These days I seem to be harking back to my Roman Catholic roots, reflecting on the “truths” I was taught in those 8 years of parochial school, and thinking about other ways of thinking about those truths. In particular, I’ve been obsession about creation: how did all of this, all of us, all of every thing come to be? From where? By whom?

For far too long, I just took it for granted that, “in the beginning God created the world.” That’s the way it was, that’s the way it is, that’s the way it always will be. And then I started reading. Reading is such a powerful and dangerous thing. No wonder there are so many banned books! No wonder dictators so often host book burning events. But I digress.

I have lately discovered that, depending on who does the categorizing and counting, there are at least five categories of creation myths and stories: 1) creation from chaos; 2) creation ex nihilo; 3) earth diver stories; 4) world parent stories; 5) emergence creation stories.

At the moment, I am particularly drawn to the earth diver stories, but I’m hard pressed to say why. There are earth diver creation stories from the Iroquois and other Native American cultures, from the Yoruba peoples of Africa, from the Slavic peoples of Europe; from Mongolia, Siberia, Japan, and even hints of earth diver themes interwoven with Chinese emergence and cosmic egg stories.

There are four themes that resonate across most cultural renditions of the earth diver: water, creator, diver, and making of the earth. I particularly resonate with the stories from the native peoples of the North American continent. Their divers are animals, often a muskrat, duck, or turtle. With all of my grandparents having emigrated to Pennsylvania from Poland, I wanted to have an attachment to the Slavic stories, but they all incorporate two creators, one good and one devilish. I still shudder when I think of the devil, even mythical ones, even though I am clear that some kinds of evil do exist in the world. So, here’s a bare bones sketch of how earth divers create the earth. More on particular cultural versions in late blogs.

Before the beginning of everything, primordial waters engulf everything. There is only water–and an Observer, the creator to be. When the first being, the observer looked out on the water and saw her image, she first became aware of herself. She conceived of the reflection as her spirit and sent the spirit out in the form of a loon. Waiting for the loon’s return, the Observer became weary of her solitude, which perhaps was morphing into loneliness. Listening to the stillness, hearing the possibility of more, the Observer sends a loon to dive into the waters to retrieve some sand or mud. After quite some time, the loon returns, out of breath, gasping for air, but with nothing. A second time, the loon dives, deeper this time, but still returns with nothing. Finally, on the third dive, the loon returns with tiny bits of mud clutched in its webbed feet. The Observer, now become Creator, kneads the grains of mud together, and works them into a small ball. When the mud in the ball becomes dry, the Creator sprinkles them across the back of a tortoise [No explanation is given for where the tortoise comes from, it is just there as needed. Sometimes the Creator sprinkles dirt across the water. No explanation is given for why it doesn’t sink into the water, it just doesn’t. This is a myth. It operates on its own logic.] Froom this foundation, all of creation, expands and grows.

Sometimes this creation story begins as I have it here. Sometimes this creation story follows a great flood which has destroyed the prior earth as a punishment for transgressive behaviors of the peoples.

My favorite versions sprinkle the dirt on the back of a tortoise. Inevitably, someone asks, what does the tortoise stand on? This is basically the same question that all creation stories invite. What was there before creation? In epistemology, this is called a regress argument or question. In philosophy, this is known as an infinite regress argument or question. It needs a potentially infinite series of additional explanations to support it.

From the likes of Terry Pratchett, the novelist; Stephone Hawking, the scientist; Ken Wilber, the philosopher, we have the considered answer: it is turtles all the way down. From Buddhism, we have emptiness. There is no fixed independent existence. Everything is interconnected and interdependent. And I am reminded of a Buddhist proverb: “The lotus flower blooms most beautifully from the deepest and thickest mud.” In Buddhism, the mud signifies the ubiquitous suffering, which if we learn to work with it properly can lead to wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment–the beautiful lotus bloom.

Maybe we are all earth divers, each in our own way, diving again and again to find our own bit of mud with which to construct our own world/reality, all of us together on the back of one immensely grand tortoise.