The Thing Before the Beginning, Part 1

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss various mythological concepts of what came before the creation or emergence of our universe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey A you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, I wanted to talk about
creation myths, in particular an aspect of creation myths that
has always really interested me but which often felt kind
of overlooked, especially in my early religious education, and that

(00:37):
element is what people imagine the world was like before
the time of creation.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
M Yeah, this is a this is a tough one, right,
I mean, because on one level, it's hard enough for
us to imagine the world before we were born, much
less some state of existence before the advent of humanity
or the event everything that came before that. But it's
you know, it's a it's an important, you know, core contemplation.

(01:08):
You know, what existed before the observable universe, And it's
such an enormous question. It's only only possible through human
reason and self awareness building, allowing us to build out mythological, philosophical,
and ultimately scientific models of phases of existence completely beyond
our time or beyond our observation, beyond our just you know,
basic fathomability, and in a literal sense. The interesting thing

(01:32):
is it does us absolutely no good as a species
to form an understanding, incorrect or even partially correct, of
of what such a period might have been like, or
to even call it a period. It may not even
be accurate, But to even contemplate such a thing it does.
It doesn't really give us a survival advantage or anything,
But it is, I guess, to a large extent, urged

(01:55):
onward by our deeply seated survival instinct to understand the
past in order to better navigate present in future threats.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Absolutely right, it pays to understand the past, But does
it pay to understand what came before the past? Are
there lessons to learn from that? But it is actually
a question worth examining when you're looking at religious or
mythological creation narratives, because one thing you will notice if

(02:22):
you start reading a bunch of these stories is that
a lot of them are actually not very well captured
by the English word creation, because, at least in English,
at least today in English, the word creation, I think,
tends to make people imagine the manufacturing of new materials

(02:45):
or substances that did not previously exist.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
So if you think.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
About the act of cosmic creation in that way, bringing
new substances into existence, bringing the world into existence out
of nothing, then it doesn't make a lot of sense
to talk about what the world was like before creation,
because there's nothing to talk about or to describe. But
the instantiation of new existence from nothing is actually not

(03:15):
what most creation narratives describe. In most cases, I would argue,
there is some kind of pre existing world or state
before creation, and the act of creation is not actually
what spits out the raw space and matter and energy
of the cosmos, but rather it is some kind of

(03:38):
sorting and ordering process which, whether by the intentional will
of a God or God's or by some kind of
happy accident, takes a static or maybe unorganized, or a
highly entropic or chaotic state of affairs, and imposes on
it some kind of order or struck sure which allows

(04:01):
stories to take place within that space. And I want
to illustrate this by looking at just one example, which
will probably be surprising to a lot of people who
grew up like I did reading the creation story in
the Book of Genesis, at least in its classic translated
form in English. So as we've just been talking about this,

(04:24):
I bet a lot of listeners were probably thinking, Okay, yeah,
some stories may have this ordering quality rather than a
creating quality. Maybe you're thinking of these creation by combat
type stories. We'll talk about some of these in our
episode today, but you might be thinking, well, the biblical
creation account in Genesis, that's got to be one of

(04:44):
the exceptions. That is a story that actually does feature
the creation ex nihilo, where God by his will instantiates
the universe out of non existence. And that's what I
used to think, because if you read the very first
sentence of Genesis one in the classic King James translation,
it says, reading from the King James, in the beginning,

(05:07):
God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth
was without form and void, and darkness was upon the
face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters. Now, a couple of
things about that passage actually, well, one of the reasons
I'm interested in talking about this subject today is my

(05:28):
memory from childhood of how overwhelmingly dark and mysterious this
passage sounded like, I guess, as with a lot of
things in the Bible, if you grow up reading it
or hearing about it. You can kind of just gloss
over it, like go past it pretty quick and not
really think about it. But if you stop and think
about this image, I think it is very frightening and

(05:52):
exciting and weird. So it is a world that did
not yet have light, because it doesn't. It says that
God didn't bring light into existence until the next verse.
But it has some quality of formlessness and emptiness, but
it's not completely empty because there are waters. It says
there are deep waters in this dark world, and the

(06:15):
deep waters have a surface. And then it says the
spirit of God or sometimes otherwise translated as the wind
of God moved upon the face of the waters. Again,
maybe you can just kind of go past you if
you don't think about it too hard. But when I
try to picture this world and like give it a
feeling of physical reality, it is literally hair raising to me,

(06:39):
kind of like if I really force myself today to
think about the physical reality of a black hole or
imagining myself on the surface of Titan or something.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, yeah, something like knowing that it's supposed to not
just be the surface of the ocean perhaps, but like
something that is like the surface of the water with
some sort of force moving across the top of it.
But there's nothing else yet. There's no fish. Yeah, no light,
Well there's no light. There's just kind of this, this

(07:12):
sort of semblance of darkness and depth and.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Presence, cosmically deep water wrapped enveloped in darkness, with a
kind of ghostly wind of the breath of God moving
across the top of it. Now, as I understood this
passage when I was young, this description would have been
of a sort of half created world, a creation in progress.

(07:39):
It was like the first state of affairs. God created
before the imposition of light, and before the land and
the day and the night, and plants and beasts and
human beings. And for a long time this was I
think the most common understanding among Christians, at least, I'm
not actually sure what is the most common understanding among
Jewish readers, But the common view that I encountered growing

(08:03):
up as an American Protestant was that the Biblical creation
story was a manufacturing type creation. Because the very first
words are in the beginning God created.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, it makes it sound like this is not adapted
screenplay category. This is screenplay. This is not supposed to
be based on anything prior, right, But I know exactly
what you're you're getting at with all this, you know,
growing up in the church as well, like when you
begin to hear readings of these early early passages, or

(08:36):
more to the point, I think most of us, our
earliest experiences are not with direct Bible quotations necessarily, but
various like picture book Bible stories, you know, illustrations for children,
versions of the stories for children that very much simplify
things and certainly gloss over anything that might be confusing.

(08:57):
But then but then things do get confused, you know,
you start thinking about, okay, the darkness on the face
of the deep, what is the deep? Or certainly when
you get into the New Testament, I remember the first
time I've begin picking up in this whole. Okay, in
the beginning, there was the Word, and the word was
with God, and the Word was God, and I think
that was often poorly explained, and it is also kind

(09:19):
of inherently confusing. So I would just be setting or thinking, Okay,
you're telling me that before the creation of the universe,
there's just a Bible kicking around, Like what, It's more
complicated than that. But I do remember the initial confusion.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
I actually had to do a sidebar on this because
I know exactly what you're talking about. Though in the
beginning was the word in the Gospel of John. That's
a whole other can of worms. It is a very
common Protestant interpretation of that verse that the word refers
to the Bible, because they say, like, you know, let's
now hear the word of God, and they mean reading
from the Bible. This is almost definitely not what the

(09:56):
author meant in that passage. The English word word is
a translation of the Greek logos, which has a host
of meanings including word, but also means like reason, logic, discourse,
maybe order. And there are literally whole books on what
the author of the Gospel of John meant by the

(10:16):
word logos there. So it's like a very fraught and
complex and highly entangled theological and philosophical concept. But at
the risk of oversimplifying, it seems to have something to
do with the author's belief that Jesus is the embodiment
of a divine principle that existed before creation with God,

(10:39):
as a part of God or as an expression of
God's power in a way that is actually manifested as words,
So in the way that God speaks things into existence
in the Genesis narrative by saying their names, like in
the in the very next verse after those first two verses,
I was just reading, God says, let there be light,

(11:01):
and then there is light, so he speaks the word,
and then the reality comes into being. And I would
even relate this to other things outside of ancient Judaism,
Like we've talked about the way that words have literal
power to transform reality in Egyptian magic. I mean, this
is a common way of thinking in the ancient world,
that there is some kind of magical or creation potential

(11:24):
in language itself, and that when the words are spoken
by God or by the gods, they have even this
greater power. So like God's word is in itself a
kind of infinite divine potential.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and really, like the whole discussion
we're having here is possible because of words. I mean,
there's of course the simple version of that, but also
like language allows us to deal with increasingly loftier and
complex subjects and topics, that allows us to talk about
things like the time before the beginning of time.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Yeah, exactly, that nature yeah, but to be clear, yeah,
the word in the Gospel of John, don't think I
don't think it's supposed to mean the Bible and it
doesn't just mean word. It's this like highly complex, multi
layered theological, philosophical load that is being delivered there.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
But when you're a kid, yeah, you think you could
just say here word and you're like, what does that
even mean? And then, like I said, I think half
the time it's very poorly explained or the person that's
reading is like, don't worry about that, Yeah, just move
on to the next topic, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
But so, anyway, so we jumped off of that from
talking about how my understanding used to always be, and
the common understanding for a long time was that the
Biblical creation narrative had this manufacturing quality in the beginning
God created. Now imagine my surprise years later when I
encountered a different English translation of the exact same passage

(12:53):
in the Bible. Again. This is Genesis chapter one, the
first couple of verses. This translation says in dead when
God began to create the heavens and the earth, the
earth was complete chaos and darkness covered the face of
the deep, while a wind from God swept over the
face of the waters. So this is from a more

(13:15):
modern translation. The first one I read was the King James,
which is hundreds of years old. This is from the
updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version or n RSV,
which uses modern scholarship to try to capture more faithfully
the meaning of the original Hebrew. In this case does
the Hebrew and the Greek of the New Testament, but

(13:35):
still it has that haunting description of the darkness enveloping
the deep waters. It has the wind of God rushing
over the surface of the ocean. But the first few
words are very different. It is not in the beginning
God created, implying the raw manufacture. Instead, it says when
God began to create the heavens and the earth, the

(13:56):
earth was, suggesting that the darkness was wrapping the deep water,
and the rushing wind or the spirit of God was
above the face of the ocean, and this is what
things were already like when God began the creation. And
from what I can tell, most scholars agree that this
newer translation is closer to the plain meaning of the

(14:18):
passage in Hebrew. And I think that's so interesting because,
like so many people read this story and they think
this is how the world was made, and this is
a totally different understanding of the initial state of affairs.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The idea that there's something out like
some makes it sound like there's like some very limited
wasteland that already existed. Now, why is it a wasteland?
Was there something before this? Is this just what was
left after the lizard men blew it? I don't know.
The Bible doesn't get into that though.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Well, actually that'll tie right into something about I want
to get into further about the translation of this passage.
So I was reading about this in a twenty twenty
two paper by University of Toronto professor Robert D. Holmstead
in the Journal for Semitics called the Syntax of Genesis
ie Verses one to three. And in this paper, the

(15:11):
scholar Homestead analyzes the linguistic features of the first three
verses of Genesis, and he says there are two plausible
ways of translating this passage, or he calls it analyzing
this passage saying what it is supposed to mean most literally,
But he says in both of these analyzes, the description

(15:32):
of that dark world and the deep waters that we've
been talking about is a parenthetical describing what the world
was like before God began his work. Now, interestingly, in
this translation and in all of the updated translations that
I've read, God does seem to instantiate or manufacture some

(15:55):
of the raw materials of reality. So it's not like
God doesn't have the power to create things from nothing.
For example, in verse three, the story says that God said,
let there be light, or in Holmsteat's translation, let light exist,
and then light begins to exist, so he speaks it,
and then it does come into existence. So I think

(16:16):
that is truly meant to be read as raw creation.
And of course light is a very important ingredient in
the universe. So I don't think this is this way
of reading the story has any less implication of God's
power to create. It's just telling a different kind of
order of affairs. But this dark world and the deep

(16:39):
water and the hovering wind of God over the surface
of the water that was all there before, And in
keeping with that, in Homestead's two possible analyzes of this passage,
the first sentence does not use the word created at all.
Homesteadt cites another scholar named Walton who makes extensive arguments

(17:00):
that create is the wrong translation of the Hebrew verb
in question, and Holmstead himself instead uses the term ordered.
He says, so God ordered the heavens and the earth.
He also acknowledges a scholar named Ellen van Wolda who
argues that the best translation is separate. God separated the

(17:20):
heavens and the earth. Either way in the story, this
is not an act of making, but of organizing, bringing
structure and character to these deep cosmic fathoms that came before.
By the way, just since we're on the subject of
this paper, one more interesting argument that Homestead makes is

(17:41):
about the very first phrase of Genesis, one which is
usually translated in the beginning with a definite article referring
to the only beginning, the beginning of all time and space,
for various linguistic reasons. Holmsteat says, actually, there are two
possible translations which better capture the original meaning. One is

(18:04):
in a beginning rather than in the beginning. So in
a beginning, God ordered the heavens and the earth. You
can take this opening as similar to the phrase once
upon a time, denoting a point of beginning among many
worlds or possibilities and then the other possible reading he gives,

(18:24):
which has a pretty similar ultimate meaning, is in the
beginning in which God ordered the heavens in the earth.
This is once again setting the beginning of the story
as one among multiple possibilities. Kind of like if you
were to say, hey, tell the story that starts with
Mary finding a kitten. Oh, okay, in the story where

(18:44):
Mary finds a kitten. So it's kind of like that
in the story where God, where God orders the heavens
and the earth. But both of these phrasings really cause us,
i think, to take differently the intended meaning of the
Creation's story being told not just as the beginning, but
as one of many possible or many actual beginnings of

(19:08):
the world in the teller's view. So Homestead says, quote,
either way, the door is logically open to other beginnings
that were before this particular one. Bring us back to
what you're just say, after the lizard people blew it
up or whatever.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, so the door is biblically open for lizard men
and great old ones and whatever you want to put
in there in the prequel.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah, at least that's the case. Homestead makes that the
best way of the most faithful translation here would say
that the story is not saying this was the only
way that the world was ever created. There may have
been many other creations before, There may be other creations after.
This was a beginning, one way God decided to do
it one time at least?

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Oh wow, do creationists know about this yet, because it
seems like this would open up new possibilities.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
I don't want to just like slam on Young Earth
creationists here. I mean, obviously we know that the Earth
is not just six thousand years old, but I'm not
not trying to hate on people who believe that. But
I do think it's interesting how as far as I'm aware,
people who have the young Earth creationist viewpoint seem to
sometimes be really resistant to scholarship that offers readings of

(20:27):
the Bible that would alleviate some of their concerns. You know,
like this would actually reduce, like I think, a more
faithful reading of the creation narrative. It would actually give
you more room to say, oh, Okay, it's not so
much a problem that this conflicts with science, because maybe
I'm not supposed to read this literally. Maybe that is

(20:50):
not actually what the author or what God even intended
but I think there's just a lot of resistance to that. Yeah, yeah,
because I think I mean, if I can just psychologize
a little bit, I think a lot of times, when
we get really rigid about representing a point of view
like Young Earth creationism according to your interpretation of the Bible,

(21:11):
a lot of times what we're really showing fidelity to
is our own past experience, Like we don't want to
budge from the way we have always felt about the narrative.
So if somebody offers you a revision of how the
narrative should be understood, you will resist that as well.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, it's like the same thing that you're resisting, but
from a different direction.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah, but anyway, So that's what I wanted to talk
about in this series, is these visions of the world
from different types of creation accounts, visions of the world
before what is commonly understood as the act of creation
took place, and also maybe looking at what in these
stories had to change about the world in order for

(21:54):
it to be seen as now ready for the beginning
of history or for the beginning of the story. So
before we move on to talk about specific examples of
pre creation narratives, Rob I know you've got a really

(22:16):
interesting one I'm excited to look at today. But before
we get to that, I just wanted to mention a
few more things, like reasons I find this topic of
the world before creation really interesting. One thing I wanted
to harp on a little bit more is just the
aesthetics of it. Like I've already talked about how I
always found it haunting to think about that sketch from

(22:38):
Genesis of the darkness upon the deep waters and the
wind of God rushing above. But there are other visions
of the world before Creation that are beautiful and strange
and frightening in similar ways. But sometimes they are illuminating
about ontologies, like visions of the world before creation can

(23:00):
inform us about what a culture and a people thought
it meant for things to exist. So one that I
find really striking is the description of the pre creation
world in the Babylonian Epic of Creation. This is sometimes
called the enuma a leash, which comes from the first
two words of the poem in the original language numa Aleish,

(23:21):
which means usually translated as something like when on high
or in the skies above or something.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
So.

Speaker 3 (23:29):
My Oxford University Press edition of the Myths of Mesopotamia,
translated by Stephanie Dally, It goes like this here, when
skies above were not yet named, nor earth below pronounced
by name, Apsu the first one, their begetter and maker Tiamot,
who bore them, all had mixed their waters together, but

(23:53):
had not formed pastures nor discovered reed beds. When yet
no gods were manifest, nor name pronounced, nor destinies decreed.
Then gods were born within them, Lamu and Lahamu emerged,
their names pronounced. So a lot of things are interesting
about this, and we may return to it in a

(24:13):
later part in the series. But one thing I really
like about the Dali translation in particular here is the
blurring of the distinction between the existence of things and
the naming of things. So, instead of just saying sky
and earth did not exist, as some translations I have found,
they translate it more like that. Here it says they

(24:34):
were not named, And in ancient Mesopotamian thinking, it seems
that there may actually be some conceptual overlap here. To
what extent do things exist if they are not named?
Is existence a thing separate from observation and recognition? Maybe
if a thing is not actually named. It's just sort

(24:58):
of a chaotic potential, and it is not really itself
yet until it is recognized. So either way, before the
naming and possibly before the existence of earth and sky,
you know, before we get the what the pastures or
the metalands, before the marshes or the reed beds, there

(25:18):
are these two substances or principles. They're both watery in nature,
and they're joined in this union. You've got Opsu, who
is the god embodying fresh water or just maybe is
fresh water or is the subterranean waters. And then you've
got Tiamot, the goddess embodying salt water or bitter water.
And this part of the story, the creation event, is

(25:41):
not a god exerting its will and imposing order like
we get in the biblical narrative, though there is something
like that later in this story. Instead, it is this
joining of chaotic potential, almost a biological telling of creation,
where you have the mingling of salt water and fresh
which results in a sort of divine pregnancy and the

(26:04):
birth of the gods, leading to many generations of gods
whose activities will define the later parts of the story.
But the interesting thing is that much later in the
story there is a second act of creation by divine
imposition of order. So the second act of creation in
it is the classic creation by combat narrative. As we mentioned,

(26:28):
it's common to many mythologies. We'll probably talk about some
other examples of it in the series. But in the
Babylonian Epic of Creation, the short version goes like this.
Apsu becomes unhappy because the younger generations of gods are
making too much noise, way too noisy, really annoying, so
he plots to kill them. But the younger gods rebel

(26:50):
and they kill Apsu, and then, enraged at this offense, Tiamot,
his mate, makes monsters descend against the young gods as revenge,
and then the young gods, represented by Marduke, the hero
deity of the city of Babylon, slay their ancestor Tiamot,
and then they fashion the world, or mar Marduke does.

(27:12):
They fashion the world out of her dead body. And
so if you take this part of the story to
be the act of creation instead of the earlier like
mingling of Tiamat and Apsu and the birth of the
younger gods, the world before is the body of the
chaotic deep salt waters, the body of Tiamot, so her

(27:33):
body parts after her defeat are chopped up by Marduke
and made into the land and the sky and you
get the mountains and the vault of Heaven and everything
like that. So it is a repurposing of the body
of a god, a repurposing of material into the created,
ordered world in which history can take place.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, and you're right, we're going to see I think,
multiple examples of this as well as these other factors.
And sometimes you'll see you'll see the different different variations
within a single creation story. And as I think, as
what we'll also be discussing, sometimes talking about a single
creation story itself is kind of a misleading idea because

(28:14):
any given you know, ancient culture is going to probably
have multiple different traditions, traditions that are forgotten at times
that are then folded up into other traditions, imported traditions,
and then eventually they're written down and they may take
on a different flavor then, So a lot of different
chefs coming in and out of the kitchen.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
Absolutely, you know, one rabbit hole I went down that
I didn't end up creating any kind of notes about
for today because it was but just an interesting rabbit
hole I went down while doing research for this episode
was about methodological problems in establishing narratives of mythology, because
you know, what some scholars today have started pointing out

(28:58):
is that you might, like, look at a story like
the Numa aliation, say, this is the creation narrative of
you know, some people in ancient Mesopotamia, of ancient Babylonians
or whatever, and you might, well, that might well be
true to in some sense. But you can also look
at a lot of these narratives that have come down
to us as artifacts of the particular time and situation

(29:23):
in which the text form was created. So you know,
most of these narratives probably do have some kind of
oral basis. You know, they're coming from some well of
oral tradition. Maybe not all of them, and maybe some
are original compositions by the original text creator, but most
of them probably have some oral tradition behind them, and

(29:45):
then at some point in history somebody sets it down
in a text form, which then of course has its
own history after that because of you know, copying and versions.
You know, so texts change as well, but often the
version that becomes the first text we know in some
cases is a kind of combination of pre existing mythologies

(30:10):
with the textualizer's own personal additions and structure imposition of
structure and things. So it's just easy to start thinking
of a lot of things as the mythology that emerges
from the people and the you know, common folk belief.
But a lot of things we may think of that
way actually are coming from the act of turning a

(30:31):
tradition into the text. Sorry if that was convoluted, but
I was just trying to recreate that from memory. Yeah, anyway,
one more tangent I wanted to do before we get
to your great example to talk about today, Rob. In
this series, we're not planning on doing a like a
running comparison between mythological accounts of creation and our best

(30:52):
scientific theories of how the universe began. I don't think
that's a very useful exercise because obviously, like the people
who told these stories did not have access to technology
or the theoretical grounding to the kinds of things that
we have to understand the universe today, So it doesn't
make sense to judge their stories on the basis of

(31:12):
questions like did they get the facts right.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Right, because sometimes they sort of do, and it's nice
when it happens. It's kind of it's noteworthy, and we'll
probably bring that up a few times. But it also Yeah,
it's not like that means the creation myth is bad
or incorrect because it doesn't line up with the current
most popular astronomical model or something.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
Well, yeah it doesn't. I mean, it's neither for nor
against whether it lines up or not. Yeah, I think
we're just we're trying to understand these stories on their
own terms and think about what they reveal about us
and about the people who told them. But I thought
it would be worthwhile, just for a bit of grounding
to make clear that in physics based cosmology, we currently

(31:54):
do not have a solid way of knowing what, if anything,
existed before or outside of our local universe. So our
best model of the history of our universe is an
updated version of what usually gets called the Big Bang,
And in short, the theory goes like this, About thirteen

(32:15):
point eight billion years ago, the observable universe existed in
an incredibly hot, dense state, and then this region of
space and the energy within it began to expand rapidly
and cool energy took the form of particles, including matter.
Matter aggregated to itself through gravitational attraction, and it formed

(32:36):
things like stars and planets, and the universe has been
expanding and cooling ever since. We know this from multiple
lines of evidence that the Big Bang theory is not
just guesswork. There are a lot of different lines of evidence,
all converging, all pointing toward it, and some of the
main pieces of evidence include the observations of the cosmic

(32:56):
microwave background. This is the energy glide left over after
the universe first cooled enough to become transparent to light,
and we can actually see this glow directly with our
telescopes in every direction. Another major piece of evidence is
the red shift of distant galaxies. So because the light

(33:17):
from distant galaxies is red shifted, we know that those
galaxies are moving away from us. Not moving away from
us in the sense of flying further away from us,
but moving in the sense that the space between us
is expanding, and this is evidence of the past and
continued expansion of space in the universe. And then another

(33:38):
major piece of evidence often sited is the relative abundance
of elements like hydrogen and helium. Basically, you find these
elements in almost exactly the quantities that are mathematically predicted
by the nucleosynthesis model of the Big Bang. So a
lot of different evidence all backing up the Big Bang
theory as the basic history of the universe of its expansion,

(34:01):
and the Big Bang theory has been updated since its
earliest inception. It's not exactly the same as it was
when people first thought it up. For example, most physicists
now accept a modification called inflation or cosmic inflation, where
this is complicated, but basically, in the earliest fraction of

(34:21):
a second of our universe, space expanded and cooled exponentially
much more rapidly, and then this led into a phase
called reheating, which created the hot, dense early state of
the universe consistent with the Big Bang. And then the
expansion after this settled into a still dynamic but overall

(34:41):
slower rate thereafter. But even with these modifications like inflation,
the Big Bang theory is only a model of the
history of our observable universe, and it does not answer
what if anything, came before the beginning of the expansion
thirty point eight billion years ago. I mean, you can

(35:01):
talk about inflation, but still that's just tracing it back
to a point about thirteen point eight billion years ago
when this expansion began. Physicists do try to come up
with models that could pre date or lead to this
initial state of the Big Bang. For example, some have
proposed a cyclical universe, like a universe that continually expands

(35:24):
and then contracts on itself over and over, or have
proposed methods through which new bubble universes could be created
out of old universes. But we don't have direct evidence
for these worlds before. The best you can do right
now is try to create a mathematically consistent model that
is consistent with the things we observe, but you're not

(35:45):
going to have direct evidence for it. So currently science
doesn't really give us a picture of the world before.
If there even was or is such a thing, it is,
at least for now, beyond our reach. So we don't
have scientific acts to the world before.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Yeah, to say the least, things get very complicated when
you start thinking about about time and in all of
this and how time seems to work, and so sometimes
questions of before don't really make a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah,
And then likewise, like to your point, if if there
was a before and that before was in like essentially

(36:24):
before like everything got scrapped and crunched down, like, then
all the evidence is lost, like as far as we
can understand it, so you know, the evidence is destroyed. Likewise,
if the evidence exists outside of this universe, in other
universes or pocket universes, also beyond our grasp and understanding.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah, though I do want to say, looking beyond the
boundaries of our observable universe in time or space is
not you know, I don't think that is like fringe behavior.
I mean, I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to
try to create models for and see like what would
actually be plausible. But we don't currently know of any

(37:02):
way those models could be. You know, we can't look
directly for evidence of those things, at least as far
as we know.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Right right, And we don't want to open those portals
through which the lizardmen and they're great old when gods
could just swarm back into our reality.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
I just want to say, we have no reason to
assume that the lizard men have hostile intentions that should
be perfectly benevolent lizards from another dimension.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, or it could just be transactional. They're just like
we want your peanut butter, and we are willing to
trade for it, and we'll just hear them out. Who
knows what they have. We might like it more than
we like peanut but are hard to imagine, but maybe
they've had they have something, Rob.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think you wanted to talk about a really interesting
example from Chinese mythology.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Right, that's right. I want to talk a little bit
about Panghu or pangou Shie. This is a creator her
entity in Chinese mythology, but it's a little more complicated
than that, and I think you'll find, like I was
kind of teasing out earlier, this is the tradition surrounding
this entity kind of get into a number of different

(38:14):
creation story types. And I'm going to be drawing on
a couple of different texts that I've referred to in
the past when we've talked about Chinese mythology. So is
Anne Beryl points out in her book Chinese Mythology and
Introduction there were various Chinese cosmological myths and they fit
a general pattern, and that is that the universe is

(38:36):
not created out of nothing, but out of some form
of pre existing matter, and she writes that this generally
takes the form of some sort of primeval vapor that
must somehow be differentiated into the two fundamental opposing forces
of yin and yang to become reality as we know it.

(38:58):
She also notes that the myths and their early view
of the cosmos they have some similarities with say, ancient
Egyptian thought, but they are distinct from Judeo Christian models
in that there is no divine will involved in the creation,
so on the whole there's no like pure creator or
creatrix character. Though that's not to say there are no

(39:22):
divine acts of creation in Chinese mythology, but because there are,
especially when you get into acts of say, you know,
the creation of humans and so forth. But as far
as the world or the universe, for the most part,
it seems to emerge without divine intent.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
Right, So what you're describing is something we have seen
already in stuff we've talked about today, and we'll see
in other examples of a kind of mixed or undifferentiated
entropic state of matter, in this case not We've talked
already about waters being mixed and just all swirling together
and having having not been separated yet. But here is

(40:02):
a mixed form of vapor or some kind of cloud,
and that somehow the separation of it into these two
distinct and opposite qualities of yin and yang. That is
the initial act of creation, even though there's nobody to
do it. It's not like a god says, now these
two will be separate.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
Right right. And it's also worth noting that, like you know,
all these different when we're talking about the creation of
the universe, that means something completely different to us when
we think about it, because we have a like a
NASA informed science education informed and probably like Star Trek
and Star Wars informed idea of what that means or
doctor who informed and so forth, you know, so we,

(40:45):
like you instantly turn to thinking about multiple planets and
possible other universes and multiverse and so forth. But like
for the Chinese, the ancient Chinese, for example, like they
were dealing with a single world and there was not
the there was no idea of there being additional worlds.
This is like a big I've seen it described as
like a big square world, and that was generally what

(41:08):
was thought of as being existence. That was the world,
that was the universe and these other concepts didn't quite exist.
So coming back to Pangu here, the name literally means
something like the ancient coiled one, or, according according to
Anne Burrel, coiled antiquity, coiled interesting. And he is coiled

(41:30):
because he is coiled within another another thing that pops
up in a number of different creation stories, and that
is the cosmic egg. Hmm, okay, So I'll come back
to the cosmic egg in just a second, but I
want to turn to another source that I used, and
that's the Handbook of Chinese Mythology by yang An and Turner,

(41:52):
and they point out that one thing to keep in
mind about Pangu here is that actual Chinese literary mentions
of Pangu only seem to go back as far as
the Three Kingdoms era, so that's two twenty through two
eighty CE, and there's a certain amount of back and
forth about whether it's completely of Han Chinese origin or
if it was imported from another another ethnic group or

(42:16):
another area. Anyway you slice it, though, it has a
great deal of sticking power, and again wasn't written down
until the third century CE, but certainly is based on
ideas that existed for a long time before that. So
let's talk about before we get back to the egg,
Let's talk about coiled Antiquity himself, Pangu. What does he

(42:40):
look like? Well, descriptions vary. Sometimes those descriptions take on
a kind of Chinese dragon or animal hybrid sort of vibe.
But when it comes to visual depictions, he's almost always
shown as a great, shaggy horned humanoid giant. So some
sort of a big shaggy giant with its generally like

(43:00):
a couple of bumps, a little couple of horns on
top of his head, not.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
Like big horns, like rams horns, but little buds almost.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, almost like two cartoon bumps from being hit on
the head with a cartoon sledgehammer, that sort of thing. Yeah, Now,
I know you and I have seen these horns before,
and longtime listeners, I've heard us mention these as well.
Because this might bring to mine Old Shinong, the divine
farmer and culture hero who, among other things, tried out
all the plants to determine what was medicine, what was poison,

(43:31):
and what was food and sampled. I believe the story
says seventy poisons a day in this quest to understand.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
Wow, that's got to be a record, yeah, but a
very important job.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so you know, very much a culture
hero culture bringer type character like here is a mythological
entity that solved problems for us or passed on some
sort of knowledge or gave knowledge to us that it
was in the stronghold of the gods, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
But Chinong is also depict with horns. It has some
kind of bovine quality.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yeah, and that seems to be the key. He's he's
tied to the ox and or the water buffalo, and
it's this has to do with his association with that animal,
and that's why he has oftentimes depicted as having horns.
Now coming back to Pongu here. According to Yang'n and Turner,

(44:24):
this use of horns, or this appearance of horns may
be connected to Chinese myths that humans all used to
have a horn or horns, which they used in hunting,
and they would weaken or loosen as humans approach death.
As this happened, however, workers would realize, Hey, I'm starting

(44:45):
to die. My horns or my horn or horns are
getting loose. I'm just going to go over here and
not work anymore, and just wait for death. And the
God of Heaven wasn't crazy about this development and was like, Okay,
we're canceling horns. It's making it's making the humans give
up hope and or not work all that hard. So
horns are confiscated.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
No more horns because people were slacking on Fridays.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah yeah, wow. Now, incidentally, to bring things back to
Judeo Christian traditions, or certainly, I guess more appropriately to
bring it back to early Christian and onward traditions, and
in the Middle Ages you have depictions of Moses with horns,
similar horns, and this actually does show up in some

(45:29):
Chinese depictions of Moses. There at least used to be
an example of this at the met in New York.
I didn't notice the last time I was there, but
it may not have been in that section long enough.
But this generally is attributed to This idea that Moses
had horns is generally attributed to a mistranslation of a
Hebrew term in Jerome's Latin Vulgate Bible and then reflected

(45:54):
in European works of visual art up to the age
of Michaelangelo. So you know, it would seem to be
more of a connection to European traditions as far as
Moses goes, has nothing to do with the idea that
humans used to have horns or anything like that. But
I did run across. I was looking into this a

(46:14):
little bit more to see there's something I didn't know
about or had missed, and I ran across a paper
in the Eurasian Journal of Anthropology from twenty twenty four
talking about the idea of Moses having horns and certainly
acknowledging that it's connected to this mistranslation issue. But it
was by an individual by Frank fan or Frank Fahn,

(46:35):
I'm not sure which it is, but he presents a
possible connection in these depictions to actual cranial deformities due
to thallacimia, an inherited blood disorder, and the idea here
is that it's tied to the idea that this illness

(46:58):
basically creates certain protection against malaria infection, and therefore there
would be like a survival advantage in having it, so
you might have used used to have had more people
with horns, or at least things that looked like horns
that were just cranial deformations. Hopefully, I'm not misrepresenting any

(47:19):
of this, this scholarship, but it's an interesting idea. I'm
not sure how much I'm willing to bet on it,
but I always love a paper that kind of says, Okay,
this is this is clearly what the case is. But
what if it were this? And so here's an here's
an alternate route, an alternate road that you know, we
can all agree might not be as a reasonable hypothesis,

(47:43):
but certainly we can stack up some some arguments why
it could potentially be the case.

Speaker 3 (47:48):
Right does not. This hypothesis does not satisfy Oakham's razor,
but is interesting at least.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah, yeah, so at any rate, Pungu has horns, and
again he's the ancient coiled one, and he's coiled within
the primordial or cosmic egg, which itself has coalesced out
of the formless vapor. So nobody made the egg, nothing
laid the egg. The egg has just formed out of

(48:16):
the vapor that pre existed everything. And again this is
a common motif for cosmic egg. But Pongu is inside
the cosmic egg, coiled within the egg of chaos. And
while he is in there, the complimentary opposing forces of
yin and yang are separating within the egg until one day,
after eighteen thousand years, according to this story, for uncertain

(48:40):
reasons or no reason at all, the egg hatches. Now, Joe,
have you ever separated an egg for a recipe? I
assume you have. Let's talk about this because this becomes
the primary metaphor for understanding the form and function of
the universe in this story. Do you have a preferred
method for separating an egg.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
I don't know what the term for this is, but
I just fingers. You dump it into your fingers, and
you kind of hold them slightly apart from each other
and allow the white to slip through, but you don't
let the yolk go through, and you kind of flex
them and press them together until you have sort of
cut the white off from the yolk. That that's what
I usually do if I need to separate them. And

(49:22):
the problem I have more often is not with separating
eggs and yolks. I don't do that all that often.
It's when I'm trying to make eggs and I crack
the egg and break the yolk on the shell. I
hate that.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, it's always that happens to me when I'm like
frying eggs for the family, and it always irks me
because I know that certain members of the family really
like like a jammy egg, and once you've done that,
it's like the egg's not gonna You're not gonna get
a jammy egg out of that.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Well, for me, it's just always like, Okay, I'm making
poached eggs or I'm making fried eggs, and you know,
I break a couple of yolks while I'm getting them out,
so I'm like, well, I guess I got to make
scre eggs too. I'll do that when I'm done.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
We used to have these little earth or maybe a
couple of these. We have these earthenware egg separators with
like a little face and a mouth where you would
supposedly put the egg in there and be able to
pour it and then just the white would come out
and the yolk, I mean just the center of the
egg would stay in and the rest would come out.
I've never seen that, but my memory of that was

(50:27):
more of a neat idea as opposed to a practical
way of carrying it out. And then there's another version
where stuff comes out of the nose. I don't know.
I haven't used that one. But yeah, most of the
time for me, it's like getting in there with a
spoon and then my fingers.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
One quick kitchen trick, I do know. If you are trying,
if you're trying to make poached eggs and you want
less of that wispy white that goes all through the water,
you just quickly put the egg in like a mesh
strainer before you poach it, and you kind of whisk
it around it or not whisk it, but you just
swish it around a little bit in the mesh strainer.
And what happened is the tight part of the white

(51:01):
will stick to the yoak, but the very watery part
of the white will go out through the bottom of
the strainer, and then when you put that in the water,
usually it holds together in a pretty tight, nice little ball.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Interesting, Okay, Well, Luckily for Pangu, he doesn't have to
mess with most of that. So the egg hatches, he's
within the egg and like essentially the stuff of the
universe is all around him. But luckily gravity is coming
into play, so murkier, heavier yen is sinking down while

(51:33):
that airy, lighter yang is rising up. So the yen
sort of falls down and becomes Earth, and Yang rises
up and becomes sky. Okay, and then here's Pogu in
the middle of this. And by being in the middle
of this, he's he's in an interesting position because he's
kind of part of both. He's not you know, there's

(51:54):
there's En and Yang with him within him. He's he's
human in his own way as well. He's not really
a human, but he's kind of like he's a humanoid being.
And in some versions of the tale, he like finalizes
the separation of Earth and Sky with an axe or
some other tool. What does well, that's that's a difficult question.

(52:18):
I want to come back to that. In other versions,
to put his role is really to prevent the two
from merging together again. So you know, he may not
have had a role in actually separating the two again.
Sometimes he does, but then he has this additional role
of like keeping them from coming back together, and so

(52:40):
he ends up taking on the you know, almost like
an Atlas roll, holding them, not holding the sky up,
but holding the Sky and Earth apart from each other
to prevent reconciliation into the universe's prior state. So it's
not just that the sky might come down, it's just
Earth and sky, Yin and Yang might come back together,
become one, and then that's that's you know, it's kind

(53:01):
of like the end of the universe. You know.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
Oh, but that's kind of almost again, I'm not I'm
not saying this was like pressions about physics, but just
by happy coincidence, this is uh, prefiguring the idea that
gravity is actually not just attraction toward the ground or
towards the center of the Earth, but the mutual attraction
of all things to each other.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
Yeah. I think one of the things to keep in
mind in all of this, especially in discussing cases where
there's something about it that feels like it lines up
with our scientific understanding of the universe, is that all
these these ancient people, you know, they a they thought
long and hard about all of this in one way
or another, you know, creativity and creatively or you know,
or philosophically. And then also they lived in this universe.

(53:43):
So they lived in a universe where emergence occurs, where
gravity exists. Uh, you know, they they see complex systems
all around them, They see how these things work. They
see they see order coming out of chaos and chaos,
you know, coming out of order in the world around them,
and so they have all of this evidence in their
perceptions of reality that are a part of the larger universe,

(54:07):
and therefore it factors into their models of the larger universe.
And that makes you know, complete sense.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
That's certainly true. As we often emphasize on the show,
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when
thinking about the ancient past is for some reason, just
assuming that the people long ago were dumb or you know,
that they couldn't figure things out. Obviously, we know a
lot of things that they didn't know a back then.
We have a lot of tools they didn't have back then.
But based on the things they had, you know, people

(54:36):
have always been smart. People have always been able to
figure things out. I mean, I'm kind of doubtful that
people in the ancient world actually figured out the like
the nature of gravity as the mutual attraction of all
mass to mass, but I guess you can't rule it out.
But yeah, that's interesting. Certainly, Certainly people have always been

(54:58):
smart and have always been able to figure things out.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Yeah, And now coming back to Pangu and another way
that he sort of ties into who you can compare
him to Atlas Tales is of course, Atlas is all
about trying to get somebody else to take on this
task for him. Can someone else hold up the sky
wanting you know, run a quick errand that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
Exactly, Yeah, Hercules, I got something to do, or let
me help you out. You just sold this for a second.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, yeah. And so we see a bit of that
in some of the tellings of pangu in which he
molds an ox out of his own saliva and some
clay to help the separation to sort of do the
work for him. And then in some of these stories
as well, he has to make a clay rooster as
well to help keep the ox alert at all times,
and with the ox going asleep and then waking up,

(55:47):
this ends up being a way of explaining earthquakes.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
Oh interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Now there's another variation on the story that gets very
much into this idea of some sort of primordial being's
body dying and then becoming the world, because it's often
said that Pangoo does not live eternally, but dies and
part of his parts of his gigantic body become key
parts of the universe or the observable reality. So according

(56:16):
to different versions of the story. One eye becomes the sun,
the other becomes the moon. His voice becomes thunder, His
limbs and trunk become the forests become the four extremes
of the earth and the five mountains. His blood becomes
the rivers, his flesh becomes the fields and the soil.
His teeth and bones become rocks, His semen and marrow

(56:37):
become pearls and jade. His sweat becomes rain and dew,
and the insects that lived on his body become the
first humans. Though to be clear, this is not the
only human creation myth in Chinese mythology. Wow, And another
interesting thing here is Okay, you can say, okay, well
Pango is dead then, but it's not. I don't know.

(56:59):
It seems like that might be the wrong way to
describe it. Again, there are different versions of the stories
concerning him. But also he is apparently still worshiped as
a god in certain parts of China, and so if
he is dead, it's not, you know, in a mortal
sense of the word, and certainly not in every tradition.
So yeah, I think the story of Pungo is fascinating

(57:22):
because you can easily detect the different sorts of creation
stories that are bound up in this figure. He's depicted
as a primordial being, as a world tree or pillar,
a decaying giant who becomes the earth, and more.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
That is really interesting. I was not familiar with this
story before, and I like this a lot. Can I
actually come back to two different things you've mentioned while
talking about this and something that connects them. So I
want to come back to the acts, where you know
the question of where did Pangu's acts come from? That
he uses to do the separation at least in some

(57:54):
tellings of the Earth and Sky. This is something I
was thinking about talking about the beginning of the episode.
I didn't have time to develop it though, but it
it's a quality that I really enjoy about some creation
narratives that I was thinking about calling the Cain's wife factor.

(58:14):
Do you remember the story of Cain and Abel in
the Book of Genesis also so yes. The short summary
is that Cain and Abel are the first children of
Adam and Eve after Adam and Eve are expelled from
the garden, and the way the story is always understood
is that at this point these are the only people
on Earth. You know, at Adam and Eve are the
first humans. They were expelled from the garden of Eden.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
They start to have children. They have Cain and Abel,
and then Cain kills his brother Abel uh. And then
Cain is banished for this. He is sent away, so
it says he, you know, he goes out of the land,
and then we're told he wanders somewhere else, and then
he meets a woman and gets married. Now, of course,
the obvious question is where did Cain's wife come from?

(58:57):
Who is she supposed to be? She just kind of
appears out of nowhere. I thought these were the only people.
Where's she from? There have been over the years, I
don't know, kind of anti Christian activists or people who
are very critical of the Bible who use this as
an example of like, look how stupid this story is,
Like look how stupid it is that they forgot that

(59:21):
these were the only characters and here's another character coming
out of nowhere. I don't view it that way. I
when I look at this, it instead seems to me
to be evidence that this story is not intended to
be taken as a literal history of events and as
a totalizing narrative of reality. It just signals to me

(59:44):
that it is being told with a sense of lightness
and understood creativity, that in the more in the original context,
that the teller of the story and the audience would
understand that the story is being told with a sense
of freedom and creativity, and that there's a playfulness here.

(01:00:05):
And so it is not meant to be taken as
a literal historical recounting of the only people that ever
existed in the past and all that kind of thing.
I mean, there may have been some sense that this
is conveying some truth, maybe in a more metaphorical sense,
about where people came from, But I don't know. I'm

(01:00:25):
connecting it more to the idea that we were also
talking about a few minutes ago about how I think
people in the past were smart and like they they
maybe not were always as literal minded as we tend
to assume.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
They were, right, Yeah, or or certainly even as pedantic
as we can be concerning some of these stories. Yeah.
Where you know, if you if you seriously asked the
question like, well, where did the acts come from, it's like, well,
you know, it's just it's just part of the story exactly. Yeah,
And so many of these creation stories, they do end
up basing at least some part of it in human

(01:01:02):
tool used, human crafting, because that's how we end up
understanding and shaping our understanding of creation, because we have
to base it on human acts of creation, be that
you know, molding something out of clay, chopping something with
an axe, or you know, using the word processor of
the gods, you know, turning a blank page into into copy.

(01:01:24):
I was thinking about that earlier. It's like when we
create a document for our podcast, it's like, you know,
it begins with nothing, just to blank white space.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
But then but that's actually not nothing, is it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
It's not nothing? No, But then it also doesn't go
from you know, from you know, beginning to end super quickly.
There are different phases of creation. Like in my case,
I always apply some sort of a template, and that's
the first act of creation, uh, you know, and then
on the third day God began to fill in the
template that sort of.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
Thing, and then one and then the gods began developing
things that turned out to be completely useless wrong, you know,
like un let's not okay, can't do that. I'm gonna
shift to something else.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Oh yeah, we'll actually come back to that idea and
some of our examples, Oh nice, the different drafts of creation.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
Yeah, but so anyway, Yeah, I wanted to make the
connection between the acts and Kane's wife because I love
these little details and I and I take a different
view of what they mean than some of the most
sort of myth critical people do, who think that this
is evidence of a kind of sloppiness in the storytelling.
I instead interpret it as a as a sign that

(01:02:34):
we should understand these stories in a more light and
sophisticated way, and not that the original context was all literalism.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
Right right, Like, well, coming back to the idea of
a cosmic egg, what laid the cosmic egg? That's the
still a question. I mean that it does get into
the whole egg and chicken thing, and you know that
is a conundrum. But you know, think of it then,
not as an organic egg. Think of it as enclosed substance,
you know, and just go from there. Now, I do

(01:03:13):
want to come back as we begin to reach the
end of this episode, I want to come back again
to what is the primary topic and play here what
was the universe like prior to creation? And so we.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Did talk about the vapor and the egg right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
Yeah, and so I have a little bit more on that.
So in most Chinese traditions, the answer is, of course
chaotic formlessness. This vapor a place before heaven and Earth
with images but no form. I really love that description.
How am I to interpret that? You know, it's like
information but no mass. You know, I'm not sure, But

(01:03:51):
as an Barreau comments, the state is rather similar to
the you know, you could even compare this to the
modern cosmological idea of the singularity. So everything is there,
but it is not ordered in the sense that it
is anything yet or not. It is not like the
world we know it but all but everything is there,

(01:04:11):
it's just you know, it's contained in a different form. Yeah. Now,
in Dallas cosmology, this undifferentiated and formless state is known
as wuchi, the boundless emptiness, and it is the prime
mol state of the taol the Tao. And I'm hoping
that I'm pronouncing it correctly here wugi, because this is

(01:04:32):
one of those things when you're dealing with the Chinese
language if I use a slightly incorrect pronunciation that it
means nonsense rather than limitless or boundlessness. It can also
mean a type of chicken. It can means a stain,
it can mean dancing skill, or it can mean to
miss a plane, depending on exactly how it is being inflected.

(01:04:53):
That's just you know the complexity of the language. But
I believe it is bugi, So to whatever extent I
actually hit that every time I say it, we'll see,
but I am going to try and pronounce it correctly. Yeah, Ouji.
So this state Wuji has the has, it has infinite potential,
but is itself non being? And these concepts are also

(01:05:17):
incorporated into Neo Confucism as well, And in this Wuji
becomes Taji, the supreme ultimate. So movement begins based on
the dualities of Yin and Yang. However, there's plenty of
room to argue and disagree over whether Wuji really becomes
Taji or if there are just these are just two

(01:05:37):
sides of the same thing. And you know, we can't
really apply line or logic to it in that case.
But yeah, the dow runs through all things. Yin and
Yang are in constant flux, competing but unable to exist
without each other. And if that's that churning nature, you know,
often depict it visually, you know, iconically as a churning

(01:05:58):
as a movement, if that movement is not taking place,
if everything is just like a sterile constant, like that
is that is the the primordial universe in this case,
like it's it's like everything that makes our universe work.
Everything that's a part of the you know, observable separation
of things and entities and conflicting energies, like, none of

(01:06:19):
that is in place. So it's almost you know, unfathomable
in that respect. At any rate, it'll be be a
lot of fun to get into some additional mythological models
here and continue to discuss, like which of these various
creation tropes do they seem to be exploring and using,
What new ideas are they bringing to it that we
haven't discussed in this series so far. We have some

(01:06:42):
some exciting examples to discuss in the future.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
Totally. This may be one of those series we need to,
I don't know, break up and revisit at different times.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
I think, yeah, this, in all likelihood, this may be
one that we do a couple of episodes for and
then we have to break and do some other content
and then come back back again. So we'll see how
it all plays out in the meantime, we would of
course love to hear from all of you, because it's
very likely that there's some great example that we haven't
come across yet, or perhaps there's a great example we

(01:07:13):
were thinking about covering and we just need a little
nudging to point us in the right direction, So write in.
We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder
to everyone out there, This Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short
form episode and then on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns, so just talk about a weird film on

(01:07:34):
Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio podcast
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