There are many different stories the Greeks told about the creation of the cosmos and the early history of mankind. These stories are found in several different works and traditions and, as Paul Veyne has argued, many were not meant as scientific accounts of human or cosmic history, but rather as allegories of how the Greeks understood the world in which they lived.
One of the best known accounts of the creation of both humanity and the cosmos can be found in Hesiod's Theogony, which discusses the origin of the world and the generations of the gods. In the beginning, the universe was a formless Chaos from which arose primal deities, Gaia (Earth), Eros (Desire), Tartarus (Underworld), Erebus (Darkness), and Nyx (Night). Gaia was the mother of Ouranos (the sky) and Ouranos mated with Gaia to produce the generation of the twelve Titans, including Oceanos, Hyperion, Iapetos, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, and Kronos. Kronos castrated his father Ouranos. Where the blood land on earth, it engendered the Furies and the Giants. Ouranos tossed the testicles into the sea, where they gave birth to Aphrodite, goddess of love. Kronos married his sister Rhea, and the offspring of this marriage were the Olympian gods.
The Titan Prometheus created man out of mud with the help of Athena. Zeus created the first woman, Pandora, in part as a punishment for humans, in response to Prometheus giving man fire. In Hesiod's account, there were five ages of man, beginning with a golden age and gradually declining into the present iron age.
Orphism was a mystery religion and many of its details were known only to initiates, limiting what we actually know of Orphic beliefs, although, the discovery of the Derveni papyrus has added significantly to our knowledge. In this text, which has only been partially deciphered due to its poor state of preservation, Night gives birth to Ouranos who is the father of Kronos, the father of Zeus. Dionysus figures far more significantly in this work than in non-Orphic mythology; also, among the Orphics, the human soul was immortal and transmigrated after death of the body.
In ancient Greece, the term Pelasgians refers to people who lived in Greece before the Mycenaeans and spoke a different language. Their identity is unclear. Strabo claims that they included an ancient kingdom in Thessaly, and Herodotus also mentions them as ancient non-Greek speaking peoples living in remote areas in Greece.
For philosophical accounts of creation, you might want to look at Plato's Timaeus in which a Demiurge imposes a rational order on chaos (undifferentiated matter) to form an ordered kosmos. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, argues that the world must be eternal, as it is impossible to create something out of nothing.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
I need a detailed note on the Greek creation myths: Pelasgian creation, Orphic creation, Olympian creation, two philosophical creations, and the castration of Uranus.
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