More Creation Myths for Spring 2014

We will start off EN 211 with some Native American creation myths, so I thought that I would post a few sites that my students in a mythology class found.  Not all of these myths are from the Americas, however.

The picture above is of Bill Reid's sculpture of Raven and the First Men, a creation myth from the Haida nation, a people from Canada's Pacific Northwest.  The sculpture is now in Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology.

Let's begin with an overview from Worldhistory.net, a British site.  This overview will give you the differences and the similarities between various creation myths (Greece, Japan, The Bible's, and so on).

http://historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab83

Wikipedia's overview is more extensive with many more examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth

The Haida's creation myth here explains the sculpture above & below:

 https://web.archive.org/web/20100106124356/http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/firstnations/haida.html

You may also enjoy this creation myth from Hawaii:

http://www.mythome.org/hawaiicreation.html

Here is a painting of the goddess Pele  by Arthur Johnson.

 


These Cherokee myths recount the origins of various parts of creation like game animals, corn, and medicinal plants.

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore80.html

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore82.html

Being a New Englander, I have to include the Mik'Maq's creation story:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore21.html

As a point of comparison to the Native American creation myths, here is a link to a retelling of Genesis' creation myth, originally from Washington State University.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_reader_1/hebrew_creation.html

The picture below is one of British poet and artist William Blake's illustrations from Paradise Lost.  In this illustration, Satan is spying on Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  This picture is from Wikipedia, and the illustration itself is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.Or you may prefer to read the Japanese creation myth of Izanagi and Izanami, a story that my student found to be beautiful yet tragic.

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Iz-Le/Izanagi-and-Izanami.html

 o put these stories into perspective, you may want to look at what Joseph Campbell and others have had to say on myths and sacred tales:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/perspectives1.html