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