In the Beginning

So I turned in my first tutorial essay, nervous as all hell. Finished it last night, celebrated at a little party down the street, came back, got four hours of sleep, woke up early, revised it, couldn't print it, tutor printed it instead, went to meet him, read it out loud (which was strangely enjoyable), and...

Success.

I didn't entirely cover everything that I could have, but what I did was "very well-written" and "thorough." Which is more than I was hoping for on this first tutorial attempt. Here for your bored-out-of-my-mind amusement, is 2000 words on the essential characteristics of creation narratives, specifically Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

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In the Beginning

“In the Beginning the strife of the chaos of the universe was finally resolved by a god, a natural force of a higher kind, who separated the earth from heaven, and thus he who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation, was wise in all matters.” Using this forced amalgamation of mythical beginnings, we are introduced to the creation of the world through three separate narratives from three separate cultures and ages: Genesis, purportedly written after the Exodus by Moses, a Hebrew from Egypt; The Epic of Gilgamesh, concerning a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who may or may not have been a historical figure and who may or may not have lived around 2600 BCE (Armstrong 72) and whose story was gathered orally across time in much the same way as The Odyssey or Beowulf —not attributed to one author, but rather to one people group; and lastly, the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a Roman writer banished by Emperor Augustus to live among the barbarians of the cold north.

What each contains is an account of the creation of the world. However, because each story is unique to a specific people group and place, the purpose of each text is completely different—and yet paradoxically serves a universal purpose, even to this day. Looked at collectively, a picture of the nature of human life begins to emerge from these far-flung stories—which, despite the differences in detail (i.e. the name Noah as opposed to Uta-napishti or Deucalion) points to a rather hopeful notion: that from the very beginning man has tried to describe his own life as an individual, as a community-member, and as a creature subservient to Fate or the god(s) whom they serve, as well as to death (a “law” that Gilgamesh in particular tries desperately to break).

If we separate the texts, we divine their specific cultural functions. Genesis was intended to instruct, Metamorphoses was to entertain, and Gilgamesh was to examine. Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Torah[1], does not have one hero, as most epics require, but many. Like Gilgamesh, its aim is to explore humanity as a whole rather than to extol the heroic qualities of a single protagonist. However, unlike Gilgamesh, it had a certain instructional purpose built into it: “This is what happens when you kill your brother, this is what happens when you pass your wife off as your sister, this is what happens when you are corrupted completely.” The implication is do not do the things that will cause these consequences, and, inversely, do the things which will cause God to look favorably upon you, for there are rewards for such actions.

Gilgamesh is philosophical more than it is instructional. The consequences for disobeying the gods seems slight and of secondary importance to investigating the manners of men and what qualities are required for leadership: the things a man must do to become civilized and fit for living peaceably with his neighbor. It calls to mind a science experiment examining cause and effect: “Let us see what happens when Gilgamesh meets a man who can match him in strength, let us see what happens when his best friend and brother dies, let us see what happens when he is denied immortality.” While there are “morals” to be taken away by the reader, it is more important to observe the journey of Gilgamesh, and to understand the general behaviors of mankind (and how man learned to function as he does).

Metamorphoses is not a myth in the pure sense. Its writer intended to collect the myths of his culture’s literary history much in the same way that the Grimm brothers collected Germanic folktales and then reinterpreted them to suit their own designs. Ovid seems to be both interpreter (“translating” many of the stories into the context of his own era—labeling, for instance, the highest levels of heaven as the Roman equivalent: the Palatine) and critic, where the line between homage and mockery is sometimes extremely thin. It has even been labeled metafiction, self-aware, and much speculation has been offered as to how clever Ovid was—or was not—in his treatment of heroes and villains and morals.

Like all ancient texts, these three books were interpreted by later authors and historians. The events of Genesis were taken as indisputable fact by the Medieval church, Gilgamesh was thought to be nothing more than a poem about death (George xiii), and Metamorphoses was made into Christian allegory by early clerics (Brown 12). It is their unique cultural purpose, however, that is most useful in reading the stories as they were meant to be understood when they were first told. In short, they are myths. And if we are to believe Karen Armstrong’s definition of myth’s purpose in her book A Short History of Myth, it is not a medium essentially archaic. “Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it” (3). The “modern” Wild West stories are an example of a specific culture novelizing its birth, just as the Hebrews, Mesopotamians, and virtually ever other people group has done since the invention of storytelling.

The contents of the thing called “myth” usually, according to Karen Armstrong, contain elements of death, immortality, sacrifice, ritual, and divinity—this last a concept that was viewed quite differently in the ancient world. “When [ancient] people spoke of the divine, they were usually talking about an aspect of the mundane” (5) because there was no great distinction between the realm of heaven and the realm of earth as they were both made of the same basic material. And as such, myths explain things that happened both very specifically (i.e. Gilgamesh went through mountains and over seas to speak with the only immortal human on earth concerning how he might also attain immortality) as well as things that are universal or common occurrences (for example, the modern cosmetics industry is a testament that women—and men—want the same unattainable things that Gilgamesh wanted thousand of years ago—their fountain of youth just happens to be Mary Kay and cosmetic surgery).

Looking at Genesis, we find what many people still believe to be the “only” creation account. It describes a universe created by a benign (and singular) god who formed everything out of absolutely nothing. In Metamorphoses, the world was created by a single god, but his name—to Ovid at least—is completely unimportant.

This strife [of the Chaos of the universe] was finally resolved by a god, a natural force of a higher kind, who separated the earth from heaven, and the waters from the earth, and set the clear air apart from the cloudy atmosphere…. In this way, the god, whichever of the gods it was, set the chaotic mass in order, and, after dividing it up, arranged it in its constituent parts” (Innes 32-33).

This section sounds extremely similar to the Genesis account, but the differences, though slight, point to a drastic disparity in cultural values. The Jewish text stresses the intentional design of a loving creator—one who, after inventing specific items like the air, the sea, or the sun, declared (brooking no argument) that it was good. The almost blasé account of the god in Metamorphoses clearly states that even the god who shaped the entire universe was far less interesting and worthy of extrapolation than the new breed which inhabited that universe—namely, humans. If even the gods were afraid of Fate, which, in Metamorphoses, demanded the “the massive structure of the universe [to] collapse in ruins” (38), then it put the gods on a fairly even playing field with men in terms of vulnerability. Genesis also predicted a cataclysmic end to the universe, but, again, an individual could be spared if he was righteous in the eyes of God (a moral prerequisite, not the product of cold Fate).

Thus the creation account in Genesis was strictly religious, while the creation account in Metamorphoses was almost humanist, interested solely in man and his condition. Indeed, Ovid writes “So the earth, which had been rough and formless, was moulded into the shape of man, a creature till then unknown” (33, italics added). It wasn’t until man was created that the earth was complete, a rather egocentric way of viewing history and man’s place in it. Although one can’t help but wonder if Ovid was perhaps mocking humanity rather than elevating it.

Gilgamesh was similarly interested in the topic of man’s position in the world. In his introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Andrew George says that, “[I]ndeed, even for the ancients, the story of Gilgamesh was more about what it is to be a man than what it is to serve the gods.” While Alexander Heidl states in The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels that, “The gods assemble and pass on life and death. And from their decrees there is no escape,” Mary Innes (speaking of Metamorphoses) counters that, “for the most part gods and men are treated in the same way, as actors in a universal drama, where Destiny is the only over-riding force” (15). Today, gods and destiny do not control man—but the laws of science do. Children are taught at an early age that gravity fixes them to the ground, that rainbows are the product of a certain refraction of light, that the air is nothing more than two hydrogen molecules coupled with an oxygen molecule, and that momentum makes the world go round. The inescapable decrees of the gods have been transferred in our modern age to the inescapable demands of physics. We are no less bound than we were before, we just call our gods by a different name.

But whether the god(s) or Destiny (or the theory of relativity) are at the helm, death is the common ground of all things, for “the earth is the great cemetery of all that dwell below the skies” (Heidel 143). In Genesis, man is promised a decadent afterlife, on the condition that he be righteous and obey God. In the world of Gilgamesh, there is a sort of afterlife, but in truth a man’s life on earth is his paradise (12). The natural conclusion that Gilgamesh and the reader must reach is, crudely, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Or, to impart a slightly deeper moral: “By achieving great things, let your name be immortal in place of your body.” And we have been trying ever since to do just that—from Achilles choosing everlasting glory over certain safety to Christopher Columbus embarking on a dangerous journey to claim new land and astronauts braving death to claim the surface of the moon, we have since the beginning sought to put our stamp on the things we leave behind, be they walls or statues or philosophies. Death, we learned, was inescapable, but immortality could still be vicariously achieved.

Before the concept of death could be invented, life (and birth) must needs precede it. In Genesis and Metamorphoses, mankind was created pure, without wickedness or evil. And in both, mankind fell into terrible violence. In Gilgamesh, man was born wicked, made from the blood of a violent, rebel god Kingu (Heidel 138), and therefore irredeemable from his very inception. In all three stories, the god(s) find that mankind has become so corrupt (Genesis) and violent (Metamorphoses) that they must as an entire breed be destroyed. Since the act of man’s destruction was a precursor to the events of Gilgamesh, the text gives no other reason than “the gods decided to send the Deluge” (Innes 88).

And indeed, the Deluge comes. Each story describes the preservation of one family by the god(s) who forewarn them of the earth’s destruction, instructing them to build a boat in which to save themselves and specific land animals. Other similarities abound in surprising number and detail.

Whether a story had one hero or many, one god or many gods, a paradisial afterlife or a vague, shadowy realm of posthumous existence, on a broad scale, the essential characteristics of these creation stories seems to encompass the creation of the world, the creation of man, instructions on how to live, examinations of man’s behavior, and fascination with death, the afterlife, and immortality. They were all concerned with the Truth, rather than historical fact, and they used storytelling to illuminate to their particular culture life as they knew it to be. And because they each consider universal themes and are linked by parallel plot points (i.e. the Flood), they can still be read today and appreciated as an in-depth look not solely at ancient man, but at humanity across the ages.

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Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh [u.a.: Canongate, 2005. Print.

Brown, Sarah Annes. Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis. Bristol: Bristol Classical, 2004. Print.

"Genesis 1 - Passage Lookup - New International Version, ©2010 - BibleGateway.com." BibleGateway.com: A Searchable Online Bible in over 100 Versions and 50 Languages. Web. 20 Jan. 2011. .

George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.

Heidel, Alexander. The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1949. Print.

Ochs, Carol. Our Lives as Torah: Finding God in Our Own Stories. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Print.

Ovid, and Mary M. Innes. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955. Print.

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[1] In her book Our Lives as Torah, Carol Ochs explains that, “[b]y providing examples of fundamental categories such as holy, trial, and covenant, the Torah helps us understand the text of our own lives, and, in turn, our lives help us understand the Torah” (2). Even today, the stories in Genesis (as well as the other books of the Pentateuch) are used to instruct a specific people group on how to carry out their daily existence.