United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Such a phenomenon deserves particular attention. If it be true that savages are for the most part degenerate races, remnants escaped from a common wreck, as their languages, their cosmogonic fables, and numerous other indications seem to prove, it becomes doubly important to examine the course by which these remnants have been driven from one hemisphere to the other.
Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. But why then give ourselves such gratuitous trouble to learn? In our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves with complete ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less ingenious and inventive awake than asleep? January 25, 1868.
The Hebrews adopted the Babylonian cosmogonic myth, but it became a mere literary attachment to the conception of the supreme god Yahweh, and was otherwise ineffective. +974+. The same thing is true of certain cosmogonic myths of the Greeks, such as the war of the Titans against Zeus and similar episodes.
Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you please. Deathless man is face to face with the Creator. He cannot degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of a taboo, Death enters the world.
Such appears to be the scheme of the Masai, who have their black god and red god. A Californian cosmogonic myth describes a nonmoral conflict of work between the good "Creator" and the malicious Coyote. A real unification appears, however, to be rare; it supposes in fact a degree of reflection and organization that we should not expect to find among lower peoples.
+306+. To early man waters, fire, winds, are interesting because of their relation to his life, and sacred because of their power and mysteriousness. They are regarded by him not as "elements" of the world, but as individual phenomena that affect well-being. His conception of them is not cosmogonic or analytic, but personal; they are entities with which he has to deal.
That stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes. The telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the spirit upon the face of the great deep.
There are other cosmogonic myths besides that of the division of the giant Ymir. One is on this wise.
What takes the place of the conception of 'eternal' in savage thought is an existence that is supposed to continue for the reason that its cessation does not come into consideration. As to creation, there is no need, in a low community, to suppose more than one originator of the world, and cosmogonic theory may stop at that point, though this is not an invariable rule.
Perhaps the most interesting of the cosmogonic myths was that which conceived that Nuit, the goddess of night, had been torn from the arms of her husband, Sibu the earth-god, and elevated to the sky despite her protests and her husband's struggles, there to remain supported by her four limbs, which became metamorphosed into the pillars, or mountains, already mentioned.
Word Of The Day