This is an IHeart 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'm Joe McCormick. And today we are back with the fourth and I think for now,

final episode in our series called The Thing Before the Beginning, which has been about

creation myths and specifically the question of what came before the creation in so many of these myths. Because as we have been discussing

throughout the series, most creation narratives are not a beginning out of absolutely nothing,

but a transformation or ordering of some pre-existing world into a world that is fit for the beginning of mythic history,

where now there can be gods and people.

If you haven't heard the previous parts in this series yet,

I should probably go back and listen to those first,

but just briefly, we have looked at a wide range of creation stories,

including but not limited to, the Chinese story of

Pangu, the ancient coiled one, the biblical creation story in Genesis 1, the Babylonian

creation epic known as the Inima Aalish, the Maori creation story about the children of Rungi

and Papa, the Aztec Ages of the Five Sons. And then in the last

episode, we talked briefly about the creation hymn of the Rig Veda, the Egyptian watery abyss

known as the Nun or the Noon, and the role of pre-creation states in some new religious

movements like Scientology and Realianism.

And we've come back today to round out our discussion.

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