Thomas Kelly Cheyne

“ As we have seen, various myths of Creation may have been current both in N. Arabia (whence the Israelites may have come) and in Canaan prior to the great extension of Babylonian influence. These myths doubtless had peculiarities of their own. From one of them may have come that remarkable statement in Gen. i. 2b, “and the spirit of God (Elohim) was hovering over the face of the waters,” which, until we find some similar myth nearer home, is best illustrated and explained by a Polynesian myth (see Cheyne, Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel, ad loc.) ”

“ And if he is the sea-god, we must remember that there is a heavenly as well as an earthly ocean; hence the clouds are sometimes called Tangaloa’s ships. It is true, the popular imagery is unworthy of such a god. Sometimes he is said to live in a shell, by throwing off which from time to time he increases the world; or in an egg, which at last he breaks in pieces ”

“ But though there are in Gen. i. six days of creative activity, and the creative works are not six, but eight, if not ten in number, and indirect Babylonian influence is more strongly indicated. Jewish thinkers would have been attracted by the emphatic assertion of the creatorship of the One God in the royal Persian inscriptions more than by the traditional cosmogony. See further Ency. Bib., “Creation,” § 9.
9. Phoenician and Greek.—Phoenician cosmogonies would appear, from the notices which have come down to us, [24] to have been composite. The traditions are pale and obscure. ”

“ The short account of creation first translated in 1890 by T. G. Pinches is distinguished by its non-mythical character; in particular, the dragon of chaos and darkness is conspicuous by her absence. This may illustrate the fact that the dragon is also unmentioned in the Hebrew cosmogony; to some writers the dragon-element may have seemed grotesque and inappropriate. ”

“ The doctrine of creation by a thought is characteristically Indian. In the şatapatha Brahmana (cf. Deluge) , we meet again with the primeval waters and the world-egg, and with the famous mythological tortoise-theory, [17] also found among the Algonkins (§ 2) —antique beliefs gathered up by the framers of philosophic systems, who felt the importance of maintaining such links with the distant past. ”

“ A third creator was Manco Capac (“the mighty man”) , whose sister and wife is called Mama Oello, “the mother-egg.” Afterwards, the creator and the mother-egg became respectively the sun and the moon, represented by the Inca priest-king and his wife, the supposed descendants of Manco Capac. [11] Dualistic tendencies were also developed. Las Casas [12] reports a story that before creation the creator-god had a bad son who sought, after creation, to undo all that his father had done. ”

“ Of course, the earth-forming animal is a preternaturally gifted one, and is on the line of development towards that magnified man who, in a later stage, becomes the demiurge. [1] Between the two comes the animal—man, i.e. a being who has not yet shed the slough of an animal shape, but combines the powers—natural and preternatural—of some animal with those of a man. ”

“ Of the carcases of the dead animals he makes the present men (N. Americans?) . There is also a Flood-story, an episode in which has a bearing on the great dragon-myth [5] (see Deluge) . The Iroquois are in advance of the Algonkins; their creator-hero has no touch of the animal in him. ”

“ For a commentary on this see the opening of the Babylonian account referred to above, which refers to the period of chaos as one in which there were neither reeds nor trees, and where “the lands altogether were sea.” As to the creative acts, we may admit that the creation of light does not form one of them in the epic (cf. Gen. i. 3) , but the existence of light apart from the sun is presupposed; Marduk the creator is in fact a god of light. Nor ought we to find a discrepancy between the Babylonian and the Hebrew accounts in the creation of the heavenly bodies after the plants, related in Gen. ”

“ To many the interest of such stories will depend on their parallelism to the Biblical account in Genesis i.; the anthropologist, however, will be attracted by them in proportion as they illustrate the more primitive phases of human culture. In spite of the frequent overgrowth of a luxuriant imagination, the leading ideas of really primitive cosmogonies are extremely simple. ”

“ North American Stories.—Theriomorphic creators are most fully attested for the Red Indian tribes, whose very backwardness renders them so valuable to an anthropologist. There is a painted image from Alaska, now in the museum of the university of Pennsylvania, which represents such an one. ”