April 30, 2026 • 52 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Robert Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we are
returning today with the second part in our series about
worlds before Creation. The idea behind this series is that
very often when we think about a creation myth or
a creation story, we imagine what's called a creation ex nihilo.
(00:37):
So there is nothing, and then suddenly, for some reason
or by some act, a world is brought into being.
So nothing existed before. Now there's a world. But the
interesting thing is that if you start really looking at
creation stories from all around the world, it seems to
me that very few of them actually fit this description.
(01:00):
And instead of being accounts of how the raw substance
of the universe was brought into existence, what you most
often get instead is a before and after story where
a world of some kind already exists, usually in some
kind of static or chaotic state, and then something happens
(01:23):
which introduces distinctions and differences and somehow orders this pre
existing world in such a way that characters can now
exist and events can take place within it. And I
realized that I've talked on the show plenty of times
before about being attracted to imagery of weird wastelands and dark,
(01:47):
unpopulated places. I don't know how unique I am in this.
Maybe basically everybody thinks this is interesting, but I don't know,
but it feels kind of personal to me that, for
whatever reason, I have never been able to forget about
that chapter in the Time Machine or the time Traveler
goes millions of years into the future and sees this desolate,
(02:08):
withering earth under the red sun and no people in it,
just these crab monsters and stuff. Or the way I
was talking in the last episode about being really haunted
by that very short description at the beginning of the
Book of Genesis of the dark, the dark deep waters
in the wind of God rushing above them.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Here's another one for you, since we're about to come
up on Alien Day, but the Service of the Planet
LV four twenty six.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's always That's always been one of
my favorite parts of the movie, when they go down
to the planet, the empty wastelands that feel like a
pre created or pre ordered world. I think maybe this
even connects to something we've dwelt on a lot in
Weird House cinema episodes, these empty places scenes in movies
(02:57):
which happened. I don't know, this has come up many times.
I'm thinking of our episodes on Night of the comment
just recently the Last Man on Earth with Fincent Price.
For some reason, that is just a really easy way
to get my attention. I'm into this the waste land
feeling or the empty world. So, in keeping with that
tradition of fascination, I got very interested in talking about
(03:21):
images from these creation stories of what the world is
like before the creation event takes place. So that's what
we've been talking about in the last episode, and we'll
continue in this one creation narratives, but also with the
special focus on what the world was like before the
so called beginning and what kind of meaning or understanding
(03:44):
these pre creation worlds imply. So for a brief refresher
on the last episode, we talked about the Biblical creation
narrative in the Book of Genesis, which is often understood
to be an example of a creation story that actually
is creation ex nihilo. It's taken as an account of
like the creation of the raw substance of reality, but
(04:07):
an interesting and I think to a lot of people.
Surprising thing is that this is almost certainly not the
intention of the original text. Most scholars today who look
at the Hebrew of Genesis one tend to agree that
it is actually not a tale of raw creation, but
a story in which God orders and furnishes a pre existing,
(04:30):
chaotic world. So this pre existing world is described as
a world of darkness and deep waters, you know, the
spirit of God hovering over the water. So it is
a dark and chaotic kind of empty place, but it
is a place. There's something there, there's water, there's you know,
this wind of God, and we talked about that at
some length. We also talked about interesting patterns that appear
(04:55):
in multiple creation stories, often themes of darkness or undiffer
differentiated masses of fluid of some kind existing in the
world before, and creation acts or ordering acts that involve
the separation of substances into discrete categories. I think that's
a really interesting trend. We also talked about the pre
(05:18):
creation world described in the opening lines of the Inuma
a Leash, or the Babylonian epic of Creation, which is
characterized mainly by the things of the world like the
skies and the earth, being nameless, and I thought this
hinted at a really interesting type of ontology in some
ancient Mesopotamian thinking, where in some sense things begin to
(05:40):
exist when they are given names and destinies, so a
concept of existence that is at some level mediated by
human recognition and salience, but also I think related to
the concept you find all over ancient Ear Eastern thinking,
where language itself has some kind of manifestation power to
(06:02):
bring reality into existence. To bring it back to the
Biblical creation narrative. In that narrative, God speaks things into
existence by saying their names. But you also see this,
for example, in ancient Egyptian Heca magic, where speaking or
writing the names of things can manifest them in reality.
Another interesting thing I was reflecting on about the anuma
(06:23):
Aleish creation story that I think is going to be
relevant to one of our major topics today is that
you could legitimately mark multiple places in the story as
the moment of creation. Right, So you could select the
birth of the first gods, after the mingling of the
different kinds of water. You could say, well, that's the
(06:44):
moment of creation. Or you could select the later creation
by combat story where the younger god Marduke kills the
primordial being of saltwater, Tiamot chops up her body like
a fish, and then makes the world we live in
out of it? Which part is the creation? And I
guess in different ways they're both creation events or both
reordering events. And I think that that's an interesting thing
(07:08):
to reflect on. People don't often think about it that way,
that there can be multiple creations occurring sequentially.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I keep and I'm going to come back to this
idea again. I keep thinking about films and sequential films
and in some of these discussions, and it's kind of
like thinking about the Friday the Thirteenth franchise. Yes, there's
a definite first film, but which is the first film
that really sets the tone for what we think of
as Friday the thirteenth.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
That's very true. Yes, So when people think about a
Friday the Thirteenth movie, the thing they're thinking about the
most common types of imagery and patterns don't really appear
until maybe the third movie, and I would argue don't
really get strengthened until the fourth movie. So yeah, that
is very interesting. It's like they're all derivative of the
(07:55):
first one, but the first one doesn't have the key
features of the people think of about the series. Yeah, yeah, Anyway,
in the previous episode, we also talked briefly about parallels
in science. Obviously, religious and cultural creation stories are a
very different type of project from physics based cosmology, so
(08:15):
we weren't trying to say, like, you know, which of
the creation narratives gets the science right. I don't think
that's a very useful project, but at least for some grounding.
We talked about scientific cosmology and about how we don't
really know what, if anything, happened before the before the
beginning of the Big Bang, or more precisely, before the
cosmic inflation. There are some speculative models that could be
(08:39):
candidates for a physics based world before, and these have
over the years included things like a cyclically expanding and
then contracting universe, or the idea that we are some
kind of bubble that emerges from a pre existing universe
and maybe this kind of renucleation just happens infinitely. But
we don't have direct evidence for these types of hypotheses
(09:01):
at present. The best you can do for a world
before in physics is create a model that is mathematically
consistent with the theories and observations we already have, but
it's not going to be There's not really a way
to confirm it with direct observations, at least as far
as we know. Finally, we also talked about a really
interesting creation narrative appearing in some Chinese traditions, which was
(09:25):
the story of Pengu, or the ancient coiled one, who
forms inside a cosmic egg within a cloud of chaotic vapor,
then hatches, and in some tellings, separates the earth from
the sky, sometimes with an axe, and then stands as
a pillar holding the sky up from the earth. Another
interesting tale of creation by separation. We also talked about
(09:49):
versions of the Pengo story, which include the Taoist and
Neo confusion concept of the wouji. And I'm sorry if
I'm pronouncing that wrong, Rob you brought up last time.
How with the inflection that means something totally different, or
it means like nonsense or something, But in the way
I was trying to say it, it is the formless
state of existence before creation, so before the egg of Pegu.
(10:13):
In these tellings with the wuci, it's the state you
might characterize as limitless potential for becoming that is actually
nothing in itself.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah. Yeah, and this, and as in some of the
other concepts we've discussed in specific stories, they're going to
keep coming up again because, as we discussed there, there's
certain various tropes that are popular in understanding and making
sense of the origins of the world or the universe,
and we see these reoccurring with different flavors.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
So let's see, Rob, do you mind if we kick
things off today by looking at one of my examples here?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So. One of the most beautiful and interesting creation narratives
I have come across while reading a bunch of them
for this series is the Maori creation story. Now, with
this one especially, this will be true actually of a
lot of the things we talk about, but with this
one especially, it is important to flag that there is
not one canonical text or telling of this story. There
(11:24):
are a bunch of circulating versions which reflect both regional
and tribal variations, and then variations unique to individual storytellers.
So whatever version of the story you read or that
I tell will not be able to be representative of
all of them. But I'm going to try to capture
some common themes that appear in multiple tellings, with the
(11:45):
caveat that this is not the only nor the authoritative
version of the story.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah. As we've discussed before a lot of times, the
idea of canon when it comes to mythology is even
in Western traditions, kind of an illusion. And then in
Western and now analysis of other cultures is also either
artificial or the product like colonial interference.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, or just the product of textualization events. This come
up in the last episode two that often the version
of a story we start to think of as the
definitive or canonical version is just the version that happened
to get put into print first, or happen to be
widely distributed in print first. Yeah, which might not have
(12:28):
any more purchase on being the original tradition or the
most widespread tradition among the original people who believed it.
It's just the happenstance that it's the one that's in
a book.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah. Yeah. And we see this in the Greek tradition,
for example, There'll be like a key text that ends
up covering everything, and it is popular and it is
a text that survives and continues to continues to resonate
culturally for ages to come.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Exactly. So in the context of Greek and Roman myths,
we're very often going to be thinking of the way
Avid tells it, or the way that Hesiod tells it,
or something like that. Anyway, So there is one particular
account of the Maori creation story that's from an older
book that I just wanted to mention because in one
(13:16):
case it's the only source I found of a detail
that I wanted to flag later. So this older book
is called, in its translated form, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient
Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as furnished by
their priests and chiefs. This was first published in eighteen
fifty five, traditionally credited to the colonial administrator George Gray,
(13:39):
but from what I've read, it was in reality significantly
the work of a writer and Maori tribal leader named
tay Rungi Kaheke, who has long been celebrated for his
work in recording and translating Maori cultural traditions. And I
apologize in advance for any pronunciations that I don't get
quite right here. I'm doing my best based on the
(14:00):
guidelines that I could find online, so I hope I
get reasonably close so the story goes like this, long ago,
the world was in darkness. The Skyfather Rungi Nui and
or sometimes just shortened as Rungi Rungi Nui or Rungi
and the Earth Mother Papa Tuanuku or just Papa were
(14:23):
pressed against one another in a loving embrace. So Skyfather
Rungi and Earth Mother Papa, they're hugging. They're hugging so
tight that no light could penetrate between their bodies. But
there was not nothing between their bodies. There was something
between the Earth and the sky. It was the dwelling
(14:44):
place of their children, the offspring of their union. So
the children of the Sky Father and the Earth Mother
lived smothered in darkness with no space to move. Now,
another quick terminology note, because I initially got confused reading
about this. Sometimes these children of the Sky Father and
the Earth Mother, these younger beings, are translated as gods
(15:09):
in English, and sometimes they're translated as if they are
humans or people, or with words usually applied to humans
like fathers. From what I could tell, the most culturally
appropriate term is going to be the Maori term atua,
which means a kind of supernatural ancestral being. So that's
what I'm going to try to use here. So again
(15:30):
we've got Rungi, the sky father, and Papa, the earth mother,
and they're in this tight embrace, and the children the atuas,
are between them. And what happens next varies by telling,
but in some versions, one of the younger beings, one
of the Atua, suggests that they kill their parents, or
they kill their skyfather Rungi, so that they might break
(15:52):
free of the dark embrace and have both light and
room to move. But then in response another one of
the atuas, this one named tne Matua or just Taune.
This is the Attua of the forests and of birds
and insects and beings that dwell in the forest so
forests and the creatures that dwell there. Tane says he
(16:14):
has a better idea. They will not harm their mother
and father, but instead cleave them apart. So they shall
push their father far away up above, and the children
themselves will remain below, close to their mother who nursed them.
And all of the younger beings agree to this plan
except for one. There is one of the the Atua
(16:37):
named Tafiri Matea, or the Atua of wind and storms,
who is close to his sky father and fearce separation
from him.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Okay, so basically we're dealing with the primordial reverse parent trap.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Oh that's interesting. Yes, so they're trying to get their
parents apart because they I mean, it's hard to blame them.
They they're like totally crushed in between them. The embrace
is so tight. But yes, yes, instead of instead, instead
of setting them up there trying to get them apart.
But it's an impossible job, it seems, because Rungi and
Papa are so vast. How can their embrace be broken?
(17:13):
So all of the younger atua take turns trying, but
eventually the stories often narrate them one by one, each
trying to separate the mother and father in their embrace,
but they can't do it. Eventually, only Tanae is able
to drive them apart, and in one telling I read
this is the telling from the eighteen fifty five book.
(17:36):
The way he accomplishes this is by inverting his body.
He plants his head head upon the body of the
earth mother so on the ground, and then pushes his
skyfather away with his feet and powerful legs, and in
driving Rungi and Papa apart, Tane lets light into the
(17:57):
world and is thus comes to be associated with light.
He's sort of God or the Attua of the forests,
but also in a way of light and in letting
the light in this readies the world for the creation
of humankind and the beginning of history. And in some
tellings it is Tane himself who leads to the creation
(18:21):
of humankind, because he creates the first woman named hine
A Hue by forming her from the earth. So he
takes the soil of the body of his mother, of
the earth mother, and then breathes life into the form
of the new woman he has made by breathing into
her nostrils, and then together with her, Tane becomes the
(18:44):
ancestor of humankind. Though I think the actual story is
more convoluted. There are some steps involved, but they give
rise to humankind down the road. But there are some
interesting consequences of this separation. So after the separation, Rungi
and Papa are in a state of grief about being
(19:04):
torn apart because they were in love, you know, and
now they're separated from one another, and that grief continues
until this day. So Rangi cries for his beloved wife
and his tears become the rain. Meanwhile, Papa cries and
her tears become mists and fog. Papa also is sometimes
(19:27):
depicted as being pregnant with another atua or having a
younger atua, either at her breast or inside her. That
younger atua is I think the youngest of this generation
between them, and is named ru Ru Almoko. And this
younger being embodies earthquakes. So the rumbling from deep inside
(19:48):
the earth is this younger or possibly unborn god stirring
within the Earth Mother. Another consequence is to remember the
dissenting brother, the Tafiri Mati, the only one who did
not want the sky father Rangi pushed away. In some tellings,
he goes up to the sky to join his father
(20:09):
after the separation, and as the embodiment of wind and storms,
he batters the world below as a form of revenge
or punishment. Also, in some versions of the story, Tane,
as the guardian and embodiment of forests, is said to
have clothed his earth mother with trees, either to hide
(20:30):
her nakedness or to comfort her in the grief of
her separation. So there are a lot of things I
find really interesting about this story. One is that it
(20:52):
frames the ordering of the present world not as an
inevitable prelude to anything of value happening. You get that
since in some of these other creation narratives, where it's
like the creation story is what had to happen for
anything interesting or worthwhile to take place, it's not really
like that here. Instead, this story frames it as a
(21:14):
as the victory of one divine party's interests over another's,
and the losing parties continue to exist. So Skyfather and
Earth Mother are perpetually thwarted and held apart from their embrace,
but they still want each other, and they weep for
each other. And the Atua of storms is constantly in reaction,
(21:38):
is whipping the earth with these with these tempests, in
a rage for his father being driven away. Another thing
that I like and find interesting about this story is
that in the narrative, the world before is not depicted
as a bad or worthless place, at least least not
(22:00):
from every perspective. Granted, from some perspectives in the story,
it's not so great, Like the cramped darkness is certainly
not appealing to Dutane and his brothers, but this pre
creation state is not the frightening chaos of nameless, churning
dark waters that we get in some of the stories
(22:20):
we've talked about, like it is, it is not necessarily bad,
and it is not nothingness. At least from Papa and
Rangey's perspective, this primordial state is comfort and love. Isn't
that kind of interesting. It's like it's an embrace so
complete that not even light can pass through it, and
(22:42):
thus the ordering of the world for human habitation is
actually the shattering of a loving embrace.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Yeah, that's fascinating. It's like this like a suffocating togetherness,
Like it's not you know, it's it's certainly not evil.
It may it even sounds like quite good, quite comforting,
but it leaves no room for the development of other things.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah. Yeah, this does imply something kind of profound to me.
And maybe this thought is not fully formed, but I
was thinking about how there is a sense in which
you can view human life as that which begins when
perfect love and comfort is denied and you have to
go searching for something to fill the gap. But coming
(23:30):
back to that point of contrast, I mean this highlighted
for me something I don't think I had thought about
as much in the last episode was how you know,
there's always room for kind of misinterpretation or you know,
reading of attitudes into these ancient stories that maybe the
people who believed in them wouldn't have had. But at
(23:51):
least as far as I can infer from the texts
that are passed down in a lot of these ancient
like especially the Mesopotamian narratives, like that really does seem
to me like the people who believed this thought the
pre creation state was kind of a bad place, Like
it feels like before the world was made, it was
not a good scene, not good. It was like a dangerous, frightening,
(24:14):
poisonous kind of void of meaning and history, and that
finally some order is brought into it in which good
things can happen.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, that is a fascinating point. It'll be it'll be
fun to compare this story too, to the next one
we get into and trying to think about its primordial
state in comparison to this one.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yeah, well maybe we can go right onto that now,
because that's all I've got for now in the Maori
creation narrative. But I really like that one. I'm gonna
be thinking about it a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, that's The great thing about these different creation accounts,
emergence accounts, if you will, they they're they're they're very
thought provoking. They make you think about the texture of
reality in our lives, uh, you know, presumably in the
same way that they made ancient people's think about these questions,
because these are not new questions either, the questions that
(25:06):
humans have been asking, you know, since the dawn of history.
So I'm gonna be talking about specifically about about Aztec mythology,
specifically the legend of the five signs. So we're gonna
be dealing with sequential creations that lead to a fifth
creation our own. And I'm going to come back to
(25:29):
film here for a second, because Joe, maybe you have
a good answer for this, But can you think of
a single film franchise that doesn't really get get good
until the fifth film or hits a notable high point
with film number five. I tried to think of one,
and I could not.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I cannot. What's the fifth hell Raiser movie?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Oh, let's say one. That would be Oh, that would
be the Space one, right.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
I think now that's the fourth one.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Oh, it would be Inferno.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I think Inferno is one of the one that was
originally not a hell raiser movie. It was a repurposed script.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Okay, if it is Inferno and I don't have the
list in front of me, Inferno, I perfectly enjoyed it
at the time, but I don't think it's topping anybody's list.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
I barely remember what happened.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
So yeah, I was coming up with blanks on all
of these a lot of Like, you know, it's a
miracle if any film in a series is any good.
But generally by five they're out of ideas. They're they're
coasting on past ideas, and if they go you know,
too much more than five, they may have great things
in their future, but maybe not yet. Now, when you
(26:36):
think about directors whose fifth films really see them hit
their creative strides, well, there are some much better answers.
You can point to things like Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather
in seventy two, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in seventy six,
or or John Carpenter's Escape from New York in eighty one. Sure, yeah,
and those are all fine films and technically are like
(26:56):
the fifth films in each individual's filmography. You can apply
the same question to musicians and bands, and you can
easily point to such examples as Bowie's The Rise and
Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and
seventy two, or Hey Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath from seventy three.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Yeah, what my daughter's favorite album?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah. Likewise, authors and novels you could single out. I
guess like two that came to my mind, where Kurt
vonnug Gets Slaughterhouse five from sixty nine or Corman McCarthy's
Blood Meridian from eighty five, with McCarthy in particular, like
I love most of the books that preceded Blood Meridian,
but Blood Meridian was certainly a huge hit for him,
(27:38):
and also one that kind of sets the stage for
most of the novels to follow. So let's come back
to mythology. Let's come back to universes creations, cases where
a fifth attempt has led to something that is successful
in a way that previous versions of reality have not been.
(28:01):
You know, that is going to be key to discussions
of as tech mythology here and I as an aside,
I did find at least some chatter online about and
about worlds of software development and engineering that speculated that
like version five of something is really where things come together.
So maybe in that design world or those design worlds,
(28:23):
there's you know a little more logical applied to this,
But I don't know, I kind of get the impression
that there's no there's no set rule about like what
version of you know, what draft is the finished one,
what version of a particular software is going to you know,
really be the sweet spot? You know. It just sort
of happens as it happens.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So this idea that this reality is not the first
creation but the fifth is one of the core concepts
of certain know it cultures and of the Aztec peoples.
They're the idea that there have been five ages, five sons.
And I think you can view these indeed as separate
worlds or as different phases of one world, separated by
(29:06):
catastrophic mass extinction resets.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
So would this be that history is not just suffering
setbacks the way you might think of, like, oh, with
actual the biological history of the Earth, where there's a
mass extinction and it sort of wipes out a lot
of life, but there's still progress to build on each time.
Is it like that or is it more like a
resetting to zero in a way, it's.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Kind of both based on my reading of it, interesting,
you know, And again we kind of come back to
the idea that we can only to a limited extent,
compare like real world linear history to something like this.
And indeed, there's a lot to dissect as well about
the way the Aztec's thought about time and thought about it.
(29:56):
They thought about it in a linear fashion, but a
less linear fashion with like cyclical elements, like cyclical catastrophes
in this case. And also, you know, it's easy to think, well, okay,
we're talking about the same world, but just terrible things
keep happening, but terrible things that require the establishment of
a new sun, which of course is not really possible
(30:16):
or at least extremely far fetched, given our understanding of
the way the solar system works and how reality works.
But again we're dealing with a mythic vision of the
world and its creation. Now, just a reminder about the Aztecs.
The Aztec Empire lasted roughly thirteen twenty five through fifteen
twenty one CE, and it was a dominant meso American
(30:39):
know civilization in Central Mexico with advanced astronomical mathematical, medical, engineering,
and architectural knowledge. The empire fell during the colonial conquest
of the Americas by the Spanish, but now it people
live on. So for a fresh take on this topic,
(31:00):
I turned to the book The Aztec Myths, A Guide
to the Ancient Stories and Legends by Camilla Townsend, whose
work entails less emphasis on colonial accounts and more on
Nowait language sources. So you know, she still you will
allude to these various codeses and so forth, but it's
(31:22):
putting more emphasis on some of the oral histories and
so forth. Along those lines, you'll also find plenty of
breakdowns out there of the five Sons myth that are
very sequential, and I believe these are more based on
the Spanish codeses. But Townshend lays out a less formalized
version of all of this, with more uncertainty about where
(31:43):
each of the prior sons slash ages falls in any
kind of sequential list, noting that the order and details
vary depending on the storyteller.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Oh so, this may be another case where there was,
maybe in the past among some scholars, over confidence in
the fixed of the story based on a textualization event exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, yeah, So it's a great book and I highly
recommend it for anyone who wants to dig deeper. And
she has an additional book on Aztec history that also
looks very good. I didn't pick that one up because
we are focusing more on the mythology here. But anyway,
here are the basics of the myth the basic breakdown,
as she describes it. So, one of the recent suns,
(32:23):
perhaps the first but also possibly the fourth, was born
on the day for water. And eventually that sun died,
the son of that age died, and the floods swept
the people away, the people that lived in that world,
and they became fish.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
But there was one term there I didn't understand. So
one of the sons was born, you said on the
day for water. That's the number four, and then water
is that like a calindrical type of signal.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
In it is my understanding. This is like a translation
of the knaw It name for the day. And it's
also connected to sort of like the flavor of that world. Okay, yeah, okay,
So there will be like different like for water, four winds,
et cetera. Because there's another age, the next one, if
you will that She discusses involves the sun being born
(33:13):
on the day for wind, and when this sun dies,
the people were turned into monkeys and swept through the
tree branches. And then there's another one of the suns
that was born on the day for Ocelot, and the
people of this sun were eaten by man eating beasts,
perhaps some sort of giant feline predators. And this sun
may have been quote swallowed in an eclipse from which
(33:36):
there was no recovery ooh, which is a very ha
thing way of putting it. And this ties into I
think Aztec ideas about what an eclipse was, you know,
not unique to their civilization, where it is the idea
that the moon is being consumed or the sun is
being consumed.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Yeah, and imagining trying to picture it like the sun
goes behind the moon and then does not come out
the other side.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, and then that's the end of your age. Yeah.
The third son, she writes, was born on the day
for rain, and a rain of not water but fire
and lava buried the people of this Sun in a
single day. Possibly she writes as an ancient communal memory
of actual volcanic destruction or just kind of like another
category of known cataclysmic destruction, and then our current age,
(34:23):
the Fifth Son is born on the day for movement,
with the movement possibly referring to earthquakes. Oh interesting, and yeah,
and so this is the age we're in and it
is the age where the gods get everything right, like,
this is the age that everything works. It's beautiful, it
is tremendous as long as we can keep it. And
(34:45):
then a lot in Aztec culture is about well, how
do we keep this sun? You know, things have been
set in motion. Powerful deities are involved in the in
the in the way this world works. But then it
is also our responsibility to help maintain the power of
the sun through you know, among other things are rituals.
(35:09):
So at the creation of this uh, this age, the
age of the Fifth Son, Like basically this comes together
as follows. She describes a dark, pre dawn world upon
which no sun had yet risen. So again this is
kind of like the idea that it's completely new creation.
No sun has ever risen here. And in this world,
(35:29):
the gods gather at Tiatua Khan and they ask each
other who will carry the burden, who will take it
upon himself to be the sun, to become the dawn
to be the dawn son, something that in previous ages
there's had to be, like, you know, the new Sun
has had to be to be like the work and
or sacrifice of a particular god.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Interesting yet another story where at the beginning the thing
that is needed is light.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, yeah, So which god is going to step forth
and be the s Well, there are numerous ones standing around,
and there's a very proud god by the name of
and I'm going to apologize for any pronunciations here I
get incorrect, but you know, trying my best to land them.
Here there's Texis Tecatal and he steps forward, saying like,
(36:18):
yeah it's me. You know who else would it be
proud to do so? But then the gods also kind
of like nominate a particular pimple faced god, Nana Watson,
and he kind of accepts the role with humility, like
he went volunteering. But he's like, okay, you're all pointing
at me, and you know I've gotten a lot of
great stuff out of this gig. Yeah, I'll step forth.
(36:40):
So both of these gods step forth to become the son,
and the proud god Texas Takado he steps forth in
a splendid headdress. And meanwhile Nana Watson is in a
paper crown, and so, you know, one is proud, one
is humble, and they move forth to to leap into
(37:00):
the sacrificial fire that will allow them to become the Sun.
And so the proud God he becomes scared and jumps
back back out of the fire at first. Meanwhile, our
pimple faced, humble god, he you know, he feels the
pain of the fire, but he just keeps going. He's brave,
(37:21):
and so in his immolation he becomes the Sun, our son,
the fifth Son, and watching on text is tacadle he is.
He's sort of like humbled by this and finally jumps
in as well. He becomes the Moon.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Oh interesting, sort of a second place in terms of bravery. Yeah,
humbled by his failure in the first go Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, so yeah. So that also, I didn't I don't
have an answer for this question, and maybe it exists
elsewhere in this text or other text. I don't know
if that means that previous realities had a moon, or
if like a moon is sort of unique to the
Fifth World because of this scenario. Yeah, but it could
(38:05):
be a case where like, how do you imagine a
sun without a moon. That's just part of our human
understanding of things, the duality. But at any rate, the
Fifth Son, the age of the Fifth Son, this is
the Goldilocks territory. Everything is just right, the world's beautiful,
it's balanced. And you know, there were problems with all
of the previous versions of reality, you know, the like
(38:25):
I think it's the first Son in some tellings wasn't
strong enough. It was too weak. Obviously there are monsters
running around eating people in other realities. So this is
the one where everything is just right, isn't it funny?
Speaker 3 (38:37):
How just depending on which way you squint, either the
seems like this is the world that's just right, which
it is, or this is the worst possible world, which
it also is.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, it's true, it's true, and you know the I
guess the the interesting thing is it would have seemed
this way to the Aztecs as well. I mean, there,
I'm you know, they would you know, clearly, there were
problems that they faced, you know, even before the big
problem emerged, so you know they would have they would
have been faced with this reality as well. But uh yeah,
(39:18):
coming back to the gods, though, we're gonna. So on
one level, we already have our answered the question like
what came before the reality, well, different realities stretching back
to a different like primordial age. And through each of
these worlds, each of these universes, each of these sons,
(39:38):
we had. The gods, the Aztec gods were present for
each of these ages, and they began, however, prior to
any of these sun ages, with a primordial dual deity
named ome Za Waddle, which consisted of feminine aspects to
(39:59):
Naka Kuti and Tonaka Seawattle. There's a nice artistic rendering
of this dual entity in a book I have. This
is by Ellen Stevens and illustrated by an artist who
goes by the name Echo. It's called a pre Columbian Bestiary.
I included just a snapshot that I took of me
(40:21):
holding the book open in my front yard. Joe. For
you others out there, I recommend you pick up the book.
I couldn't find an image of this one online. But yeah,
imagine an entity that is also two beings. So it
is a single god, but it is a dual god.
It is an entity of duality.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, at least in this left illustration you've included.
I would say that it has oh elements of being
like one big complex geometric head or face, but it
also looks kind of like two bodies joined in an
embrace or twister. Maybe kind of a sexual energy to it.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Yeah, yeah, so we have really really cool primordial energy
to this entity. So the dual god produces offspring before
any of the ages of the Sun, and the initial
offspring take the form of the four brother gods, which
some of these we've discussed in on the show before.
So first up, we have the lord of the smoking mirror,
(41:20):
tes Calipoca. Then we have the feathered serpent quetzal Cotal,
and then we have the flayed one sheipe Totec, and
then we also have Wetzelpacli, the god of war, and
they have other dimensions beyond what I mentioned here, but
that's just like the brief rundown of who they are.
And so at first, these brother gods are more or
(41:42):
less in equilibrium, but is each with each age of
the Sun they quarrel with each other, and that equilibrium
is just not sustained. And also it's like each of
the previous four ages the Sun is sort of headed
out by one particular god. So, for instance, the sun
that the various accounts say the sun that Haspoca PoCA
(42:04):
is responsible for, it's not bright enough, which makes sense
because he's not the lord of light, he's the Lord
of the black mirror. So back to the creator here,
where does this creator come from? Because that ultimately is
is where we're getting to. You know, we can say, well,
what came before this world for previous worlds, but what
came before all worlds? What is the true primordial nature
(42:28):
out of which indeed this god emerges And so apparently
the way it goes down is ometsuwattle. The dual God
kind of emerges, springs into existence, or is self born,
bringing about the creation of the universe as well, which
leads to the creation of the First Son and the
gods and so forth. And then after all of this
(42:53):
is done, the dual God continues to dwell in what
is sometimes called the thirteenth Aztec heaven, though heaven, of course,
is a very loaded Western term, and we'll get into
that a little bit here. But this particular realm is
called omeicin which scholar mevel Leon Portella described in Aztec
(43:15):
Thought and Culture, a study of the ancient non all
mind as quote, the mansion of duality, the source of
generation and life, the ultimate or meta physical region, the
primordial dwelling place of the Ometzuwadel. So this is, according
to Portilla quote, the place of cosmic origin of all things,
(43:37):
and so the original deity dwells here, but the dual
deity also exists, it's said, in the navel of the
world and also in all things. So this entity is
at the center of everything, but also is in everything.
And there's a you know, there's a real sense of
cosmic potential to this realm that it lives in. This
(44:02):
Omeo can realm. It is, it's it's sometimes said to
be the place where human souls originate, and it is
described by Portilla as a place quote beyond time m hm. So,
which we'll come back to.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
I'm seeing a lot of I'm seeing a lot of
tensions here, like things existing both in the center of
the world and seemingly outside of it at the same time.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's one of the really things
about this whole realm of of omeo Okin, this place
where the dual God resides, because it's like this is
at once kind of like the primordial state of things,
but also a place that still exists within these sort
of metaphysical uh map of creation for the Aztec. So
(44:51):
it's kind of like, you know, like to call it
to Heaven's not quite the same. Maybe it did, depending
on how you interpret heaven. But it's almost like if
you try, I do like to compare it to you know,
scientific cosmology. Uh, it's like saying, like, Okay, the world,
the universe began with the Big Bang, but then the
Big Bang still exists and it's here, you know, in
(45:13):
its own sort of pocket dimension. So if I'm understanding
it all correctly. According to as Tech mythology, our world
was preceded by four separate takes on the world or reality,
each with a different sun. And before the first world,
before the creation of the gods that would create and
govern these different worlds, an all powerful, dual creator god
emerged out of a kind of dark, timeless ocean of
(45:34):
endless potential and non time, and that place of endless
potential still exist as its own dimension within the broader cosmology.
Speaker 3 (45:44):
Okay, that's complex.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And that's one of the
things that Portilla really drives home it's like, you know,
we're not dealing with just sort of like a rough
sketch of what things you know might have been, Like
you know, the Aztecs were deeply, deeply invested in this
idea and the philosophy of this idea, Like, you know,
it's a very deep concept. And I think I think
(46:07):
the idea too, is that sometimes you know, Western views
of as technothology may be somewhat dismissive of its complexity.
This idea that Omeo can is beyond time, though, it
reminded me of some things that I'd read from Joseph
Campbell about eternity being beyond time, So there being a
(46:30):
difference between we might think of something as being eternal
and that it lasts forever or it's long lasting, but
like true eternity is something that is outside of time,
and I think that is what we're talking about here.
You know, we were talking earlier about the role language
plays and all of this, like thinking about how language
(46:51):
changes and or enables humans to think about, you know,
distant primordial origins in a way like what does like
what does time do? Like we think of time, like
thinking of time not only as like a constant knowing
that that we have this procession of events, but also
knowing that it's human perception of time that ends up
(47:13):
coloring these different views of what of what the world
is and what came before. But Portella writes that for
the Aztecs, quote, space and time are conceived not as
empty stage settings, but as factors that combine to regulate
the occurrence of cosmic events. So that one takes I
(47:34):
think a minute to sink in. But you know, it's
this idea that, like time, for the Aztecs had weight
and was alive and was carried and and you know,
it's it's not just this thing that's passively occurring, like
we're not We're not just in time riding down a
river like. It's a lot more complicated than that. And
(47:55):
it also ties into the various ritual acts that have
to be carried out the Aztecs to ensure the continuation
of things. So yeah, I found that really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
If I'm interpreting this right. So we've described some of
these other creation narratives as stage setting in a way
that a lot of times the initial ordering of the
world and a creation narrative seems to be setting the
stage on which history can take place. Now, characters, maybe
gods or humans can enter and do things on this
(48:31):
stage we've created. But the way the Aztec conception of
space and time is being described here, it sounds like
it's not just a place in which history happens, that
space and time are mechanisms, that they are the gears
that are turned in order to drive events within the
(48:52):
cosmos and within history.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Yeah. Yeah, that's the vibe I'm getting as well.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Not just the paper but the pencil in a way.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, or at least that's as close as
I can come to really comprehending it here. I've also
I also saw it put like this, this interesting idea
that a metsu Wadel is kind of the ontological sustainer
of the universe. Like again, he sets in the navel
and sort of sustains everything from the navel, but then
(49:24):
the rituals and devotions of the Aztec people serve as
the mechanical sustainer, so ensuring even the durability of the
fifth Son. So like everything like this is the best world,
but this world takes a lot of work to keep going,
And apparently it's not, or at least the vibe I
get here is there's no guarantee that will continue on.
(49:45):
There's no guarantee there won't have to be a sixth son,
but you know, we have a fifth son as long
as we can keep it. So yeah, I really I
really enjoyed diving into this one. And again, you know,
we have this concept of like what came before, something
like some sort of place where there's there's no light
yet there's no there's not time, but there is potential
(50:09):
for things and and then things begin, you know, to
be set in motion.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Okay, well, I think we are hitting our time limit
for today's episode, but I know we had more to
say about this topic. And yet at the same time,
we have some different episodes planned to record next week.
So I think what we're gonna have to do is
break at least for a week from talking about this
the concept of worlds before and the the what came
(50:37):
before in creation myths, and maybe we will come back
to this in two or three weeks. Maybe we got
a date with the worlds before in the near future.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I think. So, yeah, we've got some some other stuff
that we're already obligated to cover, but yeah, we'll come
back to this and in the meantime you can write
in and if you're if you know you're a particular
fan or or you know we're culturally attached to a
particular mythology and you're like, oh, definitely cover this one next. Well,
you have I think an appropriate amount of time to
get in touch with this and say, hey, make sure
(51:06):
this one's on your radar.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Yeah, Or if you have anything you would like to
add to the subjects we've already talked about.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Please absolutely yes, all right, Well, just a reminder as
we close out here. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is,
of course a science and culture podcast, primarily with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a
short form episode, and on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
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 (51:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Robert Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick, and we are
returning today with the second part in our series about
worlds before Creation. The idea behind this series is that
very often when we think about a creation myth or
a creation story, we imagine what's called a creation ex nihilo.
(00:37):
So there is nothing, and then suddenly, for some reason
or by some act, a world is brought into being.
So nothing existed before. Now there's a world. But the
interesting thing is that if you start really looking at
creation stories from all around the world, it seems to
me that very few of them actually fit this description.
(01:00):
And instead of being accounts of how the raw substance
of the universe was brought into existence, what you most
often get instead is a before and after story where
a world of some kind already exists, usually in some
kind of static or chaotic state, and then something happens
(01:23):
which introduces distinctions and differences and somehow orders this pre
existing world in such a way that characters can now
exist and events can take place within it. And I
realized that I've talked on the show plenty of times
before about being attracted to imagery of weird wastelands and dark,
(01:47):
unpopulated places. I don't know how unique I am in this.
Maybe basically everybody thinks this is interesting, but I don't know,
but it feels kind of personal to me that, for
whatever reason, I have never been able to forget about
that chapter in the Time Machine or the time Traveler
goes millions of years into the future and sees this desolate,
(02:08):
withering earth under the red sun and no people in it,
just these crab monsters and stuff. Or the way I
was talking in the last episode about being really haunted
by that very short description at the beginning of the
Book of Genesis of the dark, the dark deep waters
in the wind of God rushing above them.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Here's another one for you, since we're about to come
up on Alien Day, but the Service of the Planet
LV four twenty six.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's always That's always been one of
my favorite parts of the movie, when they go down
to the planet, the empty wastelands that feel like a
pre created or pre ordered world. I think maybe this
even connects to something we've dwelt on a lot in
Weird House cinema episodes, these empty places scenes in movies
(02:57):
which happened. I don't know, this has come up many times.
I'm thinking of our episodes on Night of the comment
just recently the Last Man on Earth with Fincent Price.
For some reason, that is just a really easy way
to get my attention. I'm into this the waste land
feeling or the empty world. So, in keeping with that
tradition of fascination, I got very interested in talking about
(03:21):
images from these creation stories of what the world is
like before the creation event takes place. So that's what
we've been talking about in the last episode, and we'll
continue in this one creation narratives, but also with the
special focus on what the world was like before the
so called beginning and what kind of meaning or understanding
(03:44):
these pre creation worlds imply. So for a brief refresher
on the last episode, we talked about the Biblical creation
narrative in the Book of Genesis, which is often understood
to be an example of a creation story that actually
is creation ex nihilo. It's taken as an account of
like the creation of the raw substance of reality, but
(04:07):
an interesting and I think to a lot of people.
Surprising thing is that this is almost certainly not the
intention of the original text. Most scholars today who look
at the Hebrew of Genesis one tend to agree that
it is actually not a tale of raw creation, but
a story in which God orders and furnishes a pre existing,
(04:30):
chaotic world. So this pre existing world is described as
a world of darkness and deep waters, you know, the
spirit of God hovering over the water. So it is
a dark and chaotic kind of empty place, but it
is a place. There's something there, there's water, there's you know,
this wind of God, and we talked about that at
some length. We also talked about interesting patterns that appear
(04:55):
in multiple creation stories, often themes of darkness or undiffer
differentiated masses of fluid of some kind existing in the
world before, and creation acts or ordering acts that involve
the separation of substances into discrete categories. I think that's
a really interesting trend. We also talked about the pre
(05:18):
creation world described in the opening lines of the Inuma
a Leash, or the Babylonian epic of Creation, which is
characterized mainly by the things of the world like the
skies and the earth, being nameless, and I thought this
hinted at a really interesting type of ontology in some
ancient Mesopotamian thinking, where in some sense things begin to
(05:40):
exist when they are given names and destinies, so a
concept of existence that is at some level mediated by
human recognition and salience, but also I think related to
the concept you find all over ancient Ear Eastern thinking,
where language itself has some kind of manifestation power to
(06:02):
bring reality into existence. To bring it back to the
Biblical creation narrative. In that narrative, God speaks things into
existence by saying their names. But you also see this,
for example, in ancient Egyptian Heca magic, where speaking or
writing the names of things can manifest them in reality.
Another interesting thing I was reflecting on about the anuma
(06:23):
Aleish creation story that I think is going to be
relevant to one of our major topics today is that
you could legitimately mark multiple places in the story as
the moment of creation. Right, So you could select the
birth of the first gods, after the mingling of the
different kinds of water. You could say, well, that's the
(06:44):
moment of creation. Or you could select the later creation
by combat story where the younger god Marduke kills the
primordial being of saltwater, Tiamot chops up her body like
a fish, and then makes the world we live in
out of it? Which part is the creation? And I
guess in different ways they're both creation events or both
reordering events. And I think that that's an interesting thing
(07:08):
to reflect on. People don't often think about it that way,
that there can be multiple creations occurring sequentially.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I keep and I'm going to come back to this
idea again. I keep thinking about films and sequential films
and in some of these discussions, and it's kind of
like thinking about the Friday the Thirteenth franchise. Yes, there's
a definite first film, but which is the first film
that really sets the tone for what we think of
as Friday the thirteenth.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
That's very true. Yes, So when people think about a
Friday the Thirteenth movie, the thing they're thinking about the
most common types of imagery and patterns don't really appear
until maybe the third movie, and I would argue don't
really get strengthened until the fourth movie. So yeah, that
is very interesting. It's like they're all derivative of the
(07:55):
first one, but the first one doesn't have the key
features of the people think of about the series. Yeah, yeah, Anyway,
in the previous episode, we also talked briefly about parallels
in science. Obviously, religious and cultural creation stories are a
very different type of project from physics based cosmology, so
(08:15):
we weren't trying to say, like, you know, which of
the creation narratives gets the science right. I don't think
that's a very useful project, but at least for some grounding.
We talked about scientific cosmology and about how we don't
really know what, if anything, happened before the before the
beginning of the Big Bang, or more precisely, before the
cosmic inflation. There are some speculative models that could be
(08:39):
candidates for a physics based world before, and these have
over the years included things like a cyclically expanding and
then contracting universe, or the idea that we are some
kind of bubble that emerges from a pre existing universe
and maybe this kind of renucleation just happens infinitely. But
we don't have direct evidence for these types of hypotheses
(09:01):
at present. The best you can do for a world
before in physics is create a model that is mathematically
consistent with the theories and observations we already have, but
it's not going to be There's not really a way
to confirm it with direct observations, at least as far
as we know. Finally, we also talked about a really
interesting creation narrative appearing in some Chinese traditions, which was
(09:25):
the story of Pengu, or the ancient coiled one, who
forms inside a cosmic egg within a cloud of chaotic vapor,
then hatches, and in some tellings, separates the earth from
the sky, sometimes with an axe, and then stands as
a pillar holding the sky up from the earth. Another
interesting tale of creation by separation. We also talked about
(09:49):
versions of the Pengo story, which include the Taoist and
Neo confusion concept of the wouji. And I'm sorry if
I'm pronouncing that wrong, Rob you brought up last time.
How with the inflection that means something totally different, or
it means like nonsense or something, But in the way
I was trying to say it, it is the formless
state of existence before creation, so before the egg of Pegu.
(10:13):
In these tellings with the wuci, it's the state you
might characterize as limitless potential for becoming that is actually
nothing in itself.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah. Yeah, and this, and as in some of the
other concepts we've discussed in specific stories, they're going to
keep coming up again because, as we discussed there, there's
certain various tropes that are popular in understanding and making
sense of the origins of the world or the universe,
and we see these reoccurring with different flavors.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
So let's see, Rob, do you mind if we kick
things off today by looking at one of my examples here?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So. One of the most beautiful and interesting creation narratives
I have come across while reading a bunch of them
for this series is the Maori creation story. Now, with
this one especially, this will be true actually of a
lot of the things we talk about, but with this
one especially, it is important to flag that there is
not one canonical text or telling of this story. There
(11:24):
are a bunch of circulating versions which reflect both regional
and tribal variations, and then variations unique to individual storytellers.
So whatever version of the story you read or that
I tell will not be able to be representative of
all of them. But I'm going to try to capture
some common themes that appear in multiple tellings, with the
(11:45):
caveat that this is not the only nor the authoritative
version of the story.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah. As we've discussed before a lot of times, the
idea of canon when it comes to mythology is even
in Western traditions, kind of an illusion. And then in
Western and now analysis of other cultures is also either
artificial or the product like colonial interference.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, or just the product of textualization events. This come
up in the last episode two that often the version
of a story we start to think of as the
definitive or canonical version is just the version that happened
to get put into print first, or happen to be
widely distributed in print first. Yeah, which might not have
(12:28):
any more purchase on being the original tradition or the
most widespread tradition among the original people who believed it.
It's just the happenstance that it's the one that's in
a book.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah. Yeah. And we see this in the Greek tradition,
for example, There'll be like a key text that ends
up covering everything, and it is popular and it is
a text that survives and continues to continues to resonate
culturally for ages to come.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Exactly. So in the context of Greek and Roman myths,
we're very often going to be thinking of the way
Avid tells it, or the way that Hesiod tells it,
or something like that. Anyway, So there is one particular
account of the Maori creation story that's from an older
book that I just wanted to mention because in one
(13:16):
case it's the only source I found of a detail
that I wanted to flag later. So this older book
is called, in its translated form, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient
Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as furnished by
their priests and chiefs. This was first published in eighteen
fifty five, traditionally credited to the colonial administrator George Gray,
(13:39):
but from what I've read, it was in reality significantly
the work of a writer and Maori tribal leader named
tay Rungi Kaheke, who has long been celebrated for his
work in recording and translating Maori cultural traditions. And I
apologize in advance for any pronunciations that I don't get
quite right here. I'm doing my best based on the
(14:00):
guidelines that I could find online, so I hope I
get reasonably close so the story goes like this, long ago,
the world was in darkness. The Skyfather Rungi Nui and
or sometimes just shortened as Rungi Rungi Nui or Rungi
and the Earth Mother Papa Tuanuku or just Papa were
(14:23):
pressed against one another in a loving embrace. So Skyfather
Rungi and Earth Mother Papa, they're hugging. They're hugging so
tight that no light could penetrate between their bodies. But
there was not nothing between their bodies. There was something
between the Earth and the sky. It was the dwelling
(14:44):
place of their children, the offspring of their union. So
the children of the Sky Father and the Earth Mother
lived smothered in darkness with no space to move. Now,
another quick terminology note, because I initially got confused reading
about this. Sometimes these children of the Sky Father and
the Earth Mother, these younger beings, are translated as gods
(15:09):
in English, and sometimes they're translated as if they are
humans or people, or with words usually applied to humans
like fathers. From what I could tell, the most culturally
appropriate term is going to be the Maori term atua,
which means a kind of supernatural ancestral being. So that's
what I'm going to try to use here. So again
(15:30):
we've got Rungi, the sky father, and Papa, the earth mother,
and they're in this tight embrace, and the children the atuas,
are between them. And what happens next varies by telling,
but in some versions, one of the younger beings, one
of the Atua, suggests that they kill their parents, or
they kill their skyfather Rungi, so that they might break
(15:52):
free of the dark embrace and have both light and
room to move. But then in response another one of
the atuas, this one named tne Matua or just Taune.
This is the Attua of the forests and of birds
and insects and beings that dwell in the forest so
forests and the creatures that dwell there. Tane says he
(16:14):
has a better idea. They will not harm their mother
and father, but instead cleave them apart. So they shall
push their father far away up above, and the children
themselves will remain below, close to their mother who nursed them.
And all of the younger beings agree to this plan
except for one. There is one of the the Atua
(16:37):
named Tafiri Matea, or the Atua of wind and storms,
who is close to his sky father and fearce separation
from him.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Okay, so basically we're dealing with the primordial reverse parent trap.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Oh that's interesting. Yes, so they're trying to get their
parents apart because they I mean, it's hard to blame them.
They they're like totally crushed in between them. The embrace
is so tight. But yes, yes, instead of instead, instead
of setting them up there trying to get them apart.
But it's an impossible job, it seems, because Rungi and
Papa are so vast. How can their embrace be broken?
(17:13):
So all of the younger atua take turns trying, but
eventually the stories often narrate them one by one, each
trying to separate the mother and father in their embrace,
but they can't do it. Eventually, only Tanae is able
to drive them apart, and in one telling I read
this is the telling from the eighteen fifty five book.
(17:36):
The way he accomplishes this is by inverting his body.
He plants his head head upon the body of the
earth mother so on the ground, and then pushes his
skyfather away with his feet and powerful legs, and in
driving Rungi and Papa apart, Tane lets light into the
(17:57):
world and is thus comes to be associated with light.
He's sort of God or the Attua of the forests,
but also in a way of light and in letting
the light in this readies the world for the creation
of humankind and the beginning of history. And in some
tellings it is Tane himself who leads to the creation
(18:21):
of humankind, because he creates the first woman named hine
A Hue by forming her from the earth. So he
takes the soil of the body of his mother, of
the earth mother, and then breathes life into the form
of the new woman he has made by breathing into
her nostrils, and then together with her, Tane becomes the
(18:44):
ancestor of humankind. Though I think the actual story is
more convoluted. There are some steps involved, but they give
rise to humankind down the road. But there are some
interesting consequences of this separation. So after the separation, Rungi
and Papa are in a state of grief about being
(19:04):
torn apart because they were in love, you know, and
now they're separated from one another, and that grief continues
until this day. So Rangi cries for his beloved wife
and his tears become the rain. Meanwhile, Papa cries and
her tears become mists and fog. Papa also is sometimes
(19:27):
depicted as being pregnant with another atua or having a
younger atua, either at her breast or inside her. That
younger atua is I think the youngest of this generation
between them, and is named ru Ru Almoko. And this
younger being embodies earthquakes. So the rumbling from deep inside
(19:48):
the earth is this younger or possibly unborn god stirring
within the Earth Mother. Another consequence is to remember the
dissenting brother, the Tafiri Mati, the only one who did
not want the sky father Rangi pushed away. In some tellings,
he goes up to the sky to join his father
(20:09):
after the separation, and as the embodiment of wind and storms,
he batters the world below as a form of revenge
or punishment. Also, in some versions of the story, Tane,
as the guardian and embodiment of forests, is said to
have clothed his earth mother with trees, either to hide
(20:30):
her nakedness or to comfort her in the grief of
her separation. So there are a lot of things I
find really interesting about this story. One is that it
(20:52):
frames the ordering of the present world not as an
inevitable prelude to anything of value happening. You get that
since in some of these other creation narratives, where it's
like the creation story is what had to happen for
anything interesting or worthwhile to take place, it's not really
like that here. Instead, this story frames it as a
(21:14):
as the victory of one divine party's interests over another's,
and the losing parties continue to exist. So Skyfather and
Earth Mother are perpetually thwarted and held apart from their embrace,
but they still want each other, and they weep for
each other. And the Atua of storms is constantly in reaction,
(21:38):
is whipping the earth with these with these tempests, in
a rage for his father being driven away. Another thing
that I like and find interesting about this story is
that in the narrative, the world before is not depicted
as a bad or worthless place, at least least not
(22:00):
from every perspective. Granted, from some perspectives in the story,
it's not so great, Like the cramped darkness is certainly
not appealing to Dutane and his brothers, but this pre
creation state is not the frightening chaos of nameless, churning
dark waters that we get in some of the stories
(22:20):
we've talked about, like it is, it is not necessarily bad,
and it is not nothingness. At least from Papa and
Rangey's perspective, this primordial state is comfort and love. Isn't
that kind of interesting. It's like it's an embrace so
complete that not even light can pass through it, and
(22:42):
thus the ordering of the world for human habitation is
actually the shattering of a loving embrace.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Yeah, that's fascinating. It's like this like a suffocating togetherness,
Like it's not you know, it's it's certainly not evil.
It may it even sounds like quite good, quite comforting,
but it leaves no room for the development of other things.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah. Yeah, this does imply something kind of profound to me.
And maybe this thought is not fully formed, but I
was thinking about how there is a sense in which
you can view human life as that which begins when
perfect love and comfort is denied and you have to
go searching for something to fill the gap. But coming
(23:30):
back to that point of contrast, I mean this highlighted
for me something I don't think I had thought about
as much in the last episode was how you know,
there's always room for kind of misinterpretation or you know,
reading of attitudes into these ancient stories that maybe the
people who believed in them wouldn't have had. But at
(23:51):
least as far as I can infer from the texts
that are passed down in a lot of these ancient
like especially the Mesopotamian narratives, like that really does seem
to me like the people who believed this thought the
pre creation state was kind of a bad place, Like
it feels like before the world was made, it was
not a good scene, not good. It was like a dangerous, frightening,
(24:14):
poisonous kind of void of meaning and history, and that
finally some order is brought into it in which good
things can happen.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, that is a fascinating point. It'll be it'll be
fun to compare this story too, to the next one
we get into and trying to think about its primordial
state in comparison to this one.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yeah, well maybe we can go right onto that now,
because that's all I've got for now in the Maori
creation narrative. But I really like that one. I'm gonna
be thinking about it a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, that's The great thing about these different creation accounts,
emergence accounts, if you will, they they're they're they're very
thought provoking. They make you think about the texture of
reality in our lives, uh, you know, presumably in the
same way that they made ancient people's think about these questions,
because these are not new questions either, the questions that
(25:06):
humans have been asking, you know, since the dawn of history.
So I'm gonna be talking about specifically about about Aztec mythology,
specifically the legend of the five signs. So we're gonna
be dealing with sequential creations that lead to a fifth
creation our own. And I'm going to come back to
(25:29):
film here for a second, because Joe, maybe you have
a good answer for this, But can you think of
a single film franchise that doesn't really get get good
until the fifth film or hits a notable high point
with film number five. I tried to think of one,
and I could not.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I cannot. What's the fifth hell Raiser movie?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Oh, let's say one. That would be Oh, that would
be the Space one, right.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
I think now that's the fourth one.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Oh, it would be Inferno.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I think Inferno is one of the one that was
originally not a hell raiser movie. It was a repurposed script.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Okay, if it is Inferno and I don't have the
list in front of me, Inferno, I perfectly enjoyed it
at the time, but I don't think it's topping anybody's list.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
I barely remember what happened.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
So yeah, I was coming up with blanks on all
of these a lot of Like, you know, it's a
miracle if any film in a series is any good.
But generally by five they're out of ideas. They're they're
coasting on past ideas, and if they go you know,
too much more than five, they may have great things
in their future, but maybe not yet. Now, when you
(26:36):
think about directors whose fifth films really see them hit
their creative strides, well, there are some much better answers.
You can point to things like Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather
in seventy two, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in seventy six,
or or John Carpenter's Escape from New York in eighty one. Sure, yeah,
and those are all fine films and technically are like
(26:56):
the fifth films in each individual's filmography. You can apply
the same question to musicians and bands, and you can
easily point to such examples as Bowie's The Rise and
Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and
seventy two, or Hey Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath from seventy three.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Yeah, what my daughter's favorite album?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah. Likewise, authors and novels you could single out. I
guess like two that came to my mind, where Kurt
vonnug Gets Slaughterhouse five from sixty nine or Corman McCarthy's
Blood Meridian from eighty five, with McCarthy in particular, like
I love most of the books that preceded Blood Meridian,
but Blood Meridian was certainly a huge hit for him,
(27:38):
and also one that kind of sets the stage for
most of the novels to follow. So let's come back
to mythology. Let's come back to universes creations, cases where
a fifth attempt has led to something that is successful
in a way that previous versions of reality have not been.
(28:01):
You know, that is going to be key to discussions
of as tech mythology here and I as an aside,
I did find at least some chatter online about and
about worlds of software development and engineering that speculated that
like version five of something is really where things come together.
So maybe in that design world or those design worlds,
(28:23):
there's you know a little more logical applied to this,
But I don't know, I kind of get the impression
that there's no there's no set rule about like what
version of you know, what draft is the finished one,
what version of a particular software is going to you know,
really be the sweet spot? You know. It just sort
of happens as it happens.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So this idea that this reality is not the first
creation but the fifth is one of the core concepts
of certain know it cultures and of the Aztec peoples.
They're the idea that there have been five ages, five sons.
And I think you can view these indeed as separate
worlds or as different phases of one world, separated by
(29:06):
catastrophic mass extinction resets.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
So would this be that history is not just suffering
setbacks the way you might think of, like, oh, with
actual the biological history of the Earth, where there's a
mass extinction and it sort of wipes out a lot
of life, but there's still progress to build on each time.
Is it like that or is it more like a
resetting to zero in a way, it's.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Kind of both based on my reading of it, interesting,
you know, And again we kind of come back to
the idea that we can only to a limited extent,
compare like real world linear history to something like this.
And indeed, there's a lot to dissect as well about
the way the Aztec's thought about time and thought about it.
(29:56):
They thought about it in a linear fashion, but a
less linear fashion with like cyclical elements, like cyclical catastrophes
in this case. And also, you know, it's easy to think, well, okay,
we're talking about the same world, but just terrible things
keep happening, but terrible things that require the establishment of
a new sun, which of course is not really possible
(30:16):
or at least extremely far fetched, given our understanding of
the way the solar system works and how reality works.
But again we're dealing with a mythic vision of the
world and its creation. Now, just a reminder about the Aztecs.
The Aztec Empire lasted roughly thirteen twenty five through fifteen
twenty one CE, and it was a dominant meso American
(30:39):
know civilization in Central Mexico with advanced astronomical mathematical, medical, engineering,
and architectural knowledge. The empire fell during the colonial conquest
of the Americas by the Spanish, but now it people
live on. So for a fresh take on this topic,
(31:00):
I turned to the book The Aztec Myths, A Guide
to the Ancient Stories and Legends by Camilla Townsend, whose
work entails less emphasis on colonial accounts and more on
Nowait language sources. So you know, she still you will
allude to these various codeses and so forth, but it's
(31:22):
putting more emphasis on some of the oral histories and
so forth. Along those lines, you'll also find plenty of
breakdowns out there of the five Sons myth that are
very sequential, and I believe these are more based on
the Spanish codeses. But Townshend lays out a less formalized
version of all of this, with more uncertainty about where
(31:43):
each of the prior sons slash ages falls in any
kind of sequential list, noting that the order and details
vary depending on the storyteller.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Oh so, this may be another case where there was,
maybe in the past among some scholars, over confidence in
the fixed of the story based on a textualization event exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, yeah, So it's a great book and I highly
recommend it for anyone who wants to dig deeper. And
she has an additional book on Aztec history that also
looks very good. I didn't pick that one up because
we are focusing more on the mythology here. But anyway,
here are the basics of the myth the basic breakdown,
as she describes it. So, one of the recent suns,
(32:23):
perhaps the first but also possibly the fourth, was born
on the day for water. And eventually that sun died,
the son of that age died, and the floods swept
the people away, the people that lived in that world,
and they became fish.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
But there was one term there I didn't understand. So
one of the sons was born, you said on the
day for water. That's the number four, and then water
is that like a calindrical type of signal.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
In it is my understanding. This is like a translation
of the knaw It name for the day. And it's
also connected to sort of like the flavor of that world. Okay, yeah, okay,
So there will be like different like for water, four winds,
et cetera. Because there's another age, the next one, if
you will that She discusses involves the sun being born
(33:13):
on the day for wind, and when this sun dies,
the people were turned into monkeys and swept through the
tree branches. And then there's another one of the suns
that was born on the day for Ocelot, and the
people of this sun were eaten by man eating beasts,
perhaps some sort of giant feline predators. And this sun
may have been quote swallowed in an eclipse from which
(33:36):
there was no recovery ooh, which is a very ha
thing way of putting it. And this ties into I
think Aztec ideas about what an eclipse was, you know,
not unique to their civilization, where it is the idea
that the moon is being consumed or the sun is
being consumed.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Yeah, and imagining trying to picture it like the sun
goes behind the moon and then does not come out
the other side.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah, and then that's the end of your age. Yeah.
The third son, she writes, was born on the day
for rain, and a rain of not water but fire
and lava buried the people of this Sun in a
single day. Possibly she writes as an ancient communal memory
of actual volcanic destruction or just kind of like another
category of known cataclysmic destruction, and then our current age,
(34:23):
the Fifth Son is born on the day for movement,
with the movement possibly referring to earthquakes. Oh interesting, and yeah,
and so this is the age we're in and it
is the age where the gods get everything right, like,
this is the age that everything works. It's beautiful, it
is tremendous as long as we can keep it. And
(34:45):
then a lot in Aztec culture is about well, how
do we keep this sun? You know, things have been
set in motion. Powerful deities are involved in the in
the in the way this world works. But then it
is also our responsibility to help maintain the power of
the sun through you know, among other things are rituals.
(35:09):
So at the creation of this uh, this age, the
age of the Fifth Son, Like basically this comes together
as follows. She describes a dark, pre dawn world upon
which no sun had yet risen. So again this is
kind of like the idea that it's completely new creation.
No sun has ever risen here. And in this world,
(35:29):
the gods gather at Tiatua Khan and they ask each
other who will carry the burden, who will take it
upon himself to be the sun, to become the dawn
to be the dawn son, something that in previous ages
there's had to be, like, you know, the new Sun
has had to be to be like the work and
or sacrifice of a particular god.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Interesting yet another story where at the beginning the thing
that is needed is light.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Yeah, yeah, So which god is going to step forth
and be the s Well, there are numerous ones standing around,
and there's a very proud god by the name of
and I'm going to apologize for any pronunciations here I
get incorrect, but you know, trying my best to land them.
Here there's Texis Tecatal and he steps forward, saying like,
(36:18):
yeah it's me. You know who else would it be
proud to do so? But then the gods also kind
of like nominate a particular pimple faced god, Nana Watson,
and he kind of accepts the role with humility, like
he went volunteering. But he's like, okay, you're all pointing
at me, and you know I've gotten a lot of
great stuff out of this gig. Yeah, I'll step forth.
(36:40):
So both of these gods step forth to become the son,
and the proud god Texas Takado he steps forth in
a splendid headdress. And meanwhile Nana Watson is in a
paper crown, and so, you know, one is proud, one
is humble, and they move forth to to leap into
(37:00):
the sacrificial fire that will allow them to become the Sun.
And so the proud God he becomes scared and jumps
back back out of the fire at first. Meanwhile, our
pimple faced, humble god, he you know, he feels the
pain of the fire, but he just keeps going. He's brave,
(37:21):
and so in his immolation he becomes the Sun, our son,
the fifth Son, and watching on text is tacadle he is.
He's sort of like humbled by this and finally jumps
in as well. He becomes the Moon.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Oh interesting, sort of a second place in terms of bravery. Yeah,
humbled by his failure in the first go Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, so yeah. So that also, I didn't I don't
have an answer for this question, and maybe it exists
elsewhere in this text or other text. I don't know
if that means that previous realities had a moon, or
if like a moon is sort of unique to the
Fifth World because of this scenario. Yeah, but it could
(38:05):
be a case where like, how do you imagine a
sun without a moon. That's just part of our human
understanding of things, the duality. But at any rate, the
Fifth Son, the age of the Fifth Son, this is
the Goldilocks territory. Everything is just right, the world's beautiful,
it's balanced. And you know, there were problems with all
of the previous versions of reality, you know, the like
(38:25):
I think it's the first Son in some tellings wasn't
strong enough. It was too weak. Obviously there are monsters
running around eating people in other realities. So this is
the one where everything is just right, isn't it funny?
Speaker 3 (38:37):
How just depending on which way you squint, either the
seems like this is the world that's just right, which
it is, or this is the worst possible world, which
it also is.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, it's true, it's true, and you know the I
guess the the interesting thing is it would have seemed
this way to the Aztecs as well. I mean, there,
I'm you know, they would you know, clearly, there were
problems that they faced, you know, even before the big
problem emerged, so you know they would have they would
have been faced with this reality as well. But uh yeah,
(39:18):
coming back to the gods, though, we're gonna. So on
one level, we already have our answered the question like
what came before the reality, well, different realities stretching back
to a different like primordial age. And through each of
these worlds, each of these universes, each of these sons,
(39:38):
we had. The gods, the Aztec gods were present for
each of these ages, and they began, however, prior to
any of these sun ages, with a primordial dual deity
named ome Za Waddle, which consisted of feminine aspects to
(39:59):
Naka Kuti and Tonaka Seawattle. There's a nice artistic rendering
of this dual entity in a book I have. This
is by Ellen Stevens and illustrated by an artist who
goes by the name Echo. It's called a pre Columbian Bestiary.
I included just a snapshot that I took of me
(40:21):
holding the book open in my front yard. Joe. For
you others out there, I recommend you pick up the book.
I couldn't find an image of this one online. But yeah,
imagine an entity that is also two beings. So it
is a single god, but it is a dual god.
It is an entity of duality.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah, yeah, at least in this left illustration you've included.
I would say that it has oh elements of being
like one big complex geometric head or face, but it
also looks kind of like two bodies joined in an
embrace or twister. Maybe kind of a sexual energy to it.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Yeah, yeah, so we have really really cool primordial energy
to this entity. So the dual god produces offspring before
any of the ages of the Sun, and the initial
offspring take the form of the four brother gods, which
some of these we've discussed in on the show before.
So first up, we have the lord of the smoking mirror,
(41:20):
tes Calipoca. Then we have the feathered serpent quetzal Cotal,
and then we have the flayed one sheipe Totec, and
then we also have Wetzelpacli, the god of war, and
they have other dimensions beyond what I mentioned here, but
that's just like the brief rundown of who they are.
And so at first, these brother gods are more or
(41:42):
less in equilibrium, but is each with each age of
the Sun they quarrel with each other, and that equilibrium
is just not sustained. And also it's like each of
the previous four ages the Sun is sort of headed
out by one particular god. So, for instance, the sun
that the various accounts say the sun that Haspoca PoCA
(42:04):
is responsible for, it's not bright enough, which makes sense
because he's not the lord of light, he's the Lord
of the black mirror. So back to the creator here,
where does this creator come from? Because that ultimately is
is where we're getting to. You know, we can say, well,
what came before this world for previous worlds, but what
came before all worlds? What is the true primordial nature
(42:28):
out of which indeed this god emerges And so apparently
the way it goes down is ometsuwattle. The dual God
kind of emerges, springs into existence, or is self born,
bringing about the creation of the universe as well, which
leads to the creation of the First Son and the
gods and so forth. And then after all of this
(42:53):
is done, the dual God continues to dwell in what
is sometimes called the thirteenth Aztec heaven, though heaven, of course,
is a very loaded Western term, and we'll get into
that a little bit here. But this particular realm is
called omeicin which scholar mevel Leon Portella described in Aztec
(43:15):
Thought and Culture, a study of the ancient non all
mind as quote, the mansion of duality, the source of
generation and life, the ultimate or meta physical region, the
primordial dwelling place of the Ometzuwadel. So this is, according
to Portilla quote, the place of cosmic origin of all things,
(43:37):
and so the original deity dwells here, but the dual
deity also exists, it's said, in the navel of the
world and also in all things. So this entity is
at the center of everything, but also is in everything.
And there's a you know, there's a real sense of
cosmic potential to this realm that it lives in. This
(44:02):
Omeo can realm. It is, it's it's sometimes said to
be the place where human souls originate, and it is
described by Portilla as a place quote beyond time m hm. So,
which we'll come back to.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
I'm seeing a lot of I'm seeing a lot of
tensions here, like things existing both in the center of
the world and seemingly outside of it at the same time.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's one of the really things
about this whole realm of of omeo Okin, this place
where the dual God resides, because it's like this is
at once kind of like the primordial state of things,
but also a place that still exists within these sort
of metaphysical uh map of creation for the Aztec. So
(44:51):
it's kind of like, you know, like to call it
to Heaven's not quite the same. Maybe it did, depending
on how you interpret heaven. But it's almost like if
you try, I do like to compare it to you know,
scientific cosmology. Uh, it's like saying, like, Okay, the world,
the universe began with the Big Bang, but then the
Big Bang still exists and it's here, you know, in
(45:13):
its own sort of pocket dimension. So if I'm understanding
it all correctly. According to as Tech mythology, our world
was preceded by four separate takes on the world or reality,
each with a different sun. And before the first world,
before the creation of the gods that would create and
govern these different worlds, an all powerful, dual creator god
emerged out of a kind of dark, timeless ocean of
(45:34):
endless potential and non time, and that place of endless
potential still exist as its own dimension within the broader cosmology.
Speaker 3 (45:44):
Okay, that's complex.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah, yeah, it really is. And that's one of the
things that Portilla really drives home it's like, you know,
we're not dealing with just sort of like a rough
sketch of what things you know might have been, Like
you know, the Aztecs were deeply, deeply invested in this
idea and the philosophy of this idea, Like, you know,
it's a very deep concept. And I think I think
(46:07):
the idea too, is that sometimes you know, Western views
of as technothology may be somewhat dismissive of its complexity.
This idea that Omeo can is beyond time, though, it
reminded me of some things that I'd read from Joseph
Campbell about eternity being beyond time, So there being a
(46:30):
difference between we might think of something as being eternal
and that it lasts forever or it's long lasting, but
like true eternity is something that is outside of time,
and I think that is what we're talking about here.
You know, we were talking earlier about the role language
plays and all of this, like thinking about how language
(46:51):
changes and or enables humans to think about, you know,
distant primordial origins in a way like what does like
what does time do? Like we think of time, like
thinking of time not only as like a constant knowing
that that we have this procession of events, but also
knowing that it's human perception of time that ends up
(47:13):
coloring these different views of what of what the world
is and what came before. But Portella writes that for
the Aztecs, quote, space and time are conceived not as
empty stage settings, but as factors that combine to regulate
the occurrence of cosmic events. So that one takes I
(47:34):
think a minute to sink in. But you know, it's
this idea that, like time, for the Aztecs had weight
and was alive and was carried and and you know,
it's it's not just this thing that's passively occurring, like
we're not We're not just in time riding down a
river like. It's a lot more complicated than that. And
(47:55):
it also ties into the various ritual acts that have
to be carried out the Aztecs to ensure the continuation
of things. So yeah, I found that really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
If I'm interpreting this right. So we've described some of
these other creation narratives as stage setting in a way
that a lot of times the initial ordering of the
world and a creation narrative seems to be setting the
stage on which history can take place. Now, characters, maybe
gods or humans can enter and do things on this
(48:31):
stage we've created. But the way the Aztec conception of
space and time is being described here, it sounds like
it's not just a place in which history happens, that
space and time are mechanisms, that they are the gears
that are turned in order to drive events within the
(48:52):
cosmos and within history.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Yeah. Yeah, that's the vibe I'm getting as well.
Speaker 3 (48:58):
Not just the paper but the pencil in a way.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, or at least that's as close as
I can come to really comprehending it here. I've also
I also saw it put like this, this interesting idea
that a metsu Wadel is kind of the ontological sustainer
of the universe. Like again, he sets in the navel
and sort of sustains everything from the navel, but then
(49:24):
the rituals and devotions of the Aztec people serve as
the mechanical sustainer, so ensuring even the durability of the
fifth Son. So like everything like this is the best world,
but this world takes a lot of work to keep going,
And apparently it's not, or at least the vibe I
get here is there's no guarantee that will continue on.
(49:45):
There's no guarantee there won't have to be a sixth son,
but you know, we have a fifth son as long
as we can keep it. So yeah, I really I
really enjoyed diving into this one. And again, you know,
we have this concept of like what came before, something
like some sort of place where there's there's no light
yet there's no there's not time, but there is potential
(50:09):
for things and and then things begin, you know, to
be set in motion.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Okay, well, I think we are hitting our time limit
for today's episode, but I know we had more to
say about this topic. And yet at the same time,
we have some different episodes planned to record next week.
So I think what we're gonna have to do is
break at least for a week from talking about this
the concept of worlds before and the the what came
(50:37):
before in creation myths, and maybe we will come back
to this in two or three weeks. Maybe we got
a date with the worlds before in the near future.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I think. So, yeah, we've got some some other stuff
that we're already obligated to cover, but yeah, we'll come
back to this and in the meantime you can write
in and if you're if you know you're a particular
fan or or you know we're culturally attached to a
particular mythology and you're like, oh, definitely cover this one next. Well,
you have I think an appropriate amount of time to
get in touch with this and say, hey, make sure
(51:06):
this one's on your radar.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Yeah, Or if you have anything you would like to
add to the subjects we've already talked about.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Please absolutely yes, all right, Well, just a reminder as
we close out here. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is,
of course a science and culture podcast, primarily with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a
short form episode, and on Fridays we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
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 (51:54):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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