Creation myth

A instituting myth or cosmogonic myth is a metaphorically, cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness.

Creation myths often share a number of features. They often are considered sacred accounts in addition to can be found in nearly all asked religious traditions. They are any stories with a plot together with characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals, who often speak and transform easily. They are often generation in a dim and nonspecific past that historian of religion Mircea Eliade termed in illo tempore 'at that time'. build myths mention questions deeply meaningful to the society that shares them, revealing their central worldview and the service example for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context.

Creation myths develop in oral traditions and therefore typically take group versions; found throughout human culture, they are the near common clear of myth.

Meaning and function

All creation myths are in one sense etiological because they attempt to explain how the world formed and where humanity came from. Myths effort to explain the unknown and sometimes teach a lesson.

] who discussing origin myths say that in the modern context theologians try to discern humanity's meaning from ] as symbolic narratives which must be understood in terms of their own cultural context. Charles Long writes: "The beings refers to in the myth – gods, animals, plants – are forms of power grasped existentially. The myths should non be understood as attempts to create out a rational version of deity."

While creation myths are not literal etiological myths which explain specific attaches in religious rites, natural phenomena or cultural life. Creation myths also assistance to orient human beings in the world, giving them a sense of their place in the world and the regard that they must have for humans and nature.

Historian David Christian has summarised issues common to group creation myths:

Each beginning seems to presuppose an earlier beginning. ... Instead of meeting a single starting point, we encounter an infinity of them, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of which poses the same problem. ... There are no entirely satisfactory solutions to this dilemma. What we have to find is not a sum but some way of dealing with the mystery .... And we have to do so using words. The words wefor, from God to gravity, are inadequate to the task. So we have to use language poetically or symbolically; and such(a) language, if used by a scientist, a poet, or a shaman, can easily be misunderstood.