The Thing Before the Beginning, part 2

So nothing existed before. Now there's a world. But the interesting thing is that if you start really looking at creation stories from all around the world, it seems to me that very few of them actually fit this description.

And instead of being accounts of how the raw substance of the universe was brought into existence, what you most often get instead is a before and after story where a world of some kind already exists, usually in some kind of static or chaotic state, and then something happens which introduces distinctions and differences and somehow orders this pre existing world in such a way that characters can now

exist and events can take place within it. And I realized that I've talked on the show plenty of times before about being attracted to imagery of weird wastelands and dark, unpopulated places. I don't know how unique I am in this.

Maybe basically everybody thinks this is interesting, but I don't know, but it feels kind of personal to me that, for whatever reason, I have never been able to forget about that chapter in the Time Machine or the time Traveler goes millions of years into the future and sees this desolate, withering earth under the red sun and no people in it,

just these crab monsters and stuff. Or the way I was talking in the last episode about being really haunted by that very short description at the beginning of the Book of Genesis of the dark, the dark deep waters in the wind of God rushing above them.

For some reason, that is just a really easy way to get my attention. I'm into this the waste land feeling or the empty world. So, in keeping with that tradition of fascination, I got very interested in talking about images from these creation stories of what the world is

like before the creation event takes place. So that's what we've been talking about in the last episode, and we'll continue in this one creation narratives, but also with the special focus on what the world was like before the so called beginning and what kind of meaning or understanding

these pre creation worlds imply. So for a brief refresher on the last episode, we talked about the Biblical creation narrative in the Book of Genesis, which is often understood to be an example of a creation story that actually is creation ex nihilo. It's taken as an account of like the creation of the raw substance of reality, but an interesting and I think to a lot of people. Surprising thing is that this is almost certainly not the

intention of the original text. Most scholars today who look at the Hebrew of Genesis one tend to agree that it is actually not a tale of raw creation, but a story in which God orders and furnishes a pre existing, chaotic world. So this pre existing world is described as a world of darkness and deep waters, you know, the spirit of God hovering over the water. So it is a dark and chaotic kind of empty place, but it

is a place. There's something there, there's water, there's you know, this wind of God, and we talked about that at some length. We also talked about interesting patterns that appear in multiple creation stories, often themes of darkness or undiffer differentiated masses of fluid of some kind existing in the world before, and creation acts or ordering acts that involve the separation of substances into discrete categories. I think that's

a really interesting trend. We also talked about the pre creation world described in the opening lines of the Inuma a Leash, or the Babylonian epic of Creation, which is characterized mainly by the things of the world like the skies and the earth, being nameless, and I thought this hinted at a really interesting type of ontology in some ancient Mesopotamian thinking, where in some sense things begin to exist when they are given names and destinies, so a

concept of existence that is at some level mediated by human recognition and salience, but also I think related to the concept you find all over ancient Ear Eastern thinking, where language itself has some kind of manifestation power to bring reality into existence. To bring it back to the Biblical creation narrative. In that narrative, God speaks things into

existence by saying their names. But you also see this, for example, in ancient Egyptian Heca magic, where speaking or writing the names of things can manifest them in reality. Another interesting thing I was reflecting on about the anuma Aleish creation story that I think is going to be relevant to one of our major topics today is that you could legitimately mark multiple places in the story as

the moment of creation. Right, So you could select the birth of the first gods, after the mingling of the different kinds of water. You could say, well, that's the moment of creation. Or you could select the later creation by combat story where the younger god Marduke kills the primordial being of saltwater, Tiamot chops up her body like a fish, and then makes the world we live in out of it? Which part is the creation? And I guess in different ways they're both creation events or both

reordering events. And I think that that's an interesting thing to reflect on. People don't often think about it that way, that there can be multiple creations occurring sequentially.

features of the people think of about the series. Yeah, yeah, Anyway, in the previous episode, we also talked briefly about parallels in science. Obviously, religious and cultural creation stories are a very different type of project from physics based cosmology, so we weren't trying to say, like, you know, which of the creation narratives gets the science right. I don't think that's a very useful project, but at least for some grounding.

We talked about scientific cosmology and about how we don't really know what, if anything, happened before the before the beginning of the Big Bang, or more precisely, before the cosmic inflation. There are some speculative models that could be candidates for a physics based world before, and these have over the years included things like a cyclically expanding and then contracting universe, or the idea that we are some kind of bubble that emerges from a pre existing universe

and maybe this kind of renucleation just happens infinitely. But we don't have direct evidence for these types of hypotheses at present. The best you can do for a world before in physics is create a model that is mathematically consistent with the theories and observations we already have, but it's not going to be There's not really a way to confirm it with direct observations, at least as far

as we know. Finally, we also talked about a really interesting creation narrative appearing in some Chinese traditions, which was the story of Pengu, or the ancient coiled one, who forms inside a cosmic egg within a cloud of chaotic vapor, then hatches, and in some tellings, separates the earth from the sky, sometimes with an axe, and then stands as a pillar holding the sky up from the earth. Another

interesting tale of creation by separation. We also talked about versions of the Pengo story, which include the Taoist and Neo confusion concept of the wouji. And I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong, Rob you brought up last time. How with the inflection that means something totally different, or it means like nonsense or something, But in the way I was trying to say it, it is the formless state of existence before creation, so before the egg of Pegu.

In these tellings with the wuci, it's the state you might characterize as limitless potential for becoming that is actually nothing in itself.

not one canonical text or telling of this story. There are a bunch of circulating versions which reflect both regional and tribal variations, and then variations unique to individual storytellers. So whatever version of the story you read or that I tell will not be able to be representative of all of them. But I'm going to try to capture some common themes that appear in multiple tellings, with the caveat that this is not the only nor the authoritative version of the story.

It's just the happenstance that it's the one that's in a book.

that I wanted to flag later. So this older book is called, in its translated form, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as furnished by their priests and chiefs. This was first published in eighteen fifty five, traditionally credited to the colonial administrator George Gray, but from what I've read, it was in reality significantly the work of a writer and Maori tribal leader named tay Rungi Kaheke, who has long been celebrated for his

work in recording and translating Maori cultural traditions. And I apologize in advance for any pronunciations that I don't get quite right here. I'm doing my best based on the guidelines that I could find online, so I hope I get reasonably close so the story goes like this, long ago, the world was in darkness. The Skyfather Rungi Nui and or sometimes just shortened as Rungi Rungi Nui or Rungi and the Earth Mother Papa Tuanuku or just Papa were

pressed against one another in a loving embrace. So Skyfather Rungi and Earth Mother Papa, they're hugging. They're hugging so tight that no light could penetrate between their bodies. But there was not nothing between their bodies. There was something between the Earth and the sky. It was the dwelling place of their children, the offspring of their union. So the children of the Sky Father and the Earth Mother

lived smothered in darkness with no space to move. Now, another quick terminology note, because I initially got confused reading about this. Sometimes these children of the Sky Father and the Earth Mother, these younger beings, are translated as gods in English, and sometimes they're translated as if they are humans or people, or with words usually applied to humans like fathers. From what I could tell, the most culturally appropriate term is going to be the Maori term atua,

which means a kind of supernatural ancestral being. So that's what I'm going to try to use here. So again we've got Rungi, the sky father, and Papa, the earth mother, and they're in this tight embrace, and the children the atuas,

are between them. And what happens next varies by telling, but in some versions, one of the younger beings, one of the Atua, suggests that they kill their parents, or they kill their skyfather Rungi, so that they might break free of the dark embrace and have both light and room to move. But then in response another one of the atuas, this one named tne Matua or just Taune. This is the Attua of the forests and of birds and insects and beings that dwell in the forest so

forests and the creatures that dwell there. Tane says he has a better idea. They will not harm their mother and father, but instead cleave them apart. So they shall push their father far away up above, and the children themselves will remain below, close to their mother who nursed them. And all of the younger beings agree to this plan except for one. There is one of the the Atua named Tafiri Matea, or the Atua of wind and storms, who is close to his sky father and fearce separation from him.

So all of the younger atua take turns trying, but eventually the stories often narrate them one by one, each trying to separate the mother and father in their embrace, but they can't do it. Eventually, only Tanae is able to drive them apart, and in one telling I read this is the telling from the eighteen fifty five book. The way he accomplishes this is by inverting his body.

He plants his head head upon the body of the earth mother so on the ground, and then pushes his skyfather away with his feet and powerful legs, and in driving Rungi and Papa apart, Tane lets light into the world and is thus comes to be associated with light. He's sort of God or the Attua of the forests, but also in a way of light and in letting the light in this readies the world for the creation

of humankind and the beginning of history. And in some tellings it is Tane himself who leads to the creation of humankind, because he creates the first woman named hine A Hue by forming her from the earth. So he takes the soil of the body of his mother, of the earth mother, and then breathes life into the form of the new woman he has made by breathing into her nostrils, and then together with her, Tane becomes the ancestor of humankind. Though I think the actual story is

more convoluted. There are some steps involved, but they give rise to humankind down the road. But there are some interesting consequences of this separation. So after the separation, Rungi and Papa are in a state of grief about being torn apart because they were in love, you know, and now they're separated from one another, and that grief continues until this day. So Rangi cries for his beloved wife and his tears become the rain. Meanwhile, Papa cries and

her tears become mists and fog. Papa also is sometimes depicted as being pregnant with another atua or having a younger atua, either at her breast or inside her. That younger atua is I think the youngest of this generation between them, and is named ru Ru Almoko. And this younger being embodies earthquakes. So the rumbling from deep inside the earth is this younger or possibly unborn god stirring

within the Earth Mother. Another consequence is to remember the dissenting brother, the Tafiri Mati, the only one who did not want the sky father Rangi pushed away. In some tellings, he goes up to the sky to join his father after the separation, and as the embodiment of wind and storms, he batters the world below as a form of revenge

or punishment. Also, in some versions of the story, Tane, as the guardian and embodiment of forests, is said to have clothed his earth mother with trees, either to hide her nakedness or to comfort her in the grief of her separation. So there are a lot of things I find really interesting about this story. One is that it frames the ordering of the present world not as an

inevitable prelude to anything of value happening. You get that since in some of these other creation narratives, where it's like the creation story is what had to happen for anything interesting or worthwhile to take place, it's not really like that here. Instead, this story frames it as a as the victory of one divine party's interests over another's,

and the losing parties continue to exist. So Skyfather and Earth Mother are perpetually thwarted and held apart from their embrace, but they still want each other, and they weep for each other. And the Atua of storms is constantly in reaction, is whipping the earth with these with these tempests, in

a rage for his father being driven away. Another thing that I like and find interesting about this story is that in the narrative, the world before is not depicted as a bad or worthless place, at least least not

from every perspective. Granted, from some perspectives in the story, it's not so great, Like the cramped darkness is certainly not appealing to Dutane and his brothers, but this pre creation state is not the frightening chaos of nameless, churning dark waters that we get in some of the stories we've talked about, like it is, it is not necessarily bad, and it is not nothingness. At least from Papa and Rangey's perspective, this primordial state is comfort and love. Isn't

that kind of interesting. It's like it's an embrace so complete that not even light can pass through it, and thus the ordering of the world for human habitation is actually the shattering of a loving embrace.

go searching for something to fill the gap. But coming back to that point of contrast, I mean this highlighted for me something I don't think I had thought about as much in the last episode was how you know, there's always room for kind of misinterpretation or you know, reading of attitudes into these ancient stories that maybe the

people who believed in them wouldn't have had. But at least as far as I can infer from the texts that are passed down in a lot of these ancient like especially the Mesopotamian narratives, like that really does seem to me like the people who believed this thought the pre creation state was kind of a bad place, Like it feels like before the world was made, it was

not a good scene, not good. It was like a dangerous, frightening, poisonous kind of void of meaning and history, and that finally some order is brought into it in which good things can happen.

So I'm gonna be talking about specifically about about Aztec mythology, specifically the legend of the five signs. So we're gonna be dealing with sequential creations that lead to a fifth creation our own. And I'm going to come back to film here for a second, because Joe, maybe you have a good answer for this, But can you think of a single film franchise that doesn't really get get good until the fifth film or hits a notable high point

with film number five. I tried to think of one, and I could not.

You can point to things like Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather in seventy two, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in seventy six, or or John Carpenter's Escape from New York in eighty one. Sure, yeah, and those are all fine films and technically are like

the fifth films in each individual's filmography. You can apply the same question to musicians and bands, and you can easily point to such examples as Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and seventy two, or Hey Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath from seventy three.

to mythology. Let's come back to universes creations, cases where a fifth attempt has led to something that is successful in a way that previous versions of reality have not been. You know, that is going to be key to discussions of as tech mythology here and I as an aside, I did find at least some chatter online about and about worlds of software development and engineering that speculated that like version five of something is really where things come together.

So maybe in that design world or those design worlds, there's you know a little more logical applied to this, But I don't know, I kind of get the impression that there's no there's no set rule about like what version of you know, what draft is the finished one, what version of a particular software is going to you know, really be the sweet spot? You know. It just sort of happens as it happens.

in this case. And also, you know, it's easy to think, well, okay, we're talking about the same world, but just terrible things keep happening, but terrible things that require the establishment of a new sun, which of course is not really possible or at least extremely far fetched, given our understanding of the way the solar system works and how reality works. But again we're dealing with a mythic vision of the world and its creation. Now, just a reminder about the Aztecs.

The Aztec Empire lasted roughly thirteen twenty five through fifteen twenty one CE, and it was a dominant meso American know civilization in Central Mexico with advanced astronomical mathematical, medical, engineering, and architectural knowledge. The empire fell during the colonial conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, but now it people

live on. So for a fresh take on this topic, I turned to the book The Aztec Myths, A Guide to the Ancient Stories and Legends by Camilla Townsend, whose work entails less emphasis on colonial accounts and more on Nowait language sources. So you know, she still you will allude to these various codeses and so forth, but it's putting more emphasis on some of the oral histories and

so forth. Along those lines, you'll also find plenty of breakdowns out there of the five Sons myth that are very sequential, and I believe these are more based on the Spanish codeses. But Townshend lays out a less formalized version of all of this, with more uncertainty about where each of the prior sons slash ages falls in any kind of sequential list, noting that the order and details vary depending on the storyteller.

on the day for water. And eventually that sun died, the son of that age died, and the floods swept the people away, the people that lived in that world, and they became fish.

tree branches. And then there's another one of the suns that was born on the day for Ocelot, and the people of this sun were eaten by man eating beasts, perhaps some sort of giant feline predators. And this sun may have been quote swallowed in an eclipse from which there was no recovery ooh, which is a very ha

thing way of putting it. And this ties into I think Aztec ideas about what an eclipse was, you know, not unique to their civilization, where it is the idea that the moon is being consumed or the sun is being consumed.

with the movement possibly referring to earthquakes. Oh interesting, and yeah, and so this is the age we're in and it is the age where the gods get everything right, like, this is the age that everything works. It's beautiful, it is tremendous as long as we can keep it. And then a lot in Aztec culture is about well, how do we keep this sun? You know, things have been set in motion. Powerful deities are involved in the in

the in the way this world works. But then it is also our responsibility to help maintain the power of the sun through you know, among other things are rituals. So at the creation of this uh, this age, the age of the Fifth Son, Like basically this comes together as follows. She describes a dark, pre dawn world upon which no sun had yet risen. So again this is kind of like the idea that it's completely new creation.

No sun has ever risen here. And in this world, the gods gather at Tiatua Khan and they ask each other who will carry the burden, who will take it upon himself to be the sun, to become the dawn to be the dawn son, something that in previous ages there's had to be, like, you know, the new Sun has had to be to be like the work and or sacrifice of a particular god.

proud to do so? But then the gods also kind of like nominate a particular pimple faced god, Nana Watson, and he kind of accepts the role with humility, like he went volunteering. But he's like, okay, you're all pointing at me, and you know I've gotten a lot of great stuff out of this gig. Yeah, I'll step forth. So both of these gods step forth to become the son, and the proud god Texas Takado he steps forth in

a splendid headdress. And meanwhile Nana Watson is in a paper crown, and so, you know, one is proud, one is humble, and they move forth to to leap into the sacrificial fire that will allow them to become the Sun. And so the proud God he becomes scared and jumps back back out of the fire at first. Meanwhile, our pimple faced, humble god, he you know, he feels the

pain of the fire, but he just keeps going. He's brave, and so in his immolation he becomes the Sun, our son, the fifth Son, and watching on text is tacadle he is. He's sort of like humbled by this and finally jumps in as well. He becomes the Moon.

the Goldilocks territory. Everything is just right, the world's beautiful, it's balanced. And you know, there were problems with all of the previous versions of reality, you know, the like I think it's the first Son in some tellings wasn't strong enough. It was too weak. Obviously there are monsters running around eating people in other realities. So this is the one where everything is just right, isn't it funny?

coming back to the gods, though, we're gonna. So on one level, we already have our answered the question like what came before the reality, well, different realities stretching back to a different like primordial age. And through each of these worlds, each of these universes, each of these sons,

we had. The gods, the Aztec gods were present for each of these ages, and they began, however, prior to any of these sun ages, with a primordial dual deity named ome Za Waddle, which consisted of feminine aspects to Naka Kuti and Tonaka Seawattle. There's a nice artistic rendering of this dual entity in a book I have. This is by Ellen Stevens and illustrated by an artist who goes by the name Echo. It's called a pre Columbian Bestiary. I included just a snapshot that I took of me

holding the book open in my front yard. Joe. For you others out there, I recommend you pick up the book. I couldn't find an image of this one online. But yeah, imagine an entity that is also two beings. So it is a single god, but it is a dual god. It is an entity of duality.

tes Calipoca. Then we have the feathered serpent quetzal Cotal, and then we have the flayed one sheipe Totec, and then we also have Wetzelpacli, the god of war, and they have other dimensions beyond what I mentioned here, but that's just like the brief rundown of who they are. And so at first, these brother gods are more or less in equilibrium, but is each with each age of the Sun they quarrel with each other, and that equilibrium

is just not sustained. And also it's like each of the previous four ages the Sun is sort of headed out by one particular god. So, for instance, the sun that the various accounts say the sun that Haspoca PoCA is responsible for, it's not bright enough, which makes sense because he's not the lord of light, he's the Lord of the black mirror. So back to the creator here, where does this creator come from? Because that ultimately is

is where we're getting to. You know, we can say, well, what came before this world for previous worlds, but what came before all worlds? What is the true primordial nature out of which indeed this god emerges And so apparently the way it goes down is ometsuwattle. The dual God kind of emerges, springs into existence, or is self born, bringing about the creation of the universe as well, which leads to the creation of the First Son and the

gods and so forth. And then after all of this is done, the dual God continues to dwell in what is sometimes called the thirteenth Aztec heaven, though heaven, of course, is a very loaded Western term, and we'll get into

that a little bit here. But this particular realm is called omeicin which scholar mevel Leon Portella described in Aztec Thought and Culture, a study of the ancient non all mind as quote, the mansion of duality, the source of generation and life, the ultimate or meta physical region, the

primordial dwelling place of the Ometzuwadel. So this is, according to Portilla quote, the place of cosmic origin of all things, and so the original deity dwells here, but the dual deity also exists, it's said, in the navel of the world and also in all things. So this entity is at the center of everything, but also is in everything. And there's a you know, there's a real sense of cosmic potential to this realm that it lives in. This

Omeo can realm. It is, it's it's sometimes said to be the place where human souls originate, and it is described by Portilla as a place quote beyond time m hm. So, which we'll come back to.

on how you interpret heaven. But it's almost like if you try, I do like to compare it to you know, scientific cosmology. Uh, it's like saying, like, Okay, the world, the universe began with the Big Bang, but then the Big Bang still exists and it's here, you know, in its own sort of pocket dimension. So if I'm understanding it all correctly. According to as Tech mythology, our world was preceded by four separate takes on the world or reality,

each with a different sun. And before the first world, before the creation of the gods that would create and govern these different worlds, an all powerful, dual creator god emerged out of a kind of dark, timeless ocean of endless potential and non time, and that place of endless potential still exist as its own dimension within the broader cosmology.

This idea that Omeo can is beyond time, though, it reminded me of some things that I'd read from Joseph Campbell about eternity being beyond time, So there being a difference between we might think of something as being eternal and that it lasts forever or it's long lasting, but like true eternity is something that is outside of time, and I think that is what we're talking about here.

You know, we were talking earlier about the role language plays and all of this, like thinking about how language changes and or enables humans to think about, you know, distant primordial origins in a way like what does like what does time do? Like we think of time, like thinking of time not only as like a constant knowing that that we have this procession of events, but also knowing that it's human perception of time that ends up coloring these different views of what of what the world

is and what came before. But Portella writes that for the Aztecs, quote, space and time are conceived not as empty stage settings, but as factors that combine to regulate the occurrence of cosmic events. So that one takes I think a minute to sink in. But you know, it's this idea that, like time, for the Aztecs had weight and was alive and was carried and and you know, it's it's not just this thing that's passively occurring, like we're not We're not just in time riding down a

river like. It's a lot more complicated than that. And it also ties into the various ritual acts that have to be carried out the Aztecs to ensure the continuation of things. So yeah, I found that really fascinating.

stage we've created. But the way the Aztec conception of space and time is being described here, it sounds like it's not just a place in which history happens, that space and time are mechanisms, that they are the gears that are turned in order to drive events within the cosmos and within history.

fifth Son. So like everything like this is the best world, but this world takes a lot of work to keep going, And apparently it's not, or at least the vibe I get here is there's no guarantee that will continue on. There's no guarantee there won't have to be a sixth son, but you know, we have a fifth son as long as we can keep it. So yeah, I really I

really enjoyed diving into this one. And again, you know, we have this concept of like what came before, something like some sort of place where there's there's no light yet there's no there's not time, but there is potential for things and and then things begin, you know, to be set in motion.