The Ancient World (HUM 124 - UNC Asheville)/Piper Stanley Reflection: Cosmogonies

A Short Recap

The cosmogonies and ancient stories we read in class included a series of creation stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Popol Vuh and several other stories from indigenous tribes and eastern countries. Something that kept me interested about the stories is the similarities between the different stories. One of the creation stories was about a grandfather and his grandson, as those were the first two people, and they were on an island with lots of animals. This has a loose similarity to The Story of Creation in the book of Genesis. There was also a relation between Death in the Popol Vuh and the preta in Buddhism, as they were visually interpreted to look very similar; they also have a relationship to the afterlife.

I feel like I'm still in the process of understanding how most cultures have a creation story, even if they're all different. It's amazing to think that different cultures, even cultures in the same area, have different stories to explain how we're here. I don't know how hundreds and thousands of cultures can have these different creation stories and have different deities and entities, but I'm always amazed that they're able to come to very similar conclusions, that the world was created by an entity.

A Story of my Own

If I were to make my own story, I would explain the need for sleep. As it stands, we don't have a real reason for why we get tired or why we need sleep. It seems like sleeping is a function that we do to keep us alert and sane, but we don't know why we become unalert and insane if we don't sleep. I would explain this as a sleep spirit visiting us at night and whispering songs to us to make us tired. The spirits would then move on to the next person to put them to sleep too, and we would wake up with the sun humming, and then later in the day, the sun will start screaming at us to wake up because it doesn't want us to waste our days away with sleep.