So, I’ve had an idea for the past few years. In looking at polytheistic mythologies like Greek or Norse, I’ve noticed how their creation myths differ from the Abrahamic myths. In the Abrahamic myths, an absolute god brings creation to being from nothing. Then one of his servants rebels and becomes darkness. This states that light creates, but darkness is corruption of light.
In various polytheistic creation myths, the gods either create the world from material that was already there, or simply inherit an existing world. Unlike in the Abrahamic myths, the gods are not only predated by their antagonists, but to some degree are related to them. This is an interesting contrast to the Abrahamic myths because it contradicts the origin of chaos and darkness. I’ve taken this to suggest that darkness/chaos is the primordial force of creation and destruction, and light/order brings said creation form and function, then sets out to preserve it. In fact, light/order came from darkness/chaos.
However, I’ve read that in Kabbalah, “Demons” (Chaos beings) are the remnants of an older universe that ours was built on. I think this is kinda strange, personally, because of how it fits into my own duality between these opposites. Which by its own nature comes in contrast of the more accepted idea of demons being fallen angels. For me, this fits perfectly. But for traditional religions, its not.
Darkness comes from the primordial chaos but it isn’t the same thing. Darkness is one aspect of the primordial chaos. We see this in Greek, Egypt, Norse, and so forth. The primordial void/chaos gives birth to the primordial darkness, primordial light, so on and so forth. (Which is why I strongly disagree with people here calling it the outer darkness because that’s dumb to me it’s only darkness in the sense there’s no light, sound, etc )
Not that I believe our universe was built on an old one but this does make a very interesting creation story lol.
There is a biblical interpretation called the gap theory, which states that between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 an entire world was created and had fallen into utter ruin and the rest of Genesis is God re-creating the fallen universe. It was created in the 17th and 18th centuries in an attempt to reconcile a literal reading of Scripture with the large age of the earth. I don’t know if it was embraced at all by the Jewish people.
Our sun is a 2nd generation star… meaning, it’s built of the bits of 1st generation stars that exploded.
The Earth itself couldn’t have existed if those 1st stars had not died, because the heavy elements in it were created in the center of those stars in the first place.
So this view makes sense to me.
The fallen angels thing doesn’t make any sense to me because it’s basically religious politics that’s very recent. A few thousand years is nothing in the lifetime of the universe.
I an currently going deep into Kabbalah. There are many things that really make your head spin within all these paradigms.
You may know numerology (gematria) has too much weight when reading kabbalistic texts. Well, the Torah, starts with the words Bereshit… The very first letter of is Bet of Bereshit, and is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (And the Torah ends with the letter Tav which is the last letter of the alphabet).
Given the importance the Hebrew letters have, shouldn´t the Torah start with the letter Aleph?(the first letter of the alphabet).
The reason is what you just explained above.
Don´t dig too much into Kabbalah (at least not the one based on Judaism). I’m in it and I just cannot see how far this rabbit hole goes…