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Out of the Abyss

 

 

What existed before the existence began? Physicists still struggle to present a consensus on just whaty kind of answer such a question might have. Myths, on the other hand, are quite happy to gaze out acrioss the yawning gap of pre-existence and report on what is to be found there, since they operate according to their own logic, in which the purpose of 'before' is not to cause but to explain what comes 'after'. Such a before need only contain an absence of what is to come.Hence the opening of the Rig Veda hymn to creation: "there was neither non-existence nor existence then".

The primary role of this description of pre-existence is to encompass the notion of formlessness, a notion expressed repeatedly in terms of endless water; before creation according to the Maori tradition 'the universe was in darkness with water everywhere'.

The myths of creation can refer in this way to a time before existence because they refer not the beginning of the uiniverse as such but to the beginning of cosmos' that is, with the first discernment of a system of order. The 'unknowable' universe is actually awaiting the process of discernment so that it might yield up its information.

 

 

 What these myths are trying to tell us is that the 'unbegun' universe lacks, not content, but rather discrimination. What is described at the opening of Genesis as a 'trackless waste' (the transklation of the Hebrew more commonly written 'without form and void') is in fact pregnant with potential: "Water" says Mircea Eliade, "symbolizes the whole of potentiality, the source of all possible existence."

The raw material of pre-existence is not boundless nothing but bounaryless everyting. It is as if the the myths are trying to talk of a wrld in which consciousness has not yet got to work - there has as yet been no differentiation between this and that. In the Greek poet Hesiod's words Chaos was a "confused tangle of roots ... the eztremities of all things which, by becoming distinct from each other, are to produce the organized cosmos".

Hesiod's description is to be futher understood as the emergence not only of the ditinction between one thing and another but as the organization of these distinct things into an organized whole, a whole which has been present in the fomlessness ; it takes the act of organization to reveal this completeness, a revalation often referred to as the 'awakening' of the supreme being, most commonly depicted as a circle or sphere. however, it is hard to imagine such a notion of completeness without at least some idea of what the separate elements are; Plato makes it quite clerawhen he says that " before the world's birth ... there was no Time, for neither was there arrangement, measure or mark of dicision, only an indefinite motion, as it were the unformed, unwrought matter of Time". It is with the delineation of a framework for the measurement of Time that the myths of creation are concerned.