Cosmic Creation Myths Across Cultures
Tina M. Abriani
HUM/105
March 5, 2018
Joan Canby Cosmic Creation Myths Across Cultures In this paper, I will compare creation myths from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. We have great art, literature, architecture, and philosophy given to us by these two civilizations. The Greeks did influence the Romans and the Romans used this influence to develop their own culture, both still studied today. While the Romans adopted the Greek gods and gave them Roman names, these two ancient peoples had different creation myths. Both Greeks and Romans had gods that exhibited very human qualities such as love, hate, anger and jealousy. In Greek mythology Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth, sprang into existence out the
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Eventually one of Gaia’s sons, with the help of his mother, castrated Uranus, brought his brothers out of banishment and took over rulership himself. Throughout time, all myths have focused on cosmic occurrences or natural phenomena such as stars, moons, rain, floods and other natural disasters because people need meaning for what happens, so myths were created to explain them. Natural disasters would end lives and make it harder to live, so stories were created for why they came about and how to avoid them; one example of which is sacrifice to the gods to hold back destruction. The Greek and Roman creation myths have few differences and several similarities. The names, the importance given to some beings and beliefs about how some events happened to differ. One difference is in the representation of the gods’ physical appearances; for Greece, the gods were beautiful and strong, where for the Romans, there was no physical description. Regarding the afterlife, Greek mythology tends to place more importance on life while being lived, on Earth, rather on impending death and what will happen then. Roman mythology taught people to be good in order to be rewarded by life with the gods after death. Roman gods tend not to have human qualities as is common in Greek mythology and Roman mythology was focused on the gods and their actions, while for the Greeks, the interaction of mortals with the gods was important and stories of these were