In the beginning

Magnus Magnusson

Ancient Cosmologies edited by Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe (Allen and Unwin, £5.95).

How did it all start, then? In the beginning was — what? From what primeval chaos did the universe emerge? From what welter of darkness and brooding waters? Or even from nothing at all? To this day we still don't know: whether it all started with a Big Bang, some ten billion years ago, with the matter of the universe constantly expanding and dispersing from a creative origin; or whether, as Hoyle and GoIdi and Bond and the others submitted, it never really began at all, in the absolute sense, but is both eternal and eternally expanding, its matter continually being replenished as it expands (the Steady State theory). Strictly speaking, both the Big Bang and the Steady State theories are not cosmology but cosmogony — theories (or myths) about the origin of the world. The more far-out cosmologists tend to describe their field of study nowadays as the chemistry of geometry in superspace, in which neither time nor space exist but which is the only true reality; but cosmology as such, one cannot help feeling, demands more than simply astronomical rationalisations. Cosmology requires an explanation of the universe in space and time as an ordered whole — and that must involve a creator as well as creation, and the role of man in that creation.

Modern cosmologists (and, I confess, I was scarcely aware that such a race still existed) would no doubt refute this. But to ancient cosmologers, who were myth-makers-cum-philosophers, it was axiomatic. Nor does there seem to be all that much difference between their activities: replace the word 'myth' with 'hypothesis' and you realise that they are still brothers under the jargon, for myths simply seek to explain the observable phenomena of the natural world, usually in supernatural (now 4superspatian terms.

The new book under consideration, Ancient Cosmologies, brings together into one highly satisfying, indeed enchanting, volume, the answers that nine different civilisations produced to deal with the overwhelming question: how did the world start and how does it hang together? Here in nine self-contained chapters, we are offered potted and lucid ,summaries of the cosmological views of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Greeks and Norsemen (with a postscript on 'The European Heritage').

"Potted" and "lucid" might be thought of as being faintly patronising in tone. They are certainly not meant to be so. I know of no other book that brings together so much careful scholarship, so effortlessly expressed, into such a handy, accessible volume. This book is for the most part based on a series of lectures delivered in Cambridge in 1972, and each lecture was by a scholar eminent in his or her field — one need do no more than mention the names of Joseph Needham (Early China), J. M. Plumley (Ancient Egypt), W. G. Lambert (Sumer and Babylon), or Hilda Ellis Davidson (Scandinavian Cosmology) to give an impression of the overall excellence to be expected here.

Another pleasant feature is that each chapter is separate, and there is no attempt to work out borrowings and influences in any systematic way. The theory of cultural diffusion, based as it had been on a series of 'absolute' dates and comparisons which have been broken wide open by recent new dating techniques, was a straitjacket into which all thought had to fit, and it is a relief to discard it in favour of more flexible attitudes to the past. In this book, the general reader can see for himself (thereby discovering for himself) some of the delightful parallels between the ancient cosmogonies.

Many ancient peoples saw the origin of the world in a darkness of waters. Others had creation myths in which the world was fashioned from a human body, a giant's body. In the Vedic literature of ancient India, the giant Purusa is sacrificed by the gods to create the physical universe:

Purusa is this all, that has been and that will be. And he is the lord of immortality, which he grows beyond through food .. . Such is his greatness, and more than that is Purusa. A fourth of him is all beings, three-fourths of him are what is immortal in heaven .... From his navel was produced the air; from his head the sky was evolved; from his feet the earth, from his ear the quarters; thus they fashioned the world.

(from Hymn of the Cosmic Man)

In Norse mythology, the universe was created by Odin and his fellow-gods from the body of the giant Ymir:

And from his blood they created the lakes and the seas. Indeed, the earth was made from his flesh and the mountain crags from his bones; rocks and screes they made from his toes, his back teeth, and bits of splintered bone; and vegetation they made from his hair. They took Ymir's skull and made it into the heavens, poising it high over the earth with a dwarf stationed to hold it aloft at the four corners. And they took the glowing sparks erupting from Muspell and set them in the midst of the Great Void as stars and heavenly bodies.

(from Glylfaginning)

Similarly, in ancient Egypt, the proto-god Atum, having no consort, achieves the Creation of people (gods) by mating with his own hand, while the Norse proto-giant Ymir used one leg to generate life upon the other.

. These, of course, are cosmogonies (Big Bang, presumably, rather than Steady State!). The real cosmological interest comes when we see the way in which the early thinkers tried to incorporate and locate comprehensibly in space and in time the supernatural world, side by side with the natural world — the world of the dead, for instance, the abodes of the blessed, the realm of demons, the kingdoms of the gods.

In India, the diagrammatic scheme of the universe was a complex hodge-podge of fossilised concepts; but at its heart was a World Mountain as axis mundi (the Norse had a World Tree, "Yggdrasill"), and a system of seven continents separated by concentric oceans of, respectively, sugar-cane juice, wine, clarified butter, milk, whey, and fresh water. Homer (and the Norsemen) contented themselves with one surrounding Ocean. Jewish cosmology had a pretty scheme of Highest Heaven, under which lay the waters above the firmament (a sorth of earth ceiling, apparently), which contained the storehouses of hail, of snows, and the winds, then the firmament itself pierced by two sluices (for the snows, winds, hail, and so on), then the earth sitting as an arch between the pillars of the sky and the earth, with the Fountains of the Deep leading down to the Rivers of the Nether World.

Here we are reaching the central parallel: the ethicised idea of good and evil, good being "up" and evil being "down." ' Problems began when the ancients had to fit their physical concepts of heaven and hell into the visible world, still leaving room for such exotica as the Egyptian beetle rolling the sun across the heavens like a ball of dung, or the Norse moon being pursued by a voracious wolf. On the whole they managed it, by being not too specific. That is where myth succeeds over hypothesis. Perhaps the people who managed it best were the ancient Chinese, as Professor Needham suggests; the Chinese had visualised infinite space with celestial bodies in motion in it long before Europe did, and got round the supernatural problem by creating immortality for all on earth itself. Devilish cunning, these Chinese; now, why didn't My ancestors think of that?

Magnus Magnusson has most recently written The Clacken and the Slate, a history of the Edinburgh Academy.