June 4, 2026 • 46 mins
In this episode, Robert and Joe come back to their Stuff to Blow Your Mind series on various mythological concepts of what came before the creation or emergence of our universe. (part 4 of 4)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we are back
with the fourth and I think for now final episode
in our series called The Thing Before the Beginning, which
has been about creation myths, and specifically the question of
what came before the creation in so many of these myths, because,
as we have been discussing throughout the series, most creation
(00:39):
narratives are not a beginning out of absolutely nothing, but
a transformation or ordering of some pre existing world into
a world that is fit for the beginning of mythic history,
where now there can be gods and people. If you
haven't heard the previous parts in this series yet, I
should probably go back and listen to those first. But
(01:01):
just briefly, we have looked at a wide range of
creation stories, including, but not limited to, the Chinese story
of Pangu, the ancient Coiled One, the Biblical creation story
in Genesis One, the Babylonian creation epic known as the
Inima Aleish, the Maori creation story about the children of
Rungi and Papa, the Aztec ages of the Five suns.
(01:25):
And then in the last episode we talked briefly about
the creation hymn of the rig Veda, the Egyptian watery
abyss known as the Nun or the Noon, and the
role of pre creation states in some new religious movements
like scientology and Realianism. And we've come back today to
round out our discussion.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, and just a reminder that you know, we've done
four episodes. We've covered a lot of ground, but we
can't cover all the ground, so you know, we left
anything out that you think, Oh man, this is this
is rich subject matter. They should discuss this well right in.
Let us know what you would like us to come
back to because just because we're closing out this series
(02:06):
for now doesn't mean we can't come back later. So
we'll have an email address at the end of this episode,
and that's the best way to get in touch with us.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
We'll have it right now. Contact that stuff to blow
your mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh man, that's kind of like the blowing of Gabriel's horn. Though,
I think we have to end the episode now. If
you've said the magic work, you've said it's the end.
I'm sorry. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, but please write in with your own interesting examples
of creation stories, especially if they have something kind of
different to say about what the world was like before creation.
So we haven't looked at any Greek or Roman sources
on creation and pre creation yet, so I thought that
would be worth taking a brief look at in this episode.
(02:50):
And one place I wanted to look was the ancient
Greek poem by Hesiod known as the Theogony. This was
composed sometime in the eighth century BCE, and I bring
this up only to talk about briefly because Hesiad does
not go into great detail describing what the world was
(03:11):
like before creation began. He actually quite famously spends a
lot more time talking about what the muses had to
say to him, and you know, sort of his relationship
to this story that he's going to be given by
the muses more than he spends on the initial moments
of the describing the creation itself. But when he does
(03:32):
finally get to describing the act of creation, he famously
says that first came chaos, and then after chaos came
wide breasted gy Gya, the embodiment of the earth, the
always safe foundation of the immortals. So there's this contrast
between chaos and then the establishment of a safe place
(03:55):
to stand, which is the body of Gaya. And even
this very short characterization is interesting because we have looked
at a lot of different ideas of the chaos that
existed before the beginning of the world, maybe a dark
water world or an undifferentiated cloud of mist. But here
(04:17):
the word chaos in Greek means a vast hollow, a chasm,
or a gaping space. And Rob, I think this will
come back to something that you're going to talk about
later in this episode. But in Greek at least this
term is related to the term for a mundane chasm
or a regular hole in the earth. And interestingly, it's
(04:39):
also linguistically related to the human act of yawning. So
in the Greek sense, when you are sleepy, you yawn
and you make your mouth into a chasm, that has
something to do with the initial chaos before the world
was created.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's fascinating. I know that, you know, I'm always encountering
descriptions of yawning chasms and so and it almost feels,
at least in my mind, divorced from the act of yawning,
like I don't necessarily think about humans yawning such a
mundane thing, right when I'm imagining like the yawning chasm
(05:15):
of darkness or whatever, it happens to be yawning the
yawning void at the beginning of time. But that connection
is definitely there.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because it's like, you know,
when you're going towards the land of sleep, that's kind
of when chaos overtakes your mind. You know, you go
into this dark space, this dark void, and maybe dreams
and thoughts are set loose in a very unregulated way.
There is a kind of chaos of sleep. And so yeah,
I'm not suggesting that there's any thought like that in
(05:46):
the use of yawning as a verb being related. I
think it has more to do with the opening of
the mouth, is like the creating of the gap, and.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It would be the most readily available metaphor to any human.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Yeah, But anyway, this idea of chaos is interesting because
in the narrative here it seems to have connotations of infinity,
maybe a boundlessness and featurelessness, at least until the ground
of Gaya's body is established, you know, the sound foundation
of Guya's breast there that everything can stand on but
(06:20):
under normal conditions. If you think about it, a gap
or a chasm is usually only defined if it has
a boundary or if it is between things. It is
a void that exists between other established points. But here
it's not clear if the poet intends to suggest that
there was any boundary or anything for the gap to
(06:43):
be between, like there is no earth until the next
line of the poem. So as often imagined, this line
conjures a kind of paradoxical view. It is a gap
between no points, a whole in nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I'm just I'm assuming we're not supposed to draw any
comparison between the idea of a void or a gap
and cleavage for Guy's breasts, because we have a lot
of breast related imagery here and we're talking about gaps
and voids.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
No connection, that's fun. I don't know. I haven't seen
any scholarship to that pot. And I mean, it's just
I only refer to Guy as breast because it's there
in the poem, and just something's phrased as wide breasted
Guy is the description of where Guy is born. I think.
So the idea is that in some sense, the earth
is guy's body, and she is characterized as wide breasted.
(07:36):
I think just meaning like this is a broad, great
body that we can all stand upon.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Okay, all right, you know these sorts of questions are
worth thinking about because you know, we're going to come
back in my section later and we're going to get
back to the ideas of giant bodies of primordial beings
doing strange things. So you know, all of this is
fair game.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
So next, I want to look at the more extensive
account of pre creation and what creation means in the Metamorphoses.
So this will bring us into the Roman period to
the Roman poet Avid, who lived in the first century
BCE to the first century CE. Avid deals extensively with
(08:19):
creation and pre creation in this narrative poem in the Metamorphoses.
So the poem is an interesting contrast to he see
it in a number of ways, most of all in
that it describes the pre creation state in great detail
and also with what I would call somewhat negative connotations.
(08:39):
So I'm going to read directly from the Metamorphoses. This
is going to be from book one, and I decided
to use Anthony S. Klein's prose translation. I was originally
looking at Rolf Humphrey's translation because I like that, but
I think this will be better because this translation is
more concerned with just the literal sense and less with
the poetics. Some of the poetry is going to be
(09:01):
lost here, but this is trying to capture the literal
meaning of the poem. So first Avid says that he's
going to he gives a short introduction and says he's
going to be talking about bodies changed into new forms.
That's a lot of what the metamorphoses is. You know,
these stories of magical transformations of humans into natural phenomenaic
(09:22):
rivers and rocks and trees, transformation of humans into animals
and all kinds of things like that, And there's often
a lesson to be learned in these transformations. But coming
to the creation narrative, Avid writes, before there was earth
or sea or the sky that covers everything, nature appeared
the same throughout the whole world, what we call chaos,
(09:47):
a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined,
discordant atoms of things confused in the one place, there
was no tie. And yet shining his light on the world,
or waxing Phoebe renewing her white horns, or the earth,
hovering and surrounding air balanced by her own weight, or
(10:10):
watery amftrity, stretching out her arms along the vast shores
of the world. Though there was land and sea and air,
it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air, needing light. Nothing
retained its shape. One thing obstructed another because in the
one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft
(10:34):
with hard, and weight with weightless things. So I think
that's a very interesting way of describing this precreation state,
that there are already all these things and in the
sense they have their own nature. There is land, there
is air, there is water, and they're all different things.
(10:57):
But they're also all totally mingled together in a way
that none of them can really be themselves, and thus
they are constantly fighting one another. They are in perpetual conflict.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Hmmm. Yeah, this is fascinating to think about it, especially
comparing it to some of the Chinese concepts we talked about,
because in a similar sense, we have extremes that have
not been separated yet, but they're not but they're already
like kind of like tangled up in opposition to each other. Yeah,
So you know, some some different philosophies going on here,
(11:30):
but some of the same concepts in play.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Yeah, it's not a single, undifferentiated mass. There are differences
within it, but the differences are not allowed to be separate. Instead,
the differences are forced together and thus forced into conflict.
And so so nothing. You know that nothing can be
done really, because there are no differences that allow things
(11:53):
to be done to them. You know. So all the
water is mixed with the land, and the air is
mixed with the water, and you have moist fighting dry,
and soft fighting hard and all that. Anyway, the poem continues,
this conflict was ended by a god and a greater
order of nature, since he split off the earth from
(12:15):
the sky and the sea from the land, and divided
the transparent heavens from the dense air. When he had
disentangled the elements and freed them from the obscure mass,
he fixed them in separate spaces in harmonious peace. The
weightless fire that forms the heavens darted upwards to make
(12:36):
its home in the furthest heights. Next came air in
lightness and place. Earth heavier than either of these, drew
down the largest elements and was compressed by its own weight,
the surrounding water took up the last space and enclosed
the solid world.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh wow, I mean even in this translation is it's
pretty beautiful and haunting. I love it.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, totally. And so from here the creation continues. So
you get further descriptions of what this nameless god does
to establish different sort of categories or zones of earth.
You get these different zones of earth and sea. You
get the establishment of the four winds, and then eventually
(13:22):
you get the creation of human beings, you know, with
reason to rule over this. And in a way, there's
a sense that the creation of human beings, which possess reason,
is its own kind of imposition of order onto the world,
if that makes any sense, Because now there is something,
there is some other type of being to inhabit the
world and to think about it, and thus by thinking
(13:44):
about it can speak of it and create categories and
impose a new kind of order and order of meaning.
But anyway, I thought this was interesting in a number
of ways. So a few things I want to talk
about here. One is the idea that the initial chaos
not only is represented as undifferentiated mass and matter, like
(14:07):
in some other examples, we've talked about, but here the
elements and principles within the combined mass are at war
with one another because they are mixed, so that has
naturally very bad connotations. You know, we've talked about the
different kind of valances of these pre creation states. That
(14:28):
there are some stories where the pre created world has
some nice things about it, like in the Maori story
where it's a loving embrace, you know, and so the
younger beings, the children of the Sky Father and the
Earth Mother are crushed in between them. So that's not
so great for them, but for the Sky Father and
the Earth Mother it is there is like love in
(14:49):
this pre creation state. It sounds cozy, it sounds nice.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah, also reminds me of some of these examples we've
looked at where the pre creation state is like a
place of renewal. So there is something there's a lot
of potentiality there and therefore, you know, even if it
is stagnant and unformed and even not even you know,
maybe not even like fully matter, yet it has all
(15:12):
of that potential.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yeah, that's right. But I think in contrast here you
can say the the connotations of this pre created state
are pretty negative. Now you might say that Avid ends
up showing some good things about chaos too, because later,
you know, you might say that chaos creates opportunities. Chaos
is you know, it means like change and transformation, which
(15:37):
leads to what you might call creative destruction, or you know,
creates opportunities for new things to happen. But at least
the majority of the connotations I would say are negative.
And so so these things are at war because they're mixed.
And then you have this God who comes and imposes order.
The God is not named, though it could be identified
(15:58):
with the principle call nature. The unnamed God imposes order
by separating things. So not only does the act of
separating things establish and stabilize categories, this also, it explicitly says,
brings peace. The opposing classes of matter are no longer
fighting with one another. So it's like a reduction in
(16:21):
violence because the categories are created and things are separated.
And I think that's an interesting thing to keep in
mind here. The imposition of distinctions in categories in Avid's
view of creation is not only the establishment of order,
but also the establishment of peace, an end of a
kind of violence.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Fascinating. Yeah, And I love these various hints and descriptions
that we get concerning just the idea that there's some
sort of emergence that takes place. Yeah, you know, sometimes
it's more expressly stated, other times it's you know, we
can sort of draw that out of the writing a bit.
But you know, this idea that consciousness of some form,
some sort of super consciousness eventually just kind of manifests
(17:07):
out of a system that is maybe growing a little
bit more complex.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Oh yeah, that's interesting too. You're relating that to the
idea of like the god being unnamed.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, absolutely, like an unnamed god that you know, it
is maybe just entirely composed of the will to separate,
maybe just two things, but that will kind of like
emerges out of the out of the chaos of all
of this, and maybe that's its only act, and then
it passes away or becomes something else. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
So here order is presented, I think as a clear
improvement on the disorder that came before. But another interesting
thing about Avid's view is what happens in the rest
of the poem, all of Avid's story of the history
of the gods in humanity after this initial act of creation,
(17:59):
scholars have noted that throughout the Metamorphoses, Avid repeatedly depicts
a tendency of the world to slide back toward the
initial chaos. In other words, the chaos and the state
of material war in which the world began is not gone.
(18:20):
That's not just in the past. In fact, this is
recalling a discussion we had in the last episode about
the Egyptian creation, a pre creation state, that there's a
kind of lingering presence of this chaotic pre created world,
these chaotic waters. It's sort of a place you can
go back to, and also a principle that creeps in
(18:42):
on our orderly reality. I think you could say very
much the same is true in Avid's view of the world. Chaos, Yeah,
it's not gone. It is something more like entropy. It
is temporarily held back by organizational efforts, and multiple points
in avid story, chaos strikes out and asserts itself again,
(19:06):
and so you can get big, major disastrous instances of this,
like Jupiter's flood. There's a flood narrative in the Metamorphoses
in which you know, the great god Jupiter sends a
floods wipes out one age of humanity, and this if
you think about it represents a remingling of land and sea.
(19:26):
You know, we already did the work of establishing that
order of separating land and sea they're different. Now, well
I'm going to mix them all up again. So it's
like we're losing progress, We're going back toward that chaotic
pre ordering state. And then you could also view throughout
the poem the metamorphoses themselves the central kind of thing
(19:48):
in the poem, where you'll have a character who gets
transformed into a tree, or a character who gets transformed
into a river or an animal or something. These metamorphoses
them are violations of category distinctions, and so you could
view them as undoing the careful work of separating things
(20:09):
that gives us the order we know. So it is
a story in which the chaos that existed before the
ordering of the world is not gone. It's a principle
that's always creeping back in. It's like the growth of weeds.
I feel like that's a metaphor that's come up on
the show several times recently, but I think it fits here.
It's always trying to creep back in and requires effort
(20:33):
full reassertion of orderly principles and distinctions in order to
keep everything separate and at peace.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah yeah, especially on the part of human practitioners of
religions and rituals.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
I also love this idea that all of the divine
acts could maybe be loosely divided into acts of acts
of division and separation and acts of combination and convergence.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Oh yeah, that's interesting too. And you know, the acts
of the acts of mingling and remixing and thus re establishing,
you know, creating new insertions of chaos. I think they're
not always bad because, as I mentioned earlier, like they're
usually bad for the person they're happening to in the story,
(21:21):
but they also create these interesting lessons and transformation points.
So I don't know if Avid would say that the
chaos and the mixing is always one hundred percent bad,
but it seems generally less preferable.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a mashup. You know. Mashups can be great.
They can be a little rough around the edges, and
you know, and then there's a how to and how
do the original artists feel about the combination?
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Now, for our next section here, let's move on into
Norse mythology. We're going to be talking about something known
as the Ganunga gap. This is pretty this is pretty interesting,
and this is basically a pre creation state. And for
this topic I turned to Before the Creation in Old
(22:20):
Norse Mythology, Empty Abyss or Crowded Place by Daniel Sofborg,
professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Tartu, published
in the Abyss as a Concept for cultural theory in
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
I assume that's a book. Yes, yes, okay, that would
be a really focused journal.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, yeah, this is the book, and I have not
read the rest of the book, but I read this article.
This one is publicly available if you look around in
the usual places to get your academic papers.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Sodborg's work is also available elsewhere. But this is going
to concerns specifically. It's going to concern a few different
sources for Norse mythology. But one of the main things
he's talking about here is the eedic poem known as
the Voluspa. So this is usually dated to pre Christian
(23:16):
Pagan tenth century Norse culture, and it concerns a serious
diviner by the name of Volva. And in this bit
I'm about to read she is supposedly speaking to the
god Odin as well as to other gods and human
beings as well. So in translation it goes like this.
(23:36):
It was at the beginning of time when nothing was.
Sand was not nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did
not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap was
and this is gap var ginnega. This is reference in
gnaka gap. So we'll see like different versions of that,
(23:57):
but not growth. So again the mighty gap was, but
not growth. So the character Volva here is telling us
that prior to creation, we didn't have sand, we didn't
have sea, we didn't have waves, we didn't have earth,
we didn't have heaven. All we had was a vast gap.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It brings us back very much to this thing we
talked about with he Sid Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, and so Sabborg, as he details in this paper.
The nature of this gap has long been a matter
of linguistic debate. Depending on how you tease a part
of the different translations, it might mean yawning void. It
might mean an enormous, mighty void or a magical power
filled void. With both of these these these latter two
(24:45):
translations certainly implying like the potentiality of that void like
it's it's empty, but there's something about it, there's something
that could become, you know. Okay, And so the Norse
concept here is often compared to prevailing interpretations of Christian
mythology in Christian creation stories, and we'll get back to
(25:07):
how that plays into all of this as well. But
then there's what happens next in the narrative here in
this particular work, the Voluspa, and that that is the
suns of Burr quote lifted up the lands or the earth,
those who created or gave shape to the glorious mid Guard,
(25:30):
you know, the middle world, the world between the sun
shone from the south on the halls, on the Hall
of Stones. Then the soil was grown over with green plants.
So we get some we get some creation of some
earth creation going on here.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Now, Sofborg points out that various interpretations of this text
position it as Earth being raised out of a primordial sea,
but he stresses that this is generally passed on without evidence,
and that the sea interpretation kind of becomes a tradition
of interpretation concerning this work, but one without clear basis
in the text. So it would seem more likely that
(26:06):
the lands are emerging out of the void, out of
the gap, not out of a sea. It's just like
you know, coming in from other sources. Some scholars have said, well,
the void is the sea, the void is a primordial scene.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
I love this note about the interpretive tradition becoming assumed
as part of the narrative itself, and I think often
we really overlook how much of that there is in
all kinds of narratives that we hold. Dear, I'm familiar
with tons of examples of this throughout the interpretation of
(26:42):
the Christian Bible. There are all these things that are
not part of the text of the Bible, but people
always picture and assume when they're thinking about a Bible story,
and it just becomes part of the story, such that
many Christians will even regard these things as canonical facts,
even though the books don't say it. Just one example,
(27:04):
how many how many wise men are there that visit Jesus?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Oh, there's three. We've all we've we've heard the song,
we've we've we've looked at the the little statues that
we put out at Christmas, We've we've watched people re
enacted it's three wise men.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Three, yeah, three three kings, three wise men. Actually, the
Bible story doesn't say how many there are, just says
Magi came. So we don't know where there're three, where
they're ten, where there're two. Doesn't say it's not there
in the text. But the fact that there are three
is so often assumed and pictured in the story. It
has this feeling of canonicity. Yeah, you can't change that,
(27:39):
But the story doesn't say.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
They bring three gifts. You can't have three gifts brought
by four people. You can't have three gifts brought by
two people. It must be one, per right.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, you could have three gifts brought by two people.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all in We could be in one
gift bag. You know, we always depict each one holding it.
It could be one gift bag. Yeah, And then it
could it could be like three hundred magi and one
just hands over the gifts bag and says, this is
from all of us. We all went in on this.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, I just say this to emphasize it's so interesting
how when there are stories where we regard the details
of the story is very important. Even then people just
sort of like details that aren't in the text itself
attach themselves to it and seem to become part of
the understanding of it, even if they're not there in
(28:27):
the words.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, yeah, and you know. And sometimes it is stuff
that is brought in from other texts, like, for instance,
in this mentioned the sons of Burr being involved here.
In other texts, we come to know that the sons
of Burr are Odin, Vili and v But there's no
indication in these lines who these individuals are, where they
(28:48):
get their power, in what capacity they existed or didn't
exist in this primordial gap, nor how they accomplish the
feet of raising up earth from voice. Absent from all
of this, the author points out, are the familiar Norse
creation motifs that I think most of us know from
various works on even instructional educational videos about Norse mythology
(29:14):
concerning the giant Yemir, and we've talked about this in
the show before, but the author points out that these
are rooted not in this particular pre Christian work, but
in Snorri Stirlson's thirteenth century CE pros Eda Da, which
was composed in twelve twenty to be exact. Obviously a
product of Christian times. The pros Eta drawing on Scholtic poetry,
(29:38):
reveals that there were places prior to the creation of Earth.
So it lays out a pre creation world in which
there's no Earth yet there is a gap, there is
a void, but there are also other realms that already exist. Specifically,
there's Niffelheim, the cold world of myths, to the north
(29:58):
of the gap, and then fiery must bell or must
be behind to the south of the gap. So you
have icy world up here, fiery world down here, and
in between nothing yet.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
That's interesting. Now, I don't want to assign motive to
the development of the story like this, though it strikes
me as interesting that this addresses the kind of paradox
that we brought up with he Siad, where you know,
if the first thing there is is a chasm, or
the first thing there is is a gap before there's
an earth inh Heesio it's telling. It naturally raises questions like, well,
(30:34):
in the mundane sense, a gap is between things, or
it's a hole in something, So what's it in? What
are the boundaries? And there you just don't know. You
don't really know what's intended, but you can start to imagine, well,
maybe there are things on either side before the Earth
is created. I wonder if you could imagine a similar
kind of developmental logic here. Well there, if it's a gap,
(30:57):
it has to be a gap between something.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It could well be part of it. Cyborg doesn't doesn't
get into that so much, but but definitely points out that, Yeah,
this is a rather different create pre creation story. Yeah,
not a magical void, but a true gap between two
places that already existed, which seemingly had names, had their
own dynamic natures. You know, they're active realms. They're not
(31:21):
you know, they're not stagnant, and the creation of Earth
occurs when these two forces converge. Now I think we've
covered this before, but this is this is what occurs
according to the pros Eda quote, And when the rhyme
and the blowing of the warmth met so that it
thawed and dripped. There was a quickening from these flowing
(31:41):
drops due to the power of the source of the heat,
and it became the form of a man, and he
was given the name Yimir, but the frost giants call
him r Golmere. So so yeah, we have this, you know,
very evocative vision where these two extremes are kind of
come together, mingling, and this life form emerges out of
(32:05):
these two dynamic systems, and I think this is all.
You know, this is an evocative idea as well, because
we think about the part of the world where this
idea is situated, and we can imagine, you know, people
noticing the interplay of fire and ice, of summer and winter,
of snow and geothermal heat even Yeah, and you know
(32:25):
that's a dynamic system. Dynamic things happen. There's no God
that creates Ymir, there's no prime mover in this situation.
He just kind of emerges out of the interplay of elements,
and then additional creation occurs out of Yamir. We've discussed
this before, at least different tellings of this in the
show before. But the main examples that the author here
(32:48):
draws on are Ymir's left armpit sweat becomes the giants cool,
his feet have sex with each other and produce more
giants awesome. The great Cow emerges from the fine rhyme.
The cow licks salty stones to form or reveal the
first human Bury, who begets the sun burr. And then
(33:08):
this son marries a giant woman and has three sons.
Odin VILLI and V and then the three sons according
to Uh. To the the Eda, here kill Yamir and
create the world out of the rest of his body parts.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Oh okay, another killing, killing the monster and making the
world with the body. Yeah, like we saw in the
It's like in the Alias.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, and specifically it says that, like they take Yamir
to the middle of the gap and make out of
him the earth, and you know, and they go and
it lifts through the various things that are made. You know,
the teeth become this, the mowers become that we've we've
talked about this in the show Wore. The blood becomes this. Uh.
And this is something that is explored in other myths
(33:51):
elsewhere around the world. You know, the body of the
giant becomes the world. So again, it's only at this
point in the pros at A story that the world
is created. Prior to that, we have multiple worlds, we
(34:13):
have different races and so forth. It is not an
empty void at all. It is like a full blown,
you know, campaign world that's already in place. So Software
points out that in the pros Eda, Stirlsson does quote
this pre Christian work, the Voldspa the work of divination
is talking you know, about the gap and and has
(34:36):
no mention of giants. But he gets much of his
details from a different work, a tenth century poem called
the Vafthruthnismal. And this is a This is a very
giant heavy work that features no gap, no burr, no brewery,
no lifting up of anything, only body part related creation.
(34:57):
And again, meanwhile, the older Vola Spa is giant free.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Okay, so this one lots of giant chunks, no gap, right.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
So Software contends that the Voldespa and the vaf thoth
Nismol are essentially telling two different contradictory pre Christian Norse
creation myths. Yet in this and he points out that
this is of course standard. We've already discussed examples of this,
where various old mythologies have multiple creation stories. These are
(35:30):
often told orally at in different places and time and space,
and they may have different agendas, different things they are
attempting to reveal about the world and ourselves, while also addressing,
you know, the big unanswerable questions about what came before
us and yet what happens we you know, scholars enter
into this, but also just normal people are drawn to this,
(35:52):
especially in our modern age. We want the cannon version, right,
we want the codified version. What is the full story?
And so scholars will, as the Softborg points out, take
these two and try to harmonize them. Take two myths
and form them into one.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Right, because only one thing could have happened. Therefore we
got to kind of mix them together. And that's what happened.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
He has a nice little sentence here that I think
summarize this. He says, quote, the fixed forms belong to
literacy and bookish societies, and so you know that's our obsession,
and we want the fixed forms, but that's not what
we see when we actually look back in these old
mythic systems.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Well, if we can be tendentious, allow us once again
to take up the lance for having multiple stories of
the same things. That's great.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, it's like the Joker and the Batman movies, right, yeah, Yeah,
he has multiple creation stories that he shares and they
all tell you something about who he is. So anyway,
this is exactly what Stirlson apparently did. He attempted to
create a single, cohesive, cohesive creation narrative out of two
separate stories with added did supplemental information and also leaning
(37:03):
on various interpretations that streamlined things. And the version he
created didn't exist in the pre Christian Norse world, to
be clear, but it became highly popular in the Middle
Ages and became the most commonly presented version of Norse
myth for centuries upon centuries to follow into our modern age.
You know, pick up a school book about Norse mythology,
(37:26):
or look for you know, look at a quick rundown
of it somewhere online, and you'll inevitably find these these ideas,
you know, this mixing of the two void and giant
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
This is really interesting because it comes back to a
principle we talked about, I think in the very first
episode of this series, just the happenstance of certain textualization
events that became popular text forms of a myth to
later be interpreted as the original or the canonical form
of the myth, when in fact they might not have
(37:58):
any particular claim to being like the most to widespread
or most widely believed, or the earliest version. They're just
the version that happened to enter the text stream at
a certain point and became a popular text.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yeah, exactly, yeah, and you know, there are the things
about this combined version in the Prosta. For instance, the
sacrificial concept the killing of Yumir by the gods, seemingly
had no basis in pre Christian traditions among the Norse,
not specifically with this particular sacrifice, and while also really
(38:33):
at the same time he apparently really gets in and
dwells on some of the weirder elements, like the feet
having sex with each other.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
He was really into that.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, well, you know, according to Sofborg anyway, perhaps putting
a little more emphasis on that stuff. And so this
is how he Softhborg sums it up, he says, quote
Snorri's interpretation of the Pagan Norse mythology is indeed heavily
influenced by Christian worldview and education. But when he creates
(39:03):
his version of it in his learned work, choosing between
various elements and versions of the creation story, his choices
rather increase the distance between the Christian and the Pagan view.
The tendency and its literary purpose are in my interpretation,
to mark the Pagan religion as false, bizarre, and nasty.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Oh huh, So I think that's huh.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
That's interesting because we've we've talked about examples of this
on the show before. You know, plenty of them. Where
you think about the codifying of a pre Christian religion
by say colonial powers or somebody spreading the Christian faith.
It's often viewed as this attempt to bring them together,
to say like, hey, you have this figure in your religion.
It's kind of like Jesus. Well, let me tell you
(39:47):
about Jesus, and let's draw these two ideas together. In
those it kind of comes back to the idea that,
you know, gods are bringing things together or pushing things apart.
And we often think about this being an exercise in
pushing two concepts closer together, but then leaning things into
the Christian concept. And here we would we arguably see
(40:09):
an effort to do the opposite, to distance the two things,
to show no, no, no, Christianity is here, these beliefs
are way over here, and there's less connective tissue between
the two.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
But ultimately having in my view, the opposite effect of
making the pagan beliefs actually seem cooler by being weirder.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's you know, it's not like
I guess one is a surefire recipe, and I don't
think it's Also, it's also not to imply that like
this was maybe like the prime this is not the
prime motive behind the prosetta as well, but just maybe
one of the factors in its creation. So Soborgan's up
ultimately arguing that there's actually more connective tissue between Biblical
(40:49):
creation narratives and the original pre Christian photospa a count
and that this wouldn't be due to any kind of
direct influence. So scholars tend to agree that the Volospa's
unknown author was you know, in all likelihood a committed
pagan and not someone intentionally introducing foreign Christian concepts into
(41:10):
Norse culture. However, that doesn't mean that the popularity of
Christian stories and Christian concepts elsewhere in the world at
the time didn't exert an influence. And this would have
been a wide world that far traveling vikings had access to. Okay,
So Sofborg doest pull out a specific example of what
(41:32):
you know could have influenced it, or you know, sort
of pointing to the kind of influence that might have
taken place. He points to an eight hundred CE Christian
poem written in Old High German. This is titled Vessel
Bruna Gabbat, and this details a formless pre creation state
(41:52):
with very similar details and structure to what is discussed
in the Voluspa. Here it is in translation, it's gonna
sound very familiar. This I found from Men as the
foremost wisdom, that neither earth there was, nor sky above,
nor tree nor hill. There was, nor stars there were,
nor shone the sun nor moonlight. There was nor the
(42:13):
salty sea. Nothing there was neither en nor limit. So
the German poem here of course reflects, and you know,
we have some caveats here, but basically reflects the second
and third century shift in Christian theology away from the
idea of a primordial chaos and into this idea of
a primordial nothing. And so, yeah, this is such an
(42:36):
interesting concept, an interesting idea here that the potential weaving
of ideas across cultures and across times. So you could
have pre Christian potentially you could have pre Christian pagan
mythological concepts that were themselves influenced by Christian thought that
was going to be popular, you know, mainland continental Europe
(43:00):
at the time.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeah, or if I understand correctly, maybe possibly just influenced
by Christian imagery and storytelling, even if the full theology
is not being brought.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Over right exactly, like just just some you know, I
have state to use the word entertaining, though I think
entertaining is always in the mix fulfilling, I don't know,
thought provoking, you know, these are all aspects of story. Yeah,
but it's something in the story. I think you're right.
The storyteller is key here, especially when we're considered concerning
(43:30):
oral narratives that would have been passed on, you know,
from one voice to another, from one yawning mouth to another.
And so yeah, it's interesting to think about that that
these are shaped by the storytellers, and the storytellers move around,
they listen to each other, and both intentionally and unintentionally,
they take a little bit of the stories they've heard
(43:52):
and form them into the stories they're telling.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Well, we're going to have more to say about the
storyteller tomorrow, aren't we.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
That's right, Yeah, yeah, little little spoiler, we're going to
be discussing, for my money, one of the best episodes
of Jim Henson's The Storyteller series as our Weird House
Cinema selection. So We're going to get into the meat
of that as well, the power of the storyteller.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Okay, well does that do it for the series?
Speaker 2 (44:17):
For now?
Speaker 3 (44:17):
We're done with the thing before the beginning, at least
for now.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
But maybe that's right unless more pre beginnings become apparent
to us and that sucks us back in, you know,
continual renewal in the nun if you will, so, yeah, yeah,
right in. We'd love to hear from you. Just a
reminder for everyone out there. Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
(44:42):
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Wherever
you get the podcast, whether you're listening to us on
any of the various podcast platforms out there, or watching
us on Netflix, and if you haven't checked that out too,
go check it out. If you have a Netflix membership
or do you want to sign up for one, We
are there in audio and video format wherever you're listening
(45:05):
to us, though, just rate, review, subscribe, remind me thumbs
up two thumbs up stars. Whatever the case may be,
those are all little little gestures you can use that
help us out in the long run.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
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 (45:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Press read to rat Rat Rat
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we are back
with the fourth and I think for now final episode
in our series called The Thing Before the Beginning, which
has been about creation myths, and specifically the question of
what came before the creation in so many of these myths, because,
as we have been discussing throughout the series, most creation
(00:39):
narratives are not a beginning out of absolutely nothing, but
a transformation or ordering of some pre existing world into
a world that is fit for the beginning of mythic history,
where now there can be gods and people. If you
haven't heard the previous parts in this series yet, I
should probably go back and listen to those first. But
(01:01):
just briefly, we have looked at a wide range of
creation stories, including, but not limited to, the Chinese story
of Pangu, the ancient Coiled One, the Biblical creation story
in Genesis One, the Babylonian creation epic known as the
Inima Aleish, the Maori creation story about the children of
Rungi and Papa, the Aztec ages of the Five suns.
(01:25):
And then in the last episode we talked briefly about
the creation hymn of the rig Veda, the Egyptian watery
abyss known as the Nun or the Noon, and the
role of pre creation states in some new religious movements
like scientology and Realianism. And we've come back today to
round out our discussion.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, and just a reminder that you know, we've done
four episodes. We've covered a lot of ground, but we
can't cover all the ground, so you know, we left
anything out that you think, Oh man, this is this
is rich subject matter. They should discuss this well right in.
Let us know what you would like us to come
back to because just because we're closing out this series
(02:06):
for now doesn't mean we can't come back later. So
we'll have an email address at the end of this episode,
and that's the best way to get in touch with us.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
We'll have it right now. Contact that stuff to blow
your mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh man, that's kind of like the blowing of Gabriel's horn. Though,
I think we have to end the episode now. If
you've said the magic work, you've said it's the end.
I'm sorry. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, but please write in with your own interesting examples
of creation stories, especially if they have something kind of
different to say about what the world was like before creation.
So we haven't looked at any Greek or Roman sources
on creation and pre creation yet, so I thought that
would be worth taking a brief look at in this episode.
(02:50):
And one place I wanted to look was the ancient
Greek poem by Hesiod known as the Theogony. This was
composed sometime in the eighth century BCE, and I bring
this up only to talk about briefly because Hesiad does
not go into great detail describing what the world was
(03:11):
like before creation began. He actually quite famously spends a
lot more time talking about what the muses had to
say to him, and you know, sort of his relationship
to this story that he's going to be given by
the muses more than he spends on the initial moments
of the describing the creation itself. But when he does
(03:32):
finally get to describing the act of creation, he famously
says that first came chaos, and then after chaos came
wide breasted gy Gya, the embodiment of the earth, the
always safe foundation of the immortals. So there's this contrast
between chaos and then the establishment of a safe place
(03:55):
to stand, which is the body of Gaya. And even
this very short characterization is interesting because we have looked
at a lot of different ideas of the chaos that
existed before the beginning of the world, maybe a dark
water world or an undifferentiated cloud of mist. But here
(04:17):
the word chaos in Greek means a vast hollow, a chasm,
or a gaping space. And Rob, I think this will
come back to something that you're going to talk about
later in this episode. But in Greek at least this
term is related to the term for a mundane chasm
or a regular hole in the earth. And interestingly, it's
(04:39):
also linguistically related to the human act of yawning. So
in the Greek sense, when you are sleepy, you yawn
and you make your mouth into a chasm, that has
something to do with the initial chaos before the world
was created.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's fascinating. I know that, you know, I'm always encountering
descriptions of yawning chasms and so and it almost feels,
at least in my mind, divorced from the act of yawning,
like I don't necessarily think about humans yawning such a
mundane thing, right when I'm imagining like the yawning chasm
(05:15):
of darkness or whatever, it happens to be yawning the
yawning void at the beginning of time. But that connection
is definitely there.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because it's like, you know,
when you're going towards the land of sleep, that's kind
of when chaos overtakes your mind. You know, you go
into this dark space, this dark void, and maybe dreams
and thoughts are set loose in a very unregulated way.
There is a kind of chaos of sleep. And so yeah,
I'm not suggesting that there's any thought like that in
(05:46):
the use of yawning as a verb being related. I
think it has more to do with the opening of
the mouth, is like the creating of the gap, and.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It would be the most readily available metaphor to any human.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Yeah, But anyway, this idea of chaos is interesting because
in the narrative here it seems to have connotations of infinity,
maybe a boundlessness and featurelessness, at least until the ground
of Gaya's body is established, you know, the sound foundation
of Guya's breast there that everything can stand on but
(06:20):
under normal conditions. If you think about it, a gap
or a chasm is usually only defined if it has
a boundary or if it is between things. It is
a void that exists between other established points. But here
it's not clear if the poet intends to suggest that
there was any boundary or anything for the gap to
(06:43):
be between, like there is no earth until the next
line of the poem. So as often imagined, this line
conjures a kind of paradoxical view. It is a gap
between no points, a whole in nothing.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I'm just I'm assuming we're not supposed to draw any
comparison between the idea of a void or a gap
and cleavage for Guy's breasts, because we have a lot
of breast related imagery here and we're talking about gaps
and voids.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
No connection, that's fun. I don't know. I haven't seen
any scholarship to that pot. And I mean, it's just
I only refer to Guy as breast because it's there
in the poem, and just something's phrased as wide breasted
Guy is the description of where Guy is born. I think.
So the idea is that in some sense, the earth
is guy's body, and she is characterized as wide breasted.
(07:36):
I think just meaning like this is a broad, great
body that we can all stand upon.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Okay, all right, you know these sorts of questions are
worth thinking about because you know, we're going to come
back in my section later and we're going to get
back to the ideas of giant bodies of primordial beings
doing strange things. So you know, all of this is
fair game.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
So next, I want to look at the more extensive
account of pre creation and what creation means in the Metamorphoses.
So this will bring us into the Roman period to
the Roman poet Avid, who lived in the first century
BCE to the first century CE. Avid deals extensively with
(08:19):
creation and pre creation in this narrative poem in the Metamorphoses.
So the poem is an interesting contrast to he see
it in a number of ways, most of all in
that it describes the pre creation state in great detail
and also with what I would call somewhat negative connotations.
(08:39):
So I'm going to read directly from the Metamorphoses. This
is going to be from book one, and I decided
to use Anthony S. Klein's prose translation. I was originally
looking at Rolf Humphrey's translation because I like that, but
I think this will be better because this translation is
more concerned with just the literal sense and less with
the poetics. Some of the poetry is going to be
(09:01):
lost here, but this is trying to capture the literal
meaning of the poem. So first Avid says that he's
going to he gives a short introduction and says he's
going to be talking about bodies changed into new forms.
That's a lot of what the metamorphoses is. You know,
these stories of magical transformations of humans into natural phenomenaic
(09:22):
rivers and rocks and trees, transformation of humans into animals
and all kinds of things like that, And there's often
a lesson to be learned in these transformations. But coming
to the creation narrative, Avid writes, before there was earth
or sea or the sky that covers everything, nature appeared
the same throughout the whole world, what we call chaos,
(09:47):
a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined,
discordant atoms of things confused in the one place, there
was no tie. And yet shining his light on the world,
or waxing Phoebe renewing her white horns, or the earth,
hovering and surrounding air balanced by her own weight, or
(10:10):
watery amftrity, stretching out her arms along the vast shores
of the world. Though there was land and sea and air,
it was unstable land, unswimmable water, air, needing light. Nothing
retained its shape. One thing obstructed another because in the
one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft
(10:34):
with hard, and weight with weightless things. So I think
that's a very interesting way of describing this precreation state,
that there are already all these things and in the
sense they have their own nature. There is land, there
is air, there is water, and they're all different things.
(10:57):
But they're also all totally mingled together in a way
that none of them can really be themselves, and thus
they are constantly fighting one another. They are in perpetual conflict.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Hmmm. Yeah, this is fascinating to think about it, especially
comparing it to some of the Chinese concepts we talked about,
because in a similar sense, we have extremes that have
not been separated yet, but they're not but they're already
like kind of like tangled up in opposition to each other. Yeah,
So you know, some some different philosophies going on here,
(11:30):
but some of the same concepts in play.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Yeah, it's not a single, undifferentiated mass. There are differences
within it, but the differences are not allowed to be separate. Instead,
the differences are forced together and thus forced into conflict.
And so so nothing. You know that nothing can be
done really, because there are no differences that allow things
(11:53):
to be done to them. You know. So all the
water is mixed with the land, and the air is
mixed with the water, and you have moist fighting dry,
and soft fighting hard and all that. Anyway, the poem continues,
this conflict was ended by a god and a greater
order of nature, since he split off the earth from
(12:15):
the sky and the sea from the land, and divided
the transparent heavens from the dense air. When he had
disentangled the elements and freed them from the obscure mass,
he fixed them in separate spaces in harmonious peace. The
weightless fire that forms the heavens darted upwards to make
(12:36):
its home in the furthest heights. Next came air in
lightness and place. Earth heavier than either of these, drew
down the largest elements and was compressed by its own weight,
the surrounding water took up the last space and enclosed
the solid world.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh wow, I mean even in this translation is it's
pretty beautiful and haunting. I love it.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, totally. And so from here the creation continues. So
you get further descriptions of what this nameless god does
to establish different sort of categories or zones of earth.
You get these different zones of earth and sea. You
get the establishment of the four winds, and then eventually
(13:22):
you get the creation of human beings, you know, with
reason to rule over this. And in a way, there's
a sense that the creation of human beings, which possess reason,
is its own kind of imposition of order onto the world,
if that makes any sense, Because now there is something,
there is some other type of being to inhabit the
world and to think about it, and thus by thinking
(13:44):
about it can speak of it and create categories and
impose a new kind of order and order of meaning.
But anyway, I thought this was interesting in a number
of ways. So a few things I want to talk
about here. One is the idea that the initial chaos
not only is represented as undifferentiated mass and matter, like
(14:07):
in some other examples, we've talked about, but here the
elements and principles within the combined mass are at war
with one another because they are mixed, so that has
naturally very bad connotations. You know, we've talked about the
different kind of valances of these pre creation states. That
(14:28):
there are some stories where the pre created world has
some nice things about it, like in the Maori story
where it's a loving embrace, you know, and so the
younger beings, the children of the Sky Father and the
Earth Mother are crushed in between them. So that's not
so great for them, but for the Sky Father and
the Earth Mother it is there is like love in
(14:49):
this pre creation state. It sounds cozy, it sounds nice.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yeah, also reminds me of some of these examples we've
looked at where the pre creation state is like a
place of renewal. So there is something there's a lot
of potentiality there and therefore, you know, even if it
is stagnant and unformed and even not even you know,
maybe not even like fully matter, yet it has all
(15:12):
of that potential.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yeah, that's right. But I think in contrast here you
can say the the connotations of this pre created state
are pretty negative. Now you might say that Avid ends
up showing some good things about chaos too, because later,
you know, you might say that chaos creates opportunities. Chaos
is you know, it means like change and transformation, which
(15:37):
leads to what you might call creative destruction, or you know,
creates opportunities for new things to happen. But at least
the majority of the connotations I would say are negative.
And so so these things are at war because they're mixed.
And then you have this God who comes and imposes order.
The God is not named, though it could be identified
(15:58):
with the principle call nature. The unnamed God imposes order
by separating things. So not only does the act of
separating things establish and stabilize categories, this also, it explicitly says,
brings peace. The opposing classes of matter are no longer
fighting with one another. So it's like a reduction in
(16:21):
violence because the categories are created and things are separated.
And I think that's an interesting thing to keep in
mind here. The imposition of distinctions in categories in Avid's
view of creation is not only the establishment of order,
but also the establishment of peace, an end of a
kind of violence.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Fascinating. Yeah, And I love these various hints and descriptions
that we get concerning just the idea that there's some
sort of emergence that takes place. Yeah, you know, sometimes
it's more expressly stated, other times it's you know, we
can sort of draw that out of the writing a bit.
But you know, this idea that consciousness of some form,
some sort of super consciousness eventually just kind of manifests
(17:07):
out of a system that is maybe growing a little
bit more complex.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Oh yeah, that's interesting too. You're relating that to the
idea of like the god being unnamed.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, absolutely, like an unnamed god that you know, it
is maybe just entirely composed of the will to separate,
maybe just two things, but that will kind of like
emerges out of the out of the chaos of all
of this, and maybe that's its only act, and then
it passes away or becomes something else. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
So here order is presented, I think as a clear
improvement on the disorder that came before. But another interesting
thing about Avid's view is what happens in the rest
of the poem, all of Avid's story of the history
of the gods in humanity after this initial act of creation,
(17:59):
scholars have noted that throughout the Metamorphoses, Avid repeatedly depicts
a tendency of the world to slide back toward the
initial chaos. In other words, the chaos and the state
of material war in which the world began is not gone.
(18:20):
That's not just in the past. In fact, this is
recalling a discussion we had in the last episode about
the Egyptian creation, a pre creation state, that there's a
kind of lingering presence of this chaotic pre created world,
these chaotic waters. It's sort of a place you can
go back to, and also a principle that creeps in
(18:42):
on our orderly reality. I think you could say very
much the same is true in Avid's view of the world. Chaos, Yeah,
it's not gone. It is something more like entropy. It
is temporarily held back by organizational efforts, and multiple points
in avid story, chaos strikes out and asserts itself again,
(19:06):
and so you can get big, major disastrous instances of this,
like Jupiter's flood. There's a flood narrative in the Metamorphoses
in which you know, the great god Jupiter sends a
floods wipes out one age of humanity, and this if
you think about it represents a remingling of land and sea.
(19:26):
You know, we already did the work of establishing that
order of separating land and sea they're different. Now, well
I'm going to mix them all up again. So it's
like we're losing progress, We're going back toward that chaotic
pre ordering state. And then you could also view throughout
the poem the metamorphoses themselves the central kind of thing
(19:48):
in the poem, where you'll have a character who gets
transformed into a tree, or a character who gets transformed
into a river or an animal or something. These metamorphoses
them are violations of category distinctions, and so you could
view them as undoing the careful work of separating things
(20:09):
that gives us the order we know. So it is
a story in which the chaos that existed before the
ordering of the world is not gone. It's a principle
that's always creeping back in. It's like the growth of weeds.
I feel like that's a metaphor that's come up on
the show several times recently, but I think it fits here.
It's always trying to creep back in and requires effort
(20:33):
full reassertion of orderly principles and distinctions in order to
keep everything separate and at peace.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah yeah, especially on the part of human practitioners of
religions and rituals.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
I also love this idea that all of the divine
acts could maybe be loosely divided into acts of acts
of division and separation and acts of combination and convergence.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Oh yeah, that's interesting too. And you know, the acts
of the acts of mingling and remixing and thus re establishing,
you know, creating new insertions of chaos. I think they're
not always bad because, as I mentioned earlier, like they're
usually bad for the person they're happening to in the story,
(21:21):
but they also create these interesting lessons and transformation points.
So I don't know if Avid would say that the
chaos and the mixing is always one hundred percent bad,
but it seems generally less preferable.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a mashup. You know. Mashups can be great.
They can be a little rough around the edges, and
you know, and then there's a how to and how
do the original artists feel about the combination?
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Now, for our next section here, let's move on into
Norse mythology. We're going to be talking about something known
as the Ganunga gap. This is pretty this is pretty interesting,
and this is basically a pre creation state. And for
this topic I turned to Before the Creation in Old
(22:20):
Norse Mythology, Empty Abyss or Crowded Place by Daniel Sofborg,
professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Tartu, published
in the Abyss as a Concept for cultural theory in
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
I assume that's a book. Yes, yes, okay, that would
be a really focused journal.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, yeah, this is the book, and I have not
read the rest of the book, but I read this article.
This one is publicly available if you look around in
the usual places to get your academic papers.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Sodborg's work is also available elsewhere. But this is going
to concerns specifically. It's going to concern a few different
sources for Norse mythology. But one of the main things
he's talking about here is the eedic poem known as
the Voluspa. So this is usually dated to pre Christian
(23:16):
Pagan tenth century Norse culture, and it concerns a serious
diviner by the name of Volva. And in this bit
I'm about to read she is supposedly speaking to the
god Odin as well as to other gods and human
beings as well. So in translation it goes like this.
(23:36):
It was at the beginning of time when nothing was.
Sand was not nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did
not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap was
and this is gap var ginnega. This is reference in
gnaka gap. So we'll see like different versions of that,
(23:57):
but not growth. So again the mighty gap was, but
not growth. So the character Volva here is telling us
that prior to creation, we didn't have sand, we didn't
have sea, we didn't have waves, we didn't have earth,
we didn't have heaven. All we had was a vast gap.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It brings us back very much to this thing we
talked about with he Sid Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, and so Sabborg, as he details in this paper.
The nature of this gap has long been a matter
of linguistic debate. Depending on how you tease a part
of the different translations, it might mean yawning void. It
might mean an enormous, mighty void or a magical power
filled void. With both of these these these latter two
(24:45):
translations certainly implying like the potentiality of that void like
it's it's empty, but there's something about it, there's something
that could become, you know. Okay, And so the Norse
concept here is often compared to prevailing interpretations of Christian
mythology in Christian creation stories, and we'll get back to
(25:07):
how that plays into all of this as well. But
then there's what happens next in the narrative here in
this particular work, the Voluspa, and that that is the
suns of Burr quote lifted up the lands or the earth,
those who created or gave shape to the glorious mid Guard,
(25:30):
you know, the middle world, the world between the sun
shone from the south on the halls, on the Hall
of Stones. Then the soil was grown over with green plants.
So we get some we get some creation of some
earth creation going on here.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Now, Sofborg points out that various interpretations of this text
position it as Earth being raised out of a primordial sea,
but he stresses that this is generally passed on without evidence,
and that the sea interpretation kind of becomes a tradition
of interpretation concerning this work, but one without clear basis
in the text. So it would seem more likely that
(26:06):
the lands are emerging out of the void, out of
the gap, not out of a sea. It's just like
you know, coming in from other sources. Some scholars have said, well,
the void is the sea, the void is a primordial scene.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
I love this note about the interpretive tradition becoming assumed
as part of the narrative itself, and I think often
we really overlook how much of that there is in
all kinds of narratives that we hold. Dear, I'm familiar
with tons of examples of this throughout the interpretation of
(26:42):
the Christian Bible. There are all these things that are
not part of the text of the Bible, but people
always picture and assume when they're thinking about a Bible story,
and it just becomes part of the story, such that
many Christians will even regard these things as canonical facts,
even though the books don't say it. Just one example,
(27:04):
how many how many wise men are there that visit Jesus?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Oh, there's three. We've all we've we've heard the song,
we've we've we've looked at the the little statues that
we put out at Christmas, We've we've watched people re
enacted it's three wise men.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Three, yeah, three three kings, three wise men. Actually, the
Bible story doesn't say how many there are, just says
Magi came. So we don't know where there're three, where
they're ten, where there're two. Doesn't say it's not there
in the text. But the fact that there are three
is so often assumed and pictured in the story. It
has this feeling of canonicity. Yeah, you can't change that,
(27:39):
But the story doesn't say.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
They bring three gifts. You can't have three gifts brought
by four people. You can't have three gifts brought by
two people. It must be one, per right.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, you could have three gifts brought by two people.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all in We could be in one
gift bag. You know, we always depict each one holding it.
It could be one gift bag. Yeah, And then it
could it could be like three hundred magi and one
just hands over the gifts bag and says, this is
from all of us. We all went in on this.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, I just say this to emphasize it's so interesting
how when there are stories where we regard the details
of the story is very important. Even then people just
sort of like details that aren't in the text itself
attach themselves to it and seem to become part of
the understanding of it, even if they're not there in
(28:27):
the words.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, yeah, and you know. And sometimes it is stuff
that is brought in from other texts, like, for instance,
in this mentioned the sons of Burr being involved here.
In other texts, we come to know that the sons
of Burr are Odin, Vili and v But there's no
indication in these lines who these individuals are, where they
(28:48):
get their power, in what capacity they existed or didn't
exist in this primordial gap, nor how they accomplish the
feet of raising up earth from voice. Absent from all
of this, the author points out, are the familiar Norse
creation motifs that I think most of us know from
various works on even instructional educational videos about Norse mythology
(29:14):
concerning the giant Yemir, and we've talked about this in
the show before, but the author points out that these
are rooted not in this particular pre Christian work, but
in Snorri Stirlson's thirteenth century CE pros Eda Da, which
was composed in twelve twenty to be exact. Obviously a
product of Christian times. The pros Eta drawing on Scholtic poetry,
(29:38):
reveals that there were places prior to the creation of Earth.
So it lays out a pre creation world in which
there's no Earth yet there is a gap, there is
a void, but there are also other realms that already exist. Specifically,
there's Niffelheim, the cold world of myths, to the north
(29:58):
of the gap, and then fiery must bell or must
be behind to the south of the gap. So you
have icy world up here, fiery world down here, and
in between nothing yet.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
That's interesting. Now, I don't want to assign motive to
the development of the story like this, though it strikes
me as interesting that this addresses the kind of paradox
that we brought up with he Siad, where you know,
if the first thing there is is a chasm, or
the first thing there is is a gap before there's
an earth inh Heesio it's telling. It naturally raises questions like, well,
(30:34):
in the mundane sense, a gap is between things, or
it's a hole in something, So what's it in? What
are the boundaries? And there you just don't know. You
don't really know what's intended, but you can start to imagine, well,
maybe there are things on either side before the Earth
is created. I wonder if you could imagine a similar
kind of developmental logic here. Well there, if it's a gap,
(30:57):
it has to be a gap between something.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It could well be part of it. Cyborg doesn't doesn't
get into that so much, but but definitely points out that, Yeah,
this is a rather different create pre creation story. Yeah,
not a magical void, but a true gap between two
places that already existed, which seemingly had names, had their
own dynamic natures. You know, they're active realms. They're not
(31:21):
you know, they're not stagnant, and the creation of Earth
occurs when these two forces converge. Now I think we've
covered this before, but this is this is what occurs
according to the pros Eda quote, And when the rhyme
and the blowing of the warmth met so that it
thawed and dripped. There was a quickening from these flowing
(31:41):
drops due to the power of the source of the heat,
and it became the form of a man, and he
was given the name Yimir, but the frost giants call
him r Golmere. So so yeah, we have this, you know,
very evocative vision where these two extremes are kind of
come together, mingling, and this life form emerges out of
(32:05):
these two dynamic systems, and I think this is all.
You know, this is an evocative idea as well, because
we think about the part of the world where this
idea is situated, and we can imagine, you know, people
noticing the interplay of fire and ice, of summer and winter,
of snow and geothermal heat even Yeah, and you know
(32:25):
that's a dynamic system. Dynamic things happen. There's no God
that creates Ymir, there's no prime mover in this situation.
He just kind of emerges out of the interplay of elements,
and then additional creation occurs out of Yamir. We've discussed
this before, at least different tellings of this in the
show before. But the main examples that the author here
(32:48):
draws on are Ymir's left armpit sweat becomes the giants cool,
his feet have sex with each other and produce more
giants awesome. The great Cow emerges from the fine rhyme.
The cow licks salty stones to form or reveal the
first human Bury, who begets the sun burr. And then
(33:08):
this son marries a giant woman and has three sons.
Odin VILLI and V and then the three sons according
to Uh. To the the Eda, here kill Yamir and
create the world out of the rest of his body parts.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Oh okay, another killing, killing the monster and making the
world with the body. Yeah, like we saw in the
It's like in the Alias.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, and specifically it says that, like they take Yamir
to the middle of the gap and make out of
him the earth, and you know, and they go and
it lifts through the various things that are made. You know,
the teeth become this, the mowers become that we've we've
talked about this in the show Wore. The blood becomes this. Uh.
And this is something that is explored in other myths
(33:51):
elsewhere around the world. You know, the body of the
giant becomes the world. So again, it's only at this
point in the pros at A story that the world
is created. Prior to that, we have multiple worlds, we
(34:13):
have different races and so forth. It is not an
empty void at all. It is like a full blown,
you know, campaign world that's already in place. So Software
points out that in the pros Eda, Stirlsson does quote
this pre Christian work, the Voldspa the work of divination
is talking you know, about the gap and and has
(34:36):
no mention of giants. But he gets much of his
details from a different work, a tenth century poem called
the Vafthruthnismal. And this is a This is a very
giant heavy work that features no gap, no burr, no brewery,
no lifting up of anything, only body part related creation.
(34:57):
And again, meanwhile, the older Vola Spa is giant free.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Okay, so this one lots of giant chunks, no gap, right.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
So Software contends that the Voldespa and the vaf thoth
Nismol are essentially telling two different contradictory pre Christian Norse
creation myths. Yet in this and he points out that
this is of course standard. We've already discussed examples of this,
where various old mythologies have multiple creation stories. These are
(35:30):
often told orally at in different places and time and space,
and they may have different agendas, different things they are
attempting to reveal about the world and ourselves, while also addressing,
you know, the big unanswerable questions about what came before
us and yet what happens we you know, scholars enter
into this, but also just normal people are drawn to this,
(35:52):
especially in our modern age. We want the cannon version, right,
we want the codified version. What is the full story?
And so scholars will, as the Softborg points out, take
these two and try to harmonize them. Take two myths
and form them into one.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Right, because only one thing could have happened. Therefore we
got to kind of mix them together. And that's what happened.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
He has a nice little sentence here that I think
summarize this. He says, quote, the fixed forms belong to
literacy and bookish societies, and so you know that's our obsession,
and we want the fixed forms, but that's not what
we see when we actually look back in these old
mythic systems.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Well, if we can be tendentious, allow us once again
to take up the lance for having multiple stories of
the same things. That's great.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, it's like the Joker and the Batman movies, right, yeah, Yeah,
he has multiple creation stories that he shares and they
all tell you something about who he is. So anyway,
this is exactly what Stirlson apparently did. He attempted to
create a single, cohesive, cohesive creation narrative out of two
separate stories with added did supplemental information and also leaning
(37:03):
on various interpretations that streamlined things. And the version he
created didn't exist in the pre Christian Norse world, to
be clear, but it became highly popular in the Middle
Ages and became the most commonly presented version of Norse
myth for centuries upon centuries to follow into our modern age.
You know, pick up a school book about Norse mythology,
(37:26):
or look for you know, look at a quick rundown
of it somewhere online, and you'll inevitably find these these ideas,
you know, this mixing of the two void and giant
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
This is really interesting because it comes back to a
principle we talked about, I think in the very first
episode of this series, just the happenstance of certain textualization
events that became popular text forms of a myth to
later be interpreted as the original or the canonical form
of the myth, when in fact they might not have
(37:58):
any particular claim to being like the most to widespread
or most widely believed, or the earliest version. They're just
the version that happened to enter the text stream at
a certain point and became a popular text.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yeah, exactly, yeah, and you know, there are the things
about this combined version in the Prosta. For instance, the
sacrificial concept the killing of Yumir by the gods, seemingly
had no basis in pre Christian traditions among the Norse,
not specifically with this particular sacrifice, and while also really
(38:33):
at the same time he apparently really gets in and
dwells on some of the weirder elements, like the feet
having sex with each other.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
He was really into that.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, well, you know, according to Sofborg anyway, perhaps putting
a little more emphasis on that stuff. And so this
is how he Softhborg sums it up, he says, quote
Snorri's interpretation of the Pagan Norse mythology is indeed heavily
influenced by Christian worldview and education. But when he creates
(39:03):
his version of it in his learned work, choosing between
various elements and versions of the creation story, his choices
rather increase the distance between the Christian and the Pagan view.
The tendency and its literary purpose are in my interpretation,
to mark the Pagan religion as false, bizarre, and nasty.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Oh huh, So I think that's huh.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
That's interesting because we've we've talked about examples of this
on the show before. You know, plenty of them. Where
you think about the codifying of a pre Christian religion
by say colonial powers or somebody spreading the Christian faith.
It's often viewed as this attempt to bring them together,
to say like, hey, you have this figure in your religion.
It's kind of like Jesus. Well, let me tell you
(39:47):
about Jesus, and let's draw these two ideas together. In
those it kind of comes back to the idea that,
you know, gods are bringing things together or pushing things apart.
And we often think about this being an exercise in
pushing two concepts closer together, but then leaning things into
the Christian concept. And here we would we arguably see
(40:09):
an effort to do the opposite, to distance the two things,
to show no, no, no, Christianity is here, these beliefs
are way over here, and there's less connective tissue between
the two.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
But ultimately having in my view, the opposite effect of
making the pagan beliefs actually seem cooler by being weirder.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's you know, it's not like
I guess one is a surefire recipe, and I don't
think it's Also, it's also not to imply that like
this was maybe like the prime this is not the
prime motive behind the prosetta as well, but just maybe
one of the factors in its creation. So Soborgan's up
ultimately arguing that there's actually more connective tissue between Biblical
(40:49):
creation narratives and the original pre Christian photospa a count
and that this wouldn't be due to any kind of
direct influence. So scholars tend to agree that the Volospa's
unknown author was you know, in all likelihood a committed
pagan and not someone intentionally introducing foreign Christian concepts into
(41:10):
Norse culture. However, that doesn't mean that the popularity of
Christian stories and Christian concepts elsewhere in the world at
the time didn't exert an influence. And this would have
been a wide world that far traveling vikings had access to. Okay,
So Sofborg doest pull out a specific example of what
(41:32):
you know could have influenced it, or you know, sort
of pointing to the kind of influence that might have
taken place. He points to an eight hundred CE Christian
poem written in Old High German. This is titled Vessel
Bruna Gabbat, and this details a formless pre creation state
(41:52):
with very similar details and structure to what is discussed
in the Voluspa. Here it is in translation, it's gonna
sound very familiar. This I found from Men as the
foremost wisdom, that neither earth there was, nor sky above,
nor tree nor hill. There was, nor stars there were,
nor shone the sun nor moonlight. There was nor the
(42:13):
salty sea. Nothing there was neither en nor limit. So
the German poem here of course reflects, and you know,
we have some caveats here, but basically reflects the second
and third century shift in Christian theology away from the
idea of a primordial chaos and into this idea of
a primordial nothing. And so, yeah, this is such an
(42:36):
interesting concept, an interesting idea here that the potential weaving
of ideas across cultures and across times. So you could
have pre Christian potentially you could have pre Christian pagan
mythological concepts that were themselves influenced by Christian thought that
was going to be popular, you know, mainland continental Europe
(43:00):
at the time.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeah, or if I understand correctly, maybe possibly just influenced
by Christian imagery and storytelling, even if the full theology
is not being brought.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Over right exactly, like just just some you know, I
have state to use the word entertaining, though I think
entertaining is always in the mix fulfilling, I don't know,
thought provoking, you know, these are all aspects of story. Yeah,
but it's something in the story. I think you're right.
The storyteller is key here, especially when we're considered concerning
(43:30):
oral narratives that would have been passed on, you know,
from one voice to another, from one yawning mouth to another.
And so yeah, it's interesting to think about that that
these are shaped by the storytellers, and the storytellers move around,
they listen to each other, and both intentionally and unintentionally,
they take a little bit of the stories they've heard
(43:52):
and form them into the stories they're telling.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Well, we're going to have more to say about the
storyteller tomorrow, aren't we.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
That's right, Yeah, yeah, little little spoiler, we're going to
be discussing, for my money, one of the best episodes
of Jim Henson's The Storyteller series as our Weird House
Cinema selection. So We're going to get into the meat
of that as well, the power of the storyteller.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Okay, well does that do it for the series?
Speaker 2 (44:17):
For now?
Speaker 3 (44:17):
We're done with the thing before the beginning, at least
for now.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
But maybe that's right unless more pre beginnings become apparent
to us and that sucks us back in, you know,
continual renewal in the nun if you will, so, yeah, yeah,
right in. We'd love to hear from you. Just a
reminder for everyone out there. Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and
(44:42):
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Wherever
you get the podcast, whether you're listening to us on
any of the various podcast platforms out there, or watching
us on Netflix, and if you haven't checked that out too,
go check it out. If you have a Netflix membership
or do you want to sign up for one, We
are there in audio and video format wherever you're listening
(45:05):
to us, though, just rate, review, subscribe, remind me thumbs
up two thumbs up stars. Whatever the case may be,
those are all little little gestures you can use that
help us out in the long run.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
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 (45:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
Press read to rat Rat Rat
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com