The creation myth is a common myth type throughout cultures of the world, with various plots
on how the cosmos came to be, and how man came to find his place in it. But there are
a number of creation myths across Europe, Persia, and into India that some believe show
similarities, and then a question should be asked, and that is, did all these myths with
similarities originate from a single source, and then evolve over time as cultures migrated
and had different needs in their societies, and then develop their own brand of religion?
This is the first of a short video series I’ll publish that will explain these myths,
tell their stories, and examine whether they had a common ancestor. So welcome to a brief
history of the Indo-European creation myth. And welcome to Crecganford. I’ll start with
a reading of what we consider to be the very earliest version of the Proto-Indo-European
creation myth, this concise version is based on the work of Professor David Anthony, he’s
the author of the fantastic book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, which is well worth
a read if you’re interested in Proto-Indo-European culture. And it goes like this, In the beginning
of the cosmos two beings were created, Manus and Yemo, meaning man and twin, and also a
giant cow on which they suckled. Manus wanted to stop wandering through the comos, and to
have a home, and so sacrificed Yemo, and from his body created the Sky god, the Ocean god,
and the earth. He travelled down to the earth, and became a priest, teaching that through
ritual sacrifice he would keep the world in order. So, how do we know that this was the
original proto-Indo-European creation myth, and not something just made up? Well let us
start with how people thought the Indo-European based religions spread given what we know
was said within the myth. So, in the early part of the 20th century there were two key
contrasting positions. One around the Indian, Iranian and Greek texts that contain the idea
of the connection between the world and the human body, and this was put forward by Albrecht
Götze. His idea was that Greek myth stemmed from the Indo-Iranian view, brought about
by Greek physicians travelling to the Persian court and taking this Persian view back to
the Grecian culture, and with the view that the myth is interpreted as a story about man
being a microcosmic image of the world, and the world a macrocosmic image of man. However,
there was a differing view by Hermann Güntert, and was focused on the Germanic and Indo-Iranian
texts, rather than Greek, and so came to a different conclusion. He believed that the
texts contained a common Indo-European mythologem, a recurrent idea and theme, which told of
the creation of the world from the sacrifice and dismemberment of a primordial androgyne,
a creature born at the beginning of time that is neither man nor woman. There are other
views on the creation myths as well, one, that the myths are merely a common “primitive”
type that reoccur in many places around the world, and so the recurrence of the theme
is only “natural” pre-disposed human thought. The other is that it is of Old Asiatic origin,
coming from China and predating Proto-Indo-European origin, so making it over 10,000 years old.
So between these opinions we basically have differences in the potential history, content,
and the meaning of these creation myths. So where can we find these stories so we can
investigate more? Well the myths of creation, describing the existence of the cosmos and
the creation of the world can be found in a great many texts across the Indo-European
cultures, and for those cultures think of people from Europe, across Persia, and through
India. Here, I think it’s best if I put a map as I explain these and where the initial
similarities were thought to have come from. This will probably make is far easier to understand.
The most well-known of these texts that explain the myth include the Purusa hymn of the Rig
Veda from India. There is also an argument to be had to say that the Chinese Daoist legends
of P'an-ku derived from this. From the Old Norse and Germanian areas of Europe there
are the texts the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, with the Vafthrudnismal, Grimnismal,
and Voluspa, all providing insight into the creation myth, and writings from the Roman
Tacitus also going back almost 2,000 years. And for the Romans we have the works of Levy,
or Titus Levius, who wrote about the History of Rome across a huge volume of books. There
are also texts with various myth versions found in Iran, with the Gayomart account of
the Greater Bundahisn and the story of the flight of Yim’s xarenah from Persia’s
Yast 19. In Greece, the texts usually cited are the (thair-e-v-de-muv-on) of the Corpus
Hippocrateum and the Orphic Hymn to Zeus, as well as Plato’s Timaeus. There is also
divided opinion that Hesiod's story of Prometheus contains many of the same elements as the
other creation myths, but this is much harder to align using the arguments we use for the
other versions. There is also a significant probability that the Jewish creation myth,
with the Adam figure of Enoch, being an inversion of an original source myth. And then there
are occurrences of a Gayomart figure, from Persian mythology, on the walls of the Dura-Europus
synagogue and so perhaps Jewish texts also contain elements of the myths. And we also
have the evidence of Judaism adopting Persian mythological traits such as Heaven and Hell
later in its history. In Russia there is “The Poem of the Dove King”, with 20 versions
of various lengths, some of which are up to 900 lines, describing the origin of things
and is thought to be influenced from Persia. We also have examples of creation myths from
Ceram and Babylon, that could be related, and this has been backed up with the discovery
of the fifth tablet of the Enuma Elis from Babylon, which now establishes Tiamat as a
cow whose sacrifice establishes the heavens. And with this we have a map with myths dispersed
over the Eurasian lands with a perception that there are many similar but seemingly
unrelated myths. Looking at the number of myths from these places, and if we include
those further afield such as those from the Ancient Near East or even Polynesia or South
America, but which follow a similar pattern to the Indo-European creation myth, it is
understandable that on initial investigation they may just come across as a common story,
or that it is a universal thought of the human mind, especially if a culture reaches a particular
stage of development. However, the conclusion that the plot of the creation myth is a natural
human phenomena, often repeated, can be quickly dismissed when the fact is that there is linguistic
similarity across these myths, and that means these myths have a single linguistic origin,
and that is a Proto-Indo-European origin, and therefore an original source Proto-Indo-European
creation myth. The linguistic alignment between the Germanic and Indo-Iranian versions of
the creation myth can also be further demonstrated that the myth is of Proto-Indo-European origin,
rather than a myth that travelled from Persia to Europe. Now there was some success by Götze
to show that the Greek and Russian versions of the myth evolved from the Indo-Iranians,
but the proof didn’t fit the Germanic and Scandinavian versions of the myth. His methods
could also be used to show that the Jewish version of the myth also derived from the
Iranian version, but the Chinese version must have come through India. However, the Scandinavian
link was always the most difficult myth for which to prove its origin using Götze’s
work. There were theories that the Persians who believed in Manichaeism, or even Christians,
travelled to Scandinavia around the 3rd or 4th centuries, but none of the arguments were
convincing especially as there is now much archaeological evidence of the Scandinavian
myths being established hundreds of years before that. The stumbling block that had
to be overcome was understanding that the Old Norse versions of the myth are actually
directly linked to the original source Proto-Indo-European myth, preserving details that were lost from
other versions. And then knowing this brings the Roman version of the creation myth into
the relationship. In effect both Götze and Güntert, whilst having differing ideas, were
both right to a degree, but together their ideas form the basis of the accepted understanding
of the Proto-Indo-European creation myth. And by understanding how these myths relate
to each other, and when they evolved, this enabled the reconstruction of the original
myth. So if we look at the map of the religions and construct what was discovered into a more
hierarchical order we see a genealogy of sorts of religion. The Old Russian evolved from
the Jewish texts of Enoch. The Daoist from the Vedic Indian culture. The Greek and Jewish
texts influenced from Persia. The Indian and Iranian texts stem from the same source. And
then the Indo-Iranian, Roman, and Germanic all came from the same source. And this was
the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The culture that started farming cattle, using them to pull
ploughs, riding horses, and developing the wheel, and wagons, and then chariots. This
was the most advanced culture in the world at the time, and therefore explains why it
spread so effectively, and its stories spread with it. And so it gives us this genealogical
tree of religion built by looking at the development of the creation myth. In the next video in
this series I’m going to dive deeper into these myths, and look at the specific religious
texts to see the similarities, and where they changed, so we can understand how this creation
myth developed. So until then, I hope you enjoyed that journey through the genealogy