Sublime

The ancient cosmogonies that shaped foundational myths, from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Hesiod’s Theogony, mentioned in chapter 1, tell of a world in which the order is established by a great god, Marduk or Zeus, who takes power. Following a long period of battles and confusion, a deity triumphs and establishes an order that is at once cosmic,

Notice that before the creation of light, the seas were already there. The Iliad, too, calls Oceanus the father of the gods. The idea may be even older and may have originated prior to the separation of Eurasian and American peoples. Consider the first verse of the Navajo creation myth: “The One is called ‘Water Everywhere.’

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over

Creation accounts do not provide scientific truths about material origins; they reveal deeper truths: truths about identity—who God is and who we are—and purpose, the ends for which we are made.