Link to read Epic of Gilgamesh: http://www.civ.strangegirl.com/fullgilgamesh.html
Link to read Genesis l-lll: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201-3&version=NIV
Link to watch Popol Vuh: https://youtu.be/vOEQNo5m4rg
Background information:
A creation myth is a symbolic story of how something we may not completely understand, such as creation, or the world, or death, came to be; they speak to deeply meaningful questions held by the society that shares them, revealing their central worldview and the framework for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context.
All creation myths are in one sense etiological because they attempt to explain how the world was formed and where humanity came from. While the term myth is often thought to refer to false or fanciful stories, creation myths are by definition those stories which a culture accepts as both a true and foundational account of their human identity. Ethnologists and anthropologists who study these myths point out that in the modern context theologians try to discern humanitys meaning from revealed truths and scientists investigate cosmology with the tools of empiricism and rationality, but creation myths define human reality in very different terms.
Charles H. Long writes, The beings referred to in the myth gods, animals, plants are forms of power grasped existentially. The myths should not be understood as attempts to work out a rational explanation of deity. While creation myths are not literal explications, they serve to define an orientation of humanity in the world in terms of a birth story. They are the basis of a worldview that reaffirms and guides how people relate to both the spiritual and natural world as well as to eac
h other.
The creation myth acts as a cornerstone for distinguishing primary reality from relative reality, the origin and nature of being from non-being. In this sense, they serve as a philosophy of life but one expressed and conveyed through symbols rather than systematic reason. Creation myths also help to orient human beings in the world, giving them a sense of their place in the world and the regard that they must have for humans and nature.
Myths have themes. They are stories dealing with specific subjects, the roots of which have been described above. But stories also have characters, and in the case of myths, they often represent much more than a single person doing this or that at a whim or from some basic human need. They are not just types, but archetypes, a term from Ancient Greece, signifying what we would call a prototype, a model on which other things are based.
The use of the term archetype for myth and drama was made popular by the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, who presented his application of it in 1919. He found patterns in folklore, myth, and art, from which he extracted several symbolical types, characters carrying certain meanings, which could be explained as different aspects of the human mentality.
He claimed that these archetypes are the same throughout history and in every culture, almost as if included in the human genome. By studying the archetypes and their meanings, we can learn to understand ourselves. The patterns he found might instead have been those of characters and roles necessary in drama, with which mankind has been occupied for thousands of years. Some of the archetypes are easily recognized from the recurring characters in drama history: the king, the mother, the sage, the hero, the villain, and so on.