The First Day of Creation (Sistine Chapel), Michelangelo Buonarroti, c. 1512
An excerpt from Images of the Unseen by Louis Bosco
In studying the ancient mythological accounts of the origins of man and the cosmos, the universal truth becomes clear: man has always believed himself and his world to have been created by the divine, as opposed to autonomously springing into existence. These ancient accounts were born of mankind’s wonder at the earth, sun, stars, and especially himself. “The creation of the world,” remarks Thomas Bulfinch, “is a problem naturally fitted to excite the liveliest interest of man, its inhabitant" (Bulfinch’s Mythology, p. 12). Observing the marvels of the world around them brought back some distant collective memory to the men and women of antiquity of a supreme paternal deity, of a garden, of a warfare in the heavens, and of a fall from grace. No longer being able to recall the details, they used their imagination to fill in the blanks. They knew from living their life, moreover, there was a certain logic to things, an observable set of laws governing the world—gravity, inertia, friction, and so on—even if they had not yet progressed to the academic study and classification of them. The existence of these laws necessitated the existence of a Law Giver. It was only rational for our ancestors to conclude this, and it remains so for us today.
While the accounts vary from culture to culture, the creation stories bear certain similarities that seem to suggest they originated from a common source: the universal story of man. This story, known to us in the beginning, was obscured by our fall, clarified by divine revelation, and rejected by modern man. Neglected though it may be today it remains written on every human heart nonetheless, awaiting faith to recover it.
The Biblical account of Creation in the Book of Genesis goes as follows:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters (1:1-2).
It goes on to detail the Creator’s systematic formation of all that is, beginning with the separation of day and night, heaven and earth, basic points common to virtually all origin stories.
The correlations between the Babylonian creation story and Genesis, in fact, are truly remarkable, as British researcher George Smith discovered upon studying fragments of ancient cuneiform tablets in the late-nineteenth century. He found in these fragments, for example, reference to that primordial chaos, or formless void, mentioned in the Bible’s opening verses. “When above, were not raised the heavens,” the fragments read:
and below on the earth a plant had not grown up;
the abyss also had not broken open their boundaries:
The chaos (or water) Tiamat (the sea) was the producing-mother of the whole of them (George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis [London: Thomas Scott, 1876], p. 62).
We notice that in both the Biblical and Babylonian accounts the primordial chaos is described in terms of water or the sea. For the ancients, the sea represented the mysterious and the unknowable. In speaking of the coming of the new heaven and new earth at the consummation of history, for example, Saint John in the Apocalypse affirms “the sea was no more” (21:1). In other words, at the end of time mystery will dissipate, all questions will be answered, all doubts rectified.
In one of the major creation myths of ancient Egypt, the god Atum, or “the All,” spews forth Shu (air) and Tefnut (water), male and female deities respectively. These in turn produced Geb (earth) and Nut (sky)—again male and female (cf. John Baines, et al., Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice [New York: Cornell University Press, 1991], p. 92). There is an inference in this of order being imposed upon chaos—the basic elements of air, water, earth, and sky emerging from out of the void, sequentially brought into existence by pairs of parent-gods. As in the other accounts, the separation of heaven and earth is also prominent: “heaven (Nut) was forced apart from the earth (Keb or Seb)" (Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 7 [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915], p. 145). This again suggests the rising of order, of things being set in proper relation to one another.
The same points are contained within the creation stories from ancient Greece:
Before earth and sea and heaven were created, all things wore one aspect, to which we give the name of Chaos—a confused and shapeless mass, nothing but dead weight, in which, however, slumbered the seeds of things. Earth, sea, and air were all mixed up together; so the earth was not solid, the sea was not fluid, and the air was not transparent. God and Nature at last interposed, and put an end to this discord, separating earth from sea, and heaven from both (Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology [New York: Crown Publishers, 1979], p. 12).
In the beginning, God imposed order upon chaos. Chaos was welcomed back into Creation through disobedience. The advent of Christ, the one who would “make all things new” (Apoc. 21:5), signifies the restoration of order. “Creation itself,” writes Paul, “will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole of creation has been groaning in travail together until now” (Rom. 8:21-22).