ANCIENT COSMOGONIES. Scarcely any people, either ancient or modern, has been without sonic theory concerning the creation of the world. Passing over the views of such primitive tribes as the Australians or American Indians, the cosmogonies of chief interest in connection with our own views are those of Babylonia, India, Iran, Greece, and ancient Germany. The Baby lonian system resembles in many respects the cosmogony of the Bible. There was darkness and water. with strange monsters. Into this chaos the god Bel entered. and clove the cosmic sea, and parted the darkness. Animals took the place of the farmer monsters, and man himself was created, as well as the sun and moon and five planets. In India the story of the creation was more philosophical. In sonic of the latest hymns of the Rigveda (q.v.), water was the source of all, whence came fire and wind—the breath of divinity. Or, again, the world arose from the sacrifice of Man (Skt. purusha). whose head became the sky, his feet the earth. his eye the sun, his breath the wind, while from his mouth, arms, thighs. and feet the four castes sprang. These ideas, developed more fully in the pseudoepieal Sanskrit Purapus (q.v.). exhibit clearly the pantheistic trend of Hindu thought. The role of Klima or Love in Indian cosmogony bears sonic resemblance to that of the Greek Eros. Iranian cosmology. as we find it in the d rrstu and the writings in Pahlavi (q.v.), corresponds to the dualistic character of the Zoroastrian religion. Ormazd. the god of everlasting light. created the good in opposition to Ahriman. the devil, who dwells in eternal darkness. In the course of a
period of three thousand years Ormazd created the heaven, water, earth, plants, animals, and loan. In the following three thousand years Ahriman produced evils to combat these crea tions of Ormazd: but, despite some temporary success, he was finally forced to yield to the powers of good.
Greek cosmogony is more varied. The Homeric poems regard Ocean as the source of the world, while the Hesiodie account ascribes the first be ginnings to Chaos. Thales followed the first theory, and Anaximander the second, which has its parallel also in India. Anaximenes con sidered air to be the source of all, while Ileracli tus postulated fire as the primal element, and supposed a constant flux of all things. where only the divine law (Zeus) was immutable. The notion of Eros or Love as a cosmic force was introduced into Greek philosophy by Parmenides and Em pedocles, for which Anaxagoras substituted Mind (Gk. vac). Of special interest in this connec tion is the atomic theory of Denmeritus, accord ing to whose view the world is permeated by a soul which is composed of atoms in continual motion, and which partake of the nature of fire. Later Greek philosophy did hardly anything toward the development of cosmogonic ideas.
For Germanic beliefs on this subject, the most comprehensive source is the TVIlitspa, an Ice landic poem of the twelfth century of our era. Here, however. the Teutonic ideas are strongly influenced by Christianity. and contain. according to the opinion of some scholars, an admixture of Gnostic concepts.