I love skulls and anything Dia De Los Muertos-related, so today at work I was wearing a hair clip with flowers and a skull in the middle. A resident walked up to me and told me that she thought it looked really cool (mind you, the nursing home in which I work is a Lutheran-based establishment) and I was surprised.
I told her this, and I explained that I love Dio De Los Muertos. She did too, and she mentioned that many cultures have similar celebrations. I mentioned the similarities between Pandora's Box and The Garden of Eden, and she said that she was curious as to what the central story from which all of these stories stemmed was.
After some light research, I found that before the stories of Adam and Eve and Pandora (the latter coming about a century after the former) there was the Babylonian tale of Marduk creating the earth from the spoils of a battle between gods. In this story, when the world began there existed only the god of fresh water, the god of oceans, and the god of the mists. The earth did not yet exist. Sound familiar?
From these gods came many other gods, and the original gods became tired of the noise caused by the many other gods--one plotted to kill them all. One of the original god's descendants Ea learned of this plot and slew the murderous original, and fathered a beast with four eyes and four ears named Marduk. Marduk then created the earth from the remains of other gods after a glorious battle, and created humans from the clay of the earth.
It seems apparent that few (though certainly not all) elements in the biblical creation story were borrowed from Babylonian mythology. I have to say, the Babylonians seemed way more metal.
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