Intersecting Stories with Science
By Benji Ho
In the Enûma Eliš, a three millennia-old Babylonian myth and one of the first recorded creation stories, the first gods sprang from the deified embodiments of the primeval sea.1 A thousand years later and three thousand miles away in central China, records first mention Pangu, the giant who cracked the cosmic egg of Chaos and unleashed creation after being born from the balance of Yin and Yang. For the Greeks, it was Nyx, the shadowy goddess of night, who laid a golden egg; Love would hatch from this egg and unite the two eggshells, which had become Earth and Sky, to form the universe. And in the Judeo-Christian canon, God created the heavens and the earth and over the course of six days, filled the world with light, darkness, and matter.
In the thousands of years since these civilizations first attempted to comprehend creation, scientists have modeled the origin of the universe to just trillionths of a second after the Big Bang using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We now know that 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began as high-energy, high-density matter squeezed into a tiny volume; the Big Bang was the release of this miniscule container, and its contents have been expanding ever since. But from a cultural perspective, what is particularly fascinating is not the advancements scientists have made into understanding the nature of creation, but the similarities between the Big Bang and the first stories our ancestors invented to explain a phenomenon that occurred long before their time. How did our ancient counterparts reach the conclusion that order came from bound chaos?
One intersection between the scientific and mythological creation myths lies in the Metamorphoses, the fifteen-book magnum opus of the Roman poet Ovid which details the history of the world from creation to the deification of Julius Caesar.2 Ovid’s creation myth stands out in that it is neither a scientific or philosophical account, nor is it a conventional mythological tale. Rather, Ovid meshes these two genres together through the lens of metamorphosis, the changing of form. In this regard, a modern observer can appreciate Ovid’s version of creation as a crossroads between traditional storytelling and the roots of Greco-Roman atomic theory, as philosophers and scientists from Aristotle to Lucretius attempted to make sense of the physical world.
Ovid’s story follows many of the tropes of a creation myth: At first, nature was “Chaos, a wild, disordered mass” of inconsistencies where “cold was fighting hot, wet with dry, soft with hard.” Another hallmark of typical creation myths is Ovid’s “god and greater nature,” a force, like the Judeo-Christian God, cleaves the darkness and brings about order. Unlike typical creation stories, however, Ovid shifts the focus away from his god; Ovid’s god is never explicitly named, and the titles this god receives, “builder of the world” and “craftsmen of things,” are more occupational than reverential. For Ovid, the focus is less on his creator and more on his creation.
What makes Ovid’s story particularly unique, however, are the places where he strays from typical mythological tropes and incorporates scientific thought into his story. By this point, the roots of modern atomic theory had been postulated by Greek thinkers such as Democritus, and philosophers like Empedocles had suggested the presence of four classical elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Ovid strove to incorporate this way of thought into his story: “Fiery strength, of the vaulted sky and without weight,/ burst up and made its place in the highest height;/ then air, nearest to fire in lightness and place;/ land, denser than these, drew full-grown elements and/ was pressed by its own weight; and flowing water/ occupied the last elements and enclosed the unbroken world.” Ovid’s scientific arrangement of the world, where elements sort themselves according to density, physical location, and mass, rather than a divine figure moving them, stands out even more when we recall that Ovid was renowned as a love poet, not as a philosopher or scientist.
Despite his inclusion of science, however, Ovid was first and foremost a poet, his work rife with poetic devices. One particularly interesting device lies in the lines previously mentioned; the words “highest,” “nearest,” and “last” form what is called a tricolon diminuens, a decreasing tricolon, or a list of three consecutive elements in which each element is less significant or smaller in the last. What is particularly poetic about the placement of these three words is that they mirror the descending behavior of elements and in doing so, reinforce the scientific structure to Ovid’s poetic universe.
Ovid’s story itself may not hold much relevance today, but his attempt at reconciling science and myth seems particularly relevant today. As we learn more and more about our universe, from the greatest of supernovae to the smallest of atoms, we will have to resolve these discoveries with our culture, ethics, and beliefs. We all will discover our own ways of combining past and present; for Ovid, perhaps this meant writing a myth of science.
Works Cited
[1] Elish, E. (1966). Enuma Elis: The Babylonian Epic of Creation; the Cuneiform Text. Clarendon.
[2] Ovid, M. (1986). trans. AD Melville. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 3, 651-2.
In the Enûma Eliš, a three millennia-old Babylonian myth and one of the first recorded creation stories, the first gods sprang from the deified embodiments of the primeval sea.1 A thousand years later and three thousand miles away in central China, records first mention Pangu, the giant who cracked the cosmic egg of Chaos and unleashed creation after being born from the balance of Yin and Yang. For the Greeks, it was Nyx, the shadowy goddess of night, who laid a golden egg; Love would hatch from this egg and unite the two eggshells, which had become Earth and Sky, to form the universe. And in the Judeo-Christian canon, God created the heavens and the earth and over the course of six days, filled the world with light, darkness, and matter.
In the thousands of years since these civilizations first attempted to comprehend creation, scientists have modeled the origin of the universe to just trillionths of a second after the Big Bang using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We now know that 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began as high-energy, high-density matter squeezed into a tiny volume; the Big Bang was the release of this miniscule container, and its contents have been expanding ever since. But from a cultural perspective, what is particularly fascinating is not the advancements scientists have made into understanding the nature of creation, but the similarities between the Big Bang and the first stories our ancestors invented to explain a phenomenon that occurred long before their time. How did our ancient counterparts reach the conclusion that order came from bound chaos?
One intersection between the scientific and mythological creation myths lies in the Metamorphoses, the fifteen-book magnum opus of the Roman poet Ovid which details the history of the world from creation to the deification of Julius Caesar.2 Ovid’s creation myth stands out in that it is neither a scientific or philosophical account, nor is it a conventional mythological tale. Rather, Ovid meshes these two genres together through the lens of metamorphosis, the changing of form. In this regard, a modern observer can appreciate Ovid’s version of creation as a crossroads between traditional storytelling and the roots of Greco-Roman atomic theory, as philosophers and scientists from Aristotle to Lucretius attempted to make sense of the physical world.
Ovid’s story follows many of the tropes of a creation myth: At first, nature was “Chaos, a wild, disordered mass” of inconsistencies where “cold was fighting hot, wet with dry, soft with hard.” Another hallmark of typical creation myths is Ovid’s “god and greater nature,” a force, like the Judeo-Christian God, cleaves the darkness and brings about order. Unlike typical creation stories, however, Ovid shifts the focus away from his god; Ovid’s god is never explicitly named, and the titles this god receives, “builder of the world” and “craftsmen of things,” are more occupational than reverential. For Ovid, the focus is less on his creator and more on his creation.
What makes Ovid’s story particularly unique, however, are the places where he strays from typical mythological tropes and incorporates scientific thought into his story. By this point, the roots of modern atomic theory had been postulated by Greek thinkers such as Democritus, and philosophers like Empedocles had suggested the presence of four classical elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Ovid strove to incorporate this way of thought into his story: “Fiery strength, of the vaulted sky and without weight,/ burst up and made its place in the highest height;/ then air, nearest to fire in lightness and place;/ land, denser than these, drew full-grown elements and/ was pressed by its own weight; and flowing water/ occupied the last elements and enclosed the unbroken world.” Ovid’s scientific arrangement of the world, where elements sort themselves according to density, physical location, and mass, rather than a divine figure moving them, stands out even more when we recall that Ovid was renowned as a love poet, not as a philosopher or scientist.
Despite his inclusion of science, however, Ovid was first and foremost a poet, his work rife with poetic devices. One particularly interesting device lies in the lines previously mentioned; the words “highest,” “nearest,” and “last” form what is called a tricolon diminuens, a decreasing tricolon, or a list of three consecutive elements in which each element is less significant or smaller in the last. What is particularly poetic about the placement of these three words is that they mirror the descending behavior of elements and in doing so, reinforce the scientific structure to Ovid’s poetic universe.
Ovid’s story itself may not hold much relevance today, but his attempt at reconciling science and myth seems particularly relevant today. As we learn more and more about our universe, from the greatest of supernovae to the smallest of atoms, we will have to resolve these discoveries with our culture, ethics, and beliefs. We all will discover our own ways of combining past and present; for Ovid, perhaps this meant writing a myth of science.
Works Cited
[1] Elish, E. (1966). Enuma Elis: The Babylonian Epic of Creation; the Cuneiform Text. Clarendon.
[2] Ovid, M. (1986). trans. AD Melville. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 3, 651-2.
