Scott's Potawatomi Creation Myth

These were the materials Scott brought in to illustrate the creation myth of the people of the Potawatomi tribe. Theirs is an earth-diver creation myth, telling of a pair of muskrats, the first trees, and a creator's three attempts at making people in a hearth. The underdone person came out white, the overdone person came out black, and the red person was juuuuuust right.

Tree-Hugger

Several Asian cultures believe humanity emerged from a bamboo stem.

"In Philippine mythology, one of the more famous creation accounts tells of the first man, Malakás ("Strong"), and the first woman, Maganda ("Beautiful"), each emerged from one half of a split bamboo stem on an island formed after the battle between Sky and Ocean. In Malaysia, a similar story includes a man who dreams of a beautiful woman while sleeping under a bamboo plant; he wakes up and breaks the bamboo stem, discovering the woman inside. The Japanese folktale "Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" (Taketori Monogatari) tells of a princess from the Moon emerging from a shining bamboo section. Hawaiian bamboo ('ohe) is a kinolau or body form of the Polynesian creator god Kāne."

^^Taken from Wikipedia^^

Needless to say, trees are important in all of mythology, whether you realize it or not. It is hard to escape the image of a tree when reading almost any myth. Be it the story of Daphne and Apollo, the story of Tree of Life, or even stories about the Dryads (Oak tree nymphs in Greek mythology), trees are constantly bewitching us and filling us with wonderment.

Scientology and its creation story

Our story begins 75 million years ago. There existed a galactic federation ruled by an alien overlord by the name of Xenu. Xenu let his federation get a little out of hand, and each planet in his care had reached a population of around 178 billion! When he heard he was to be deposed from power, Xenu knew he had to do something drastic. He devised a plan to gather billions of people together under the ruse of income tax inspections, and froze them all! He and his henchmen loaded the people into his fleet of space ships and flew them to a plan among the confederation known as Teegeeack. We now know this planet as Earth. Xenu placed all of the billions of frozen bodies around the base of every active volcano on Teegeeack and lowered hydrogen bombs into each of the volcanoes and detonated them simultaneously. This created a worldwide disaster and killed all but a few of the people instantly. The souls, then having been released of their bodies, floated upwards. Xenu foresaw this, however, and essentially created a giant soul-sucking vacuum cleaner to capture them all. He took the souls to a couple of cinemas - one in the Virgin Islands, one in Hawaii. Here, they forced them to watch "various misleading data" for 36 days straight. These souls, now having been turned evil, are the source of our everyday bad thoughts and feelings. The people who somehow survived the volcanic eruptions are the descendants of modern humans. True story!

As it was in the beginning... whatever that means.

As we discussed in class, humankind is overly worried about events yet-to-be and what exactly may come after life. Some people make it their goal to figure out the mystery of what, if anything, comes after this nearly century-long roller-coaster ride. Many people are so sure (blindly, I might add) of what comes after death that they are willing to execute people who disagree with them. What comes next? Is there an afterlife in which we are judged to be good or evil? Do we reincarnate as another life form? Or do we simply turn into earthworm food after our soul dies with our body? These are questions to which we may never know the answers. However, is it so far-fetched to wonder instead what may have come before life rather than after? People can be so preoccupied with the future they completely disregard the past. The answers may be in front of us, simply hiding in our unconscious. Maybe rather than trying to unveil the future, we should simply sharpen the memories of our pre-existential past.