In Genesis 11, the collapse of the Tower of Babel, and consequent ‘confusion of tongues’ (the division of human speech into mutually incomprehensible languages) was a punishment for overweening pride.
In this Genesis story, however, people do not steal the power of naming and making from God. God gives it to them freely, without cost. Language, and with it the power to name and dominate, exists before the Fall, not evil but good. Part of the initial Grand Plan. All the three religions concerned – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are highly verbal narrative faiths, their adherents speak directly with their God, and their God speaks to them through texts as well as face to face. All three religions see the creative capacity of language as ‘innocent’ rather than arrogant; as divine rather than demonic.
Naturally a culture that sees power in speaking is likely to develop a creation-by-fiat story. And such a culture will obviously see silence as lack, silence as absence, not merely as negative, but as blank. Paul Davis, the cosmological physicist and writer, has argued that the question ‘what happened before the Big Bang’ is a non-question; it is the equivalent of asking, ‘What is north of the North Pole?’ There is nothing north of the North Pole; the whole point about the North Pole is that there is nothing north of it. The whole point about the biblical story and the Big Bang story is that there is no ‘before’. There is nothing. In such a poetic-religious context it is not at all ‘unreasonable’ to argue that all silence is waiting to be broken. Once it is broken, the myth suggests, the human situation improves radically. Matter, order, intricacy, socialisation, language, representation, identity, the individual, ME can emerge and evolve. From here it follows, all too easily, that silence – since ‘I’ am the purpose, centre and goal of the whole project – was waiting to be broken, longs and desires to be broken and should, ought to, be broken. The word desires to break the silence; that is the word’s job.
However, there is a problem. Although this myth has proved extremely effective, especially for those who wish to conquer the world and banish the darkness, or at least bring it firmly under control, it is not actually necessary or inevitable. The global power that this myth has given its owners obscures the fact that it is a very unusual, indeed very peculiar, story. There are lots of other creation myths, all of which get the show up and running without this primal fracture. The world is littered with them. Gods, Prime Movers and their newer scientific substitutes, create the origin of matter by ingesting, by brooding, by birthing, by killing, by withdrawing, by defecating, vomiting and masturbating, by fucking, by desiring, by self-mutilation and even quite simply by mistake.
Here is a Maori creation story:
In the beginning was Te Kore – the Nothing, the silence. The beginning was made from the nothing and the nothing existed for a long, long time. Then there was Te Po – the Great Night and it was dark and silent and it went on for a long, long time. In the silence and the dark there was nothing, and there were no eyes to see that there was nothing and no ears to hear that it was silent, not even the gods’.
Then Papa Tu Anuku, the earth, the mother, and Rangi Nui, the sky, the father, embraced and lay with each other and loved each other. Locked together, they lay so close in their love that there was no light between them; and they did not speak because there was no space between them. And though their love was rich and fruitful their offspring were trapped between them, sealed in the darkness so they could not grow and take shape and live. It was like this for a long, long time: from the first division of time unto the tenth, and unto the hundredth, and unto the thousandth, all was darkness and silence.
But at last the children of Papa and Rangi agreed that their parents must be separated so that they could live. Tane, who would be the father of the forests and whose strength was the strength of growth, lay down on his mother and he placed his feet against his father and, as slowly as a tree grows, he pushed and pushed until, with cries of pain and loss Papa and Rangi were separated. Light flowed into the space between them and their many offspring were uncovered and took shape and lived.
Later, Tane took some earth, red with the blood of his parents’ severed love, and made a woman Hine Ahu One, the Earth-formed maiden. And she gave birth to a lovely daughter, Hine Titama, the Dawn Maiden – and the children of Hine Titama and her father Tane became men and women in the world, and for a long, long time death had no power over them.
Here is a Norse myth:
In the beginning was Ginnungagap – the void, the chasm. Because there was nothing there it was cold and dark in Ginnungagap. It was so cold and dark there that layers of everlasting salt ice formed in that dark void. Then Authumla, the Great Cow, came to lick at the ice and with her rough warm tongue she licked out the giant Ymir. When he came out of the ice she fed him with her rich warm milk until he was grown up. Then alone, using the material from his feet and his armpits, he created the giants. From the giants, the Aesir and the Vanir, the gods of the north, were all descended.
After many generations Odin, Lord of the Aesir, and his brothers killed Ymir and used the pieces of his dismembered body to construct the worlds, with Yggdrasil, the world tree, at the centre. After the three worlds were built Odin went for a walk on the beach of Middle Earth with two of his colleagues – Lodur and Hoenir, the silent god. They found two trees on the shore – Askr and Embla – and they breathed humanity into them. Odin gave them life, Lodur gave them form and Hoenir the silent gave them understanding. That was the beginning of people and time and speech and song.
I love this story and find it hard not to push for some connection between Authumla and the idea of a ‘mother tongue’ – the first language we all learn. In honesty the connection is not there. Authumla is silent, animal, licking not speaking – she is before language. That is the point.
And here’s an Egyptian version:
In the beginning was a limitless expanse of dark water – inert and sullen. The benben, the primal mound rose out of the water, as the islands and sandbars and banks rise out of the water when the Nile floods recede. And Atum, lord to the limits of the sky, created himself out of nothing and stood on the benben. Atum was the sun, the totality, containing within himself all potential, all being, the life force of every deity and every animate and inanimate thing yet to come. Atum stood alone on the benben while light flooded into the world; then he masturbated every thing into existence.
‘No sky existed, no earth existed … I created on my own every being … my fist became my spouse … I copulated with my hand … I sneezed out Shu, I spat out Tefnut … and later Shu and Tefnut gave birth to Geb and Nut … and Geb and Nut gave birth to Osiris, Seth, Isis and Nephthys … and ultimately they produced the population of this land.’
Well, this is how they told it in Heliopolis. But Egyptian mythology is extremely complex – mainly because Upper and Lower Egypt were originally two different countries and cultures, each with its own mythological hierarchy, divinities and stories. It was essential to pharaonic authority to synthesise these into a single narrative. The seams still show. In Hermopolis in the distant south they thought Atum a Johnny-come-lately. In the beginning, they said, there was the dark water, the primeval matter. Within it there was power: there were eight gods who appeared to be like frogs and snakes, and who contained in themselves the four deep energies of water, flood, darkness and dynamism. After a long time these forces broke through the inertia of the water, and the energy of their collision threw up the benben, not in the Delta but at Khemnu in the south. Thoth, the ibis god, flew down bearing the cosmic egg, which was laid on the benben. Atum was born from that egg and the rest is history.
I have picked these stories more or less at random from an enormous selection: I could just as easily have told the story of Vishnu’s lotus, or Pangu and the Yellow Emperor, or Crow’s flight, or Uranus’s castration. I have told them in my own words and to my own ends as the old stories are always and necessarily told, though I hope I have told them with respect. However, I am going to tell on
e more here, because it comes from a mindset so utterly unlike my own.
There are numerous examples of myths that express the sense that there was no beginning. For the Cherokee, for example, the land was always there. However, it was flat until the Great Eagle flew over it, and each downbeat of his wings pushed in the valleys, and each upbeat pulled up the mountains. But in the following Australian aboriginal myth, humans are themselves active in the creation, which is continuous, ongoing and is a creation not by word, but by acts. The songlines, the ancient sung poems of the Australian people, record the creation of meaning for the land, but they do not create it. It is the ancestors travelling, and the people replicating those journeys, that are the creative moments.
In the beginning is the land and the land has no beginning – it is before the beginning and it is for ever, everlasting. But in the beginning the land was flat, dark and featureless. It had neither shape nor meaning. It had no places in it or on it, until the ancestors went travelling the paths of it. The ancestors did not create the land, but they created its meaning and shape. As they travelled they were creating the mountains and the hills and the rocks and the animals, people, places. They did not do it once and for all, they do it still – they do it in the walking and the dancing and the singing and the dreaming. The paths must be walked. The creation work must be done. The ancestors start the process, but the land is for ever and the creating of it is for ever. The ancestors are not gods – they die and go to be stars, or to be animals or to be mountains, but they are still walking the paths and creating the land. In the beginning, still, always, without beginning. The dreaming, singing, dancing, walking goes on and on, for ever.
It is hard to see what most of these stories have in common, except for the things they do not have in common with the verbally creative, highly intellectual, monotheist God of the Children of the Book. They represent a different way of seeing, a different way of telling about what can only be imagined. For example, the current story, the one we call the Big Bang, could equally well have been named the Tiny Egg, but it was not. And that is not accidental.
In all these stories, instead of having an abrupt singularity, a sharp-edged instant marking the beginning, a sound breaking the silence, the whole process is much more gradual. Time and silence come together in a slow, even piecemeal, creative drama. In one of the classical Greek versions the first god is actually called Kronos – Time.7 Language here really is the ‘foster-child of Silence and slow Time’.8 It comes into play late in the story, usually after emotions, divisions and growth. Silence is not broken by the word, not outwith the beginning, but an integral, if separate, part of the creation.
There are good reasons for taking note of these stories. The first is obvious – they give a positive and active role to silence itself, not a negation or lack or castration or something to be ‘broken’, but a creative, generative power. The Gnostics – who tended to think that the creation of matter was a shocking error, unimaginable to the true God who is pure spirit – narrated long genealogical creation myths. These start with a Primal Being as the beginning of all things, who gave rise to other beings (often called aeons or demiurges) by a process of emanation. These in their turn emanate further beings, and so on, each generation slightly further removed from pure spirit, until one of them, usually by mistake but sometimes through wilful error, creates matter and thence the world as we experience it. Valentinus, one of the most important of the Christian Gnostics of the second century, names silence as one of the active demi-urges who (tragically from the point of view of Gnostic philosophy) made the material world. Silence is a god, or at least a divine force, herself (and not the feckless one who finally created the world – that was Nous – intelligence). It is rare for silence to be personified in this way; even the medieval Christian Church, which loved to make physical representations of most abstract qualities, virtues and vices (Justice with her blindfold and scales, for example), does not seem to have given silence a human face.9
In a real sense, these sorts of creation stories better correspond to our contemporary knowledge of evolution and the scientific account of the ‘creation’ of the universe, and particularly of our species, than the God (or other force) who creates ex nihilo by suddenly breaking the silence. We know, now, of evolution’s slow, inexorable, chancy, silent movement through vast fields of time. We see both intricacy and accident in our own making and in the making of the world around us. If, in our imaginations, we could really accept the information from evolution and from astrophysics, we might find that the most complex genealogies of the gods and their creative methods were actually less alien than the notion of humanity popping up, on a single verbal command, sophisticated in all matters except fashion sense.
Perhaps even more important, since it is myth – the poetry of the soul – that I was looking at here, these complex, convoluted stories of division and change and mixed motives and chance feel closer to our experience of our own ‘creation’ as individuals. Despite our potent ideas about our unalienable human rights, inherent from birth, we tend to experience ourselves as individuals in the process of becoming, rather than as finished and fixed, all complete when our parents picked out our names. The moment of our emerging, becoming, the moment of our creation as fully rounded autonomous selves remains blurred and gradual: a journey from infancy towards self-hood.
Moreover, at least since the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, we have accepted that human creative activity requires time and effort, and a withdrawing from the social bustle. Creative individuals – in both arts and sciences – are supposed to be detached, to withdraw into a silent introspection and self-examination, which is not simply about practice and experiment, but somehow a brooding process, which gives birth to new ideas or creative works. All myths are complex and cannot be interpreted too literally, but it seems curious to me that the three monotheistic religions want to claim both that we are ‘made in the image of God’ and that God creates in a radically different way from the way we create. George Steiner has suggested that all artists set themselves up as ‘rival gods’ – they are in creative competition with God.10 Certainly we assign a rival method to them. God creates by breaking the silence in a single abrupt instant – God speaks. But when we mythologise ourselves as creators we seem to accept that silence plays an indispensable part in the process.
So when we think of silence as a lack, something that needs to be broken in order to let in life and meaning, we must not forget that this is a singular, though powerful, viewpoint. It is not ‘natural’, obvious or inevitable. There are indeed many creation stories that do not see a violent breaking of silence by the voice of God or any other force as either necessary or desirable. And there are some that see silence itself as a creative agent, an active power, a vital ingredient.
There is, of course, a huge, probably unanswerable question about why different cultures come up with different sorts of creation stories. But the God who creates everything from nothing by speaking is a desert God. The silence of the desert has a horror to it, as well as, born of the horror, a deep and joyful beauty. The desert is vast, cruel and very silent. Perhaps there is an inevitable attraction to a God who speaks – to creation through sound.
But there has to be a story to explain why we came up with this sort of mythology and particularly why we hold to it so tightly that even the most rational scientific minds of the secular twentieth century reverted to it apparently subconsciously and very illogically when they wanted a name for a radically new narrative of creation – the Big Bang. This looks like fear to me and I sense that the fear of silence is very deeply embedded in the Western psyche. I began to get extremely curious about why we are frightened, where the fear comes from. I think there is a plausible story that goes something like this:
Once upon a time, almost at the very beginning, there was the Great Chthonic Terror.* No one, back in these earliest human societies, has time to worry about abstractions; at this point there is a far more press
ing question. Actually, there are two pressing questions that are quite closely linked. One of them (the other of them) is ‘Are we sure? How can we be sure that we aren’t animals?’ And one of the mythological ways we can answer this is by speaking – language is what humans have, and what by definition animals do not have. But the first pressing question is simple, ‘How do we stay alive?’
The Great Chthonic Terror is that the dark may swallow the light, may gobble it up, terminate or destroy it. That the night will conquer the day; that the sun will not rise, that the fires will go out, that the cold will triumph; and we will all be dead. Light is life; dark is death. This is not symbolic at all; this is actual and biological.
Everything we can do to allay the Terror, to assist, persuade, seduce, propitiate, cajole, reward or bully the sun, which, for all its power, seems oddly fragile and recalcitrant, we must do and we will do. Anthropologically ‘sun encouragement’ rituals are as nearly universal as anything is, from the Aztecs to Beltane. They are gruesome, expensive and ruthless. They are creative, beautiful and symbol-rich.
What is more, they work. Every morning the sun rises; and further north, where it matters more, every spring the sun returns.
Though, interestingly, the doubt remains and the colder the terrain the deeper the doubt. The Vikings were never entirely confident: Norse mythology is the only theistic theology I know of where the issue remains in serious peril. The gods will go out to fight at Ragnarok. They will do their best, for themselves, for humans and for the light; but Baldur the Beautiful is dead and we do not know if they or the forces of the dark will triumph. Even if the gods do win, it will be at great loss and with a tragic diminishment (like the Hobbits at the end of The Lord of the Rings). The Terror is fobbed off but never defeated; the issue remains in the balance. I think this may be why Viking culture is the only one I have so far encountered that has never valorised, desired, or found any positive cultural space for silence. Valhalla is also the noisiest heaven I have ever come across, no everlasting rest and sweet music for the heroic Norsemen; their dream is of drunken rioting and a great deal of crashing and banging.
A Book of Silence Page 15