Where Did We Come From?

For my first project, I’m starting at the very beginning. And that beginning is with our creation.

It is a question that has been asked for centuries. Where did we come from? Many individuals and groups of people have tried to answer this as best as the could. I wanted to know; why do we need creation myths? Where did they come from, and how come some have spread across the world while others are long forgotten. ​

History:

For my History portion, I studied two articles to figure out why, psychologically, we have the need to find out our origins. Why we need to have the comfort of knowing where life started.

In the first article, "New theory suggests people are attracted to religion for 16 reasons", I looked at why people have the need for religion in general. My first guess on why we need religion, is comfort. The comfort of knowledge. We gain some kind of peace when we are educated. However, this also brings up the question if curiosity is the reason we need religion.

In the first article, it says, "Religious intellectuals, who are high in curiosity, value a God who is knowable through reason, while doers, who have weak curiosity, may value a God that is knowable only through revelation" ('New theory'). The force which makes us crave knowledge is the power of our curiosity. We need the comfort of knowing where we came from, so we search for it. Curiosity and the thirst for knowledge causes us to make our own stories. I think we get frustrated with not finding out, that we have created these tales to give us a more peaceful mind and a want to live a longer life.

The next article was, "Why do we need creation myths". It talks first about how we shouldn't call them myths. That we should call them stories because these things are what shaped us in life. Then, instead of pure curiosity, they talk about our imagination. When we have questions, we desire answers. Children do this when they are young. In the article it states, "Young children, for example, tend to believe that even trivial aspects of the natural world were created with purpose, according to a series of studies by Boston University psychologist Deborah Keleman, PhD" ('Why do we').  Just like children, I believe adults also need to know the meanings of certain ideas, especially when we are put into uncertain situations. Adults ask themselves just as bizarre questions as children do; why do we have war, and disease, do we even have a god?


Now, back onto these stories themselves. When were they made? And could they have influenced each other?

Here are the stories in chronological order:

Greek (Ancient Greece)- 700 BCE
Hindu (India)- 700 through 600 BCE
Hebrew (Middle East)- 600 BCE and 900 AD
Chinese (China)- 100 BCE
Norse (Scandinavia)- 1241 AD


And here is a wonderful video showing how ideas such as religions spread across the ancient world until today.

English:

For my English portion, I’ve studied creation stories from history, and created my own. I did not make a story on how the Earth was created, but instead used my own characters to invent something much smaller. In this story, I have put in similarites that I found in the historical myths such as: In the beginning, there was nothing, a creator of the universe itself and having them become the earth, the creator(s) making humans out of the earth itself, incest, and a patriarchy.

The god of light is named “Lux” because that is latin for light.
The god of creation is “Aediffux” which is latin for creator or builder.


Light Bulbs and Electricity


In the beginning, there was nothing. Nothing to bring light to our darkness. We had the sun, brought by Lux, our god of light. But, we needed something for the nights in which the stars could not guide our paths alone. So, Lux gave us the power to create fire.

We lived with fire for a long time. It lit our settings and provided energy for our foods and our warmth. The world was like this for thousands of years. However, humans became tired of this. The fire was painful, and their candles did not last long when they were at work.

Eventually, the humans became tired. They strung black wires on large wooden poles to net themselves from the gods who they thought did not watch over them anymore. Lux saw this and saw their struggle. He saw the advancements humans have made since their days in caves, and decided to reward them. Lux met with his father, Aedifix, our god of creation. The one who made humans from dirt and the mountains out of her limbs. Aedifix agreed with Lux that there needed to be some kind of change. Together, they took lightning from the sky and captured it into tiny glass bottles. Then, gave these glass bottles to the humans in the most populated of cities.

The humans did not understand this at first. They took the bulbs and studied them. Breaking them open and inspecting them. Lux did not like this. They were breaking their gifts. So, he struck lightning down onto the human’s wires and left to the heavens.

Upon this electrocution, the lightning passed through the wires. A human by the name of Thomas Edison found that the light bulbs burnt out quickly. He noticed the energy in the wires and connected them to the glasses base. The light immediately came back again. And thus, electricity was created with the first invention; the light bulb.

Art:

For my art portion, I originally wanted to show the Earth and put aspects of the stories into it. Such as the snake from Hebrew, or the man who became the mountains in the Chinese version. But, I realized that it would be a little hard to include something from every story and still make it look like the Earth.

So, instead, I drew our Earth itself with a golden halo around it, showing its importance and how some of our ancestors have worshipped it as a god. I also put in symbols from the cultures where the five stories came from. Each of them a symbol of peace, of earth itself, or just a religious symbol that everyone knows of already. The symbols are in gold because of its importance in history. I also made the background a distressed look as to show the conflict behind these symbols, and the disagreement in where we came from. But, in the end, we are all just on earth inside the golden halo.  


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My Art Process
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