The Ancient Tradition

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Music

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You’re listening to The Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. He is your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

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Welcome to the Ancient Tradition podcast. I’m your host, Jack Logan. Today’s the day, the day we reveal the answer to the greatest mystery in the world, how life came to be. In this episode, we’ll dive into the ancient record and unearth the catalyst that set the creation in motion. In the previous two episodes, we established

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the ancients assigned exceptional importance to the creation, the creation of the cosmos and the earth. And what’s interesting is that the ancients didn’t begin their accounts of the creation with a description of the creation. Instead, the ancients began their creation accounts by describing what the cosmos looked like before the creation ever took place. We pointed out that Marinus van der Sluis, the world’s expert on ancient cosmologies,

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found that the ancients the world over described the primordial precreative state of the universe as a dark watery substance, which scholars today refer to as the primordial waters. In the previous episode, we established that the ancients didn’t believe that the precreative state of the universe was made up of actual water. The ancients used water symbolically to describe the precreative state.

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and why? Because water was an excellent way to convey many of the important characteristics of what the universe was like before the creation took place. Water was used to convey that the pre-creative state of the universe was made up of some sort of substance, a substance that filled the universe like water. In ancient Egypt, in Hermopolis, the ubiquitous nature of the primordial waters was represented by the god Haya, or Haya.

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Hey-oo, whose name originally meant flood, and he personified the boundless indifferentiation or infinity. Hey represented that this pre-creative substance or matter that filled the universe was not only everywhere, it was without end, it was without bounds, it was infinite. It filled the expanse much like water.

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And like water, this matter was undifferentiated. There was no form to it. So the ancients used water to symbolize that the precreative universe consisted of abundant chaotic elements that were teeming with the potential for life. In their precreative form, these elements were lifeless, dark and disorganized. And this is how the ancients across the globe almost uniformly describe what the universe was like before the creation.

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took place. Interestingly, Richard M. Wilkinson, who wrote a seminal book on Egyptian gods and goddesses, wrote this of the god Hê. Hê was the personification of infinity, usually in the temporal sense of eternity. In hieroglyphic writing, the figure of Hê was used to denote a million. The god was thus associated with the idea of millions of years.

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and is sometimes paired with a female deity, Hauhet, representing the alternative Egyptian word for eternity, jet. I didn’t mention this in the previous episode, but did you catch that? The Egyptian god He represented not only the infinite nature of the primordial waters, but he and his female counterpart, Hauhet, also represented the eternal nature of the primordial waters, the…

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unorganized elements that filled the universe before the creation. It’s quite astounding that the ancient Egyptians understood this thousands and thousands of years before scientists like Sadi Carnot confirmed the laws of thermodynamics, which established that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or converted from one form to another. In other words, Sadi Carnot established that energy

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is eternal. Couple this with Albert Einstein’s famous formula E equals mc squared which states that matter and energy are the same thing just in different forms and voila scientists have come to the same conclusion as the ancient Egyptian god He that the matter that made up the primordial waters before the creation was in fact eternal matter. Matter that can neither be destroyed or

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just astounding. This brings us to the greatest mystery of the world. How did the primordial water, that lifeless, dark, disorganized eternal matter, go from an inert, diffuse, formless state to the gorgeous blue marble we call planet Earth, to a planet filled with life, lush forests, exotic birds,

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Crystal waterfalls, herds of antelope and gazelles and human beings, you and me. Well, although modern scientists don’t yet know, the ancients did. And like I just mentioned, to this point, the ancients have been highly accurate. What they claimed about the primordial waters has been in complete conformity with what scientists have only recently learned. So.

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The ancients just might be onto something here too, when they describe how life came to be. What the ancients have to say about how life came to be is pretty intriguing from both a spiritual and a scientific point of view. Now, considering the number of ancient cultures, the wide geographical expanses between peoples, the centuries between the accounts, we would expect to find vastly different explanations for the emergence of life among the ancient peoples.

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but we just don’t find that. Van der Schluyck found that the ancients sang one song and he writes, quote, “‘It emerges that people of all creeds and colors have sustained surprisingly similar notions about the origin of the cosmos.'” So before I reveal what that song was, it’s important to take a moment and think about how important the answer to this question really is.

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Not only should the answer explain how the earth was created, but the answer of how can also give us insight into why the earth was created and ultimately why you and I were created. That makes the creation of the earth a pretty important process to understand, because if we get it wrong, then we misunderstand our entire existence. So let’s jump in. According to the

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emerge? Well in simplified terms, van der sluess found that pretty much all of the ancients explained the transformation of eternal disorganized matter, those primordial waters, into life in pretty much the same way. Through the power of a supreme being. A supremely intelligent being who had full knowledge of how the universe worked and used his knowledge to act upon

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or organize the formless matter into a beautiful creation, a world full of life. This idea is not as out there as many would have you believe. If you go back to my Lego analogy from the previous episode, you might imagine a primordial sea of Lego blocks dumped all over the living room floor. They’re brimming with possibilities, but nothing is built. All of the building blocks are there, but nothing is formed. And if we use the ancients creation account,

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the supreme being then acts upon the Lego blocks, organizing the blocks into a beautiful creation. And we see this same idea of acting upon or transforming materials that already exist in the ancient Egyptian Heliopolis cosmogony. Famed Egyptologist Jan Asman notes, quote, in the context of the Heliopolis cosmogony, the central term is not to create.

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in Egyptian, which is JRJ, to do, to create, to produce. But kepper, to become, to shape, kepper refers to the ideas of transformation. We see this process take place every day. When the techs in China take different elements and organize them together and out of them, they produce an iPhone, or when a chef takes

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a lot of different elements and mixes them together and produces a gorgeous cake. The techs and the chefs have knowledge of how to organize and mix the elements so that they will produce the desired product. A key difference between a supreme being and the techs and chefs is that the supreme being or God is light years more advanced intellectually and spiritually than we are. The ancients contended that God acquired the knowledge necessary to create life.

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used that knowledge to act upon the elements and thereby produce life. I’ve never quite figured out why modern scientists reject this possibility other than perhaps pure hubris. It’s unfathomable to them that anybody could acquire more knowledge than they have. But all you have to do is look around and see that the acquisition of knowledge is a huge component of personal growth. We send our kids to school for years.

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with the precise objective that they acquire greater and greater knowledge. And we hope that that knowledge will give them greater and greater power to create their own lives. The problem with modern scholars is that they arbitrarily cap the acquisition of knowledge. They basically contend that no human being could ever acquire knowledge to the point that they could create life or create a world. Yet, ironically,

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There are scientists every day who are trying to do just that, acquire the knowledge necessary to create life, just like I pointed out in episode number 10. So although these scientists reject the notion that a supreme being created life, they themselves are seeking knowledge that would allow them to do the exact same thing, create life. The duplicity of modern scientists here should not be lost on anyone.

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If these scientists think that they can create life, what makes them think a supreme being couldn’t create life? Hubris is the only explanation I can think of. And I wonder sometimes if they reject the notion that God created life because God beat them to it. So how did the ancients describe the process of God acting upon the primordial elements, the primordial waters?

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Well, when we dive into the ancient cosmogonies, we see that the ancients used a variety of metaphors to express God acting upon the primordial elements. These included things like their voice, name, thought, breath, wind, secretion, touch, and sometimes by co-creators or companions. And this divine action resulted in the creation of life, the cosmos, and the earth.

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didn’t stray from this account. They didn’t mince words. They universally attributed the creation to intentional, intelligent, powerful actions taken by a supreme being. Of the many metaphors used by the ancients to describe how God acted upon the primordial elements, transforming them from a lifeless, formless state to creation full of life, one stands out for its

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really pretty intriguing implications and for the considerable frequency for which it shows up kind of all over the globe. And this is creation by divine utterance. Sometimes it’s referred to as divine speech, the word, the tongue, divine fiat, the spoken word, creative utterance, creative words, all along those lines. I find this pretty fascinating. How did God do this?

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How did he create the earth through words? I find this intriguing because this is not something that we would really predict that the ancients would think of if they were coming up with this stuff on their own. I could see how the ancients could conceive of a Potter type God, one who molded or fashioned man out of clay. But to create through divine utterance seems to be a concept outside of rudimentary thinking. So let’s dive into the ancient record and see what we can learn.

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Let’s begin with some of the oldest accounts and then we’ll work our way forward. This means that naturally then we’re going to start in ancient Egypt. Over the 3000 year history of the ancient Egyptians, four general creation accounts developed, which were essentially different versions of the same basic mythic cycle of creation. One of these accounts is known as the Memphite creation story.

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and it contains one of the earliest known references to creation by divine utterance. Most of what we know about the Memphite creation account comes from a remarkable artifact known as the Chebacca Stone. So I told you I was gonna tell you a little bit about some of these fun artifacts. So here’s a little bit of background on the Chebacca Stone. In 1836, a French Egyptologist named Francois Xavier Joseph Drose

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was conducting excavations at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, which today is located near modern-day Cairo. Memphis was once a prominent city in ancient Egypt, and it served as the capital during the Old Kingdom period. During his excavations, Drose uncovered the ruins of the Temple of Ptah, an important religious complex that had been dedicated to the god Ptah, and this god was highly revered in Memphis.

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The temple had fallen into disrepair, and while he’s going through the rubble, Droes stumbles upon a large slab of black basalt. It looked like a millstone. If you look at it, it looks like a millstone, but as he looked closer and closer, he noticed that it had this intricate inscription. Today, this stone is known as the Shabaka Stone, and it dates to around the 25th dynasty, to the reign of King Shabaka.

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King Shabaka ruled in Egypt between 705 and 690 BC, and he ruled as the third king of the 25th dynasty. Scholars have dated the stone to 710 BC, but the stone’s introduction says that it was a copy or had been copied from a worm-ridden papyrus that had been found in the great temple of Patah in Memphis. Now, Memphis was founded

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at the very beginning of dynastic Egypt around 2925 BCE, so 3000 years before Christ. Because the Shabaka Stone was a copy of a record that had been kept in Memphis, there’s scholars, like a scholar by the name of Homer W. Smith, who calls the Shabaka Stone, quote, the oldest written record of human thought. Not all scholars agree with him. But a lot of prominent Egyptologists have.

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dated the original document from which the Shabaka stone came to sometime in the Old Kingdom because Linguistically its language is similar to the language that was used in the pyramid texts that are dated to the fifth dynasty More modern-day scholars. They don’t date it quite back that far The stone was given to the British Museum in London and it’s there still today You can find it tucked away in the north end of room number four among the Egyptian artifacts

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It was housed in the British Museum for nearly a hundred years before American Egyptologist James Breasted in 1901 began the painstaking process of trying to decipher it. And it took a while and a lot of other scholars had to help. The stone contains the King’s Titulary, a story of the unification of upper and lower Egypt and the Memphite creation account, which is known as

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the Memphite theology of which we’re interested in here. If you’re interested in listening to a full audio recording of the Shabbat Kaston, you can find it on our sister podcast, the Ancient Tradition Audio Rit. And you can find it any place you get your podcasts. In this creation account, Ptah, the Memphite God of creation, first thinks of what he wants to create in his heart. See, Egyptians didn’t understand the brain, so thinking was assigned to the heart.

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then he speaks what is thought in his heart and it comes into existence. It reads, and this is directly from the Shabaka Stone, quote, there took shape in the heart, there took shape on the tongue of the form of Atum, for the very great one is Ptah, who gave life to all the gods and their cause through his heart and through his tongue, in which Horus had taken shape as Ptah, in which Thoth had taken shape as Ptah.

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So in this passage, Ptah thinks of the gods Atum, Thoris, and Thoth in his heart, and then he speaks their form into existence. And according to this passage, Ptah gives form, shape, and life to the gods. He creates the gods. In the next passage, Ptah, by way of his heart and use of his tongue to speak,

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He commands into creation everything, all gods, all men, all cattle, just everything. It reads quote, Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that he, Ptah, is in every body and Ptah is in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives.

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thinking whatever he wishes and commanding whatever he wishes. So a couple of interesting things are going on in this passage. First, as we noted, Pata has the power to bring about the creation of anything he thinks of in his heart, which suggests an intellectual creation takes place first, and then he speaks that into creation by his tongue, the physical creation.

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I don’t want to stop here though. We can’t glaze over the other really, really important and super intriguing points that are being made in this passage about creation through divine utterance. Let me read the first line one more time to see if you can catch what the ancient Egyptians are teaching here. It says, quote, “‘Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Ptah is in every body.'” Wow.

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What does that mean? So here we learn that Patah has the ability to quote, rule over all the limbs. And rule as we know is associated with dominion and power and authority. So in this passage, we learn that Patah exerts his authority over quote, all the limbs or all matter through his heart, his mind and tongue.

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through speech. He uses his heart and tongue to exercise his dominion or rule over matter. Do you get what this is saying? It’s saying that matter, which from the creation myth can be organized or disorganized, responds to God’s commands. Matter responds to God’s authority. Okay, so wait a minute. Wait just a minute. This is a little mind blowing.

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First, this suggests that matter has an ability to respond to God’s rule. That’s mind blowing enough, but it also suggests that it will respond to God’s rule. The elements will obey God’s will. But why? Why would matter respond to God’s commands or voice? Well, for the answer to that question, we need to read the passage one more time and see if you can catch it. It reads, quote,

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Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Ptah is in everybody. Okay so from this passage it’s apparent that the ancient Egyptians in Memphis taught that part of Ptah’s essence or spirit or something was in everything. The passage here couldn’t be more clear. I’ll read the whole thing one more time.

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heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Bata’a is in everybody and Bata’a is in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives. This passage tells us that the reason that the elements respond to God’s commands, his divine utterance, is because part of God is in them, in everybody.

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part of God is in everything. And I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever part of God is in all things is somehow related to light. But I’ll save that for our next episode. I wanna share one more passage from the Shabbatka stone, which gives us a little more insight into creation through divine utterance or the tongue. And it reads, quote, the in need a group of nine gods is the teeth

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lips in this mouth which pronounced the name of everything from which Shu and Tefnut came forth.” Alright so in this passage it appears that Ptah creates at least in part by pronouncing the name of what is to be created. Keep in mind that in the ancient Near East objects and especially people were given names that captured their true essence.

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It seems as though God assigns a name to match the true essence of what he’s thought in his heart, then utters the name, which calls it into being. It’s almost like the elements respond to God’s command by organizing into the essence of the name that God utters. Dr. Abdao of Sadat City University says of Memphite creative utterance, the object becomes real with its identity when being named.

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What originated in the heart is only completed by being given their names, since the names appeal their reality or their identity. We see a passage similar to this in the Coffin Texts, which read, who, which represents lips or creative command, and Sia, which represents the heart or intelligence, said to him, come then, let us go and create the names of this coil.

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According to what comes from his heart and I think in this passage coil refers to a rope The understood power of the spoken word was ubiquitous in ancient Egypt The ancient Egyptian pyramid texts themselves are organized according to utterances because they needed to be spoken out loud to make them efficacious According to dr. Abdao quote the ancient Egyptians believed that uttering from the mouth had power uttering or the articulation of the word had

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power. Saying it was considered like the power of doing the action. Saying it had the exact same effect as doing it. Uttering a speech achieves the action stated. We find a similar reference to creative utterance in a hymn to Amun-Rei which dates to about 1400 BC and it reads and this is speaking of Amun-Rei as a creator. Quote.

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You have started to create this land to establish what has come from your mouth. We find another example from the tomb of the high priest Nebuen Eneth dating from the first half of the 13th century. And it reads quote, who created heaven and earth and gave birth to human beings who brought forth all that is through the utterance of his mouth who spoke and it happened who gave birth to what exists.

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It was his tongue that formed everything he created. Let’s move to ancient Mesopotamia. In ancient Mesopotamia, we don’t have a lot of direct references to creation by divine utterance, but we do have some good hints, which imply a connection between creation, words, and names. For example, if we look at the very beginning of the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, we read,

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quote, when in the height heaven was not named and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name and the primeval Apsu who begat them. So here we see that in the beginning existed the primeval waters, the Apsu, but at this time that there was no name for heaven and there was no name for earth. They did not exist without a name, much like what was suggested in ancient Egypt.

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The passage proceeds, quote, and chaos Tiamat, the mother of them both, their waters were mingled together and no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen. One of the gods, none had been called into being and none bore a name. So again, here during the pre-creative state of the universe, the pre-mortal waters of Tiamat and Apsu mingled, but nothing had yet been created, not even the gods.

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because they had not yet been named. And it continues, quote, then were created the gods in the midst of heaven. Lamu and Lahamu were called into being. So here the gods are called into being and given names. Lamu and Lahamu seems like a pretty clear reference to creation by divine utterance.

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If you’re interested in listening to the full audio recording of the Babylonian creation myth, the enuma alish, you can find it also on our sister podcast, the ancient tradition audio writ. Now let’s turn to the ancient Hebrew tradition creation by word or divine command is the prominent creative act in the Bible. If we look at Genesis chapter one verses three, six and nine, it reads quote, and God said, let there be like.

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and there was light. And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. In this passage, God verbally commands the creation to appear each time uttering, let there be, let there be.

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And in each instance, a feature of the creation appears and obeys his verbal command. The God of the Old Testament continues to command the waters of the deep to take shape. And the waters or the prima materia, the raw material of the primordial waters, abide by his commands and take shape as light or firmament, seas, grass, fruit, trees, et cetera. Just like what we saw.

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ancient Egypt. In Genesis chapter 1 we also find the creation associated with naming. Verse 5 reads, quote, and God called the light day and the darkness he called night. In verse 8, and God called the firmament heaven. Verse 10, and God called the dry land earth.

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Names and naming in the ancient tradition are incredibly important and we’ll dedicate a couple of episodes to this down the line. Suffice it to say here that names seem to be an incredibly important facet of the creation process. The connection between the creation process and naming gets even more interesting when we read Genesis chapter 2 verses 19 and 20 where God gives Adam the privilege of naming every living creature and it reads, quote,

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And out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle and to the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field. What’s going on in these verses is quite striking because

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Here we have God giving Adam the power and authority to name, which appears from all the cases we’ve covered to this point to be a salient feature of the creation process. In chapter one, verses five, eight and 10, it’s only God who had the privilege to name the night and day and the heaven and earth. So for God to give Adam the authority to name suggests that Adam was in some way a co-creator in the creation process.

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For Adam to be able to do this, he had to have had the ability to discern their true essence. Dr. Michael E. Stone, who’s a professor emeritus of comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, quotes a fifth century author, Elise, who notes, quote, Those who are without names are reckoned with the uncreated, as though the created come from the uncreated through that.

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receiving names. Here the creative dimension of naming is made very explicit. Adam can name true names which is an act of creation. Adam gave names which means he created and because he created he was a companion or partner of God in creation. Consequently he was Lord of the creatures he named and had

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And then Dr. Stone makes an interesting spiritual connection. He notes, quote, Adam gave names just as a priest gives names in the baptismal font. Baptism is rebirth, so here again, the theme of creation and re-creation reoccurs. Here we are back to the parallels of the birth of the earth of the primordial waters and naming and the rebirth of the spiritual.

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coming out of the waters of baptism and a new name taking on the name of Christ. We can see here why the ancients placed so much importance on the creation because it served as a prototype for spiritual creation. And think of all the times in the Judeo-Christian scriptures where God calls people by name. If you look at John chapter one, verse 42, when he is first introduced to Simon Peter, and it reads, quote,

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And when Jesus beheld him, he said, “‘Thou art Simon, the son of Jonah.'” Okay, we can also find a couple more verses in the Bible, verses six and nine of Psalm 33, also attest to creation by divine utterance. We read, quote, “‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, “‘for he spake and it was done. “‘He commanded and it stood.’

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fast. In these verses we see the same thing attested to in the Shabbakka stone, that the elements respond to and obey the authority of God, taking shape according to His command. The connection between creation and divine speech of the word is especially prominent in the Christian tradition in the New Testament in John chapters 1, 1 to 4, and maybe some of you have already thought of this before we got to it.

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But John chapter one verses one to four read quote, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of men.

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These verses are absolutely loaded with amazing stuff. And there’s no way I could address all of it here. But I wanna point out that the phrase, quote, in the beginning marks the beginning of the creation process, the time of creation. In this first God is directly associated with divine utterance. He’s referred to here as the word, or in the original Greek, the logos. In this passage, we have the beginning, the time of the primordial waters.

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God as the Creator and the Word or divine utterance. All the same things that we see in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Here God as the Word is the agent of creation. What’s really intriguing in these verses is that Word in the King James Version is capitalized. Word is used as a proper noun. It’s a name. It’s a name for God.

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It says, and the word was God. So could it be that God used the authority of his personal name to command the elements to organize themselves into the earth? Is that what God uttered as a way to act upon the elements? Now, I don’t know, but from other things I’ve read and things I’ll bring up as the podcast continues, it sure seems to point in that direction.

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Before I leave John chapter one, I also want to point out in the last line of verse four, here we have a connection to the creation of life and light. It reads, quote, In him was life and the life was the light of men. Remember earlier in this episode when I said that I thought light was connected to the creation process? Well, here’s another reason to suspect that this is the case.

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In the next verse, in verse five, we see how John relates the light of men back to the lighting of the dark primordial waters. And John chapter one verse five says, quote, and the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. So it seems like John wants to emphasize how God’s word initiated the creation, brought about the cosmos, brought light to the dark waters.

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But then he implies that God’s word, his divine utterance, does the same thing for human beings, brings us out of darkness into spiritual light. And in verses 12 and 13, John ties the creation directly to spiritual rebirth. He says this of Christ’s spiritual creative power, quote, but as many as received him, to them gave he power.

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to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name, which was born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” These verses are very interesting because John is teaching that the same mechanism, divine utterance, the word, the name, that led to the creation of life in the universe

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also leads to the creation of the new man, the reborn spiritual man. All right, we’re going to switch to the Quran. Hopefully I gave you enough to really ponder and think upon there. We also find creation by divine utterance in the Quran. In Quran 2 117 reads, quote, the originator of the heavens and the earth, when he decrees a matter, he only says to it, be.

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it is. In this passage God’s creative power is concentrated in a single word be and in Arabic that word is koun which means be or exist. We see divine utterance in the Hindu tradition as well among the Hindu the word om and lots of you out there probably have heard this you beat your little index finger in your thumb together and om

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This is the sonic representation of the divine and is said to be the essence of the supreme absolute. It first shows up in the Upanishads, which eventually became the basis for Hindu philosophy and is connected with the cosmic sound. Om is the first sound that was produced at the time of creation. And through this sound, God created the universe. It is the most sacred of all words.

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The Mandukyo Upanishad opens with quote, Aum, this syllable is this world. In the Ramayana, it reads, referring to Rama, who is a Hindu deity, it says quote, you are the mystic syllable Aum. You are higher than the highest. People neither know your end nor your origin or who you are in reality. You appear in all created beings in the cattle and in the Brahmanas.

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You exist in all quarters in the sky, in mountains, and in rivers. This is very interesting. In the yoga Sutra, it says, quote, his word is Om. If we move to the Popal Vuh, which Mursi Aliyat calls, quote, the most important surviving work of Mayan literature and contains the Mayan creation account. And it reads speaking of the primordial waters, quote,

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Whatever might be is simply not there. Only murmurs, ripples in the dark in the night. Only the maker, modeler alone. Sovereign plumed serpent, the bearers, begaters are in the water, a glittering light. They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feathers and blue-green. And then came his word. He came here to the sovereign plumed serpent, here in the blackness in the early dawn. He spoke with the sovereign plumed serpent and they talked.

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than they thought. And then the earth arose because of them. It was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth, they said, Earth. It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming now, unfolding. Pretty great stuff. Among the Maori people of New Zealand, Io is the supreme being.

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And this comes from the Maori account of creation. And this is what it says. Io dwelt within the breathing space of immensity. The universe was in darkness with water everywhere. There was no glimmer of dawn, no clearness, no light. And he began by saying these words that he might cease remaining inactive. Darkness become a light possessing darkness and at once light.

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He then repeated those self same words in this manner. A Maori elder noted quote, the words of Io, the supreme God became impressed on the minds of our ancestors. And by them were they transmitted down through generations. Our priest joyously referred to them as being the ancient and original sayings, the ancient and original words.

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the ancient and original cosmological wisdom, way Nanga, which caused growth from the void, the birth given evolved earth. Interestingly, the Maori then use these words in their sacred rituals. And they say, quote, the words by which Io fashioned the universe, that is to say by which it was implanted and caused to produce a world of light.

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The same words are used in the ritual for implanting a child in a barren womb. The words by which Io caused light to shine in the darkness are used in the rituals for cheering a gloomy and despondent heart. The words used by Io are used to overcome and dispel darkness.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing some parallels here to John chapter one, one to four and the rest of the chapter that is saying basically the same idea that there’s a light very similar to what lit for the cosmos, which also leads to spiritual rebirth. These words that are used to bring about physical birth and spiritual birth. Let me give you one last example of the Hopi Indian tradition of Northeastern Arizona. In this creation story, the birth goddess Spider Woman.

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and the sun god Tawa, translate their creative thoughts into a creation song. And note how like with Pata’a in Egypt, the creation first starts with a thought and then the thought is given utterance. Quote, Spider-woman and Tawa had this sacred thought, which was of placing the world between the up and down within the four quarters in the void that was the eternal waters.

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The thought became the first song. Father of all, life and light I am, sing Tawa. Mother of all, receiver of light and weaver of life I am, sing Spider Woman. My thought is of creatures that fly in the up and run in the down and swim in the eternal waters, sing the God. May the thought live, intoned Spider Woman, and she formed it of clay.

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Together the first gods placed a sacred blanket over the new beings and chanted the song of life. The beings stirred into life. Now this is from, you know, Native Americans, Hopi Indians in Arizona, but you’re seeing all of the same motifs. We’re seeing eternal waters, we’re seeing light and life coming out of these eternal waters, thought, and then a song. It’s pretty mind boggling.

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obvious that there are cultural variations in these sacred creation stories, but it’s also clear that they share important core elements that point to a common heritage, a heritage which we refer to here as the ancient tradition. Although we didn’t fully explain in this episode how life came to be, we’ve definitely covered a few tantalizing clues. In our next episode, we’ll continue our investigation into the ancient record and see if we can uncover the connection between the

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the supreme being, divine utterance, and the creation of life, and the mechanism by which God’s utterance brought about life. And you can bet it has something to do with light. That wraps up this edition of the ancient tradition. In the words of William Shakespeare, knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. I’m Jack Logan.

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You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production.