Creation Mythology and Man\'s Place

Creation Mythology and Man's Place Among He Animals: Surprising Intercultural Similarities

Every culture has some version of a creation myth that is inherent to its beliefs. Even science has its own explanations for creation, and these are in many respects as uncertain as many of the mythological explanations for the origins of the Universe, the Earth, and all of the features and organisms that inhabit it. In fact, despite the vast differences that exist in varying versions of the creation myth, certain similarities exist between different mythologies -- and can even be found in scientific explanations -- that warrant at least a modicum of comment and comparison. Man's place in the animal kingdom is one such similarity.

The Judeo-Christian Version

It is hard to imagine anyone growing up in Western civilization without having some knowledge of the story of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden. It is probable that very few people, however, consciously think f this story as part of a creation myth. That is precisely what the first chapters of the Book of Genesis in the bible are concerned with, however -- an explanation of how the world came into being. In this version, the Old Testament God single-handedly and unilaterally creates order out of chaos, separating day from night, land from sea, and woman from man. There is a highly apparent and even explicit hierarchy in the order and manner in which things are created, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Bible's treatment of the creation of the animals.

On each day of the six days of creation, the Old Testament describes God creating specific features and creatures in a very specific order. Man is the last creature to be created (with a great deal of debate surrounding the creation of woman), and yet he is placed in charge of naming and organizing the other animals. In this sense, Adam (the first man) is made like a God, with the singular task of naming -- and thus imparting identity to -- each of the animals. Though last n order of existence, then, Man is first in order of importance according to this version. This also means that man has more to lose; when Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they are banished from paradise and forced to endure far more arduous and laborious lives. Man is still higher than the animals, but this height has carried a great cost.

The Ancient Greek Version

Though ancient Greece laid many of the foundations for Western civilization, the version of the creation from Greek mythology is far less well-known (and in many ways more complicated) than the story of Adam and Eve. The key source of the differences between the Greek and Judeo-Christian versions of the creation myths, in addition to the overall cultural differences in the societies that produced these myths, is the specifically different beliefs in their concepts of divinity. While the Old Testament version is generally interpreted as the product of monotheistic theologians and religious practitioners, the ancient Greeks believed in many gods, whose power was both more limited and more directly concerned with human affairs.

The race of men that currently exists, according to Hesiod, is the fifth race of mortals that the god Zeus created. Zeus himself, though now king of the gods, is the child of other gods who are themselves children of still greater gods -- Gaia or Mother Earth among them. Most significant for our purposes here is the fact that Zeus created four other races of man before he got to ours, meaning that again man (especially in his current form) was the last in a long line o creative outbursts. Certain other portions of the Greek creation myth necessitate the creation of animals prior to the creation of the current race of man for procreative purposes, meaning that modern man was most certainly the last species to be created according to this myth. What this says about Man's relation the animals is somewhat more obscure.

Similarities in Man's Position

Both the Greek and the Biblical creation myths leave a certain ambiguity concerning Man's relation to the animals. In the Biblical version of the creation, Man is seen as the culmination of a single consciousness's concerted efforts to create, and thus is paced in charge of the other animals, yet he eventually falls from grace and is banished from the bliss of paradise that other animals still inhabit. In the Greek version, different races of man have existed in generally deteriorating circumstances, much like the Biblical banishment from the paradise in the Garden of Eden suffered by Adam and Eve and subsequently all of mankind, but the cause and effect of creation is far less linear and planned. The relationship between Man and the animals in the Greek myth is at first difficult to perceive.