Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin

Where does everything come from? How did the universe, such as we know it, originate? Is it the result of a blind mechanical process or of the plan of a higher intelligence? As humans,we have always been concerned by these questions, and ancient cultures have offered different responses, usually in the form of cosmogonic myths, in which common solutions and exclusive features can be distinguished. Darkness, confusion, and violence are usually imagined at the origin of time. Later, through an enormous struggle against the primeval creatures that incarnate excess and chaos, the main god establishes a new order and inaugurates his kingship, which will then be threatened on many fronts. This section of the 2020 issue of Archiv für Religionsgeschichte compiles most of the papers that were presented at the colloquium “Ex arches: looking back at the myths of origin,” organized by Carolina López-Ruiz and Marco Antonio Santamaría at the Ohio State University on September 13 and 14, 2018. The conference’s aim was to explore how narratives of origin in ancient Greece were articulated and their functions within the literary context in which they are framed. Some of the articles focus on relevant passages of Hesiod’s Theogony, the canonical, but not indisputable, account of the world’s origins for the ancient Greeks. Thus, Jenny Strauss Clay studies the challenge presented to Zeus by Typhon, his last and most powerful antagonist, whereas Warren Huard examines Heracles’ fights against monstrous creatures, such as the Nemean Lion, which echo Zeus’ combat against Typhon and uphold the cosmic order established by the god. Marcus Ziemann adopts a cutting-edge approach to assessing the parallels between Hesiod’s Theogony and Enuma elis ̌, analyzing the ideological meaning projected on the latter poem by the Neo-Assyrian Empire to reinforce its power, an orientation apparently contested by Hesiod with his poem. Taking into account the Hesiodic background, Marco Antonio Santamaría investigates four passages from Old and Middle Greek Comedy that parody the traditional literary form of theogony and, in some cases, make use of the account of primitive times to denounce the political and social corruption of the present. Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal tackles certain legends about the miraculous appearance of wine, which must have triggered the attribution of the birth and infancy of Dionysus to these very regions. In his paper, Fritz Graf focuses on the cosmogony in the Hermetic Poimandres and compares it with similar examples of diakrisistype cosmogonies in Imperial times. Two papers examine the interaction between myths and images: Carolina López-Ruiz explores the presence of cosmogonic motifs, probably of Phoenician and Orphic origin, in a fourth-century CE mosaic from Cyprus, which depicts the gods Aion and Dionysus, and Gabriela Cursaru and Pierre