More Creation Myths

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 last semester's 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

In fact, you may find the Haida's creation myth here, explaining the sculpture above & below:

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


You may also enjoy this creation myth from Hawaii:

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

Here is a picture of the goddess Pele from Twisted Cocktail Party Physics, a blog.

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 the Greek creation myth.  The article was originally posted at Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080424092313/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths_16.html

In addition, here is a link to a retelling of Genesis' creation myth, also originally from Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080430155831/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths
/myths_15.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

Below is a contemporary illustration of this story by Gospodar Svemira, which I found at Wikipedia.

To 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