No matter where you go in the world, there’s a local mythology, and in each of these mythologies, you’ll find a creation story. Why? Well, to put it succinctly, they’re an attempt to rationalize the world around us.
Humans have a natural curiosity — that’s why we have science and exploration. Of course, there was a time when those weren’t as advanced as they are today, but the yearning to understand was always there. These stories are so abundant because though mankind wasn’t there to witness when many parts of our world came to be, we knew they couldn’t always have been. To explain these, we speculated.
While tales of creation vary from culture to culture, there are certain constants: earth, water, and humans, as key parts of every civilization, as well as the frequent use of a higher power to explain how these were formed. In a time predating the science to formulate theories like the Big Bang, it’s unsurprising that the general consensus was, “Humans couldn’t possibly have done this, so there must be something bigger.”
There are other themes in common, as well. For example, take the Iroquois, Hebrew, and Norse creation myths (“The World On The Turtle’s Back,” “Yahweh,” and “Odin and Ymir,” respectively). All of these stories set up a dichotomy, not necessarily between good and evil, but between opposing entities. “The World on the Turtle’s Back” is a conflict between two brothers, Othagwenda and Djuskaha; the Hebrew tale is about the humans disobeying Yahweh’s command not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; and “Odin and Ymir” is primarily centered on the gods defeating an evil frost giant. This is likely because mankind cannot conceive a world or time bereft of conflict, and therefore it features in our attempts at explaining the world around us.
There are many differences between the creation stories. According to Iroquois legend, a vast body of water existed before land, and a woman fell from heaven. In “Yahweh,” land came before sea, and humans were fashioned from earth. “Odin and Ymir,” in complete contrast to the other two, suggests that neither earth nor sea existed at first, but after the other realms came to be and Ymir was slain, his body was used to create the earth, his blood the sea, and his skull the sky, and the gods later formed humans from logs.
Despite this, there are, as I’ve suggested before, many common themes, due to the universal truths of our world and of human existence. It is, after all, because of curiosity, one of these human truths, that these stories were written in the first place, and continue to be told. For the people of the past, these stories were products of their yearning to understand the world. Now, they’re shared because of our yearning to understand those who came before.
