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Updated: May 29, 2025
Now the stories of creation, or cosmogonies, as they are technically called, are peculiarly interesting because they give us an insight into the concrete terms which the imagination was forced to use in its attempt to picture the past and the origin of things. Moreover, we can trace the changes these naïve stories underwent as man's experience broadened and he was able to think more abstractly.
Such was the origin of this famous dogma, recognized by all the heathens, and incorporated with all the sacred fables, cosmogonies, and mysteries of antiquity." The Religions of Profane Antiquity, p. 186. See the "Bhagvat Geeta," one of the religious books of Brahminism.
It has been observed that, according to the ancient cosmogonies, within water was contained the life principle, and as a woman presided over it, or was the only being or entity present, she must have been the self-existent Creator. From this woman sprang all creation. According to the account in Genesis, the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep and creation began.
There are other cosmogonies in Chinese philosophy, but they need not detain us long. His tao, or 'Way, is the originator of Heaven and earth, it is "the mother of all things."
As to all other cosmogonies, Egyptian, Indian, and Buddhistic, nothing can be more opposed in principle and in detail than they are to the severe and stately simplicity and directness of the Mosaic. We cannot, then, account for the narrative on human grounds; nor can we suppose that any inspiring control would have given the author so much truth, and yet allowed so much error.
Besides the interest of its unique position as a popular epic, the 'Kalevala' is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and for the confused mass of folklore which it contains. Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales.
As such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting, but a venerable, monument of a stage in the mental progress of mankind; and I find it difficult to suppose that any one who is acquainted with the cosmogonies of other nations and especially with those of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, with whom the Israelites were in such frequent and intimate communication should consider it to possess either more, or less, scientific importance than may be allotted to these.
The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate between mythology and philosophy and had a great influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them; they were to physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history.
Thus many who are not brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly and unawares, by their religious speculations. The gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a true physics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle which everywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things.
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