by Janet Grischy

Created on: January 17, 2009

Some myths speak of a better, more golden world, before the imperfections of an ungrateful people brought it down.

Hesiod, a Greek poet who claimed that he was a simple shepherd before the Muses spoke to him, describes a series of ages of decreasing comfort and glory. In the first age, the Golden Age, it was always spring, life was ease and delight, and dying was a peaceful falling asleep without pain or fear. In the Silver Age, there were four seasons, but the land was rich and generous. Still, men did not respect the gods, or follow the prescribed religious rites. So their world ceased to be. In the Bronze Age, men were made from trees, and their homes and weapons were bronze. They were warlike and strong, but knew no peace. They slaughtered one another. They were replaced by the men of the Heroic Age. These were noble warriors, for whom a place was made in the Isles of the Blest, west or north of inhabited lands. Ours is the Iron Age.

It's human, apparently, to believe in a lost better world. Many in developed countries say they long for the world before television, before cell phones, or even before Facebook. Some take this far enough to use no electricity in their quaint summer homes, or to live off the grid entirely.

Other myths do not portray a decline, but rather a rise. In some myths, the creation of the world may happen over and over, but the world is arguably improved each time.

In an Aztec creation myth, the world is recreated five times. There are two brother gods Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, who spar for control. In the first world, Tezcatlipoca makes himself the sun. Quetzalcoatl removes his brother, who destroys the world for revenge. In the second world, Quetzalcoatl is now the sun, but Tezcatlipoca destroys the world with a monstrous hurricane. The existing people become apes. In the third creation, the rain god Tlaloc becomes the sun. So Quetzalcoatl destroys the world with a rainstorm. The people become birds. Then the water goddess, Chalchiuhtlicue, becomes the sun of the fourth world. This world is destroyed with a flood, and the surviving people become fish. The gods then convene. They decide some god must sacrifice himself to make the sun. One does, but the sun does not move until all the gods sacrifice themselves. Then Quetzalcoatl makes the world and the people that we know, and invents maize and other crops to feed them.

In one of the Hopi creation myths, this is the fourth world. The people originally lived in the dark underground. It was far too crowded. But a pair of brothers helped the people rise. The people of the earth came up from the dark underground, breaking their way up through a series of caves. When they reached the air, they scattered.

We're not from here, say many of the myths. We won this place, or attained it, or were chosen to inhabit it.

In Mexico, the Aztecs did not begin their rise in Tenochtitlan, so they said, but in Aztlan, in the northwest, whence they came to the valley
of Mexico. The Hopi, too, in their myth, won their way up through the darkness to this sunlit world.

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