, a primeval mound rising from them, probably modelled on land emerging after the Nile flood, and the sun rising from the mound. On this account Heliopolis has Atum generate Shu and Tefnut from himself. Memphis has Ptah create by “the Word and the Mind”, the heart conceiving and the tongue naming. In Hermopolis four male-female pairs of the Ogdoad embody the water, and Thebes makes all gods “merely aspects of Amun” [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths] (ch. 4). The Memphite version is the one later readers single out, because it makes creation an act of speech, which invites comparison with the spoken creation of Genesis 1 (ch. 4). Creation in Egypt also produced an order that had to be kept up. Ra rose from the mound only “after he set his daughter Maat in place of isfet”, and kings “inherited the duty to ensure Maat remained in place” [Wikipedia: Maat]. Egyptian cosmogony, like the Babylonian, ended in a throne.

3. Sacrificed giants and the nameless origin: India, China and the Indo-European frame

Eliade’s Istoria credințelor și ideilor religioase treats the dismemberment of a primordial being as a cosmogonic type that runs from India to Scandinavia and China. He groups “Puruşa (§ 75), Ymir (§ 173)” with the Chinese Pan Ku, and draws on Lincoln’s “The Indo-European Myth of Creation” [Eliade, #44123, ch. “Religiile din China antică”, n. 4]. The Chinese version, which he takes from Kaltenmark’s “La naissance du monde en Chine”, runs: “at the beginning, ‘when Heaven and Earth were a chaos resembling an egg’, a primordial anthropomorph, Pan Ku, was born”. When he died, “the head of Pan Ku became a holy mountain, his eyes became the sun and moon, his fat gave birth to the seas and rivers” [Eliade, #44123, “Religiile din China antică”, n. 28; trans. from the Romanian]. Eliade also notes a second Chinese theme from the Shu Jing: Huang Di ordered Zhong Li “to break the link between Heaven and Earth, so that the descents (of the gods) should cease” [Eliade, #44123]. The Daoist line is non-anthropomorphic. Eliade quotes Daodejing 42: “The One gave birth to Two. Two gave birth to Three. Three gave birth to the ten thousand beings, which carry yin on their backs and embrace yang”, and he cites the Zhuangzi parable in which the emperor Hun Dun, “Chaos”, died on the seventh day after being bored with seven orifices [Eliade, #44123, nn. 49-51]. For the Indian side of the comparison, which runs from the Purusha hymn to the Upanishadic Brahman-Atman and Advaita’s maya, see chs. 83–84 and 92. For Tian and the Dao see chs. 94 and 96.

The Indo-Iranian inheritance (chs. 6–7) supplies the older form of both the sacrificial cosmogony and the Bundahishn of section 1. Boyce reconstructs a pre-Zoroastrian scheme in which the gods made the world in seven stages: a stone sky, water, earth, a single plant, the Uniquely-created Bull, the first Man (Gayo-maretan, “Mortal Life”), and fire. The gods then “made a triple sacrifice: they crushed the plant, and slew the bull and man”, which set the cycle of life and death in motion. Each daily yasna re-sanctified the seven creations [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “1.2.6 Cosmogonical and cosmological ideas”]. On Boyce’s reading, the Bundahishn’s sequence of sky, water, earth, plant, cattle and man is this inherited order put to use in Ohrmazd’s war. The governing principle was rta/asha, “what ought to be”, which “should govern everything, from the workings of nature to human laws” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.3”]. In the Rigveda, Mitra and Varuna “govern all the world with the ṛta and set the sun firmly in its place” (RV 5.63.7), though Heckaman holds that “a precise definition cannot, and need not, be found for ṛta” [Heckaman, Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of Ṛta in the Rig Veda, #51915]. The Vedic combat myth stands beside the West Semitic dragon-combat of section 2: Indra, strengthened by soma, slays Vritra, “cleaves the mountain, making the streams flow or taking the cows” [Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, #54250, §22 “Indra”]. The Purusha hymn (RV 10.90), the Indian dismemberment myth, also derives the four varṇas from the body of the sacrificed Man. The reference shelf calls this “a relatively late addition”, probably made “to accord theological sanction to an increasingly unequal Kuru polity” [Wikipedia: Purusha Sukta] (ch. 7). Here, as in Babylon, the account of how the world was made also explains why society is ordered as it is.

4. Demiurges, emanations and contraction: Greek, Gnostic, Manichaean and Kabbalistic models

Pike’s Morals and Dogma places the Platonic, Philonic and Gnostic systems in one survey. “To many there were two Principles; the Unknown Father, or Supreme and Eternal God, living in the centre of the Light … the other, eternal Matter, that inert, shapeless, darksome mass, which they considered as the source of all evils, the mother and dwelling-place of Satan. To Philo and the Platonists, there was a Soul of the world, creating visible things” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, “Comparative Theology of Ancient Religions”]. In his account of the Ophites, the Supreme Being is “the Buthos, or Profundity, Source of Light, and of Adam-Kadmon, the Primitive Man, made by the Demiourgos, but perfected by the Supreme God by the communication to him of the Spirit” [Pike, #378717, “Comparative Theology of Arius, Manes, and Gnostic Cosmology”]. This is the reversal treated in ch. 46, where the maker of matter, Yaldabaoth, is lower than and ignorant of the true God. Pike also states the Masonic reading of Philo: “Light and Darkness, chief enemies from the beginning of Time, dispute with each other the empire of the world” [Pike, #378717]. Manes systematised that idea as two eternal empires (ch. 27). Pike derives Iranian dualism from India: “The Persians received from the Indians the doctrine of the three principles, and changed it to that of a principle of Life, which was individualized by the Sun, and a principle of Death, which was symbolized by cold and darkness” [Pike, #378717].

Pike also paraphrases the Lurianic Kabbalah (ch. 104) in terms that make it a counterpart to emanation: “Before the creation of worlds, the PRIMITIVE LIGHT filled all space, so that there was no void. When the Supreme Being … resolved to display His perfections … He withdrew within Himself, formed around Him a void space, and shot forth His first emanation, a ray of light” [Pike, #378717]. This is the tsimtsum, the withdrawal that comes before the breaking of the vessels. For Orphic and Platonic theogony in their own right see chs. 40–41.

5. Linear and cyclical world-time

The ERE gives a typology. The Greek, Hindu and Buddhist systems “have even evolved a series of cycles each of which contains four Ages, and which have been and are to be repeated in infinite succession”. Hesiod’s four ages of gold, silver, brass and iron are “each worse than the one preceding”; in the Hindu system “the four yugas, or Ages of a ‘day of Brahma’ (12,000 years), are successively shorter in duration and increasingly degenerate”. “Among primitive peoples such a series of Ages of the World seems to be unknown”, though South American peoples hold that the world was destroyed twice, by fire and by flood [ERE, #60381, “Primitive and American”]. “Outside the great culture nations of Asia, Northern Africa, and Europe … only the Aztecs” developed such a doctrine. They counted four previous Suns, of Earth, Fire, Air and Water, and at the close of each fifty-two-year cycle “every fire was extinguished” until the Pleiades rose and the priests “rekindled fires by the friction of two pieces of wood, one of which was placed on the breast of a human sacrifice” [ERE, #60381]. Berosus, the ERE’s Babylonian contributor reports, fixed the world’s conflagration and flood by the conjunctions of the planets [ERE, #60381, “Babylonian”]. The older Mesopotamian sources measure time by the flood and by kingship rather than by ages. The Sumerian King List runs from antediluvian reigns of thousands of years, through the flood, to kingship passing from city to city, and the reference shelf reads it as “likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power” of rival city-states [Wikipedia: Sumerian King List] (ch. 3). Black and Green trace the universal flood from Mesopotamia “to Ugarit, and to Palestine, where it was incorporated into the Hebrew Book of Genesis” [Black and Green, #70458, “Flood”]. Egyptian time, by contrast, centred on keeping the first order going. Pharaohs were “obligated to sustain the gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain Ma’at … and repel Isfet” [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian religion], and “an impious king could bring about famine” [Wikipedia: Maat]. Order came at the beginning and had to be renewed again and again, and no sequence of ages is attested.

The Zoroastrian scheme is a bounded cycle that does not repeat. According to the ERE, “these 12,000 years form the long period of creation, divided into four great Ages”, and “the complete Avesta knew the system of four times three thousand years”. The last Bundahishn chapter gives a dynastic chronology for the final millennium, the one “ruled by Capricorn”, with 268 years for the Achaemenians, a short span for Alexander, 284 years for the Arsacids and 460 for the Sasanians [ERE, #60381, “Zoroastrian”]. Jewish reckoning, the ERE notes, was built “on the 6 days of Creation … a thousand years being with God as one day”: “As the sabbatical year is remitted once in 7 years, so is the world remitted 1 chiliad in 7” [ERE, #60381, “Jewish”]. Godwin draws the large contrast. The mythologies of the Mayas and Aztecs knew “no past era unclouded by the threat of cyclical destruction”, Buddhism “absorbed the idea of declining ages”, and “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all begin with Adam and Eve in Paradise”, which makes history a single run rather than “a single turn of the wheel of time” [Godwin, Arktos, #71379, Part I]. Eliade adds the shared premise of the cyclical view: “perfection belongs to the beginning of a cycle … ‘decadence’ makes itself felt soon enough” [Eliade, #44123, n. 69].

6. The encoded sky and the modern cosmologies

A further line of interpretation reads creation myths as astronomy. Pike holds that from “the journey of the Sun through the twelve signs came the legend of the twelve labors of Hercules, and the incarnations of Vishnu and Buddha”, and that Hiram’s murder by three Fellow-crafts encodes “the three Winter signs” [Pike, #378717, “Astronomical Signs and Seasonal Origins”]. He derives the Arabic Hîrm, “an ox”, from “the symbol of the Sun in Taurus, at the Vernal Equinox” [Pike, #378717]. Stewart builds on Santillana and von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill, the book that, he says, “first inspired me”. Their thesis was that “the night sky was being read as a message concerning the laws of organization”, and Stewart concludes that “the boundaries that need to be distinguished for the world to emerge are those that allow the measurement of time” [Stewart, The Spiritual Science of the Stars, #70131, “The Language of the Stars”; “The Matter of Time”]. Ulansey’s precessional reading of the Mithraic tauroctony is covered in ch. 24.

Two late cosmologies in the library cut against all of these. Keshe, in KSW 205 (4 January 2018), makes the soul the generator of matter: “the soul of the man is the sun and so it’s the creator of the physicality”. He adds that “in deep space there is no cycling of time by rotation of planet”, and that “Earth is a nursery for the creation of souls to become stars in the universe” [Keshe, KSW 205, #377848]. His wider system of Magrav fields, matter, antimatter and dark matter, and the Soul of the Creator, is set out in chs. 151–152. Heisman inverts the order of Genesis itself: “Contemporary scientific evidence does not appear to support either the hypothesis that God exists or the hypothesis that God created the universe and life”. The “larger truth behind monotheism” is instead “the probability of God’s evolution”, and “it is civilization that culminates in the God-potential of artificial intelligence” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “The Genesis of God”; ch. 160].

Comparative table

Key points

• The Bundahishn presents creation as a deliberate weapon: Ohrmazd foresees that “the Assault would not be made powerless except through creation” [#55116].
• The Zurvanite myth, known through Christian reporters such as Eznik, derives both spirits from Time (“fate” or “fortune”). The ERE’s Söderblom reads it as a later softening of dualism [#55116; #60381].
• Enuma Elish makes Marduk king by conquest and makes humanity to serve the gods, and Assyrian copies substitute Ashur. Egypt had several rival priestly cosmogonies, including Ptah’s creation by word, all ending in a Maat that the king had to uphold [Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš; #72968; Wikipedia: Maat].
• Boyce reconstructs a pre-Zoroastrian creation in seven stages, closed by a triple sacrifice of plant, bull and man, that the Bundahishn later turned into a strategy of war. The Purusha hymn’s derivation of the varṇas is read on the reference shelf as a late sanction for an unequal polity [#55116; Wikipedia: Purusha Sukta].
• Moore records four rival hypotheses on Enuma Elish and Genesis. Day finds a Canaanite dragon-combat behind the biblical creation psalms [#27071; #86469].
• Eliade groups Purusha, Ymir and Pan Ku as dismembered primordial beings and sets beside them a Daoist line from the One to the ten thousand things [#44123].
• The ERE holds that four-age cycles belong to developed civilisations (Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Aztec), while the Zoroastrian 12,000 years and the Jewish world-week are bounded and run forward [#60381; #71379].
• Pike and Stewart read myth as encoded astronomy, in the twelve signs, Taurus and precession [#378717; #70131].
• Keshe makes the soul “the creator of the physicality”, and Heisman makes God the product rather than the source of evolution [#377848; #38252].