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Updated: June 1, 2025
What more wild and drear is there, even in Indian cosmogonic fable, than that strange carbonigenous era of the globe, whose deposits, in the shape of petrified forests, now keep us warm and cook our food, and whose relics and souvenirs are pressed between the stone leaves of the secondary rock for preservation by the Omnipotent Herbalist?
These two propositions appear to be self-evident, but they have often been ignored in discussions of the provenance of mythical material. +827+. The similarities in myths all over the world extend over the whole domain of religion. +828+. Cosmogonic myths. Reference is made above to the reasons which led early men to pay such high regard to the lower animals.
The Navaho series of five worlds represents, apparently, nothing but traditions of social changes, interspersed with minor ætiologic myths. +837+. Many other cosmogonic details, common to various peoples, might be added. Transformation from human to animal or mineral forms and the reverse are to be found, as we have seen, everywhere.
This would be nothing else but an actual carrying of a pretended religious interest over beyond the limits of a realm in which the deciding vote belongs to natural science. However incomplete the cosmogonic knowledge of the latter may be, it nevertheless is at present established clearly enough to reject forever such a demand.
+Nut+, the embodiment of heaven, is shown as a female figure dotted over with stars. She was not worshipped nor did she belong to any one place, but was a cosmogonic idea. +Seb+, the embodiment of the earth, is figured as lying on the ground while Nut bends over him. He was the 'prince of the gods, the power that went before all the later gods, the superseded Saturn of Egyptian theology.
Following up the surprising clews thus suggested, Sir Norman Lockyer, of London, has in recent years elaborated what is perhaps the most comprehensive cosmogonic guess that has ever been attempted. His theory, known as the "meteoric hypothesis," probably bears the same relation to the speculative thought of our time that the nebular hypothesis of Laplace bore to that of the eighteenth century.
Here we find two distinct styles dependent on the content of the myth. The tales of animals, cosmogonic myths, and the folk-lore of Buso, are all told in prose, with many inflections of the voice, and often accompanied by an animated play of dramatic gesture.
From this religious interpretation, which we have to ascribe to that Biblical idea of the divine week of creation, it by no means follows that religion has to demand of natural science that it shall reach in its cosmogonic investigations the same succession in the appearance of things as we find in the Biblical account.
One does not wonder to find among the general characteristics of those writers who admire Bacon as a materialist, the most utter incapacity of philosophising on Bacon's method, the very restless conceit, the hasty generalisation, the hankering after cosmogonic theories, which Bacon anathematises in every page.
All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate days."
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