A New Look at the Biblical Story of Creation
Disclaimer:
This is NOT a religious discussion. I'm not trying to question the Bible. I'm trying to question my personal perception of it. This is my attempt to understand and decipher the stories behind it, specifically here - the story of Creation.
It is important to realize that this Story was written down in the form we know thousands of years after the actual events. I am convinced that every story (including religious ones) and legend (including fairy tales) is inspired by some real events that often reached us distorted and having lost their original meaning, which makes their identification hardly possible.
Nevertheless, below is my attempt to do so.
Creation stories in different religions have the same similar pattern:
- Some form of the Universe already pre-existed before Creation in a form of Chaos.
- The God existed before Creation as well.
- Then God starts Creation by separating Earth from Heaven (firmament from sky). Consequent steps may vary in different religions, but the first one - always the same.
- Then from each generic concept (such as Earth and Heaven) God creates everything else. Like animals and trees - from "Earth", Sun and Moon - from "Sky", and so on, increasing the specificity of subjects with each iteration, ending up by Creation of people.
- Everything happens pretty quickly.
All these suggests that these stories have the same or similar origins. I dare to suggest that the origin is the emergence of language and speech as a new level of consciousness and mind, as the formation of a superstructure of "conscious" consciousness over the unconscious subconsciousness, as a new ABSTRACT level of world perception, formalized in WORDS.
Thus, the process of Creation appears as a process of conscious comprehension of the World, dividing it into categories, concepts and terms. From the most generic to more detailed and specific ones.
- The presence of creatures/demons with unclearly separated properties - half-humans, half-animals, often associated with various natural phenomena, not having a clear connection with existing species (like Leviathan in the Bible, for example) only confirms this concept. For me, they look like rudimentary artifacts of this dividing process, some intermediate concepts in this logic chain that occasionally reached us.
Actually, there is a direct reference to this event in the Holy Scriptures, in the Gospel of John for example. John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This phrase always seemed allegorical to me until I tried to read it literally.
As I understand now, it refers to the emergence of speech from the moment the first word appears. And this first word (as suggested) was "God", which meant at that moment just everything including "myself", just like the word "Ku" in movie "Kin-dza-dza". So, whoever invented this first word, was the bearer of this word, and for him it was a self-designation ("and the Word was with God").
- Just a reminder: we are talking about times LONG before Monotheism, even before Paganism, when “gods” could be much more “earthly” and "human" than we are accustomed to thinking.
Why "In the beginning"? Does this mean that nothing existed before? Existed, but just wasn't "counted". This first Word ("God") simply opened a countdown of conscious humankind's era. That's why "beginning". And the first few days of this new era were dedicated to breaking down this super-universal concept into more specific areas and terms, like "Sky", "Earth", "human", and so on.
The memory of mankind has preserved this revolutionary event in the form of legends about the Creation of the world. With this assumption, the 6 days of Creation around 6000 years ago seem quite convincing and justified.
But why "Creation", why not just "naming"? Well, initially and for a long time after, mankind just wasn't able to distinguish a thing from its verbal equivalent. Whoever possessed the word, possessed what it meant as well. The long era of magic and sorcery was just beginning.
By the way, what is witchcraft and sorcery in reality? It's an ability to affect surrounding world by WORDS (curses and spells). In essence, it is not an influence on the physical world, but an influence on a person's perception of it, bypassing the conscious level of perception and directly addressing the "subconscious". Its modern rudiment is hypnosis and other "extra-sensority".
Even now familiarity with terminology is often equated with mastery of the subject.
Memories of those times can be found in ancient literature. For example, in the Finnish epic "Kalevala" there is an episode describing a battle between two sorcerers, from which the earth shook and writhed. But what was the "battle"? They SANG. It was a competition, who knows more words…
Or the Chinese concept of Tao, a direct reference to the pre-verbal perception of the world (true knowledge). "The Tao is eternally nameless and should be distinguished from the countless named things that are considered to be its manifestations, the reality of life before its descriptions of it."
As a Christian myself, I understand how controversial this all may sound, but we are talking about a time when humanity was just beginning to speak, and the concept of God in our modern sense as a Creator Father was still very far away. It was not formulated until Moses thousands of years later.
This approach also allows to shed light on some other Bible passages. For example:
Why were Adam and Eve created from different materials? Adam - from clay, and Eve - from Adam's rib?
Because the concept of "human" was inherited from the more generic concept of "Earth" (clay), which does not mean (IMO) that man was actually molded from clay, it just defines concepts hierarchy, while the term "woman" is a part of more generic concept of "human".
How did Adam and Eve populate the world if they had 2 sons and no daughters? My theory suggests that Adam and Eve were not the ONLY Homo Sapiens in the world, but just the only ones named "humans".
What was the primordial "Chaos"? The same World as we know it, just not yet conscious, formulated and structured. Which makes it look like a monolithic mixture of unrelated entities. Perhaps cats and dogs (and other animals) see it like that?
I now believe that Michelangelo's vision of God was not merely symbolic.
So, this was the event that separated Humanity from the rest of the living world and determined all its further development. The true Greatness of this event makes this Story essentially Divine and highly Sacred.
Well, it is very possible that I am wrong, please be lenient with me, but so far I do not see obvious logical discrepancies. If you do, please let me know, I will be very grateful.
Citations:
- The Book of Genesis
- Gospel of John
- Elias Lönnrot. "Kalevala" (compilation of Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology)
- Laozi (Lao Tzu). "Tao Te Ching"