Parallel Myths

In nearly every creation myth, before the world, before the animals, before humans, nothing exists but some variation of “chaos,” “watery chaos,” or “watery darkness.” Out of this chaos, the “Creator” molds and shapes the world and its inhabitants. In a stunning parallel to evolutionary biology, these myths paralleled what Darwin and later biologists would describe in their theory of evolution, a primordial soup covering much of the Earth from which all life eventually evolved. The transition from chaos to order represents the human need for community and society and may also follow the transition from early, pre-civilized Homo sapiens to more modern, socialized humans. Water itself is also a potent symbol, representing both power and chaos (the many flood myths) but also fertility and birth (and even rebirth for those cultures whose myths describe a creation/destruction/recreation cycle). These creation stories perfectly exemplify the way in which myth conveys a deep, psychic truth centuries before science quantifies that same truth with data.

Early humans saw in the world around them repeated patterns: the seasons, the rising and setting sun, the movement of the stars and the tides. Without the science to understand these patterns, they mythologized them, even extrapolating them into an