Greek Ethology: The Creation Myth

When it comes to myths, there are so many simple, everyday events or objects to be presented in different ways depending upon who is telling them. Depending upon what culture a myth comes from, there can be thousands of explanations of how the Earth was created, why the sky is blue or why the sun comes up every day. Each culture portrays their ideas of why the world works the way it works in order to understand our time on Earth. In Greek mythology, the Creation Myth explains the commencement of life and how all things were created. Through Theogeny, a poem written by the Greek poet Hesiod, the creation of the cosmos was told through the birth of the Greek gods and how their lives began to generate existence as a whole. In this myth, everything

Chaos was the origin of where everything began. First came Gaia who personified the Earth and then Eros who embodied love. These three major elements were what originally contributed created existence of the cosmos at a very basic level. After Earth was created, then came Erebus and Nyx who encompassed the underworld and nighttime. Then came Uranus and Pontus who became the sky and sea. As these gods continued to give birth to more and more gods, they slowly began to create all the elements of Earth today. When the gods produced with other gods, they created attitudes such as doom and strife. As they continued to reproduce, then came feelings, fate, memory, and natural beings such as the moon and the rivers. Through the gods’ different joys and misfortunes, new explanations of why Earthly events occur became known to us through mythological standpoints. The gods created humans the human race and other mortal beings by separating gifts they were given such as personality and physical characteristics. Some were given strength, some were given beauty and some were given brains, as an example. These beings were given mortality so that they could inhabit the Earth unlike the gods

On Earth, we experience events that can be considered unexplainable even though there is factual knowledge to back up why these occurrences happen. This is often referred to as phenomena – which can overwhelm the senses of human beings because we are unable to control them as they are happening. For example, the clouds are frequently given heavy burdens to carry. These burdens weigh the clouds down for as long as they can handle them. The clouds eventually are unable to carry this weight any longer, so they finally release them in the form of water. This natural phenomenon was a metaphorical way of describing rain. A clinical or scientific way of defining rain would be that the air is saturated with moisture through evaporation and because of this, clouds form. When clouds become heavy with precipitation, they release rain down onto the Earth, and then the cycle starts over. It’s a common occurrence, but could be difficult to explain without any previous knowledge or extensive scientific research – which is why we consider non-man made occurrences to be phenomena. The metaphorical explanation seems like a perfectly respectable way of describing how precipitation takes place on Earth if the scientific explanation was not presented when factual information comes in to play. Language in