Mythology; Mythology, Greek -- Juvenile literature
Those who are interested in watching the mental development of a child
must have noted that when the baby has learned to speak even a little,
it begins to show its growing intelligence by asking questions. "What
is this?" it would seem at first to ask with regard to simple things
that to it are still mysteries. Soon it arrives at the more
far-reaching inquiries--"Why is this so?" "How did this happen?" And
as the child's mental growth continues, the painstaking and
conscientious parent or guardian is many times faced by questions
which lack of knowledge, or a sensitive honesty, prevents him from
answering either with assurance or with ingenuity.
As with the child, so it has ever been with the human race. Man has
always come into the world asking "How?" "Why?" "What?" and so the
Hebrew, the Greek, the Maori, the Australian blackfellow, the
Norseman--in a word, each race of mankind--has formed for itself an
explanation of existence, an answer to the questions of the groping
child-mind--"Who made the world?" "What is God?" "What made a God
think of fire and air and water?" "Why am I, _I_?"
Into the explanation of creation and existence given by the Greeks
come the stories of Prometheus and of Pandora. The world, as first it
was, to the Greeks was such a world as the one of which we read in the
Book of Genesis--"without form, and void." It was a sunless world in
which land, air, and sea were mixed up together, and over which
reigned a deity called Chaos. With him ruled the goddess of Night and
their son was Erebus, god of Darkness. When the two beautiful children
of Erebus, Light and Day, had flooded formless space with their
radiance, Eros, the god of Love, was born, and Light and Day and Love,
working together, turned discord into harmony and made the earth, the
sea, and the sky into one perfect whole. A giant race, a race of
Titans, in time populated this newly-made earth, and of these one of
the mightiest was Prometheus. To him, and to his brother Epimethus,
was entrusted by Eros the distribution of the gifts of faculties and
of instincts to all the living creatures in the world, and the task of
making a creature lower than the gods, something less great than the
Titans, yet in knowledge and in understanding infinitely higher than
the beasts and birds and fishes. At the hands of the Titan brothers,
birds, beasts, and fishes had fared handsomely. They were Titanic in
their generosity, and so prodigal had they been in their gifts that
when they would fain have carried out the commands of Eros they found
that nothing was left for the equipment of this being, to be called
Man. Yet, nothing daunted, Prometheus took some clay from the ground
at his feet, moistened it with water, and fashioned it into an image,
in form like the gods. Into its nostrils Eros breathed the spirit of
life, Pallas Athené endowed it with a soul, and the first man looked
wonderingly round on the earth that was to be his heritage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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