Cosmic Creation Myths Across Cultures

Cosmic Creation Myths Across Cultures

Ravinder Singh

HUM/105 World Mythology

November 30, 2015

Matthew Hitechew

The Creation, Death, and Rebirth of the Universe is a creation myth of the Hindu culture. The Hindu creation myth says that before this time began, there was no heaven, no earth and no space between. A vast dark ocean washed upon the shores of nothingness and licked the edges of the night. The world is created, destroyed, and re-created in an eternally repetitive cycle. It continuously moves from one Maha Yuga (great age) to the next. Just as the Hindu religion accommodates a number of different religious views, it accepts a number of different creation myths. The basis of the myth is a continuous cycle of, as the name suggests, reincarnation. Hindu culture has many myths on reincarnations. The almighty god in the myth is Vishnu, who takes on the form of three different gods during the creation, death and the rebirth of the world.. During the life of the world, four parts exist which go from best to worst from the mortality standpoint of mankind and decrease in length respectively. During this part of the cycle, Vishnu is himself and comes down to earth in the human form to protect both humans and gods from demons. Once one thousand of these cycles go by, it is time for Vishnu to go to sleep, so he turns into Shiva-Rudra and sends fire, water and winds to the earth one by one to destroy all three worlds – the heaven, the earth, and the Underworld. Vishnu will then sleep soundly for a period of time equal to the period of life on earth. He wakes up in the form of Brahma and recreates life on earth from a golden egg in which the seed of life was preserved. Vishnu, in his three forms, directs the life cycle of the universe from creation to disintegration to dissolution to re-creation, over and over again 

In the Greeks’ version of the creation, The Creation of the Titans and Gods, the earth, Gaea, is a woman who gives birth to the ruler of the sky, Uranus. Gaea and Uranus have children together, but Uranus considers them to be horrible creatures and locks them away. Gaea is horribly distraught over this and instigates a later child, Cronus, to slay Uranus. Cronus carries out her request, but later when he is the ruler of the sky, he does not release Gaea’s first children. It is said that because of his treason to Gaea, he too will be slayed by his son one day. After, trying to beat the odds by eating his own children, Cronus is finally tricked into letting one survive by his wife, Rhea. The one that survived is Zeus, and, just as was prophesized, he took over his father’s spot as the ruler and the main god. From there on out, Zeus and his siblings rule the different parts of the world – Zeus the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld.