I’m kind of fascinated by the emphasis on creation in Christianity. I was raised Christian, but either my denomination didn’t emphasize creation as much, or I just never internalized it. There were a lot of Christian ideas that I needed to work through and deconstruct when I became pagan, but this was not one of them. So, when I learned on Quora that a lot of Christians believe that the reason why God is worthy of worship is because he created everything, I was a bit nonplussed.
Why? Why is creation so important, and why is it intertwined with divinity? Why can’t a non-creator be divine?
Paganism mostly does not place a huge emphasis on creator gods. It’s far more common for the significant gods to be the children or grandchildren of the first gods to exist. There’s multiple Greek creation myths, but in the standard one, the first set of gods (the Protogenoi) passively emanate from a primordial void called Khaos. Khaos is often interpreted as a deity in her own right, but she is not actively responsible for creation. The Protogenoi also are mostly irrelevant to Ancient Greek religion. The most prominent one is Gaia, the Earth, who is also partly responsible for “creation” in that she is the mother of most kinds of life, as well as the first generation of gods (their father is Ouranos, the sky). The gods that actually matter are three or four generations down. The current Lord of the Universe, Zeus, is Gaia’s grandson, and Gaia herself is an antagonistic force under his rule.
In Norse mythology, the brothers Odin, Vili, and Ve shaped the world out of the body of the giant Ymir, who arose from the primordial void, Ginnungagap; Odin is the chief god, but his importance is not tied to his role in creating the world, and his brothers completely lose relevance after that one myth (as far as we know). The Babylonian creation myth is similar; the first gods emerge from primordial water, and after a great battle, the god Marduk slays the primordial goddess Tiamat and makes the world from her body. Egypt also has a whole bunch of conflicting creation myths, but most involve the Sun or some other god arising from primordial waters or void. In one of the best-known Egyptian creation myths, the first really significant set of gods (apart from the Sun) are born from the Sky and the Earth. I don’t know what Hinduism’s exact theology is around creation, but I do know that the creator god, Brahma, is worshipped far less often than the other two aspects of the supreme being (Vishnu and Shiva) and considerably less often than many other “lesser” divinities in the pantheon.
In most of these religions’ creation myths, there are a couple of recurring ideas: One, the idea of primordial water or void, from which everything else emanates. (The Abrahamic creation myth implicitly has this as well, since the Earth exists in a dark void when God creates it, but God already exists. There’s never any specification of where God came from, leading to an endless chain of ontological debates. But that’s unusual.) The first gods just sort of arise or coalesce out of the prima materia. Two, the gods immediately set about making more of themselves. They mate with whatever other beings happen to be there or, if there aren’t any, they… improvise. One of the Egyptian creator gods, Atum, masturbates to produce the first set of gods, Shu and Tefnut. And really, why not? That kind of makes sense when you think about it. Shu and Tefnut (both gods of air) have sex and produce Nut and Geb, the Sky and the Earth, who have sex and produce the first set of gods that’s actually important — Isis Osiris, Nephthys, and Set — who also immediately pair up and then it goes from there.
It’s the same in other mythologies. Tiamat and Apsu, each representing primordial waters, have sex and produce two other sets of gods that represent fundamental male/female principles, who have sex and start spawning the gods that actually matter. In some versions of the Greek creation myth, the primordial gods Nyx and Erebos (Night and Darkness) spawn a whole brood of other gods that represent different fundamental aspects of existence — Day, Ether, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Fate, Friendship, Misery, Old Age, Vengeance, etc. In the Orphic creation myth, Kronos and Ananke are the parents of the cosmic egg, out of which hatches Phanes, the closest thing to a true creator deity that Greece has (excepting Platonism; we’ll get there). Phanes is a personification of progenation, the force of creation itself that drives things to come into being. “Phanes” means “to bring to light” or “to make appear,” but in Hesiod this being is called Eros — literally, a personification of the drive to have sex. Sex is an act of creation. That’s true in a literal sense. So gods create the world by spawning other gods that each make up a piece of the world as we know it. The Sky and the Earth are born, rather than made, because they are gods and they are alive. If they’re alive, then, like you, they had parents.
If we’re going to interpret this from a mystical standpoint, then of course, sex is a metaphor. It’s how we make more of ourselves, so we speak of the gods as “having sex” to describe how they make more of themselves. And because gods all represent and/or rule over fundamental aspects of reality, they create more of reality by creating more of themselves. Certainly not all pagan creation myths follow this format, though. Another Egyptian creation myth, the one concerning Ptah, is a lot more like the Abrahamic one. Ptah creates the world by conceptualizing it with his thoughts and then speaking it into existence. Another big exception is the Platonic Demiurge, but again, we’ll get there.
The third thing that these myths all have in common is that the later generation of gods is usually the more important one. Most of the primordial gods become irrelevant after the creation story is over. The later generation of gods is usually more anthropomorphic, more immediate, more relevant. Most of the myths are about them, and most cults are dedicated to them and not to the primordial gods. I don’t have a definitive or scholarly answer on precisely why this is, but I have a few guesses.
Growing up with Christianity instills you with certain ideas about what religion is and how it works. You probably feel like the point of religion is to develop a personal relationship with God, and thus better understand God and perhaps earn your way into a better afterlife through your understanding of God. If that’s the way you feel, congratulations! You’re a mystic! I’m a mystic, too, and I still care very deeply about fostering a personal relationship with and understanding of the Divine. I don’t know if that’s because I was raised Christian or if it’s because I’m naturally inclined towards mysticism, or both, but regardless, that was not the main goal of ancient pagans. For ancient pagans, the main purpose of worshipping the gods was to get their help with solving immediate, mundane problems that fall within their little spheres of influence. The great Mystery of Creation therefore isn’t that relevant to the lives of most pagans. It’s not important. What is important is what the local rain god thinks of your sacrifice, because if it is satisfied, it will water your crops for you and bless you with abundance so that you can survive the coming winter. This god could be the lowest on the totem pole of gods, with the smallest sphere of influence, and no worshippers apart from you and your local community, but none of that matters if your survival is tied to its approval. You worship it anyway. When people’s religious needs are more immediate, then it’s more useful to have a god that is easily comprehensible, anthropomorphic, and present over one that is incomprehensible, transcendental, and abstract.
Pagans also tend to believe that everything in nature is worthy of worship in its own right. The distinction between polytheism and animism is actually arbitrary; most forms of polytheism have just as many small gods, nature spirits, household spirits, fairies, daimones, genii, etc. as they do big-name gods. Sometimes the smaller gods are actually more important because — again — they’re more relevant to the average person’s life on a regular basis. Everything is alive, everything has a consciousness, everything can be called upon or petitioned. Everything deserves reverence. The idea that you shouldn’t worship any of these smaller spirits because they were created by something else is absurd. Why does it make a difference whether the spirit had parents or not? It’s simply advantageous to befriend as many spirits as possible, so you can have their allegiance or even affection when push comes to shove.
These structures of venerating or petitioning smaller spirits still exist in a lot of traditions of Christianity, mostly through the worship of saints, although some have other folkloric concepts of nature spirits that deserve some kind of homage or tithe (like the aformentioned fey folk). Not Protestantism, though, or at least not the kinds that are prominent in America. Angels exist in almost all Christian traditions, but are generally assumed to be beyond the reach of the average person. Some Christians will interpret any attempt to call upon an angel as an act of hubris; God chooses when to send an angel to you, and you cannot request the aid of one for any reason. If you don’t believe in saints or nature spirits, and you can’t call upon angels, that leaves you completely bereft of options when you need something smaller and more accessible than the Great Trancendent I AM to help you solve a little mundane problem. The ultimate, transcendental version of God is frankly too big to take notice of you.
And that leads me to another relevant concept that I’ve so far avoided bringing up — that of the Platonic chain of emanation. It’s a complicated concept, but here’s the short version: There is a Great Divine or ultimate Source of all existence, which is an absolute philosophical standard of perfection, truth, and goodness. From this entity emanates all of existence, descending through a sequence of “spheres” from the most abstract to the most material. This is a very common idea in mystical systems, including Abrahamic ones, such as Jewish Kabbalah. Mysticism involves “climbing back up” the ladder of emanation to reach the Divine.
Interpreted in this context, the pattern of abstract vs. anthropomorphic gods takes on another layer of meaning. Metaphorically, the anthropomorphic gods could be taken as a more humanized variant of the same concept as the primordial gods. For example, Ouranos and Gaia are the most abstract version of the Sky and the Earth, followed by their children Kronos and Rhea who are a little more concrete, followed by their children Zeus and Demeter who are fully anthropomorphic. These are all just different ways of expressing the same concept. In Orphism, there’s a series of Lords of the Universe who proceed in a line of succession: Phanes, the aformentioned personification of generative force, then Nyx, then Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus (the current one), and finally Dionysus. Zeus, Phanes, and Dionysus are all frequently identified with each other in Orphic sources. One Orphic source even tells the story of how Zeus swallowed Phanes in order to subsume him and gain his powers as Demiurge:
Zeus when, from his father the prophecy having heard, strength in his hands he took, and the glorious daimon [Phanes], the reverend one, he swallowed, who first sprang forth into the Aither. […] And with him all the immortals became one, the blessed gods and goddesses and rivers and lovely springs and everything else that then existed: he became the only one. Orphica, Theogonies Fragment (from the Derveni Papyrus). Translation from Theoi.
This makes Zeus an evolution of Phanes. He’s the same Supreme Being, but less abstract. He’s more understandable — the King of the Gods, with plenty of colorful stories about a humanlike version of him to offset the more transcendental interpretations. But even at his most anthropomorphic, he’s still up there in the sky somewhere, at a distance. Dionysus is Zeus’s son (and, in Orphism, explicitly his heir), but even more immediate. In many of his myths, he lives on earth among humans, and he is directly accessible at any time — all you need to do is drink wine. Dionysus is the same Supreme Being at its most present, most carnal, and most human, therefore the easiest to reach out and touch. It’s not much of a stretch to consider the six Orphic Kings to all be the same being at different levels of emanation, from the most transcendental (Phanes), down to the most earthly (Dionysus).
Plato’s creation myth, detailed in the Timaeus, describes a single deity, the Demiurge, who created the world and all of the other gods. He makes the younger gods eternal, and charges them with the creation of everything else:
When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal as far as this was possible. […] When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and those who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator addressed them thus:—‘Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will, are indissoluble. That which is bound may be dissolved, but only an evil being would dissolve that which is harmonious and happy. And although you are not immortal you shall not die, for I will hold you together. Hear me, then:—Three tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in death.’ Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star—then having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. […] Having given this law to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all but self-inflicted evil. —Plato, Timaeus
So, we’ve got a clear dividing line separating the transcendental God from the more “mundane” gods. The Demiurge is responsible for the spiritual plane, while the “mundane” gods are responsible for the material plane. But nowhere does Plato suggest that these other gods shouldn’t be worshipped just because they came later. They are still infused with divinity because the Demiurge made them in the form of perfect spheres, and gifted them with the ability to create and preside over lesser beings.
The Demiurgus therefore, as I began to say, by whom all things were produced, generated them [the gods] consubsistent with himself, and assimilated, and perfected, and converted them to himself; their order not being confounded by the at once collected evolution, as it were, of all things into light, but being in a much greater degree guarded and connected. — Proclus’ Commentary on Timaeus
(Isn’t it great that both this weird philosophical text and a commentary breaking it down survived?).
Translation: The gods are divine because they are made of the same sort of stuff and do the same sort of things as the Demiurge, but on a smaller scale.
Now, you might have noticed that the Abrahamic God also creates humans in his own image and commands them to preside over lesser beings. Does that mean that humans are divine? And to that I say, yes. Humans are divine, but on an even smaller scale, and with more mundane “stuff” attached to us and weighing us down. Freeing yourself from the mundane world and climbing your way back up the ladder of emanation to reach God is the goal of a lot of mystical systems.
So why does Christianity care about creation? Christianity is a mystery tradition. Creation is one of the big Mysteries, and part of the aim of Christianity is to interact with the Divine on that level. It skips over all of the more present/immediate/mundane versions of divinity — actively shuns them, even — and reaches straight for God at its most ultimate and transcendental. I’m of the opinion that this is admirable but not practical. One of the reasons I left Christianity is because it didn’t work for me, and worshipping Dionysus definitely did. And I also like being a polytheist. I like not being limited in who I can worship. I like making friends with all the gods, big ones and the little guys. I like the versatility.
Despite being a mystic, I’m not that interested in creation. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I spend a lot of time creating my own worlds. I think I know a thing or two about the process of creation. Some of it is active choices on my part, but some of it is passive… it just sort of emanates from me, and then evolves on its own. I get to discover my own world as I build it. Maybe God’s relationship with its world is similar. I created all my characters — does that mean that they should worship me? (hint: yes)
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