Eurynome (Oceanid) - Creation Myth

Creation Myth

A few important sources relate a creation myth. The main source is Apollonius of Rhodes, who is quoted in the article on Ophion. The details are not repeated here.

Robert Graves, one of the chief scholars interested in the myth, saw in this passage a possible Pelasgian creation myth. Putting together what was then beginning to be known of Neolithic Greece and its connections to the orient, he hypothesized that Eurynome originally was another manifestation of the Neolithic mother goddess.

The Ophion article takes a skeptical approach on the grounds that he read too much into the sources. As he did not rely only on the sources, this article presents some of Graves’ wider arguments:

• The egg and the snake. The rebirth of the world from an egg and the use of the snake as a symbol of regenerative power is a strong theme of what Marija Gimbutas called “the language of the goddess”; that is, the common (but undeciphered) writing system attested on Neolithic pottery of much of Europe, including the Balkans. In another myth, the Pelasgians descend from the teeth of Ophion, which ostensibly means “snake.”
• As the Neolithics either entered the Balkans from the eastern Mediterranean region or kept close ties with the Natufians there, Graves makes comparisons with and draws parallels to mythic elements among cultures to which the Natufians descended; that is, the entire Middle East. For example, he compares her to Sumerian Iahu, “exalted dove”, which he believed became the name of Jehovah.
• Many if not most of the names of Greek mythology are believed to have come from pre-Greek elements. For example, the Proto-Indo-Europeans had no word for ocean or travel upon it. Okeanos is a pre-Greek word, as are Olympos, Tethys and Titan.
• The antiquity of Eurynome and Ophion are sufficiently attested in the sources to warrant a presumption that they descend from prehistoric times. Only the prefix, Eury-, appears in the most ancient known Greek, but that is sufficient to demonstrate the remoteness of the names in time from later poetic mythologizers such as Apollonius.

Graves’ views attract more attention as time goes by, perhaps because of increasing knowledge about the Neolithic. At the present time, however, they are still regarded as mainly speculation. Concerning prehistoric Europe, archaeology and speculation are all we have at the moment. Even if some of Graves’ detail can be shown to be wrong, no proof exists that his overall views, based on the synthesis of many elements, are either true or untrue.