The Museum of Lost Wonder

Four Creation Tales

No one really knows where we come from, but as you'll see, a lot of people had a good time imagining it. Some of these stories are theories, some are myths. The theories want to be facts. The myths want to be truths. Both are useful in combating the dreariness of the waking hours.

Ever since Hegel in the 1800s, philosophers seem to have given up worrying about first causes and ultimate purposes. We at the Museum of Lost Wonder think they've been missing out on a lot of fun. The following stories are provided to incur doubt, inspire wonder, help spur the imagination, and provide fodder for creating your own myth.

The Big Bang Theory
Big Bang is a marvelous term coined as a joke by the astronomer Fred Hoyle. (He actually believed in a steady state theory.)

According to this popularly held theory, before there was anything there was less than nothing. Not only was matter and energy created at the first moment, but so was space and time. So there's no sense in worrying about what, where, or when it was before it happened because those things didn't exist, not to mention anybody to worry about causing it.

* Day One was the moment of the Big Bang. It was infinitely dense, and time didn't exist yet.
* Day Two is called the "Particle Epoch" a period of expansion when subatomic particles were formed that lasted only an instant.
* Day Three is called the "Grand Unification Epoch" where four great forces organized matter. The weak, the strong, the electromagnetic, and gravity. Only 10-32 of a second had passed.
* Day Four is called the "Era of Nucleosynthesis" where particles formed into atomic nuclei. It lasted 1 to 100 seconds.
* Day Five, the "Era of Recombination" is when particles and energy linked together to form different matter. This day lasted a million years.
* Day Six is the "Era of Galaxy Birth." Gravity condenses baryonic matter into clouds of gas. It lasted a billion years.
* Day Seven, the "Modern Era" is 10 to 20 billion years old. Superstructures of galaxies form, stretching as gigantic sheetlike filaments spanning hundreds of billions of light-years. It makes you wonder. If the universe is still expanding, Where is it expanding to? What's on the other side of a hundred billion light-years?

Genesis Myth
Genesis is from the Greek "gignesthai," meaning origin or birth.

This popular myth also holds that the universe was created in seven days. Myths, unlike theories, elaborate on feelings to explain how things happened. This story credits the beginning of the universe to a very human and moody creator, who, when done, takes the day off. It maps the first geography of the planet and goes on to describe how life began.

Everybody has a job to do. For the first two humans life consists of gardening and naming everything in Eden. The fun doesn't start until, on their time off, they seek wisdom. Once they get wisdom (that's supposed to make them godlike), all they realize is that they're naked. The search for wisdom only ends in embarrassment. This embarrassment is the birth of shame . . . which explains all the sorrows to come.

The first couple have two kids. They have jobs too. One becomes a farmer, and the other, a rancher. One kills the other because the creator, having no experience in child rearing, compliments one's work and not the other, which creates jealousy. Shameful. (Must not have been a lot of thinking going on between naps on that seventh day.) The remaining kid has to leave home and goes off to the next town, Nod, to find a wife and start a family of his own.

It makes you wonder. If Eden was the first inhabited place in the world, How did Nod get there? And if we're still in the seventh day of creation . . . When is the creator going to wake up from that nap?

Alternative Theories
to the Big Bang

These latest theories contest the validity of the Big Bang. Recent data from our new Hubble telescope find young things at the edge of the known universe when there should only be older cosmic structures. Both of these theories infer that "the universe is dynamic with creation and destruction ongoing and continuous."

The new steady state theory sees galaxies as "huge recycling systems that go on forever." Here matter is ejected out of a central "neutroid" and after millennia of spiraling outward falls back into itself.

In the symmetric theory the engine of the universe is located in black holes. The center of a black hole is so infinitely dense that its gravitation pulls in everything around it. Even itself. This force is so powerful that even time and space become warped, meaningless, and cease to exist. Adjacent to the central black holes are white holes that eject the stuff of the cosmos simultaneously. The known universe seems to be scattered with these holes.

The universe can be imagined as a huge mass of spaghetti, like some big, intertwined Möbius strip or even a massive bedsheet with no edges that perpetually folds in and through itself.

It makes you wonder? When did all this infinite creation and destruction start? And Who cooked it all up in the first place?

Creation Myth
This tale is adapted from the Zohar, a medieval commentary on the Kabbalah.

In the beginning is EIN SOF ("without end"), an undifferentiated light-filled essence without being, which permeates the universe in every direction. Needing to define itself, EIN SOF makes room for creation by withdrawing into itself. This withdrawal, or "TSIMSTUM," creates a vacuum in its center which is called "AYIN," or nothingness.

"The light withdrew like water in a pond displaced by a stone . . . Descending into the vacuum, it transformed into an amorphous mass . . . For in its simple desire to realize its intention, the emanator relumined the mass with a ray of light . . . As this light began to enter the mass, vessels were formed." *

There are ten vessels, or "SEPHIROTH." Each holds a particular essential quality of their creator. Out of this configuration of vessels four worlds are organized: Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Actualization. As the light breathes energy into these vessels, the first, and strongest, vessel withstands the force, but the others shatter, or "SHEVIRAH." The pieces of these vessels fall to the ground with essences of light within them. All the pieces get trapped in material existence.

Our jobs as humans is to reconstruct these shattered remains by "TIQQUN," or mending. Thus restoring these essence-filled vessels to their original divinity.

It makes you wonder. Why couldn't EIN SOF make unbreakable vessels? And why are we left to pick up all the pieces?

* From the Essential Kabbalah by Daniel C. Matt

from the book The Museum of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke Published by Weiser Books; August 2006;$49.95US; 1-57863-364-8 Copyright © 2006 Jeff Hoke