This video topic was requested by my patron Landon Bowers. If you would like to become a patron and have your video request prioritized, link down below. Alright, so let's break down two of the values that Adam and Eve story evokes. Spare Rule with Caron Terry. Hey y'all and welcome to Spare Room. I'm Caron Terry and today we're going to talk about writing creation myths for your world. When you're doing world building for your role play or for your story, creation myths are a great way to add flavor to your world. Every culture on earth has a story about how the world came to be and how their people came to be in the world. And your world is the same. Your world has a creation myth even if you don't write it. If you do want to write down a creation myth for your world, the main thing to focus on is flavor. Think of the creation myths that we have in our world. What a many of the Judeo-Christian mythology. The Rig Veda in Hindu mythology. Or the Jaffa-Geneing of Norse mythology. In our world, adherents don't typically believe the letter of these stories. They know that these are just stories to give a quick and easy explanation of their people's existence in the world and also to explain complex things like the world's creation. So hence, flavor. And we're going to do the same thing when it comes to creating your creation story. Depending on how fantastical or mundane your world is will depend on if your creation myth is literally true or not literally true. However, regardless of whether it's literally true or not, what it should do is seek to explain the values of its people. Let's take the Adam and Eve story as our example. I'm taking this as my example because I assume most of my audience knows the Adam and Eve story or at least the basics of it. So if you don't, I recommend pausing the video here and going and looking it up. It's not a very long story so it won't take you long to get context. Alright, so let's break down two of the values of the Adam and Eve story evokes. God made the world in stages and after that, he rested. This shows how important it is in Judeo-Christian cultures to work hard during the week and then on the weekends, take time to rest and praise God. And we see that theme of hard work ethic during the week and then rest on the weekend in tons of different cultures across our planet because the Judeo-Christian traditions have spread so far because those religions are so popular. Another thing we see in this story is a very basic way of understanding gender that still permeates to this day. Eve was created from Adam and for Adam. When the snake comes to the garden, it's Eve that's tempted first. The man in this story, Adam, is the one that's created first. He's the one that has the most authority and he's the one that behaves the most correctly. The man in the story, Adam, is the one that's created first. He has the most authority and he behaves the most proper. His downfall is simply following Eve's lead who is the originally sinful one. This dynamic between men and women is something that is still passed down to this day and cultures that use this story. Now none of this is intended to imply that if we got rid of this story, somehow misogyny would go away. That wouldn't happen. The way a culture and a culture's stories interact is tightly interwoven and it can't be unthreaded so easily. Think about this for your creation myth. What values are important to the people? Those values are likely to show up in the myths including the creation myth. So make a list of those possible values and then once you do, what I recommend next is to model your creation myth after one of the five types of creation myths. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel here when scholars that have spent way more time on this than any of us have have already studied it and know that there are certain types of things that show up over and over in these creation myths. This particular system of five types that we're going to cover today was developed by Elliott and his colleagues at Charles Long. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I'm not totally sure I am. So let me know in the comments down below if I did it wrong. But suffice it to say that's the model we're going to use. There are other models. If you go googling, you'll find some others but this is the traditional one. This is the one that I find easiest so that's what we're going to talk about. Alright, so there are five types of myths and the first one that we're going to go over is X Nilo. X Nilo myths are myths where God created the world from nothing and that's literally what it means X Nilo is Latin for from nothing. In most X Nilo stories, God creates the world either from his speech or his breath or sometimes he just thinks it into being. These myths are often masculine in nature and the creator God is typically a skyfather type of God and also these cultures tend to lean more towards misogyny than misandry. Hence the father God as opposed to a mother goddess. Notable examples are Egyptian mythology and the Rigveda. In contrast to X Nilo myths are emergence myths. In these myths humanity emerges from one world into another. The previous world may involve symbolism of the womb or giving birth. So the creator God and these stories tend to be more of a mother earth type of God. And these stories often have more than one emergence. People tend to move through multiple versions of the world until they get to the current world. As they travel from world to world they may experience some kind of metamorphosis as their values and physical forms become more and more like the current people that live in the world. Notable examples are the Hopi and the Mayan creation myths. And that brings us to our third type. Sometimes instead of just an earth mother or just a skyfather, a myth will have both world parents. They'll have a skyfather and an earth mother. There are two types of these stories. The first one being where the world comes into existence through the sexual union of the skyfather and the earth mother type God. These stories typically mimic the culture's concepts of conception in our world. The other type of myth is where body parts like limbs or blood or hair are removed from the world parents and they're used to create all of the elements and creatures of our world. These stories focus more on creativity as the element of creation than sex being the element of creation. Norse mythology is a notable example of a world parents creation myth. Our next type of creation myth is called creation from chaos. In these myths there is chaos in the beginning and some force comes in to bring order to that chaos. These creation myths often take care to describe the concepts of order and chaos and of good and evil. The previous world is sometimes described as an abyss or vapor or muddy and then a creator God comes in and takes those chaotic elements and starts forming them into ordered elements that are recognizable by us and often this is how people and animals and other things are created as well. In these myths, order must be preserved to stop the world from descending back into chaos. A notable example of this is the creation story in Genesis. The last type of R5 is the earth diviner myths. In these myths a God sends an animal down into the primordial waters of our world. This animal then goes and lays the groundwork for our world. They typically will create land and mountains and other such features and they'll go and awaken the animals and the people of that world. This process often takes multiple attempts before the animal finds something that works and is sustainable. The common theme in these myths is emergence from depths and there is less to do with a particular creator God traditionally in these myths. Notable examples are the Tartar creation myth and the Tutshki creation myth. So those are the types. There are other methods as I said for categorizing the different types of creation myths which you will find out about when you do your next step which is research. Once you know what type of creation myth you want to model yours after, go and find creation myths of that type and read them. This is your inspiration. Read those myths and think about what they mean for the context of the culture that created them and this is how you're going to get your mind in the right framework to write your world's creation myth. Now one word of caution here unless you're deliberately trying to create an allegory between your fantasy culture and a real world culture, resist copying anyone particular myth. If you do copy then what's going to happen is anyone joining your role play looking at your world or reading your book to look at your world is going to potentially recognize where you pulled it from and they're going to bring in their baggage and their stereotypes of what they think about that particular culture into your role play and into your story. And you don't get any control over what stereotypes and baggage they might bring. So to make sure a reading that you didn't really intend doesn't happen, we're going to use this for inspiration, not to copy. So in conclusion, when working on your world's creation myth, there are four things that you're going to do. First is focus on flavor. Second, list your culture's values. Three, pick from already established types of creation myths and then four, read existing myths of that type you picked for inspiration. So those are my tips for writing creation myths. Have you guys done this before? If so, have you done something like this process or something different? I'm really curious. Let me know down below for that. And if you've not done one before, does this methodology inspire you to go create a creation myth for your world? If you do, I would love to read them. So also please post those down below. And of course, don't forget to make it a great day.