The Songlines, Ovid 's Metamorphoses, And The Book Of Genesis

Did you know that religious texts are some of our most important documents in history serving as an idea of past. And two famous texts are The first chapter of Genesis and “Creation of Hymn”. These two documents are very similar than they are different, even though they are from different origins. The style, narration, and tone are very different in both texts, but there is a couple of things that they are in common. The idea of emptiness, the description and establishment of darkness, the setting of water, and the origin life.

The first creation story is found in Genesis 1-2:4 and it explains how God created the world from a void of darkness in six days of work. On day one God made the heavens. On day two God made the sky. On day three God made land and sea. On day four God created time. On day five God made marine creatures. One

One of the fundamental questions that religions seek to answer is that of origin. How was man put on earth? Why and from what was he created? Who created him? What does his creation imply about the status of human beings? Some or all of these questions are answered by a religion’s creation stories. Every religion’s creation myths attempt to give solutions to problems present to that religious society. Because of this, each religion may have one or more creation stories, each of those different from one another in the questions they ask and the answers they give.

Indigenous people are dependant on their knowledge and understanding for the survival of their land. They needed to know the seasons and when and where the various types of food are available. The land needs to be protected to ensure the survival of the land. They do this by passing on knowledge of the land and its creation through stories, songs, ceremonies, dances and art. The closest English word for this knowledge of the land and its creation is the Dreaming. The Dreaming is a unifying characteristic of all Indigenous culture, but each group within Australia had its own particular Dreaming. The Dreaming of a group explained how features of their world came to be; the dreaming explained the sacred sites and their importance. It also set out the rules of how people should behave, particularly towards the land. The Dreaming gave meaning and direction to the lives of each Indigenous group, and continues to do so.

The Dreaming is communicated through songs, stories and rituals, in which is explains how the “creator ancestors shaped the land and brought it to life” (Gammage, 2011, p. 1419). All of life, from religion, geography, life and more, are explained and connected to the Aboriginal people’s spirituality, land and family through this form of communication. The Dreamtime “shapes the Aboriginal people’s view of the universe and themselves” (Wierzbicka & Goddard, 2015, p. 43). The passing on of the Dreaming stories from one generation to the next was a “most important aspect of education” (Edwards, 1998, p. 83) and is seen as the fundamental reality. Edwards stated that through ritual, humans are able to “enter into a direct relationship with

The Drama of Scripture written by Bartholomew and Goheen takes the reader on a journey through the entire Bible in six short “acts.” The first Act discusses creation and the establishment of God’s Kingdom. In the beginning was complete darkness. Then, God created light and divided the heavens and the earth. He then split the waters and the seas, creating dry ground on which the rest of creation could walk. He proceeded to make plants and flowers and the sun, moon, and stars. He created days and seasons and animals of all shapes and sizes. And then, to add the finishing touch, God created men and women, male and female, He created them. The book states that “the Genesis story is given so that we might have a true understanding of the world in which we live, its divine author, and our own place in it” (Bartholomew, 29). Genesis 1-3, the story of Creation, is prevalent because it introduces the author of creation, humanity, and the creation upon which humanity’s drama unfolds.

Creation myths have been present in all cultures of the world, and while these stories reflect very different credences of engenderment, they additionally possess many kindred attributes as well. The myths has its own way of explicating the unknown and answering the fundamental questions. Each culture from around the world has developed notions and cosmogony that avail them to understand the question: where did we emanate from? Some have kindred characteristics like a higher potency, but all are individually unique when describing the story of engenderment. These myths are centered on engenderment; how the earth was engendered, how the empyrean, land or the sea was engendered, and how humans and animals were engendered.

water (as humans know it) seems to form at one instant when "God, or kindlier

In Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses, he uses many transformations of humanoids to explain the existence of many natural entities such as animals, plants, rivers, and so forth. Ovid uses the Roman gods to be the active agents in many of the metamorphoses, although some of them are caused simply by the will of the being. In the Melville translation of Metamorphoses, the stories "The Sun in Love" (book IV, ln226-284) and "Hyacinth" (book X, ln170-239) have occurrences of both agencies of transformation of people into plants. Apollo is the catalyst that causes the metamorphoses in each of the stories. The metamorphoses involved support the concepts of the "Great Chain of Being" and the

Ovid’s interpretation of the creation myth, begins the same way the Greek creation myth begins, with only chaos. A god or entity forms and orders the chaos into different elements of the earth. Here the world, or the universe itself is undergoing a metamorphosis, but Ovid implies through his works that the universe never truly moved beyond the essential chaos that predated the universe. In Book V of the Metamorphoses, Ovid uses the significance and the quantity of the transformations to demonstrate the idea of everything is operating in a state of constant flux. He then, uses the order of the stories, to develop his ideas about a hierarchical pattern of existence.

Ovid’s Diffusion of Responsibility in the Tale of Arachne Ovid's Metamorphoses greatly revolve around the physical aspects of the word metamorphoses, such as the gods and goddesses transforming themselves into various animals or transforming humans into animals or inanimate objects. The transformations, particularly on the part of male gods, is done to fool mortal or semi-divine women and fool them into lowering their defenses so as to sexually violate them. Most of these many different metamorphoses are visually depicted by Arachne in her tapestries in her challenge to Minerva, the Greco-Roman goddess assigned to the art of weaving; the way in which Ovid chooses to portray the challenge, and describe Arachne's art, allows him to indirectly

In one word, the author Ovid describes the overall content and theme of his poem with the word “Metamorphoses” in the title. Some relative synonyms of this word among others are; altar, change, mutate, develop, and reshape (metamorphose). But Ovid goes further to describe the theme within the first two lines of the poem.

Ovid’s change takes place when he abandons the masterful but ironically detached attitude towards life and language that he had acquired in Rome. In Tomis, the poet is challenged and forced to question his life and poetry. Recognising the pain of the separateness of name and thing, he is struck by the ‘amorous experience’ of the will to knowledge. Ovid is becoming acquainted with the Gaetic language and is, at the same time, fascinated by it: ‘I now understand these people’s speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving’ (In Imaginary Life, p. 65). Ovid believes he could even compose poetry in Gaetic. He certainly did, as he stated in his Epistulae ex Ponto. But here, Malouf’s fiction departs from Ovid’s biographical notes in Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Having broken the period of mourning for the loss of Latin, Ovid is ready to embrace his new linguistic

In Ovid’s book Metamorphoses, transformations have usually taken place as penalties inflicted by gods for sacrilegious or villainous conduct. Since the author portrays gods to be moral arbitrators, one may consider the purpose of recounting these stories to be admonishing people against blasphemies. However, unlike many epic poets whose works usually show great respect to the divinities, Ovid, holding a slightly disrespectful attitude towards the gods, boldly characterizes the deities as flawed as he suggests two destined qualities of irrationality and hypocrisy. Throughout the book, uncontainable lust leads gods to commit aggressive sexual assaults, and morbid jealousy of goddesses results in unjustified vengeance. Specifically, the flaw of gods can be perceived in Lycaon in Book I (12). In the story, enraged by Lycaon, Jove convoked the gods and announced that he “shall destroy the mortal’s race” to “lest the untainted beings on the earth become infected” and “ensure their (half-gods’ and rustic deities’) safety on the lands.” The corruption of gods insinuates a subtle similarity between them and human, challenging the conventional belief that humanity is never comparable with divinity.

The transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses serve several purposes. The most common meaning of the transformations is to punish or to protect. Ovid distinguishes among purposes through his word choice. In the myths of Metamorphoses, Ovid’s uses the descriptions of transformations in “Daphne,” “Arachne,” and “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela,” and the character’s new form to imply the purpose of the transformations.