This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we are returning today with the second part in our series about worlds before creation.

The idea behind this series is that very often when we think about a creation myth or a creation story, we imagine what's called a creation ex nihilo.

So there is nothing. And then suddenly for some reason or by some act, a world is brought into being.

So nothing existed before. Now there's a world. But the interesting thing is that if you start really looking

at creation stories from all around the world, it seems to me that very few of them actually

fit this description. Instead of being accounts of how the raw substance of the universe was

brought into existence, what you most often get instead is a before and after story, where a world of some kind already exists, usually in some kind of static or chaotic state.

And then something happens, which introduces distinctions and differences and somehow orders

this pre-existing world in such a way that characters can now exist and events can take

place within it.

And I realize that I've talked on the show plenty of times before about being

attracted to imagery of weird wastelands and dark unpopulated places. I don't know how

unique I am in this. Maybe basically everybody thinks this is interesting, but I don't know.

But it feels kind of personal to me that for whatever reason, I have never been able to forget about that chapter in the time machine or the time traveler goes millions of years into the future and sees this desolate withering earth under the red sun and no people in it, just these crab monsters and stuff.

Or the way I was talking in the last episode about being really haunted by that very short

description at the beginning of the book of Genesis of the dark deep waters and the wind of God

rushing above them.

...