Alpha: The Myths of Creation – A challenge to the ETH

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Alpha: The Myths of Creation by Charles H. Long (Associate Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago) was published by Collier Books, NY, in 1963, five years before Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods.

Few know of this book, but it is replete with stories of creation from various cultures since the earliest of times.

What’s interesting (to me) is how the creation myths accumulated by Professor Long fifty-five years ago can, by a suspension of intellectual (academic, scholarly) acumen, be interpreted to indicate that entities from other places in the galaxy (or Universe) were the instigation, and even the gods, of religious belief or mythical reality.

It’s easy to see space visitors in many of the mythical tales related in Dr. Long’s book.

For instance, in the Navaho story of the emergence – mankind derives from Mother Earth – the people “heard in the east the distant sound of a great voice.” The people continued to hear the voice, getting nearer and nearer. “A moment later four mysterious beings appeared to them….

“These beings, without speaking, made many signs to the people, as if instructing them, but the latter did not understand them. When the gods [sic] had gone, the people long discussed the mysterious visit, and tried to make out what the gods meant by the signs they had made.” [Page 53]

Myth from the Minyong (From Wikipedia: The Minyong are a sub-group of the Adi people, a tribal people living in Arunachal Pradesh, India)…..

The earth, Sedi married Melo, the sky – “the Earth is a woman, the Sky is a man. These two married, and when they came together … men and animals held a Kebang (village council) to consider how they could save themselves from being crushed between them. Sedi-Diyor … caught hold of the Sky and beat him so that he fled far up into the heavens leaving the Earth behind.” [Page 110]

The Djanggawul myth (Australia):

“In the beginning there were land and sky, animals and birds, foliage and trees. There was sea, too, in the waters of which were fish and other creatures; and upon the land were beings of totemic origin. All things were there, as they had always been; but man, as we know him to-day [sic], was not among them.

“Far out to sea, out of sight of the … mainland, was an island … the land of the Eternal Beings.” [Page 238]

The book’s chapter Chaos and the Cosmic Egg [Pages 113-149] opens with an account of the four pairs of deities, known as the “eight” “who were before the beginning, and were the elements that represented Chaos, which is described in terms of confusion, darkness, and water …” that in the Dogon mythology brought forth these genii  (Nommo) which were the products of God, of divine essence . [Page 116]

Ogotemmêli, theDogon philosopher, said, “If it were not for Nommo … the earth could not even have been created.”

In the Creation Myth as Found in the Laws of Manu “He (that is the Self-existent) desiring to produce beings of many kinds from his own body … with a thought created the waters and placed his seed in them. That (seed) became a golden egg …in the (egg) he himself was born as Brahman, the progenitor of the whole world.” [Page 129]

In A  Version of Creation in Chinese myth and Legend [Pages 131-132] “Yang and Yin became mixed, the five elements separated themselves from it and a man was formed. As he looked about he perceived …all the stars were circling a great star … Out of this illuminating pattern a brilliant ray fell to earth and standing in front of this amazed man appeared someone like him yet different, he was completely golden in color. The Gold Colored One bowed to the man and honored him. He taught him how to make a garment from grass in ordr to cover his naked body …He explained to him the journey of the stars, the year long path of sun and moon.

In The Mande Creation Myth [Page 139] appears “the ‘Egg of God’ which is also called ‘egg of the world.’ … In [that] egg, there were … two pairs of twins, each consisting of one male and one female, archetypes of the future men.”

A Japanese Creation Narrative [Page 147]:

“The seventh generation consisted of two deities, Izanagi and Izanami [who] stood on the floating bridge of Heaven … saying ‘Is there not a country beneath?’ Thereupon they thrust down the “Jewel-Spear of Heaven’ (Ame no tama-boko) [which] found the ocean … and formed an island which received the name of Onogoro-jima or the ‘Self-Coagulating Island’ [to which] the two deities descended and dwelt there.”

By this smallish representation of a few of the many myths in Dr. Long’s book, one can see how a perverse interpretation of myth can produce the manic perorations of Ancient Astronaut theorists.

Tales of intruders from elsewhere, mostly the heavens or sky, invite imaginative hypotheses that extraterrestrial beings have to be the explanation for those mythical stories.

But we know, some of us anyway, that alien beings [ETs] are not coming here and haven’t come here, to this lonely spot in the vast universe or galaxy.

So, from what do the ubiquitous tales of deities or entities visiting mankind, even creating it, come?

Obviously, creation tales can’t be so uniform (or similar) if human imagination created them, from an unconscious fictive mental process. Or can they?

Human diversity and cultural uniqueness impugns the kind of sameness that envelopes the tales in Dr. Long’s book, but there it is.

Even Jung’s theory of the archetypes can’t account for such fictional uniformity, archetypes arriving in the collective unconscious long after such tales as those presented occurred.

Since extraterrestrials cannot, for some of us, account for such stories, and gods are shunned by most of you because they are as ridiculous as the ET hypothesis, what are we left with?

Julian Jaynes, as noted here a few times, offers a view that is interesting and academic, even scholarly creative, but few know of it or can fathom it if they do.

And yet, Jaynes remains open to intellectual antithesis.

Therefore, where are we? From whence do the visitors come, Jayne’s mental forces, von Däniken’s spacemen, actual deities who no longer exist, or, despite the odds against it, a fictional “reality” that is contrived from the loneliness that Earth’s place in the cosmos forces us to confront by creating forces or beings outside ourselves whom we hope will come back to relieve us of our dire solitary existence?

RR