Creation myths like Theogony,Genesis and Norse myths,are interlinked by basic ideas
...n though they differ in the way they perceive the creation of the world and their birthplaces are quite far away the one from the other, there can be seen many similar points on various levels. However, this can easily be explained, since the needs and the fears of the people were and still are the same in all around the world However, those symbols apart from the fact that they represent something, many of them have the quality of the “sacred”. Of course things are not consecrated by themselves, but people make them to be. Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred as the real, yet he states clearly that the sacred is a structure of human consciousness. The most characteristic example of a sacred thing in those stories is of course the sacred tree. Therefore we could say that all beings reveal and at the same time conceal the nature of Being. In addition to that we have an other sacred element in all three of the stories, which is not easily understood by the first time. A common thing that all these have in their stories is the mandalic pattern, the quartered circle that represents the original creation of space and matter out of primordial chaos. “The center of the circle is the sacred center which connects the worlds” (http: home. Earthlink.net/~delia5/pagan/sgw/Eliade-and-Wicca.htm. 20/12/02). Specifically in Theogony we have the four winds, in Norse Myths we have the four dwarfs and in Genesis we have the four rivers. All of them represent the four cardinal points of the world, and hold something in their circle. In The Myth of Eternal Return (1954), Eliade distinguishes between the religious and non-religious humanity on the basis of the perception of time as heterogenous and homogenous. The modern and non-religious humanity perceives time as homogenous, which means linear and unrepeatable, while the archaic or religious humanity, like the ones in the three creation myths, perceive time as heterogenous, that is as divided between profane time (linear) and sacred time (cyclical and reactualizable). However, the sacred time is more existent in Theogony, Genesis and the Norse Myths. In fact their end is based on this idea. As Eliade says “By means of myths and rituals, which give access to this sacred time, religious humanity protects itself against the “the terror of history”, a condition of helplessness before the absolute data of historical time, a form of existential anxiety”. Therefore, based on that, the three myths describe either how the regeneration of time has occurred –through the flood stories- or prophesize how it will happen again and again. As we know the flood march the beginning of the end, but also the beginning of a new life. Thus, in it lies both the feeling of sadness for the destruction and the feeling of happiness and hope, because a better life will rise. In my opinion, the flood acts both literally and metaphorically as a catharsis. Like the end of the ancient tragedies, where catharsis comes in the end to put things back in the appropriate order. Hence, the water with its natural quality cleans all the “dust” of the world, but through it life will rise again. After an apocalyptic event, man will be reborn again and life will flourish even better upon the earth. This “eternal return” as Eliade named it, is in my opinion that special thing that make people to believe in life, accept their miserable fates and death. It is the hope that something better must be out there. Closing this attempt to examine those thre...