MYTHS OF CREATION
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4. First Things First:
Cosmogony |
In each of these antique cosmovisions one myth or cluster of myths tended above all to be primary or more prolific in particular — customarily serving as both the cultural foundation stone that furnished the people’s basic mythos to begin with, as well as the central hub around which the full array of their total cosmovision continued to be systematically expanded from time to time thereafter.
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* C O S M O -
from the Greek κόσμος : 'The world or universe as an ordered system' - G O N Y * from the Greek γόνος : ‘Creation, generation, or begetting’ |
I here refer specifically to the traditional MYTHS OF CREATION that once were quite commonplace at the beginning of recorded history — foremost among them the oldest-known pre-scientific accounts conserved by our mythopoeic ancestors’ polytheistic COSMOGONIES — which (often in great detail) described the creative actions and sacred undertakings initiated by a primordial pantheon of wildly ambivalent deities and discordant elemental forces, by which the predictable regularity of our present world order, with all of its characteristic features & behaviors, was widely believed to have been first set in motion. |