The Egyptian Creation Myth

Throughout time, the countless cultures and religions that make up our world have always formulated stories revolving around the creation of the earth as we know it. Stemming from the art of storytelling, tales of first creations often share captivating details of the deities, processes, and results of world and species creation. However, they can also be stunning to compare, as one can see how differentiating morals and values of cultures reflect in their creation stories and line up with how they practice their religions or traditions. Two such creation stories belong to the Iroquois and the Egyptian people. Within these two myths, we can see the presence of each culture's impressions on relating aspects, such as morality and human existence,

The most prevalent details that stand out within the two creations stories are the epic battles between the divine forms of good and evil. In the Iroquois story, the two opposing sides are Good Mind and Bad Mind, and in the Egyptian creation myth, Horus and Set are the representations of righteous good and chaotic evil. Both pairs have family relations to another - Good and Bad Mind are siblings, while Set is Horus’s uncle. These two turbulent relationships have also been set off by jealousy. In the Iroquois story, Bad Mind is jealous of Good Mind’s creations and wrecks his works out of spite. For the Egyptian’s myth, Set carries envy of his brother, Osiris, for being ruler of the earth, motivating Set to murder his brother. After extreme toil, Osiris’s wife, Isis, is able to raise him back from the dead for a night to conceive Horus. Although there are different final battles between the two opponents and similar outcomes of triumphant good in these stories, there is strong evidence of both cultures understanding the creation of good and evil and how they affect their world. Bad Mind was responsible for natural disasters, reptiles, and diseases, while Set commands deserts, chaos, war, and

In the Iroquois story, Good Mind is the one who “formed two images of the dust of the ground...and by his breathing into their nostrils he gave them the living souls” (Cusick 20). He then appoints the maintenance of the animals to these newly formed humans. For the Egyptians, their story on human creation begins when the first god, Amun, wept for joy after finding his lost children, Shu and Tefnut, and his “ tears, dropping into the dark, fertile earth...gave birth to men and women” (Mark). Because these new creatures had nowhere to live, Shu and Tefnut combined to give birth to the gods of earth and sky, who then provided these new humans a home. Humans were given the important tasks of not only upholding Ma'at, the order of the world, but to also tend to the earth and worship the gods. Perhaps these two different processes of human creation has strong messages of how each culture treats their existences. The Iroquois, feeling at one with the elements around them, work well with the land and coordinate with the seasons. They show their respect by treating the earth and animals well. The Egyptians, seeing themselves as a side-effect of godly tears, seem to be much more god-fearing and ornate about their religion, assigning a great number of priests to please their numerous gods. They understand that