It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.
In another verse in the same poem the creator is called the carpenter. One of the most familiar forms for us, because in our medieval art he is generally represented in this way, is the idea of the Godhead constructing or fashioning the world as a carpenter builds a house.
Also in the Rigveda, in 10.81, is the verse:
“Tell us from what matter, from which tree, it was that the God fashioned heaven and earth so that they remained firm and young forever and did not fall apart.”
The Sanskrit word for wood is the same as the Greek word hyle, which means both wood and matter, including the wood used for building.
The Latin word for matter is also the same, namely materia, which also means the building material, wood as building material, the wood which is already cut and prepared for use in building.
So in our languages the first matter, the material from which the world was fashioned from Indo-Germanic time onward, has been the carpenter’s material, wood.
Very often, therefore, in medieval art God is represented as a geometer with a circle in his hand.
He sits on his throne above the world, making a plan like an architect for building a house, and in that way he fashions, or creates, the world.
The God who fashions the world as a dead object is mostly found in civilizations which have a rather developed technical aspect.
Also there is a tendency in these pictures of the Deus faber to use the idea of creating the world like a carpenter or smith as a simile only, and not to take it as concretely as other creation myths do.
I think we can conclude from that that creation myths where the God appears as a craftsman mirror a stage in which consciousness has already to a certain extent developed as an independent power apart from the unconscious.
Thus in such pictures the Godhead is no longer immanent in the material world, but exists outside it and treats the world as his object, as a craftsman uses his material.
To us this seems so self-evident because our whole tradition has trained us to think always of God as being outside the world and shaping its dead material in some form.
But upon making a general survey of creation myths, we see that this type of God mirrors a rare and specific situation; it mirrors a state where consciousness has already markedly withdrawn, as an independent entity, out of the unconscious and therefore can turn toward the rest of the material as if it were its dead object.
It also already shows a definite separation between subject and object; God is the subject of the creation and the world, and its material is the dead objects with which he deals.
Naturally we Our whole tradition has trained us to think always of God as being outside the world and shaping its dead material in some form.
But upon making a general survey of creation myths, we see that this type of God mirrors a rare and specific situation; it mirrors a state where consciousness has already markedly withdrawn, as an independent entity, out of the unconscious and therefore can turn toward the rest of the material as if it were its dead object.
It also already shows a definite separation between subject and object; God is the subject of the creation and the world, and its material is the dead objects with which he deals.
Naturally we must correct this viewpoint by putting it into its right context, namely, that the craftsman in primitive societies never imagined himself to be doing the work himself.
Nowadays if you watch a carpenter or a smith, he is in a position to feel himself as a human being with independent consciousness, who has acquired from his teacher a traditional skill with which he handles dead material.
He feels that his skill is a man-made possession, which he owns.
If we look at the folklore and mythology of the different crafts in more primitive societies, we see that they have a much more adequate view of it.
They all still have tales which show that; man never invented any craft or skill, but that it was revealed to him, that it is the Gods who produced the knowledge which man now uses if he does anything practical.
There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that the bow and arrow were not man’s invention, but an ancestor God turned himself into a bow and his wife became the bowstring, for she constantly has her hands around his neck, as the bowstring embraces the bow.
So the couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as bow and bowstring, and from that the man understood how to construct a bow.
The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in the earth.
So man, like an ape, only copied, but did not invent, the bow and arrow.
And so the smiths originally, or so it seems from Eliade’s rather plausible argument, did not feel that they had invented metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of understanding how God made the world.
Always at bottom there is a divine revelation, a divine act, and man has only had the bright idea of copying it.
That is how the crafts all came into existence and is why they all have a mystical background.
In primitive civilizations one is still aware of it, and this accounts for the fact that generally they are better craftsmen than we who have lost this awareness.
If we think that every craft, whether carpenter’s or smith’s or weaver’s, was a divine revelation, then we understand better the mystical process which certain creation myths characterize as God creating the world like a craftsman.
By creating the world through such a craft he manifests a secret of his own mysterious skill.
In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity.
The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity.
It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths, Page 140 – 141
