or agree with, including what seems to me to be a benign paradise myth. Strong opinions and emotions are common with any discussion of religious ideas. This is one reason I want to emphasize that I am not asking readers to believe any particular story. I invite everyone to decide for themselves what to believe.
Regarding paradise myths, some people dislike them because they are often patriarchal narratives that portray a male creator. Indeed, according to L. Robert Keck in Sacred Quest, the skill of writing emerged on the human scene about the same time as did patriarchy, so perhaps it is not surprising that our first recorded creation stories reflect a patriarchal worldview.4 In this book, I use inclusive language as much as possible, but I also tell religious stories in the ways they were originally told, even when that includes male-biased language and conceptions.
Another concern people sometimes have with religious myths is that they spread what might be considered wrong, inappropriate, or even “evil” teachings. Again, my goal is not to judge whether certain spiritual beliefs are right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, but to examine them for what they might tell us about our spiritual beliefs about animals. I searched far and wide, seeking a broad range of geographic and cultural perspectives. What I offer are the results of my journey of exploration, and I invite readers to draw independent conclusions. I urge you to evaluate what you agree with for yourself and to scrap the rest. Creation stories and paradise myths are important to understand because they are the foundation for modern religious beliefs. Human spiritual practices today build upon our shared ancient history.
And so, in this chapter, I examine four ancient myths from four very different cultures and areas of the world: the Native American Hopi, the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Hebrews, and several African tribes.
These creation myths share the common theme of people living at peace with animals and communicating with them before being expelled from a garden paradise. There are five other themes to notice: 1) Sound is an important vibrational substance of creation; 2) human and animal forms are made from the earth and given names; 3) the spirit or power of the creator is within everything, including animals; 4) specific creatures usually play roles in the stories, such as the spider and the snake; and 5) creation is destroyed and animals are saved.
The Native American Hopi tribe lives in northern Arizona. The word Hopi means “peace.” Here, I paraphrase the Hopi creation story found in Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters.5
As the story goes, in the beginning, there was only an immeasurable void that lived in the mind of Taiowa, the Creator. Taiowa created So’tuknang, who became the creator of life. So’tuknang molded forms and made the universe half solid and half water.
This was the first of four worlds described in Hopi mythology, and each new world followed the destruction of the previous one. In the First World, So’tuknang created Spider Woman to be his helper. Spider Woman mixed earth with saliva and molded it into two beings. She sang the creation song over them, and they came to life. “All sound echoes the Creator,” said Spider Woman, and the world was made an instrument of sound. She sent these twins to opposite poles of the earth to keep the world rotating properly. According to anthropologist Jeremy Narby, twin creator beings are another extremely common theme in world mythologies.
The earth vibrated with the energy of the Creator. From the earth, Spider Woman created trees, bushes, plants, flowers, all kinds of seed and nut bearers, giving each life and name. In the same manner, she created all kinds of birds and animals, and the power worked through them all.
Spider Woman made four male human beings, then four female partners, each of four different colors: yellow, red, white, and black. She granted them pristine wisdom, and they understood that the earth was a living entity like themselves. As Waters describes it, the bodies of humans and the earth were constructed in the same way, with vibratory centers along an axis, and this mirrors Hindu and Tibetan mysticism. The channeled material of Edgar Cayce also refers to God creating five colored humans at once.
The first people multiplied and were happy, although they were of different colors and spoke different languages. All humans, birds, and animals felt as one and understood one another without talking.
Waters writes, “They all suckled at the breast of their Mother Earth, who gave them her milk of grass, seeds, fruit and corn, and they all felt as one, people and animals.”6
Then entered Lavai’hoya, the Talker; he came in the form of a bird called Mochni, which was similar to a mockingbird. The more Mochni talked, the more he convinced everyone of the differences between them: the differences between people and animals and the differences between people themselves, due to the colors of their skins, their speech, and their belief in the plan of the Creator.7 The animals drew away from people.
Also among them was the handsome Ka’to’ya, who took the form of a snake with a big head.8 He led the people still farther away from one another and their pristine wisdom. The people became fierce and warlike; there was no peace. The Creator and So’tuknang decided to destroy the world and start over.
Those who remembered the plan of the Creator were led to a big mound where the Ant people lived, and there they were kept safe when So’tuknang destroyed the First World by fire.
Today, a number of excavated underground ancient cities have been discovered in Turkey. One, called Derinkuyu, is several stories deep and could have held as many as twenty thousand people, along with livestock and food storage. Perhaps the “Ant people” were people who lived underground like ants. Sometimes ideas in myth seem so strange we think they must be fiction. Then archaeologists discover something like these ancient underground cities, which had wineries, stables, and up to five hundred–kilogram round doors to close off the outside world — an ideal home for “ant” people.
When the First World cooled off, So’tuknang created the Second World. He changed its form completely, putting land where the water had been, and water where the land had been. This description concurs with what we know of geology. The movement of the continents caused dramatic shifts in landscape, so that in the southwestern United States today, what was once tropical forest with dinosaurs grazing along the ocean is now the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau, the regions where the Hopi reside.
So’tuknang thanked the Ant people for saving his people and told them to go into the Second World and take their place as ants. In the Second World, the people were close in spirit and communicated from the center at the top of the head, and they sang joyful praises to the Creator. They did not have the privilege of living with the animals; the animals were wild and kept apart. Being separated from the animals, the people tended to their own affairs. When they began to trade and barter, trouble started.
The more the people had, the more they wanted; they began to fight, and wars occurred. Again, the world was destroyed; and again, the Ant people protected the chosen people by allowing them into their underground world. This time the twins were told to leave the poles, and the earth spun crazily and froze into solid ice.
Many years passed and the people lived happily underground. Then the Third World was created. The people advanced rapidly, creating cities, but again, they eventually became wicked, killing each other. This time, the world was destroyed by water. Continents broke apart and sank to the bottom of the seas.
In the Hopi story, the current world is the Fourth World.
By one count, 272 cultures describe a great flood destroying the world, including the Hopi story of the end of the Third World.9
