The Great Themes

Creation

The ability to explain the creation of the world is one unique to mythology and religion. Practically
every culture in the world has had some way or another to explain the fundamental question of
how the Earth, along with its many land and life forms, came to be in existence. Many cultures
however, have separate stories of how humanity came about, and how the celestial bodies were
created. The creation of humanity is covered under another theme: The Making of Mankind.

Coming back to the central idea of the creation of the world itself, there are mainly two concepts
that were adopted by people around the prehistoric world. The first idea was that of a divine being
who single-handedly created the world by explicit intention, which is clearly illustrated in the
following examples:

Africa: Divine Intervention

Most people in Africa believed in the existence of a supreme being who made the world single
handedly, although the gods themselves vary. One example would be the Tiv people who
populate Northern Nigeria today. They believed their god to have carved the world out of wood, in
the image of what he thought was utopia.

Japan: Izanagi and Izanami

The Japanese believed that the world was created by the two gods, Izanagi and Izanami. The two
stirred the ocean with a jewelled spear and later used their different genders to create the islands
of Japan, and subsequently, the whole world.

The alternative form school of thought is that of the world being a natural, accidental process that
needed no external help to happen.

Norse
Norse mythology tells of the creation of the world when the fire from the southern realms mixed
with the ice from the northern realms in the middle, causing the formation and melting of ice,
which birthed the primeval cow, and the giant, Ymir.

Yet, few cultures describe creation without any intention at all. Most cultures present a mix of both
ideas, describing the world with a natural beginning and intentional creation after that.

Greek
According to the Greeks, the physical world was created and embodied by Mother Earth, Gaia.
Gaia herself was a product out of the chaos that reigned before her evolution. Mother Earth later
produced a son named Uranus, and together they formed the heavens and the earth.

China
Some Chinese believe in creation having been the work of the giant Pangu. Pangu was born out
of a cosmic egg, whose existence seems to have been taken for granted. When Pangu broke the
egg, the lighter parts became the heavens whilst the heavier parts became the land.

Yet, other common traits run deep in the different mythological pantheons across the ancient
world. A common idea was that of the cosmic egg, where the world started with the hatching of
some sort of an egg in the middle of the cosmos. Another common idea was the world having
emerged from a body of water. This can be seen in one Egyptian creation myth, where the world
started with the rising of land out from the sea. In Native American mythology, the first land was
created when a toad placed mud upon a turtles back. Lastly, in Japanese mythology, as
mentioned above, the islands of Japan were created from the stirring of the sea.

The Cosmos

The cosmos, in mythology, is very different from the way astronomer-author Carl Sagan writes
about it. Yet, it proves to be the more abstract and perplexing of the two interpretations. What is
the cosmos? Let us go on to address this question..

The cosmos is the entire universe, always beyond the naked eye of the human being. It
encompasses the underworld to the heavens, and in it, all creation is held. Yet the cosmos
extends in time long before creation, and after it. In many mythologies, the world is popularly
created out of a void, emptiness, or the nothingness of the cosmos. It is in this context in which
we see the cosmos taking on the role of an entity whose magnitude and complexity is way
beyond imagination. Yet, the men who wrote about the gods and the skies, sought to understand
the world beyond themselves, and wrote of these great worlds.

After the world was created, the cosmos now held the world in all its intricate detail, and with all
its different realms and levels. The most prominent example of this is in Norse Mythology, with
Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

Yggdrasil is the centre of the world for the Norse. It is comprised of nine different realms, each
housing different creatures. Humans lived in one of these realms. These nine realms resided on
three different levels in the tree, with the top three in the branches of the tree, and the next three
being below the three. The last three were below the ground, around the giant tree's roots. Not
only the Norse had a world tree as such. The people of Kalimantan in Indonesia, and the Aztecs
too had the world mapped with the central feature being a large tree.

Apart from the Norse, the Japanese had a rather unique structural plan of the cosmos. They
believed there are six skies above the mortal plane, and six more realms below it. The Chinese
believed in a much larger world, with the Jade Emperor upon his throne in heaven, in a separate
and distinct place from the mortal world. Greek mythology also talked of a different architecture,
with the cosmos being in the shape of a dome, where the rounded top was the sky, whilst the flat
bottom was the ground.

Apart from having physical three dimensions, the cosmos also possessed the fourth dimension:
time. Apart from telling of the cyclic nature of creation and destruction in some myths, the cosmos
also served to link the worlds which operated on different chronological planes. In Indian
mythology, one thousand days on the mortal plane translated to a single day in the heavens.

The cosmos were not built without their blueprints and maps. To conceptualize the cosmos
required tools of their own. These tools were the cardinal and spatial directions, which dictated
the underlying architectural basis on which the cosmos was built upon.

Tibetan mythology illustrates the adoption of the system, which was comprised of four cardinal
directions on any plane. China had an extra cardinal point, which was the middle of the four
points, which was simply called 'middle'. This incidentally suggests why China is called 'Middle
Country' in the Chinese language: they thought their country sat in the middle of the cosmos.
Most ancient civilizations stopped at five spatial directions, but went on further to divide it into six
directions, each at right angles to each other, in space.
Back to Carl Sagan's cosmos, the world as we know today has completely debunked previous
myths on the construct of the world. To start with, the world is round, and it is situated within the
solar system of nine planets. Interestingly enough, the sun is a part of what we know as the
cosmos today, although most civilizations thought it to having been an embodiment of the
creative force of the cosmos.

Making of Mankind

Mankind was never the creator of the universe. He was often an after product or byproduct of the
process of creation by higher creatures. To explain the phenomenon of human existence, the
creation of human beings have become as essential to mythology as the creation of the universe
itself, though these myths are seldom given the same degree of emphasis and detail as that of
creation.

The creation of mankind, to a certain extent, serves in part, to answer the age old question of the
meaning of life. Yet, what is so amazing about myths of the creation of humanity, are the striking
similarities between cultures across the globe. The general idea was that humans were made out
of mud or clay in the image of themselves, and were given life.

This is true of Greek mythology where the Titan Prometheus made little statues of the gods for his
own entertainment. The goddess Athene were enchanted by the little gods when she saw them,
and thus breathed life into them, making humans as we know them today. In Chinese mythology,
the goddess Nu Wa felt lonely, and thus started making little humans out of mud, who sprang to
life once they were done. However, Nu Wa herself had the body of a human and the tail of a
snake, but in order to enable her little creatures to be able to stand upright, she put legs in place
of the tail.

With this done, the creation of humanity seems to be complete, but yet, it is not, as the myths go
on to explain to formation of two genders.

The first woman in Greek mythology was Pandora, who was made by Zeus in order to bring
disaster upon humanity. In the famous tale from the Christian Bible, God created Eve, the first
woman, out of a rib of Adam, the first man. Many other myths echo this idea, for example, a
central African myth which told of the first woman being made out of the left knee of the first man.

Super-Natural Beings

There is one ubiquitous feature that manifests itself in every mythological pantheon in the world.
Almost crucial to the classification of mythology itself, are the divinities- the gods. Sometimes,
they are not omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, but powerful enough to suspend their
followers in awe. These gods become the key actors in the stage of mythology, be it through
creation, through fighting evil or just in jostling amongst themselves.

And yet, there is heavy division within the pantheon of the gods. Many cultures possessed a
supreme god, who ruled over the rest. Such is the way of the Greeks, with Zeus, and the Norse
with Odin. The Chinese had the Jade Emperor, the Mesopotamians had Anu, the Egyptians had
Osiris, and the list just goes on.
Some other cultures had a few principle gods instead of an isolated supreme being. Indian
Mythology, for one, describe three supreme gods, who form a triad, made up of Brahma, the
creator, Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishnu, the preserver.

In those of Greek and Norse, the gods were further wedged into two groups. The Greeks had the
Titans and the Olympians, two classes of gods who came in respective order. The Norse had the
Aesir, the sky gods, and the Vanir, the earth gods, who granted unequal rights until a war broke
out.

Of course, the gods were not the only members of the supernatural beings that evaded the mortal
eyes of man. There were the spirits, who inhabited the forest and the rivers and the demons, who
ravaged the world in their quest against the gods. Similar structural divides existed in the spiritual
and demonic worlds, but were less pronounced.

The trait that fundamentally separated the gods from the spirits and demons was immortality.
Spirits and demons were often vulnerable and transient. But, all the same, the supernatural
beings were slotted into various posts in the cosmos. Some became river gods to be worshipped
by the farmers, whilst some became home spirits to be appeased by the owner of the home.

The supernatural beings obtain a sense of purpose, with their roles, and in turn gave the various
goals physical embodiments. One prominent example is fertility, which was widely worshipped,
especially among the shamanistic civilizations, such as the Aztec, the Mayan and the Africans.
Egypt saw the river Nile as a source of fertility, and worshipped the god Osiris, the controller of
the Nile and its fertile alluvial soil which was so essential to them in the barren desert.

In the eastern mythologies, the Japanese believed that every region, village and house was
inhabited by individual spirits, and even trees and rocks had their own supernatural residents.
The Chinese echoed this idea of residing spirits, and further developed this idea to incorporate
into their mythology, the existence of spirits and demons who were derived from animals such as
the snakes and foxes. These lower beings often sought to climb the ladder of immortality..

Gods of war are another important divinity, in the ancient world where wars over territory were
frequent and pivotal to a civilization's success. The Valkyries in Norse mythology are an excellent
illustration of this aspect, who scoured the battlefields and brought back the better warriors
into Odin's hall named Vallahala. The Irish believed in the goddess Moriggan, who had the ability
of shape shifting. The Greeks worshipped the gods Ares and Athene, while the Mesopotamians
worshipped Ishtar, who ironically was both the goddess of love and war.

A Babylonian myth tells of the King Nimrod who tried to build a tower to reach heaven and to
make war on the supreme god. The god in retaliation sent angels to confuse the workers, who
eventually led to abandonment of the building. It is generally accepted in most cultures that gods
exist on a higher altitude than humans. It is interesting though how different cultures grappled
with the actual abode of the gods.

The Norse believed in a world tree, whence humans lived below the tree's canopy whilst the gods
lived in the branches. The majestic Mount Olympus was thought to have been the home of the
gods to the Greeks. With the Chinese, heaven has no exact location, but rather exists in a
dimension quite beyond human accessibility, a theme common to other cultures.

Another class of beings that are worth some mention is the primeval gods and creatures. This is
largely comprised of gods who came before and after creation itself, when the world had yet to
take on fixed form or genders. As such, these beings are generally sexless. This can be seen in
the example of the giant Pangu, in Chinese creation. The giant was born out of a cosmic egg, and
he grew for many millennia before dying, then his body parts became the world. This idea is
repeated in Norse mythology, and in one version of Egyptian creation.

One may expect that the only natural things about the world were the humans, animals, plants
and non-living things. To primitive people, supernatural forces seemed reasonable enough to be
considered natural. After all, the gods, the spirits and the demons were all part of their
mythological pantheon, which they used to explain the natural world.

Mythical Creatures

It is beyond doubt that many creatures that have been found in mythology do not exist at all.
These creatures, such as flying horses and mermaids, have been termed as mythical creatures,
which simply means creatures of myths. The presence of these mythical creatures in mythology
is multifaceted, as the roles they play vary drastically from one creature to another. Some of these
creatures come in the form of gods, whilst others come in the shape of demons. Most of them are
however, neutral creatures that roam the cosmos harmlessly, but yet play a huge part in the
course of mythology.

There are mainly two kinds of mythical creatures. The first kind are those who manifested the
mortal characteristics of animals that really existed. They also possessed abilities or aspects, that
endowed upon the creature exceptional features, such as that of Pegasus, the horse who was
able to fly with wings that grew out from the sides of his body.

Another famous example of the horse is the Unicorn, who was widely believed in, in Europe. The
unicorn had a spiral horn, which grew out from its forehead. It had the unique ability to be able to
purify water with its horn, and thus unicorn horns, which were usually animal tusks, were greatly
prized in medieval times.

And there were giants: gigantic human beings who stood many feet tall. Giants are largely
associated with the primeval world, around the time of creation. In fact in many mythologies,
giants have a direct part to play in the creation of the world. To take the tale of creation from
Chinese mythology, it talked of the giant Pangu, who broke out from a cosmic egg, and who later
died to form the earth.

The hallmark of the creatures of the mythical world was perhaps the dragons. Dragons appeared
often both in Eastern and Western mythologies, being in the family of reptiles, like those of
snakes and lizards. These hulking creatures were able to blow fire from their mouths, and were
covered in a thick protective skin that acted as armour. However, there lies a large difference
between the views of dragons across the different cultures.

In Western mythologies, dragons were usually seen as evil creatures that sought to pillage
villages and to amass large amounts of treasures for itself. However, quite a different view was
taken in Eastern mythologies, where especially in Chinese mythology, the Dragon was seen in
fact as a sign of good luck and of favorable things to come. The Emperor, who was seen as the
Son of God himself, wore a robe, which featured the embroidery of a dragon.

The second type of creatures was perhaps more common than the first. They were the creatures
that not necessarily possessed exceptional ability, but were made out of two or more animals in
their body. The Greek world is filled with such creatures, such as Centaurs, with the upper body of
a human, and with the lower body of a horse. There were also the fauns, who had a human body
and two trotters of a goat in the place of legs.
The more important examples of this sort of creatures were those who had unique abilities. Such
was the Gorgon, Medusa, who was a woman with the lower body of the snake, and with snakes
in place of hair. She was able to turn people into stone when she gazed at them. Another creature
was the Chimera, also out of Greek mythology, which was made up of a lion, a serpent, and a
goat.

In fact, many of the Egyptian gods such as Seth, Horus and Thoth were hybrids of humans and
bird-like creatures. In Indian mythology, the god Ganesh had an elephant's head on a human
body, which was caused when Shiva, the destroyer, cut off his original head while mistaking him
for a stranger denying him entrance into his own house.

In some sense, the creation of mythical creatures by mythology has been an essential aspect in
the foundation of many mythologies. Not only as cornerstones in the telling of tales, but also as
the elements that thicken the mythological world, giving the mortal world more depth and
vibrancy.

Heroes
Heroism is a common theme that is found in much of mythology. These heroes usually manage to
perform extraordinary and revolutionary tasks that leave a great impact on human society.
Although many of these tasks bring about change with lasting effect on the environment and the
world as a whole, these tasks require the quality of courage, the quality that so epitomizes
heroism.

Heroes are generally depicted as human beings possessing superhuman abilities, as the Greek
heroes were so famous for. However, there is one class of hero, which one might consider to be
called the unsung heroes. These include the people who had, in one way or another, brought
huge changes to the world, without garnering much glory along the way.

Firstly, who were these heroes? Although many of the heroes were human, many gods also do
perform heroic tasks. In Norse mythology, there is much talk of Thor who wielded his hammer, the
Mjollnir, and defended the gods from the giants. The Greek heroes, however, were mostly
children of the gods, those such as Perseus and Herakles, which are talked about in other
sections of this site. It is an interesting side note that most of the heroes were male..

Let us start on the supernaturally able heroes. One of the famous Greek heroes was the son of
Zeus, Perseus. Perseus had many encounters, and of all, the most famous of his tasks was the
slaying of the gorgon, Medusa. On another count, the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur,
eventually saving the many people who had to be sent to the half-human/half-bull regularly as
sacrifice. The Chinese hero, Houyi, shot down nine suns, when ten suns had appeared in the sky
at the same time, scorching the earth and drying up the rivers.

Indian mythology tells of many heroes, within the great epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, where the heroes were largely seen upholding morals, and in the process
overcoming great odds. An interesting hero is the Scandinavian hero, Sigurd, who gained the title
of hero, when he killed a dragon for its treasures.

To extrapolate the trend in heroism, these notions of heroism revolve about the saving of lives
and performing impossible tasks such as slaying dragons or killing man-eating creatures that
have been terrorizing nearby villages. We are all familiar with this class of hero, so let us now
move on to the next class of hero.
There is a minor theme in many mythologies around the world, which is the theft of fire. It is
through the theft of fire, that fire finally managed to reach the human world. Initially it was
restricted only to the gods, and at times withheld by the sun. In order for fire to reach human
society, there is the need for a character to steal the fire from its source and bring it to human
society. This character is invariably a hero, though not celebrated in the same fashion as the first
class of heroes.

The fire stealers include Prometheus, in Greek Mythology, who stole fire for human beings when
he pitied human beings who were freezing in the cold winter without any heat. He did this against
the will of Zeus' and was finally punished by having his liver eaten by an eagle every day.

South American mythology tells of a boy who was marooned on a tree, and was saved by a
jaguar who brought the boy back to his lair. There, the boy discovered fire within the lair, and stole
some for humanity. In Oceanic culture, fire came when the hero Maui stole fire from the keeper of
fire, who dwelt in the underworld. However, Maui could also have been considered as a trickster,
on the many occasions in which he hooked up islands from the sea and ensnared the sun using
the hair from his sister, so that during summer the days are longer.

What marks the stealing of fire as such an important example of heroism in mythology is that it
marked the revolution of human society through the act of one person, which is the very essence
of heroism in itself. This class of hero performs courageous tasks, such as Dekanah-Wida, who
forged peace between five warring tribes, in North American mythology.

Yet another hero inhabits the mythology of the Greeks, that of Antigone. There were two brothers
who had killed each other in pursuit of the throne. The brothers' uncle thus buried one of the
brothers, while he deemed the other a traitor. Antigone went against her uncle's will and gave the
other brother a proper burial, which angered her uncle. Her uncle later deprived her of food and
drink, and she hung herself, demonstrating the courage and bravery of heroism, and on the few
occasions, in a woman.

Disasters
The theme of disasters that afflict the whole world at once, are common features that is in many
mythologies across many different cultures. There is not one reason that can be applied to
describe the reason for this disaster, but in many cases, the disaster comes as a form of
punishment for human beings who have offended the gods as a race, thus warranting such a
harsh punishment.

The most famous story of such a disaster is that of Noah's Ark, where Noah gathers two of every
creature on earth, one male and one female, who boards his ark to survive the great flood that
God sent to punish mankind for their sins.

The idea from Noah's Ark is hardly unique. The Babylonian tale of its cosmic disaster contains an
equivalent of Noah's tale, where Noah later attains immortality when the chaos passed. A more
comparable tale to that of Noah's comes from Greek Mythology. Zeus sent a flood to earth when
he found that humanity had grown arrogant and complacent. The children of Prometheus had
been warned of this, and therefore managed to escape the flood by building a boat. This idea is
also repeated in the case of the Indian myth, where the supreme god Vishnu appears to King
Manu, and advises him on the flood and what he may do about it.
However, it has not always been man's fault that the flood was sent upon them. The Inca creator,
Viracocha, first made man out of stone. He was unhappy with the stone people, and decided to
recreate human beings. To do so, he sent a flood to drown the world, and to start afresh with
people made from clay.

Since most ancient civilizations started on the fertile flood plains of large rivers, which flooded
regularly during monsoon seasons, the people envisioned the global disaster to be in the form of
flooding that was so severe it covered the world to such a depth that even trees and houses were
completely submerged.

The effect of the disaster is varied. In some myths, such as that of Andean mythology, the world
after the flood is much improved from that before the flood. Greek mythology tells of a positive
change in Zeus' attitude towards humans after the flood. However, in most mythologies, the world
before and after the flood remains generally unchanged.

An interesting tale of such disasters comes from a Malaysian myth, which tells of the world being
inverted from time to time, causing floods to occur. The people believed that after the flood, the
world was remolded by the gods who would then recreate humans. In this particular tale, the
movement of the snake below the human realm may also have caused such floods.

In order to repopulate the world again, an important theme is evoked: that of rebirth, and
recreation. After the flood, the children of Prometheus proceeded to throw stones over their
shoulders, which turned into men and women, thus repopulating the earth. In southern Chinese
mythology, a girl and boy are saved from the flood, safe inside a gourd. After the flood, the
children emerge, and they later give birth to a ball of flesh, which they sliced into pieces. These
pieces were blown all over the world, effectively repopulating it.

This notion of recreation of life on earth brings to mind the theme of creation, where the survivor
of the flood can be seen as the parent of all mankind after the flood. The person may not have the
same status as that of a God who created man out of clay, but the general ideas that run
throughout both cases are strikingly similar.

So far, the only form of disasters that has been talked about has been about floods, triggered off
by unique events. However, there are two more types of disasters that also occur in many
mythologies: the idea of cyclic creation and destruction, and the idea of the world's end.

As mentioned before, the supreme god Vishnu appeared before King Manu in the form of a fish
whom the king had saved. The fish thus advised the King about the upcoming flood, and told him
what to do. To put the tale in perspective, it happened at the end of the first age of man, or Yuga,
as the Indians called it. The Indians believed in an infinite number of continuous creations and
destructions as the creator god, Brahma, awoke and slept in a never-ending cycle.

The Aztecs of Mesoamerica also had a similar tale. Due to strife between the gods, Jaguars had
destroyed the world in its first age. In the second age, the world was destroyed by a hurricane, in
the third age it was destroyed by fire, and in the fourth age by a flood. We live in the fifth age
where the world will be destroyed by an earthquake. Each time, the world is recreated and
repopulated once again after a disaster.

Not many cultures accounted for the end of the world as conclusively as Norse Mythology, and
however isolated, the tale of Ragnarok has held the imagination of people all over the world, so
much that it has to be mentioned here.

Ragnarok is the end of the world for the Norse, who believed that the giants would wage war
against the gods. The gods will eventually lose, and the world will finally be engulfed in flames.
What makes this so interesting is that the disaster itself was not a product of any gods. The end
of the world is covered more comprehensively as a theme on its own.

Conclusively, disasters seldom actually signified the end of the world or of humanity, but rather it
represented some form of rebirth and rejuvenation of the world. After each disaster, the world was
cleansed for the next age to come, or perhaps, in some cases, it just was just another part of the
endless cycle of creation and destruction.

Good vs. Evil

Good and evil are two opposite poles that are present in an uneasy equilibrium, in many
mythologies. The good and evil is most obvious in the form of the presence of a rift between gods
and demons. It is so often in many cultures that good and evil take on the opposites of light and
dark. The Egyptians believed that the sun god, Ra, travelled the sky during the day when it was
light. In the night, he would travel the underworld, and would always be attacked by the evil
serpent, Apep.

It is through this basis that many other tales were built upon. The sky is often seen as the good,
while the underground regions are regarded as evil, another clear indication of the eternal
struggle, where the battlefield is the Earth. This sort of conflict is especially evident in Indian
mythology, in the epics called the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana concerns the
evil demon god, Ravana, who eventually captures the wife of the hero, Rama. The battle that
ensues happens entirely on earth, but Rama is in fact an incarnation of the supreme god, Vishnu,
and thus provides a very good example in which the battle between the gods is carried out in the
human world.

There is no coherent distinction between good and evil across all cultures, no clear definition that
classifies the evil as being evil. If we were to recall the abstract idea of chaos, which preceded the
creation of the universe, we would notice that evil, in cultures that believed in this sort of
cosmology, was very often seen as the force that tried to return the world to its state of chaos.
This can be seen in Norse mythology, where the forces of darkness continuously assail the world
tree, trying to bring its downfall. Norse mythology is discussed again later.

In many cultures, especially Oriental cultures, evil can also be seen as the spirits of the mortal
world who attempt to attain immortality, by means that are in no way good. Chinese folklore tells
of many of these tales, where various spirits such as that of snakes and foxes garner spirits of
human beings, eventually hoping to use the power of the spirits to attain immortality. It also tells
of spirits who tried to steal the peaches of immortality in heaven.

In other occasions, good and evil can often be considered as the gods, and those against them.
At other times, the war itself might be within the classes of good and evil itself, between the two
internal parties, each having a slightly different alignment. Greek mythology itself illustrates very
good examples of this.

There were two classes of gods in the world, the Titans, and later on the Olympians. Preceding
these two classes of gods was the creator, Gaia. Gaia was the constant agent of change, as she
aided the shift in power from the Titans and Olympians. This shift in power was carried out by a
single war that happened near the start of time. Since there were no coherent evil forces present
in the Greek Pantheon, unlike many other cultures, the wars between good and evil were entirely
carried out within the classes of gods.

The Olympians finally beat the Titans, and later, Gaia was not happy with the Olympians and tried
to wage war against them. In this situation, the Olympians might have been seen as being on the
good side and they were the rulers of the Earth. Gaia, who was trying to overturn them, might
have been considered as an evil party.

The balance between good and evil is yet another interesting idea. The Chinese have the famous
symbol of Yin and Yang. The black and white sections within the circle represent the equilibrium
between good and evil, and the existence of good within evil, and evil within good. This idea is
also repeated in many cultures in the daily cycles of light and darkness. In this cycle, night never
really overcame day, whilst day never really overcame night. Yet day-by-day, good fell to evil and
evil fell to good. This idea is reiterated in Norse mythology.

However, times and cultures often tell of the time when such a balance is tipped. In Indian
mythology, the demons have often overpowered the gods, and had taken portions of the world.
This imbalance required the intervention of the supreme god Vishnu to come and restore the
previous order.

Norse mythology is a unique example, which speaks of Ragnarok, the day when evil would
ultimately overtake good. In this case, the tip of the balance does not last long, as the entire world
is eventually destroyed, after which there is a rebirth. In this case, the overtaking of the evil might
be seen as an instrument of rebirth and recreation.

It is however more common in mythologies to tip the balance in favour of the good. Back to the
case of Indian mythology, the supreme god Vishnu is often able to push back the situation in
favour of the gods. In the stirring of the ocean to produce a potion of immortality, Vishnu takes the
potion and gives it only to the gods, leaving the demons without any.

To tip the balance in this way, various cultures have employed different methods to quell the evil.
Even though Greek mythology did not have a coherent force of darkness, it had its many heroes
who had slain many isolated agents of evil, such as the Hydra and the Gorgons. The Tibetans
have the destroyer of evil, Vajrapani, who is adept at slaying the evil forces, and to maintain the
tip of the balance in favour of the gods.

However, many cultures still acknowledge the impossibility of such a task as to eradicate evil. The
Tibetans had a god who was reincarnated as a human being to battle evil. After slaying the evil in
the world, he returned to heaven. However, it is said that from time to time he would return, for
evil would once again arise.

For sure, it would be impossible, at any point, to deem good or evil to have completely taken over
anything, for even the Bible tells of evil arising from within the ranks of angels. In Greek
mythology, Pandora is set upon human beings, as she accidentally releases all the diseases and
sins upon humanity, who were then still pure. However, all was not lost, as she also released
hope: the good within all the evil that would afflict man.

The After-Life
Different cultures and traditions had different ways of accounting for what happened after death.
Most mythologies around the world believed in the presence of souls within the human body.
They believed that for every human body, was an exact invisible duplicate, which was able to
move about independent of the human body after death. Some others believed in similar spiritual
models, differing only in some of the details.

After death, these souls would travel to the realm of the dead, which most cultures referred to as
the underworld. The underworld traditionally was located far away from the mortal world. In the
case of the Greeks, the underworld was situated at the end of the Earth, where one had to pay
his way across the river, on the boat of Charon. The Norse believed that the realm of the dead
was at one of the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil, while the Chinese believed in an underworld
with no exact real world location, just that it was far below the surface of the Earth.

From there on, myths generally split in two directions, the first towards reincarnation, whilst the
second towards an eternal life after death. Either way, there traditionally had always been a
screening process, where the deceased were judged, to decided their outcome.

Judgement in a culture that subscribed to reincarnation often involved the idea of karma, the
amount of good or evil a person has done in his life. This karma would decide the deceased's
punishment, and even the outcome of his reincarnation. A classical example of this system was
the one found in Chinese mythology. Chinese mythology, was similar to Japanese mythology,
where there were eighteen varying levels of hell in the Chinese system, whilst there were sixteen
in the Japanese.

The unique thing about the Chinese underworld was that it did not only serve humans, but also
animals. Thus, when the creature had kept a good record throughout his life, he would be
reincarnated to a higher levelled creature, and perhaps to a wealthy social caste. Conversely, if
he was condemned, he would be reincarnated to a lower level of creatures.

Cultures that do not believe in reincarnation usually believe in some form of eternal life.
The judgement process is carried out in a similar fashion to that of the Chinese, and eventually
the deceased is accessed. It is then determined which path he would take: the path towards
eternal life and bliss in a place such as heaven if he had been good, and torture and even death
such as in hell if he had too many transgressions to save his soul.

In Egyptian mythology, for example, the deceased's heart was weighed against a feather, and if
the heart tilted the balance, then the person would be sent to be devoured by a monster, thus
ending his afterlife. However, if he passed the screening, he would join the ranks of the gods to
fight the evil serpent Apep.

This idea is very similar to the idea of Norse mythology, where the Norse believed that the only
way of afterlife came in the form of being chosen by the Valkyries, to be a part of Odin's army for
Ragnarok, the end of the world. In Slavic mythology, heaven itself is situated in the East, beyond
the sunrise, where the people depart for, if they pass judgement.

Besides death, many ancient cultures also believed in other ways the spirit left the body, such as
in dreams. Although it does not have an effect as great as that of death, the leaving of the soul
from the body temporarily allowed for exploitation by those skilled in the black arts. They were
able to exploit this time to steal the body, which requires great skill from a shaman to remedy.

End of the World

In mythology, the world and its many cyclic processes exist in delicate equilibrium that requires
constant effort to maintain. Within this balance also existed various processes that were ongoing
since the beginning of time. Such is the fragility of creation, which would be easily shattered by
the imbalance of any one force, usually as a case of inevitability.

As such, most cultures accounted for the end of the world, which lay at the end of an indefinite
period of time, waiting for the trigger to be pulled to finally result in the end of the world. However
varied enough as the possibilities may be, the myths of destruction around the world are strikingly
similar.
One major idea with regards to the destruction of the world lay with the cosmic architecture that
was not able to sustain itself forever, and that would sooner or later collapse when an important
section of the world gave way. The Australian Aborigines believed that the sky was held up by
four pillars, and that sooner or later one of the pillars would become too weak to hold the weight
of the sky anymore, and would give way, causing the sky to fall upon the world, ending it instantly.

Conversely, the Cherokee people of America believed that the earth was held above the sea by
four suspensions from the sky. When one of these four suspensions finally rotted, the earth would
fall into the sea, wiping out the whole world. Also from North America, the Cheyenne people
believed that a beaver gnawed at the single beam that supported the world. When the beaver
finally succeeded in severing the link, the earth would fall and be destroyed.

Besides just ideas of fractures within the cosmic architecture, many mythologies also talked of
times when certain elements would run out, causing an adverse effect upon the world, causing it
to eventually end. This is the case in West African mythology that believed in the presence of a
huge serpent known as the rainbow serpent. This serpent held together the world, and was fed
iron bars to keep it from biting its own tail. However, sooner or later the bars would run out. When
that happens, the serpent would bite its own tail and devour itself, causing the world to fold upon
itself.

Lastly, another example comes from American mythology and the Tsimshian people. These
people believed that one day, the person who holds up the pole holding up the Earth, would run
out of energy and cause the world to fall as he dies from the strain.

The other sort of apocalypse comes about when the balance in the forces in the world is upset.
This is so in Norse mythology. Although the destruction of the world still involved the decay of
some element holding together the world, this apocalypse included the idea of giants overcoming
the gods. This seemed to play a more important role in the destruction of the world. To
understand the end of the world, or Ragnarok as the Norse called it, it would be good to read the
story of Ragnarok itself. To summarize, Ragnarok basically referred to the time when the giants
would finally rise against the gods, and where all the main gods were killed. The world would
finally be consumed in fire.

This idea is similar to Egyptian destruction, although the Egyptians made it a lot simpler. The sun
god Ra was believed to walk through the underworld each day where he would be attacked by
the serpent Apep, but would successfully slay the serpent every night. However, the Egyptians
believed in a time when the god would be too old to fight the serpent, and would finally fall to it.
Without the sun god, all creation would come to a bitter end.

Of course many mythologies do not provide an absolute end of the world. This is especially so in
cultures that believed in cyclic processes of creation and destruction. This idea is largely talked
about in creation itself, but to mention it again, this can be seen in mythologies such as Indian
mythology and Aztec mythology.

Indian mythology believed that the many ages of the world was accompanied by the waking and
sleeping of the creator. The creator destroyed the world before he slept, only to recreate it the
next morning. However, each day in the life of the creator lasted several million years. Within
each day in the life of the creator also came many other destructions and rebirths of the world,
which is further elaborated in Indian Cosmology. The Aztecs believed that there had been four
previous worlds before this one, each with its own creation and destruction. They believed that it
was a matter of time before the end to this world came too.

Once again, as in the discussion of Creation, it would be interesting to bring in the idea of the Big
Crunch, which essentially is the opposite of the Big Bang, which created the entire universe and
the cosmos. The Big Crush refers to the time when the various masses in space eventually pulled
themselves, by way of gravitational forces, back into a single point mass. This idea is very similar
to that of the collapse of the cosmic architecture. However, as scientists predicted, and as the
ancient people prophesized, such destruction is a far throw from reality and could occur at the
end of an indefinite period of time.