Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions 1.5. Chapter 12: The energetic (thermodynamic) structure of creation myths ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

copyright © 2003, 2005 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.

We deal here with the first theme of creation myths: the problem of the maintenance of order. A typical mythic cosmogony is presented as a "drama", i.e. genesis of the cosmos in an interpersonal-relationship type of event. Here are compacted together various spheres of experience of being and existence: that of human (corresponding to the later anthropogony), of gods (... theogony), of the social collective (... historiogenesis) and of the cosmos itself all interpenetrate one another in the drama of the myth. Simply speaking, interpenetration is the result of un-differentiation among the component strands. For the functional consciousness of the myth the cosmos is necessarily peopled by gods in its inner structure -- as the ancestral spirits, after leaving their dead body, blend into the atmosphere -- so that cosmogony is necessarily a drama of interpersonal relationships among these gods that are the structure of the cosmos. Differentiation of consciousness "de-peoples" the cosmic structure of these "gods" as we shall see soon with the Presocratic cosmogony, and cosmogony would then also be cosmogony pure and simple, this strand now separated from the other three.

Let us consider two examples. First a Chinese cosmogonic myth. In the beginning heaven and earth are compacted together in an undifferentiated or indeterminate form like an "egg". Pangu (盤 古 the god) is nourished and dwells inside. After 18,000 years he awakens and is disturbed by darkness. He thus splits open the egg, the lighter part of which ascends to form the sky, and the heavier part of which descends to form the earth. Now Pangu, stuck between heaven and earth, the more he grows the more he pushes the sky higher up away from the earth and the earth deeper down away from the sky, this for another 18,000 years. He is the column between heaven and earth preventing the two from collapsing back into one another to result in the original indeterminate chaos. When finally the heaven and the earth are stable enough to remain in their respective places, Pangu lies down and dies. His breath becomes the wind and clouds and his voice the thunder. His left eye becomes the sun and his right eye the moon. His limbs and body become the four cardinal directions (north, south, etc.) and the famous five mountains (of China). His blood becomes the rivers, his arteries and tendons the roads, his muscle the (agricultural) plains, his hair the stars and so on. (The specific form of this common myth follows Yuan-Ke, Chinese Ancient Mythology [in Chinese, 1951].)

Second the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish. "When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name, Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, And Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters ["the fresh waters of Apsu and the marine waters of Tiamat 'the sea'", translator's note] commingling as a single body; No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared." Then the gods Lahmu and Lahamu are formed from them, Anshar and Kishar from these, then Anu (meaning sky?), and Ea (Nudimmund) from him. These (latter) band together to disturb Tiamat ['s belly]. Apsu, unhappy, plans revenge. Ea sees through Apsu's scheme, slays him in his sleep. Ea (and his wife) create Marduk out of the heart of Apsu. Now Tiamat plans revenge, with her other gods. Ea hears and goes to Anshar who turns to Anu and tells him to persuade Tiamat. Anu's effort futile, Marduk rises up and, with a net and seven winds (of the cardinal directions and others), engages in battle with Tiamat. Marduk sends the Evil Wind to Tiamat's mouth to distend her body and keeps open her mouth; he then releases the arrow that tears up her body. Marduk rules over all of Tiamat's gods, dismembers her body, cuts it in half, one half of which he sets up as sky, posts guards to not allow Tiamat's waters to escape. "He constructed stations for the great gods, fixing their astral likenesses as constellations. He determined the year by designating the zones: He set up three constellations for each of the twelve months. After defining the days of the year [by means] of (heavenly) bands, That none might transgress or fall short. [Tiamat's] belly he established the zenith"... and so on with the rest of astronomical proportions. Kingu, the commander of Tiamat's gods, is brought to Anshar's assembly for judgment for his role in Tiamat's intrigue. Kingu killed, Ea creates out of his blood humankind, and imposes on it the services of gods. The gods build a shrine to Marduk and together have a banquet, where the fifty names of Marduk are called. (Ancient Near Eastern Text, 60 -72)

Three points need be made about these creation stories. Firstly, these creation myths -- or cosmogony as creation of order (determinateness or, thermodynamically speaking, the state of low entropy, the state far from equilibrium) out of chaos (indeterminateness or disorder, or the state of equilibrium or maximal entropy) -- usually have their elements, cosmic order vs. chaos-disorder, personified by gods in accordance with the mythic consciousness which sees the cosmos as animated by gods or ancestors. In the Babylonian, Marduk and his crowd are the force of order that has to triumph against the force of chaos or disorder represented by Tiamat and her crowds. And in the Chinese Pangu has to struggle for 18,000 years to keep order, i.e. the differentiation between sky and earth, from collapsing into the undifferentiated chaos. The theme here is invariably firstly the experienced tension between the formation of order despite necessary overall entropy-increase, and secondly between the second law and the first law of thermodynamics, between the destruction of order necessitated by time and the conservation behind despite destruction. In the non-historical mythic consciousness, the law of conservation is only implicitly recognized behind the second law so that the (permanent) negation of destruction by conservation (of the second law by the first law) has not yet been differentiated; mythic consciousness therefore sees only the problem of order-formation and -maintenance (going up-hill, against the arrow of time) within the general continuous disintegration of order (the general arrow of time, going down-hill) and confronts the necessary tendency of the cosmos-order to disintegrate and reach equilibrium through time by ritual periodic restoration of order, as in the Mesopotamian New Year Festival where the above Babylonian creation epic was in fact re-enacted or recited in Babylon, during the ceremony called akitu, in the last days of the old year and the first days of the new year (Mircea Eliade, Le Sacré et le Profane, Gallimard, p. 67). We have already much commented on how this ancient human need for the return to the pristine, pure, temps sacré after the exhaustion of the temps profane of which Eliade has made much is just determined by ancient people's functional understanding of entropy and the arrow of time as determined by the second law of thermodynamics, and how salvation, the negation of the second law with the first law -- given, that is, the non-differentiation between qualitative and quantitative conservation -- would break up this ritual periodicity.¹ This ritual periodicity is not yet salvation because it is mere maintenance of order akin to eating -- which maintains the body, i.e. regenerates it from its increasing weakness and from the increasing entropy within its constitution, but does not "save" it once and for all. Thus, at the turn of each new year Marduk had to re-defeat Tiamat in the re-enacted ritual drama, and he had to post guards to keep the waters of Tiamat (now the substance or order of the sky) from pouring out (collapse back into chaos [i.e. equilibrium]); and Pangu had to serve as the column between sky and earth for a continuous 18,000 years to prevent the collapse of order back into disorder. Otherwise, without energy input to regenerate the differentiation between heaven and earth and all the orders of the cosmos, they would soon overcome the differentiation and reach equilibrium with each other (original undifferentiatedness) due to the necessary increase of entropy through time. As we will see in our genealogy of the Israelite testamental "religion", the permanent negation of the destructiveness of time by conservation (salvation proper: but note here that the quantitative conservation of amount is mistaken by the functional perspective as the qualitative conservation of order) had disengaged, in the Israelite historical form, from the Mesopotamian mythic milieu through diachronization (historicization) of the periodic restorative cosmogony: i.e. through the application of the final cosmogonic restoration once and for all (because it is Eternal: i.e. Conservation) to an indeterminate time in the future. Through eschatology, that is. Now the transcendent God comes at the end of time once and for all. It is only then that mythic consciousness resolves the tension between order and disorder by resolving the more implicit tension between the second law and the first law of thermodynamics, which itself is expressed often in another theme, mortality vs. immortality. Here again, proper to the stand-still mode of mythic consciousness, the issue is not resolved but simply accepted; hence the myth that narrates how man loses immortality through negligence, hubris, or unwise rivalry with gods. This tension between mortality and immortality is not resolved until the philosophia of classical Greece and India (but also later in Christianity). In China, the Daoists resolved it in yet another, more implicit, muted way.

Secondly, the problem of genesis and maintenance of order from and against the disorder ordained by Time as the natural state of things evidently implies the problem of the differentiation of the components of order that are to be maintained (the stars and their cycles, the farm lands differentiated from waters, the seasons differentiated from and succeeding one another) so that creation myths always narrate the stories of the genesis of natural phenomena. As said, because of the second law order cannot appear unless some greater order has "sacrificed" itself and released its stored energy to make us -- in empirical reality, the self-burning of the Sun, but in myth, the self-sacrifice or imposed death of the primordial god(s) -- so that the mythic consciousness often derives these orders from the bodies of the gods. This is expected since the gods (the anima) constitute the very structure of the cosmos.

Thirdly, this premature understanding of the second law (the necessary background of increased disorder for the formation of some localized order, i.e. "negentropy") contains naturally also the memory of the law of Conservation which is to differentiate into the philosophical search for arche (origin of being). The fundamental components of the order of the cosmos (e.g. heaven and earth) have to differentiate out of, not just the body parts of gods, but also a primordial, indeterminate whole, represented as an egg, waters, a compact air-ball, or something of such nature. This reminds of the "substratum", the consubstantial, that is the effect of the recall of the first law. If, in accordance with the law of conservation, there never is any destruction or construction but only re-shuffling (transformation) of the same substrate here and there and then and now, then the primordial indeterminateness expresses this substrate before it starts to "shuffle" itself regionally and temporally.

Mircea Eliade has remarked on the prime importance of the cosmogonic myths, that it "serves as the exemplary model for all 'creation', for all kinds of 'doing things' ("... la cosmogonie sert de modèle exemplaire à toute 'création', à toute espèce de 'faire.'" Ibid., p. 71) "It is perhaps in Polynesia that one encounters the widest ritual application of cosmogonic myth. The words that Io had pronounced in illo tempore in order to create the world have become ritual formulae. People repeat it during many occasions: in order to make a sterile woman fecund; in order to heal (the sickness of the soul as well as of the body); in order to prepare oneself for war; and also at the time of death or in order to stimulate poetic inspiration." (p. 71 - 2) This is because the moment of creation, as the beginning of Time, is the most energetic, most orderly, least "running-out", because the destructive effect of time (entropy-increase) has not yet had "time" to take effect; by magical extension, the myth of this moment becomes capable of energizing, re-ordering, or generating creativity. It may thus also be therapeutic in this way, used in healing rites to "regenerate" the person as "brand-new", as "before being subject to the entropic destruction of Time" (p. 72; in addition to Polynesia, c.f. "Na-khi, population tibéto-birmane vivant dans la Chine du Sud-Ouest (Province du Yunnan). Le rituel de guérison consiste à proprement parler dans la récitation solennelle du mythe de la Création du monde, suivi des mythes de l'origine des maladies (provoquées par la colère des Serpents) et de l'apparition du premier chaman-guérisseur qui apporte aux humains les médicaments nécessaires"; p. 72 - 3).

A different, more advanced species however is Hesiod's cosmogony in his Theogony. Here the cosmogonic reflection gets into the speculative mode already, though not yet philosophic. (For this latter we have to wait for the Presocratic philosophers.)

Now Eric Voegelin (Order and History, Vol. 2: The World of the Polis) reminds us that Hesiod's myth is a deliberate construction and a speculation on the truth of the order of the cosmos that moves within the traditional medium of the myth. Hesiod suffered injustices from his brother and village people who conspired to rob him of his inheritance. As said, consciousness often differentiates as a response when faith in the current order or justice (cosmic and societal) is falsified and disappointed by its break-down, disintegration or degeneration, in which case consciousness seeks after a more comprehensive conception of order -- a more accurate understanding of Reality and the lessons of order and justice that are therein implied -- and in consequence narrows its distance to Truth. Hesiod is such a case. When he discovered a more adequate understanding of Reality and order, he then felt himself different from the common tradition and opposed his better truth to the now untruth of the common tradition: a typical case of the stratification of the communal consciousness due to differentiation within its specific spheres. Hence Hesiod's myth, while in its expressive mode remaining within the bound of the myth, as a speculative penetration into the meaning of order is intermediate between the philosophy of the Presocratics and the cosmological myth of the past. Our examples of myth thus correspond to stages in the evolution of myth: The Chinese creation myth cited was taken from the oral traditions of the villages and hence represents the most spontaneous production (first stage; the numeral speculation of 18,000 is probably later cosmological addition); the Babylonian from the cosmological empire (second stage); and Hesiodian, the speculative (the third).

The theme of the Theogony is the aforementioned perpetual theme of the tension between order and disorder and implicitly between the two thermodynamic laws, not yet differentiated so as to remain as the problem of maintenance of order against its perpetual collapse into disorder as ordained by time. "The story of the Theogony is a cardinal problem in a philosophy of history and order. In nonmythical language, it is the tension between a hard-won civilzational order, precariously in balance [always tending to reach equilibrium with the disordered environment due to the second law], and a rumbling underworld of demonic forces which at any time may break loose and destroy it [symbolization of the effect of the second law, of the maximum entropic equilibrium of the environment against which the localized order is maintained]." (Ibid., p. 132) Hence Hesiod attempts here an "articulation of the principles of order represented by Zeus"; and "the meaning of order must be found in the development of the god's personality... [in] the evolution of Zeus as an ethical personality." (Ibid.) But:

The "generation" of the primordial trinity in the Hesiodian theogony thus expresses in mythic form a very particular, more advanced anamnesis of the law of Conservation:

We'll see later that the law of conservation -- that nothing can come from nothing, so to speak -- eventually means paradoxically that the world around us can only have come from nothing; but also that the problem of the existence of the universe out of nothing seemed to be able to be circumvented when it was discovered that "the energy stored in the gravitational field is represented by a negative number... It is therefore conceivable that the total energy of the universe is zero. The immense energy that we observe in the form of matter can be cancelled by a negative contribution of equal magnitude, coming from the gravitational field." (Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe, p. 12) This led Edward Tryon, assistant professor at Columbia University in the 1960s, to posit the creation of the universe ex nihilo as a matter of vacuum fluctuation. That is, from the vacuum, which is subject to quantum uncertainties just as any other system, anything can pop into existence from nowhere, though the larger and more complex a thing (like a refrigerator) is, the chance of its materializing out of nothing the lower. "The vast cosmos that we see around us could have originated as a vacuum fluctuation -- essentially from nothing at all -- because the large positive energy of the masses in the universe can be counterbalanced by a corresponding amount of negative energy in the form of the gravitational field." (Ibid., p. 14) Tryon writes: "I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time..." (Ibid., p. 14) But "for a number of years Tryon's work was largely ignored, as most physicists apparently believed that any universe produced from a vacuum flactuation would, with overwhelming probability, be much smaller than the one that we observe." (Ibid.) We'll come to a detailed articulation of this problem later.

So the Universe can, in fact, be Nothing. Through the following exposition we will see how the enlightenment-salvational traditions of the First Axial will gradually come to match up to this insight -- and maybe even beyond (Buddhism).

The point is that it is to be expected if the Hesiodic speculative myth of genesis out of nothing -- and any other speculative systems from the functional perspective of ancient time -- is reminiscent of the idea of genesis ex nihilo in modern theoretical physics -- or halfway, since there is in the myth no Retributive god who would even out the Jovian order to zero. Moreover, because of the law of Conservation, Being can easily pass into non-Being, so that the speculative metaphysics of the functional perspective of the past might well play Being into non-Being or non-Being into Being just as in modern Big-Bang cosmology where the Universe, the total Being, may be Nothing at all. As said, through the two laws of thermodynamics the structure of the Universe is actually manifested on the macroscopic level appropriate for human senses and thus enters human memory. The memory has been dim in ancient time because the thermodynamic laws are vague within the functional perspective, that is, without its quantification on the level of the structures (atomic constituents of matter and units of energy). Hence the enlightenment and salvational traditions in the past attempted to recall the memory, but failed so most of the time. The situation is somewhat similar to Plato's statement that humans had knowledge of the forms (eidos) but did not know them distinctly because these forms were memorial reflections of what had been formerly seen by the soul in the divine realm before the soul was degraded to the world of the senses.

The other point about Hesiod's Theogony is that it stays very true in form to ordinary myths in that natural phenomena are also variously derived from interpersonal relationships among the gods, here specifically through "marital relationships". But this is only similarity in appearance, for, as said, Hesiod's myth is speculative of the truth of social order as originative of divine order immanent in the personalities of the gods. Thus the personification of elements of order is taken up (aufgehoben) to a higher consciousness of the order of the cosmos and society.

Given his analysis of Hesiod, Voegelin thus feels justified in seeing a natural transition from this last stage of myth (which is fully speculative of origin and not merely implicitly so as in ordinary myths, and where the personalization in ordinary myths has been toned down as the personalities of gods are no longer of private persons but of universal ethical principles) directly into the pre-Socratic speculation of the cosmos completely de-personalized: "... they [the Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes] replaced the divine figures of the myth, in their search for origins, with symbols drawn from objects and substances of the world of sense perception." (Voegelin, ibid., p. 167) This de-personalization of the cosmos, as said, is the result of a further differentiation of consciousness.

Footnotes:

1. Eliade describes the Babylonian new year rituals in more detail: "L'abolition du Temps profane écoulé s'effectuait au moyens des rites qui signifiaient une sorte de 'fin du monde'. L'extinction des feux, le retour des âmes des morts [recycling of the dead, as mentioned], la confusion sociale du type des Saturnales, la license érotique, les orgies [these meaning the dissolution of social order], etc., symbolisaient la régression du Cosmos dans le Chaos. Le dernier jour de l'an, l'Univers se dissolvait dans les Eaux primordiales. Le monstre marin Tiamat, symbole des ténèbres, de l'amorphe, du non-manifesté, ressuscitait et redevenait menaçant [the order of the cosmos has entropically dissolved and is leading to the primordial equilibrium state]. Le monde qui avait existé durant toute une année disparaissait réellement. Puisque Tiamat était de nouveau là, le Cosmos était annulé, et Marduk était forcé de le créer encore une fois, après avoir de nouveau vaincu Tiamat." (Ibid., p. 69)

2. Chaos = "space (here the first state of being, the mode of uniform mass), infinite space, the atmosphere, gap." Kirk and Raven comments: "disordered, shapeless matter", ibid., p. 27. Erebos: "a place of nether darkness, above the still deeper Hades." Pontos: "open sea." Tartaros: "a dark abyss, as deep below Hades as earth below heaven, the prison of Titans."