A myth of creation, a cosmogony (Greek kosmos, meaning "order," and genesis, meaning "birth"), is a story of how the cosmos began and developed. Typically, though not always, cosmogonies include the creation of the world, the creation of humankind, and the fall of humankind from a state of perfection, or the struggle in heaven between various groups of immortals.

Each person's birth is the subject of a story that is somehow revealing about that person. The events surrounding one's birth are a celebration fo the miracle of individuality. The same applies to cultural myths of origin. Origin stories are sacramental -- outward and visible signs of an inner truth about the individual or culture in question. Mircea Eliade has called the creation myth the "narration of a sacred history," the story of the "breakthrough of the sacred" into time.

That the creation story is a metaphor for birth is indicated further by the frequent presence in cosmogonies from around the world of the motifs of the primal egg or the primal waters. These essential female symbols remind us that it is the Great Mother, perhaps breathed on by an intangible ultimate source, who gives form to life. It is she who is the prima materia without which life cannot be born:

The mother of us all
the oldest of all,
hard,
splendid as rock

"The Hymn to the Earth,"
(Homeric Hymns, trans. Charles Boer)

In the analogous mythic motif of the hero's birth, even God, if he chooses to participate in the human experience, must be born of a Maya or a Mary or an Isis, the living embodiment of Creation itself.

For us, the creation myth, like the myth of the hero's birth, inevitably has a psychological meaning. In the fact that cosmos is born of chaos or nothing-ness, or the fact that a hero is born of a virgin, we find a metaphor for the awakening of consciousness from the unconscious. In the creation myths themselves, the creation of the human being is a necessary step. In the Judeo-Christian Genesis myth we find explicitly stated what is nearly always implied in creation myths, the idea that human beings are created to be namers, to apply their godlike powers of the consciousness to recording creation and thereby providing it with significance.

The creation myth, then, establishes our reason for being, the source of our significance. As such, it is often used to help individuals or groups to region health or order. When we are broken, we return to our origins to become whole again, whether on the psychiatrist's couch or in the shaman's hut. So it is that the ancient Sumero-Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma elish, was read aloud at the Babylonian New Year festival. And so it is that many curing ceremonies, such as the Navajo and Buddhist sand-painting ceremonies, begin with the recitation of the creation myth. The sand painting is itself a mandala, a sacred circle representing creation in its original wholeness.

When the patient sits in the sand painting and has the creation myth recited over him by the shaman (medicine man), he is returning to the womb of nature in the hope of being reborn into nature's wholeness, of reenacting the creation myth in his own life.

An equivalent of the curative sand painting for the Christian, for example, would be the church building. It is in "Mother Church," where the sacred meal is administered or "celebrated" by a priest -- the spiritual descendant of a hero born of the Virgin Mother -- that the Christian is reborn into spiritual health. There is obvious significance in the fact that in certain branches of the church, the Christian version of the creation story from the first book of John's Gospel ("In the beginning was the Word...") is recited before the dismissal of the congregation at the of the Eucharist, the sacred soul-curing liturgy.

But if humans are born to make Earth conscious of itself, why must they (or warring immortals) fall from grace soon after creation? The answer would seem to lie in the nature of the created world. Life, by definition, implies death, the entropic equilibrium of chaos. To be in the world is to be part of the life-defining struggle to create order out of chaos. The bodies we live in, the chairs we sit in -- all in process of decaying -- are models of that struggle and, as such, models of creation. Works of art are even more obviously so. A poem lives insofar as its form holds chaos at bay, and its very being is a celebration of the skill that enables it to do so The fall from grace at the end of the creation story perhaps suggests this necessary freedom of the created sphere of time and space from the formless perfection of the supreme source.

Source: The World of Myth by David Leeming