The OLDEST Creation MYTH in World, and its Origins

what is the oldest grocery myth we know and if we find this out will this help us understand what our ancestors thought happened in the beginning before there were humans before there was the earth before the universe existed and perhaps even before the gods existed and so today i'm going to take you on a journey to discover this myth and in doing so i will go over some of our earliest known beliefs i'll tell a few croatian stories on the way and i'll even show where motifs such as the tree of life or world tree come from and if you stay until the very end of video i will finish with a creation story based on what we've learned recreated from the remnants of this oldest myth and its motifs and that is still entwined in some of our cultures today a story so very old his origins are incredibly primitive and because of this world would usually tell you to grab a cup of tea right now and relax well some of the descriptions towards the end of the video may actually put you off your tea doubly so if you're also eating some chocolate fudge and so you have been warned but i like my tea so i'm grabbing a cuppa anyway and welcome to kraken fort if we go back in time tens of thousands of years what do you think the most well-known story was amongst their ancestors well it was probably a creation myth a myth of how humans came to be and then this story developed into two parts one to describe the creation of humans the other telling how the cosmos was formed how the gods came to be how the earth came to be and we have reason to believe this because we see remnants of this split in the myths as told by various cultures across the world with some only telling stories of human creation and others telling stories of how the world was created and then how humans came after this and for many people nowadays they often see these two myths as being one the same and we have religions such as the abrahamic story of the bible's genesis to thank for that merging these myths and their motifs into a single story but this isn't how most of our ancestors cultures saw these myths and particularly the creation myth and so let me give you an example of a creation myth from new zealand that may help shed light on how our ancestors thought before there was any light there was only darkness all was night before there was even darkness there was nothing it is said in the karakia at the beginning of time there stood core the nothingness then was tipo the night which was immensely long and immensely dark the first light that existed was no more than the glowing of a worm and when the sun and moon were made there were no eyes there was none to see them not even katayaki the beginning was made from nothing let's think about that for a second the beginning was made from nothing no god no big bang no dragon slain no twins were sacrificed there wasn't even a sneeze out of the great green uncle caesar's nose and this idea this motif of creation from nothing is from one of the earliest creation myths and so probably one of the earliest ideas of creation our ancestors had that we can identify now i will talk a lot about motifs today as they are subject to less change than a whole myth which contains many of these and so before i go into the details of the creation myth and its earliest motifs let me take a few minutes to explain how i know all this and so how this research was carried out so you have confidence in what i'm saying and i'm not just making this up now if you've watched my old story video or my flood myth video then you'll be familiar with some of this and to summarize this for everyone else the process of research includes complex statistical modelling of how humans migrated based on genetic archaeological and linguistic information alongside their geographic location and with this we have established databases of myths and motifs which are associated with language cultures and classification of story types which are again assigned to their geographic location now a culture can have many stories and a story can be in many cultures and all these can be in different locations at different times and to simplify a complex process we model the likelihood that a myth or motif has traveled with human migration and so if we see two myths that are similar told by two very separate cultures but we see they have a common ancestor and we see the myth turn up in the cultures that formed between the spit of the common ancestor up to the cultures we were looking at in a timeline that is feasible then we can conclude that there is a possibility that the myth was known in that original culture and the strength of this conclusion depends on how good a match the whole signal is from an origin to current known location culture and story and so if you wrap this analysis in some complex computer software you have the basis for phylogenetics which in this academic field allows us to understand the probability of the origins of these myths and motifs and i do recommend you watch the flood myth video where i explain this more if you want a deeper understanding of this and so now we can go forward and look at the creation myth and also the flood myth a little bit where within these myths we regularly find a motif called the earth diver which is a reference to where a creature often a waterfall of some kind but not always living in the sea which would dive to the bottom of the sea bring up something usually mud and when it arrives at the surface the mud would transform into land and that's how land was built from the sea and in the creation myths we see that from a place in this new land such as a rock or tree or hole we would find humans appearing often from an underworld and these would go on to populate the land and research has shown us that this earth dive motif has evolved from this earlier humans born from the underworld motif a creation story that didn't require a flood myth and as this underworld myth evolved it found its way to be more commonly told in vlad myths especially in southeast asia and that transformed into the earth diver motif and if this seems odd we see the underworld motif has a hole going down into the ground where you get life and bring it back up which translates into a bird going down to the bottom of the sea getting something and bring it back up to create land and because we observed this earth diver motif in australia and occasionally in africa but associated more with primordial seas and not flood myths we can infer that this earth dive motif was used originally to explain the creation of the earth as part of the creation myth of humans rather than creating land to recover from a flood but if the earth diver is also being placed into the flood myths at a later date this suggests that the flood myth developed and changed with time and this is an important observation and one we can see with a clear example of this change as the earth diver develops into another motif the bird scout now what is the bird scout motif you may ask well that's a good question now if you're familiar with the biblical story of noah's ark you may remember that noah released dove to find land the dove flies off grabs a twig brings it back and no one knows that land is available and probably celebrates with a nice dove pie and this is an excellent example of a motif adapting from the earth diver where an animal traveling this time down to the bottom of the sea grabbing something land in this case or mud and bringing it back turning into land well it's uh an analogy of the bird scout or the burst scout is strictly analogy of the earth diver and it's seeing this and understanding these motifs changes that allows us to trace motifs origins back with confidence looking for changes to understand the root motive and so to summarize this research we show that we have humans that evolve from an underworld myth evolving into this earth diver creation myth as it moves out of africa into asia and down to australia but also into northern eurasia and eventually across into the americas but then being adapted into the flood myth in south east asia before spreading again in this form so the next questions are how can we be sure this earth diver has originated in a crochet myth if there are no whole creation myths to study especially in africa and if it is then is it part of the oldest crochet myth and if we understand this it will allow us to understand why it was used in the early christmas and where did this idea of the earth diver come from well using our database of myths and motifs we know that there are many motifs and creationists with some talking about the land's emergence from the chaos of waters this primordial sea and within these we sometimes see that this is done with the help of this earth diver but we also see creation coming from the cutting up of a giant or bovine or sometimes coming from an egg or sometimes a combination of all these and where there is this combination they are usually placed in a logical order which helps create the mythological story but we can also observe these motifs in standalone versions within myths and so this raises the question that considering all these variations are in crazy myths then are the all these myths and motifs the same age or are some older than others and how does the earth diver fit into all of this now the bad news is that to answer this question for all myths and motifs will require many videos and i'll cover all these myths in time on this channel in many videos and so the good news is that if you can press the like and subscribe button and the notification bell which is really important you won't miss them when they're released but here in this video right now we will focus on the earth diver motif which we think is a key part of the oldest croatian myths as we are confident it originates in africa due to the data in berezikin's database one of the sources we use for mythological information and to keep all the out of africa debunkers happy whilst we know that not all hominids that influenced homo sapien development came from the out of africa migration and out of africa migration did happen around 75 to 90 000 years ago and so it would be acceptable consider that the 75 000 year ago date as the latest date this motif entered the cultural story and with the probability suggesting that it is older still now we also know that as the earth diver motif remained in certain locations but involved in others it again leaves us evidence that supports this out of africa migration of the myth so with us feeling confident it is old let me get back on track by asking how we can work out why the earth diver motif came about you know what were our ancestors thinking we saw in the new zealand story that the beginning was made from the nothing but the earth oven is making land from something so what has changed well if we look at the research and the database data we observe that beginning myths can be constructed as such that creation comes from a primordial darkness or chaos or sometimes a salty ocean and then goes through four ages or four generations of gods before the origin of mankind and its heroes come to be and whilst this myth structure is predominantly eurasian due to the lack of data we have from africa we still see these early crash myths happened with a void at the beginning without the need for a god and this is a motif we see in many creation myths and i will talk about this aspect in another future video as alluded to these questions as a whole like like this with all these components in them are not found in africa and so had developed post-african migration or have been completely replaced without trace which seems less likely however due to knowing this it can also make it easier for us to understand the development of the earth diver motif and maybe understand aspects of creation that we can trace back and if we look for motifs that either mention the earth diver or void or chaotic waters then we may find clues about the influences and origins of the earliest crochet myths and the good news here is that there are many examples of chaotic waters and voids and myths we have records of today we see examples of the celtic waters in the dragon myths of the near east and even in the first lines of genesis albeit they're referring to the story of the babylonian enumer elish but as for void then we do see a specific example this in the oldest religious texts we know the rick vader from india where in verse 10 1-9 we see that the earth had humankind came from neither being nor non-being or neither existence or non-existence depending on the translation you read and that gods came later to the world this seems to align to those early myths and again we see that when gods are spoken about that they were not even present from the beginning nor were they originally from the primordial void but we're not limited to india culture saying this we also have japanese versions of the crescent myth where it says that the divine beings were produced between the heaven and the earth but we also see phrases within the story such as when the well began to be created the soil floated about or when heaven and earth began a thing existed in the midst of the void and so here we have a world being built in this void but within these myths we also see something interesting the land is floating and we see this in various texts in the japanese anu tradition there is a motif of stabilizing the shaky earth in china and post vedic india we see a giant turtle supporting the land on its back and this seems to go back to southeast asian all-star origins but we see the idea different in egypt and in vedic india where the earth emerges from the bottom of the ocean as a primordial hill or it is brought up by some animal such as in the earth diver motif and in these cases the land does not need any stabilizing it just needs separation from the overarching sky and following the statistical probability of origins it seems like the unstable earth has come from siberian culture and the primordial hill is an indo-mediterranean cultural development but before we leave the shaky world and the need to keep the night sky away from the land there is one motif a very well known one that is worth a mention here and that is the world tree or the tree of life this motif isn't as common as you might think but it is quite widespread pointing to a very old age for example we see it in the old norse in the ash trees of greece the armenian vahon which is also an adaptation of the indo-iranian mythology and the irish account of dian kecht and misha and in several mythologies of taiwan which has a boy born from a banana tree as well as in japan although we only see this motif in folk tales as opposed to myths however we also know the motif is much older as it's prominent as well in africa oceana and australia the point of all this is that the tree was originally there to support and stabilize the land and push up against the sky which as we see is misdeveloped ends up supporting the milky way to stop the stars from falling and eventually evolves into pillars and occasionally a world mountain but then we also see this tree become a more regular source for the older humans from the underworld motif this allowing a more complete form of the creation myth to start being understood where this motif has evolved and has been reused and to summarize what we have found is the components of a void a primordial sea a land being built the tree holding up the sky a place for humans to come from all the elements potentially for a complete creation myth the earth diver motif just seems to add a piece to the jigsaw that makes sense as you may never have thought about it before but the basic premise of the motif is how did land appear in the sea it is a fundamental question people don't understand geology would have probably asked themselves you know land is in the sea c is not around the land which then lets us know the flood myth came after this because that would place c around the land and so you could argue that whilst sometimes a flood myth is like a a reset world myth it could also be considered as a reflex of the crash myth rather than the land being built on water water has been poured over the land to re-establish the land and perhaps this made sense to those cultures who were inland and had originally heard the crush myths that contained these waters of chaos and so given this also known that there are all these mixed mythologies and motifs out there is there anything else we can use to help confirm our thoughts about the void the earth diver what do these other mythologists say could the mix of their motifs tell us anything else well let me give you an example of the emergence of the world from a non-being with mixed motifs to again show you how these ideas develop and this is from the calavera a finnish epic the wanator the daughter of the winds fell from the dark heavens and into the sea floating there until the sea made her pregnant and after floating for seven centuries a duck searching for a resting place sat down on her knee and built a nest upon it the wanator then felt a pain in her knee and when she moved the duck's eggs fell into the sea their lower part became the earth and the upper part to heaven their yoke the sun their albumen the moon their spotted fragments the stars their black fragments the clouds here we have a combination of the birth of earth from a celtic waters but also the creation of heaven and earth from an egg another old croatian motif and we see this confused mythology in a number of places especially within south america again suggesting that these are early motifs but one place we haven't really talked about is the americas and particularly north america so we shall take a brief look at the work of someone called anna brigitte ruth who studied around 300 north american first nation mythologies and from this found that there were eight types of creation myth but the type with the widest distribution was that of the earth diver motif and her research showed that the versions of myth in north america were closely connected with the tradition of the earth diver of siberian cultures based at kulima wagul and magya so let me tell you one of these american first nation myths the old man and the old woman of the tundra mound lived surrounded by the primeval waters to their astonishment the land begins to grow around their mound after three diver birds from heaven have successively tried to bring up mud from the bottom of the sea the old couple send out a white raven to learn the size of the earth the first and second day he is away for a short time but on the third day he does not return until late in the evening as the earth has grown so much but when he arrives he is all black because he has eaten from a corpse and so it is clear that primeval waters and earth diver myth have traveled from siberia into the americas before the flood myth has developed and there is the inkling of a bird scout myth almost developed within this as well but we also see variations of the myth whether it is a man who dives down or sometimes a god and a grain of sand or mud gets caught under their fingernail and when that is brought up it is from this where land expands so where did this myth originate well whilst the original myth is lost in its complete form we see the earth diver and its associated motifs including a tree motif for holding up the sky and for the birth of humans all over the world we do see variations in eurasia and north america but with similar motifs in africa southeast asia and australia looking at these variations and the evolution of the motifs and known human dispersals everything points to an african source of this myth and no later than during the african migration around 75 000 years ago and it is with this information we can look at where this motif comes from and i don't mean geographically as i've just done that but i mean psychologically creating land from the sea seems obvious looking at how ancestors may have thought but land from mud from the bottom of the sea does that have any significance well it could be argued that this is the only place where material can be found in a watery world but there is another thing to be said about using mud or sand to create the world as it is often the same substance that man is created from in other creation myths although obviously not those where the humans appeared from the tree but another aspect which was seen in north american myths but also in some africanus is that the dirt under the fingernail well there is often something magical and strange about fingernails and we see a motif in flood mist where the cutting of a fingernail starts a deluge and if the flood myth is a reflex of the creation myth perhaps then it was the version where the fingernail having mud or sand released under it then forms land and so to take this to a conclusion and i will use references to sigmund freud's observations and suggest you stop drinking your cup of tea right now he suggested that the birth of the earth came from a story of excrement and the idea stemmed from a consideration that there was male pregnancy envy and this was recorded as motifs in these myths paleolithic man wanted to create the world in his own view and not from a woman now you may think that void isn't necessarily the go-to on mythologians or many other matters i mean but we must consider that this isn't a view without evidence you know we see adam used to create eve the need for man to create woman whilst women no doubt told stories to their children and to each other in early societies or even today you know were these stories different to the male versions of the stories and some academics think so and believe that we are only left with traces from the male versions of the oldest stories because it was men who were writing manuscripts and sources and so the allowing the concept of birth from a man's bottom is the motif we are left with now we do see that there are some pressure myths where an animal performs this act to create the world and so it could also be thought that the piece of soil under the fingernail may represent this material and it could also be thought that over time this form of output multiplies and becomes a mass and the motif behind the evolution of the primordial hill story and we also mustn't forget that we see spiders in croatian myths where the spider seems to create a web from its behind creating a belief that it is excreting the world now if all this seems far-fetched that the earth diving myth creating a world from mud in a primordial sea came from a man thinking that mass could be created by going to toilet then let me remind you that in vedic culture pragapatti created mankind by downward breathings from his back part so in effect rather than inferring the solid material he infers that flatulence created men and knowing wind is used to create man then could this wind be considered magical and so develop into a motif used in other creation myths such as marduk killing tiermat and using wind could it be the wind evolved from this variation of creation story and if so then let me read the first lines of the bible to you when god began to create the heaven and earth the earth being unformed and void with darkness over the surface of the deep and the wind from god sweeping over the water should we ask ourselves are we seeing this motif here now there are definitely traces of primitive creation with here avoid world before god appears with water and darkness and then this wind now i'm also not saying the writers of the bible considered god was creating downward wind from his back part to help creation but the original source motif could have well inferred this and so on that piece of information let me tell you a reconstruction of the earliest creation myth based on the earth diver motif and its associated parts but before i do i want to thank all my patrons who helped make this work possible by helping me have access to resources i would not otherwise have and in return they get to see my research notes information about my work as well as having early access to many of these youtube videos and additional videos so please consider signing up if you want to support the channel and information is in the description below but here is a reconstruction of what could be very much a form of earliest creation myths from around 70 000 years ago there was no darkness no light no heat no cold in the beginning there was just a void there was nothing and from nothing there came night and water with no stars no light no gods no life and over many ages as the night pressed against water the water stirred and waved and became salty and grew into an ocean and as the many ages continued they came into being deduce floated on the watery ocean not being able to see as there was no light deuce dived down into the water but soon returned to struggling to breathe deuce dived down one last time as deep as it could go and there it touched the bottom of the sea with its fingertips and then came back to the surface looking under its fingernails it saw muttered stuck there and as it cleaned its nails the mud lay on the sea and the night sky touched that mud and this caused the mud to expand it continued to float on the sea and it became land and from the land worms and insects appeared from the soil birds and beasts came out from behind rocks and holes in the ground the birds poked holes in the night sky as they tried to fly and as the land grew so a tree grew in the middle of it as it grew it pushed up the night sky up and away from the land up out of reach of the birds and the beasts light came through the holes in the night sky these were the stars and they shone down on the land more plants started to grow the land warmed the animals warmed this wound caused the sun to form and they came but the sun rolled away into the sea and night returned for a while before the sun came back and it has continued to roll around the ocean giving us day and night and with day and night the tree that held up the sky formed a hole in its trunk and from this humans emerged men and women old and young and this is where our story begins but let's not forget the beginning because the beginning was made from the nothing i've only just scratched the surface of this research into creation myths and of the earth diver motif you know there is so much more to say about these and how phylogenetics actually works in detail but i do want to keep these videos to a visible length to me this is an exciting journey to see how we can trace motif specs step by step to before 10 000 years ago or 20 000 years or 40 thousand or even 75 000 years ago some of these motifs have been potentially understood to be depicted in cave paintings in the positions of stars from all those years ago and in some of these motifs we're also probably seeing traits from an earlier form of mythology which according to witsel could all even date back 130 000 years but there is more work to be done here and excitement and fascination shouldn't ever be allowed to bias academic findings no matter what we would like to discover but this is a wonderful area to research and if you subscribe to the channel you'll get to see regular videos discussing aspects of mythology gods and culture of our ancestors and i hope you find these stories as interesting as i do and i'll talk about this far more in the future so please leave comments below or any questions you have and i will do my best to try and answer as many as i can and so until the next video please stay safe and stay well this is krakenfold [Music]

Channel: Crecganford

Views: 884,404

Keywords: creation, story of creation, mythology, creation mythology, creation myths from around the world, creations myths, oldest story in the world, earliest creation story, earliest creation myth, earth diver, bird scout, origin of mythology, origin of creation, first creation

Id: nZmEro_ODqc

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2022