How did Rig Veda passages serve as a creation myths?

Answer 1

Paul William Robert has written: "The Bible begins with the Creation. Before the Creation, however, there was the Creator, but does even He know what was there before He existed ? Long before such philosophical questions occurred to other historical peoples, Vedism posited the existence of something more ultimate than the one God. Whatever must have created Him. That is presuming the absolute and basic reality. Or is it?
"Nor aught nor naught existed; you bright sky
Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above;
What covered all? What sheltered? What concealed?
Was it the waters' fathomless abyss?
There was no light of night, no light of day,
The only One breathed breathless in itself,
Other than it there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound, an ocean without light;....



This is mysticism that is simultaneously metalogic and the kind of thing those bardic sages living some twenty-five thousand years ago thought about a great deal, according to Hindu tradition. The Vedas are the very first compositions mankind produced dating back at least twenty thousand years. Most orthodox historians and anthropologists strongly dispute such a view. They confuse writing with civilization and deny meaningful history to any people who did not leave a written record. A rich culture does not necessarily depend on writing, as the Celtic civilization proves. The hymns are the most sophisticated, most profoundly beautiful, and most complete presentations of what Aldous Huxley termed the “perennial philosophy” that is at the core of all religions. In modern academia, of course, there is not supposed to be any “ancient wisdom”.

The Vedas go much further in outlining the nature of reality than any other religious texts still in use. Some Vedic hymns paint the exquisite glories of the natural world: the preternatural beauty of predawn light, its rosy fingers holding the iridescent steel-blue sky; some celebrate the welcome cool of evening the scented breeze of a calm and refreshing night, its basalt dome studded with shimmering pearls and diamonds. Beauty permeates them, a reflection of Truth. The Vedas hold within them enough information to rebuild human civilization from scratch, if necessary. I think someone did believe that might be necessary one day.
The Vedas are the quintessence of classical Hindu philosophy. Thinking with your heart; loving with your mind. All yoga and meditation aim to attain this goal. Anything else is delusion, or worse. And when the heart sees, it sees the unknowable, nameless, formless, limitless, supreme God. He is called the nonexistent because he is eternal, beyond existence. God manifest is the fabric of creation itself. They are one. The heart that learns to think realizes this truth and merges into the eternal oneness. As William Blake put it, “ If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite.”

Answer 2

The real answer is that they didn´t, in the sense we normally mean. Creation Myths are the result, usually, of verbal histories being passed down through inummerable generations until the relavent culture arrived at the written history stage, at which time they were converted into the more chronologically consistent form, and which point they altered much less with the passage of time.

The Vedas were produced so far back, and in written scripts that were handed to the Hindu people by the ´Rishis´. As far as it is possible to determine these texts, rather like the Pyramid Texts of tye Unas pyramid in Egypt, were reproduced from even more super-ancient scripts.

Some historians have suggested that the Pyramid texts were transcribed by scribes that proably had little idea what the meaning of those texts was.In rhe case of the Vedas there is no such phenomenom, the Rishis seemed to be quite aware of what they were passing down to posterity, if there was any doubt it was whether posterity would understand them. Which by and large we don´t as most ´historians´seem to tsake the position of refuting their historical accuracy.