The Mythology Of Outer Space
Parade Of Ants
The earliest humans, and really every human alive up until a few hundred years ago, had a great advantage over us city dwellers - they looked up at night and saw a sky filled with thousands of stars and planets, unobscured by the light pollution that largely ruins the view for most of us.
And they wondered, and observed, and told stories about the movements and patterns of the stars. And some began to keep track of these movements, and others made calculations, and soon mankind found some regularity in the relationships between the earth and the sky, and made tools so they could keep track of time and space.
They also noticed that these movements were not completely regular, and they thought that there must be intelligences at work in the sky to keep order in the heavens and other intelligences that disrupted the order of the universe. Some intelligences must be more powerful or influential than others, and so the gods and goddesses, and their consorts, servants, and messengers, soon filled the sky.
Much later some humans decided that there must be a single sky creator, but because things in heaven, as on earth, did not always turn out as expected, there must be an opposing force of evil that causes all the trouble. Heavenly civilization, like on earth, was constantly at war. And each civilization had their own One True God, and other civilizations’ gods were False and Evil.
And much later in the last few hundred years we learned that the universe is much larger and much more chaotic than even our earliest ancestors imagined. It seems we live on a small obscure planet in a extremely rural part of an insignificant backwater galaxy in a 3rd ring suburb of a cluster of nondescript galaxies far from the center (if one can say such a thing) of the cosmos.
Perhaps the earliest humans were wiser than us after all - they seemed to understand that we are not very special, and the universe is so vast, and so chaotic and in a state of continual creation, change, and destruction, that even the gods are just like a line of ants walking across the floor - each one a former omnipotent and eternal being, that once was and ultimately once again returned to the void.
Humbling yes, but maybe now we can stop with the bullshit?
Love this perspective!