God vs. Mayas People of all time have searched to understand how the earth and humanity developed. There are many wondrous, mysterious aspects of life which cannot be explained with scientific or measurable proof. Also there are many stories that talk about the creation of the earth. History has left us some creation myths which serve to point us in the right direction by hypothesizing the events that led up to human creation. Two of the most popular myths are Genesis and the Popul Vuh, which explains how the earth was created and how humans were created.
o Myth 1: Before the earth was created, all life was housed in Galunlati. When this location became too crowded, the water beetle came down to the mix of water and darkness that comprised what would soon become the earth and found mud in the water. This mud expanded until it because and island susopended in the sky. The buzzard is the next character in the myth who flew down from GAlunlati, flapped his arms against the ground and created mountains and valleys in the new earth. Whne the earth was dry, the animals directed the sun to travel across the sky as it does today(Creation stories, n.d.).
The Popol Vuh is a Quiché text that attempts to explain the creation and meaning of the universe. Tedlock’s translation began with the acts of Mayan gods in a world in which there only exists “the pooled water, only the calm sea” and ended with the coming together of the three Masters of Ceremonies who founded the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands: lords of the Cauecs, Greathouses, and the Lord Quichés. Originally written in Mayan hieroglyphs, the Popul Vuh was later transcribed into the Roman script; despite the attempts of Spanish missionaries to destroy all copies of the sacred writing, original hieroglyphic manuscripts were still in use at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The only surviving copy of the text in Quiché (in the Romanized script) was discovered by a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez. He not only copied the Quiché writing but also added a side-by-side Spanish translation.
For centuries people have tried to explain the beginning of life and its existence, giving it supernatural and theological reasons, mainly due to the lack of scientific explanation. However, myths should not be underestimated as they have deeper and more allegorical meaning. In this paper we will examine two creation myths, very different in their in their geographical and cultural origin, then again very similar in some elements used. According to the mythology of the Yoruba people in Africa, people are a product of artistic ability Obatala, lesser god of the Yoruba religion. He is the creator of life, and sculpted the first man.
Hundreds of religions all over the world and not a single one are entirely the same. A belief in different gods and having numerous traditions and folklores is what sets all faiths apart from each other. Polytheistic and Monotheistic is very diverse and the reasons for the necessity of the “trickster god.” Polytheistic is having faith in more than one god. They also believe in reincarnation, where once a person has reached their end on this world; they may be reborn again in a new life. Monotheistic is the believing the existence of only one god.
Both religions are often thought to be henotheistic, meaning they recognize a single deity, and view other Gods and Goddesses as manifestations or aspects of that supreme God. In the Ancient Egyptian religion, this is untrue due to the fact that the pharaoh, who is believed to have been descended from the gods, can choose when to shift the focus of the supreme deity. Because the concerns of the population in both areas were different, gods held contradictory roles due to landscape, social, and climatic variation. Worship in both religions also has similarities, with a temple dedicated to a particular deity, and shrines within that temple dedicated to other gods correlated with the main deity. Both religions believed in the afterlife.
this. Special beliefs that they held about the creation of people were: “the only thing that the world lacked was a symbol of God”, “Seeing this, Prometheus sculpted a figure, man, out of earth.”, and “This figure was to symbolize the gods, thus human life is formed” (“Roman Creation Myth”). As evident from the quotes, one can see that the Romans’ beliefs were quite odd from what a human living in the present day would believe in. These beliefs are ‘special’ to a present-day human as the Romans created these myths based strictly off of their imagination. In the current age, one would not need to create their own stories because we now have correct information because of the scientific knowledge that is currently present.
The civilizations of Mesopotamia, thus creating a blend of old and new parents. Unlike Egypt. Both civilizations built immense monuments, Sumerians built Ziggurats as monuments for the gods while the Egyptians built Pyramids for tombs. Both were polytheistic, although Akhenaten and Nefertiti attempted to convert Egyptians to monotheists by believing in Aton as the only god but they were not successful. Sumerians produced The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the wanderings of Gilgamesh in search for eternal life.
Citizens of ancient Egypt believed in many gods all through the Old Kingdom. Some of these gods were Anubis, Set, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Egyptians worshiped these gods with animal sacrifices and with incense and many demonstrations where citizens bared the image of the god from one place to another. Citizens believed that all of Egypt belonged to the gods, and that the Pharaoh was the ambassador on earth of the gods and so all in Egypt rather belonged to the Pharaoh. (Quirke, S.) For example, Horus, the sky god, had the head of a hawk and body of a human.
In what concerns religion, the greatest paradigm shift was monotheism. In previous centuries, most of humanity believed in more than one god: polytheism. Gods were used to explain nature and phenomena not yet understood – the mysterious laws of nature. The unknown was always attributed to the gods. Yet, Different cultures had different gods.