When one looks at the early creation myths, i.e. mythos, of the Indo-Aryans[2], what we today call Hinduism, one is confronted with the fact that their early mythology was not so clearly codified or synthesized as its sister cultures in… Read More ›
Ancient Civilization
Orphic Theogony: Thanes and the Great Cosmic Egg
While Hesiod’ Theogony remains the standard, orthodox version of theogony (i.e. the story of the origin and genealogy of the gods) to the ancient Greeks, there exists an alternate tradition attributed to pseudo-historical and somewhat mythical figure of Orpheus, a character whose… Read More ›
Classic Hellenic Theogony: Chaos, Chronos and Eros
One of the nice things that you found as you studied more advanced civilizations, as you got further into the first millennium BCE, you had better material and source texts to work with. You no longer had to rely on… Read More ›
Ancient Persian Theology: Zarathustra and the Avesta
In the 2nd and first millennium BCE, some 1500 years before Christianity and the Roman Empire spread throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East, we see evidence of the prevalence of a faith that has come to be known as Zoroastrianism, a term… Read More ›
The Enûma Eliš: Sumer- Babylonian Creation Mythos
Like all ancient mythological traditions, in order to have a contextual understanding of ancient myth and the culture within which it evolved, one must look at the historical and archeological record, along with the extant textual and writing material, most… Read More ›
Ancient Egyptian Mythos: The Weighing of the Heart, Ra and Ma’at
Perhaps the earliest mythological tradition we find documented, or evidence of, is that of the ancient Egyptians, a culture and civilization that evolved out of the settlement of the Nile delta river region in Northern Africa around the turn of… Read More ›
The Ancient Hebrews: The Tanakh, Torah and Five Books of Moses
As a specific example of how a word, a concept, can be disfigured and lose its fullness and richness of meaning as it moves through successive languages of translation and cultural evolution, let’s look at how the Hebrew word Torah, which… Read More ›
