Myths of Creation

Explore the lectures from Paul Cantor’s Harvard University Myths of Creation Course.

Course Overview

“Myths of Creation” surveys the creation myth as a literary form from antiquity to the twentieth century, analyzing how it mirrors religious, philosophical, and political developments over the centuries. The course begins by juxtaposing the two creation accounts fundamental to the Western tradition: the ancient Greek or classical account (Hesiod, Plato) and the biblical account (Genesis). It then studies Milton’s attempt to synthesize the biblical and the classical in Paradise Lost. The course moves on to Hume and Rousseau, who provided the philosophical basis for rethinking and reformulating the idea of creation in the modern world. The core of the course is devoted to the Romantic creation myth, beginning with Blake and culminating in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In a series of rewritings of Paradise Lost, the Romantics, in gnostic fashion, invert the values embodied in traditional creation accounts, recasting God as the devil and the devil as God. The course concludes by pursuing these developments in modern literature, as the idealism of Romanticism collapses into a nihilistic vision that emerges in the works of Nietzsche, Yeats, Beckett, and John Barth. The story of the creation myth is the story of the Western tradition in miniature.

Lectures

Featured

Myths of Creation Introduction

The introductory lecture in Prof. Cantor’s course “Myths of Creation.” It explains the importance of creation myths in Western civilization; it lays out the classical and biblical traditions of creation; and outlines the readings in the course and its focus on the Romantic creation myth, which seeks to overturn in gnostic fashion the values of traditional creation myths. Lecture

Hesiod & The Bible

The ancient Greek accounts of the creation differ greatly from the one in the Bible. In his Theogony, Hesiod produces a polytheistic account of the origin of the world. Lecture

Paradise Lost

Milton’s Paradise Lost as an attempt to synthesize the Biblical and classical accounts of the Creation. Lecture

Wagner's Ring Cycle

A study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a Romantic creation myth, analyzing how it tells the story of an initial harmony with nature, a fall from that unity into the power struggles of civilization, and Wagner’s hope for an apocalypse that would allow for the triumph of love in the world. Lecture

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche does not offer a myth of creation, but his new myth of the Eternal Recurrence is meant to provide a new basis for human creativity. Lecture

The Poetry of William Butler Yeats

This lecture analyzes Yeats as the poet of a Post-Nietzschean world, having rejected any vision of eternity and embraced human life as a series of historical cycles of creation and destruction; the lecture looks at the opposition between art and life in Yeats’s works and shows how he tries—but ultimately fails—to transcend it. Lecture

Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) treated as a gnostic creation myth, in which what is created is the book itself, by a mysterious god or gods, who, like the Romantic demiurges, cannot create a decent world for their creatures. Accepting Nietzsche’s idea of the Death of God, Beckett creates a story in which the novelist dies midway, leaving his characters to fend for themselves in the absurd world he leaves behind him. Lecture