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The following is a transcription of ‘A History of Creationism - Ancient Religions Month’, an online video by a popular educational youtuber that goes by the name Cyn Sims.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to Cyn Shows, the web series where I, your host Cyn Sims, educate the viewers on a new topic every week. This month’s theme; Ancient Religions!
As always, we are halfway through the month and that means the poll for next month’s theme is published and ready for Spirit level members! As always, keep in mind that although you can suggest themes I will veto anything to do with politics or modern religions.
Now, today's topic kind of toes the line on that no modern religion rule, but I researched the topic and made the judgment that it should be fine. If I was wrong and ended up offending anyone, I'm sorry, it was not my intention. That said, the topic of today's video is Creationism!
Creationism was a religion in the Hoenn region that never really left its shores and has mostly died out. I say mostly because many of its traditions and practices are preserved in the culture of the local peoples. This has a few main reasons according to the research I did, and the main ones seem to be as much about staying in contact with their roots as because it’s practical. But I’ll get back to that later.
Creationism is most characterized by the founding belief that all things were created by insanely strong Pokémon. This belief was likely rooted in observation, ancient Hoennian peoples observing as local Pokémon terraformed the land to their specifications, as they do. For example; Tropius and Treecko herds planting and tending to forests, Swampert creating large ponds or mud pits to live in, Flygon expanding or creating deserts for territory, even Absol 'creating' misfortune. These observations were then applied to further things. What created the storm? The river? The snow?
All the way to the logical extreme; the land, the sea, the sky.
The story goes that in the beginning the planet was a barren place with no features or life and a thick layer of mud covering everything. It floated in a void, periodically baked into clay by the light of the sun before cooling and cracking back into mud under the moon.
In the molten core of this planet was born Groudon, the primordial earth. It was a colossal being, the size of a mountain, and as it broke through the surface of the planet it erupted out of the first volcano.
Groudon disliked the cold mud of its planet, and preferred the baked clay of the day much more. Alas, the clay could not support its weight and wherever it stepped it would fall through to the mud again. To stop this it pulled the solid earth from beneath the muck and to the surface, creating mountains and islands and continents. The mud on this land dried and stayed dry, and Groudon was content as it wandered and made more land.
However, these new features meant that the planet was no longer flat, it had peaks and valleys, heights and depths. And as we all know, water flows down. It flowed down and down away from the mud and land, and into the canyons and chasms made as a side effect of the mountains. And in these abyssal depths was born Kyogre, the primordial sea.
Kyogre was a being of matching size to Groudon, but made from and for water. It found itself cramped in even the abyssal depths it was born from, so its first action was to bring into being a great flood, to fill the drained planet with great oceans.
Groudon noticed this, of course. It was infuriated when the cold of the water returned after so much time dry, and in fury caused harsh sunlight to cover the land, drying anything it landed upon. Kyogre in turn was infuriated by this.
The two searched the planet for the source of the infuriating phenomenon, and upon first sight of each other started a cataclysmic battle. The mountains and land cracked and sank into muck, the seas boiled away, and in the end it was a draw. The two, drained and battered, retreated back to whence they came.
The planet once more appeared lifeless, though no longer barren. Patches of clear sea around deep pits and occasional mountain ranges and volcanoes broke the monotony of the endless mud fields. It is to this planet that a green meteor fell, landing and cratering the mud fields before being cradled in their embrace.
But the meteor was an egg, and in the next year it hatched, bringing forth both Rayquaza and the sky. Unlike the others, Rayquaza was born young instead of fully sized, and so too was the sky only a thin layer of air, but it grew and so did the sky, thickening with time.
For a hundred years Groudon and Kyogre slept and recovered, and for a hundred years Rayquaza grew until he was equal and greater than either Groudon or Kyogre. When primordial earth and sea awoke, healed and rested, they emerged from the depth of the earth and sea and discovered the new sky, but it was nowhere near as heinous as they found the other and so it was ignored.
So too did Rayquaza, far in the sky, barely notice and ignore the earth shifting and rising, the seas filling and mud draining away. When Kyogre called forth a flood once more and a great storm came with it, Rayquaza only found it convenient for his drink to come to him. When Groudon called forth harsh sunlight and sent water evaporating into the new sky, Rayquaza enjoyed the warmth.
But the clash of Groudon and Kyogre was titanic and cacophonous, and Rayquaza’s attention was drawn. At first it only watched, but it had grown used to the silence of the sky, only the wind to be heard, and eventually it approached. With a great swell of energy it struck both Groudon and Kyogre down, forcing them to retreat, as it would do for all further clashes.
That was one of Creationism's founding tales, kind of a creation myth and explanation for why they worship these three in particular. There are a couple other big tales in Creationism, like the creation of the stars and the local Regi legend. For anyone new here, I’ve spoken about the Regi’s before, both as part of a religious standpoint and a scientific question, so you can check out those after, link in the description.
Creationism itself stands out for a couple of reasons among the ancient world. All religions have their creation myths of course, but it isn’t the myths that stand out most in this religion, it’s the practices.
So to start with, Creationism ranks as one of the least spiritual religions in the world. It’s all about the material world, you know. They didn’t really concern themselves with concepts like souls and whatnot, in fact ancient Hoenn is thought by some anthropologists to have the lowest concentration of magic/psychic/dark/fairy users of the ancient world.
What they did have was an early form of natural sciences integrated into their religion. They fine tuned their control over Hoenn in the form of understanding how and why something, usually Pokémon, did stuff. Now this has pros and cons, like everything else.
Pro, this firm understanding of Pokémon led to a great many excellent trainers, and is considered one of the largest reasons they came out of the colonial period with only a couple of new cities and an influx of people
Con, they need evidence to believe something, in general, and a couple centuries without seeing their gods caused many to have some kind of crisis of faith. This was only exacerbated when they retook control of the various ‘beachhead’ attempts by others to colonize and got an influx of new ideas and points of view.
Pro, as one of the few regions without a natural heal-main Pokémon, like Chansey or Audino, this let them develop a relatively advanced level of medicine for the times, even using surgery about three decades before anyone else.
Con, this firm focus on the material world led to them nearly completely missing the idea of energetics, the study of type energy, and even types in general. Only outside collaboration brought those to Hoenn, for all they were very advanced in other fields. In fact, Hoenn is where the taxidermic categorization system stemmed from, it’s what they used before types.
Anyway, this early form of natural sciences can most commonly be seen today in the Hoenn region in the form of the many shrines and altars that can be found throughout. They were dedicated to their gods of course, Groudon’s temple on Mt. Chimney is an amazing sight I recommend any tourist check out, but uniquely they were also dedicated to local Pokémon populations.
Because, like I said, the origin of their beliefs was found in observations of local Pokémon terraforming the land. The ancient peoples of Hoenn found that their offerings were much more likely to cause the result they wanted when offered to a local Pokémon instead of a god. I guess they assumed god's needed better offerings to bother, which, fair, I guess. If you're a god the size of a mountain a platter of oran berries won't quite sate your hunger, will it?
So, they would build shrines and altars near areas where particularly powerful Pokémon were known to nest, or where large amounts of particularly useful species hung out. And those Pokémon quickly learned that certain behaviors led to more free food, quickly forming symbiotic relationships, some of which have lasted to modern times.
This is what I was talking about earlier when I said it was kept up for practical reasons. As a rule, Hoenn trainers tend to go for quality over quantity, having small but very well trained teams, as any fans of competitive battling have probably noticed. And while this has many upsides, especially in the aforementioned competitive battling scene, when it comes to large government projects or emergencies that require large amounts of Pokémon aid the Hoenn people find that they can’t really rely on just the aid of trainers, they simply most likely don’t have enough Pokémon with necessary skills handy.
As a result, it is still a popular local practice to ask wild Pokémon for aid in return for 'offerings'. For example, a landslide might block a road leading out of a remote fishing village, which naturally contains mostly water type specialists. Instead of waiting for Ace trainers or rangers, they would instead put an offering on a shrine to the native Aron line, steel types who spend their time burrowing, before leading them to the landslide and having them do the bulk of the work.
A larger and more well known example is Operation Groudon(named after the legendary god), a civil project begun near the end of the colonial period. After facing and forcing back half a dozen colonizing attempts, some more forceful and damaging than others, the Hoenian government of the time came up with an idea. One of the major issues the natives had in stopping these attempts was the large amount of easily reached coastal area, which took large amounts of manpower to keep watch over.
Instead of trying to limit the amount of coastline, which raised environmental concerns, or trying to increase population, which is both slow and taxes resources, the plan was to create a ring of man made islands and reefs around the Hoenn mainland, leaving only a few viable approaches by any significant naval force. The islands would have forts or watchtowers and the reefs would be designed to be appealing to Pokémon, as well as too shallow for any large ships to sail through. The project was accomplished primarily through use of the wild Corsola, who worked in tandem with trained Barboach, Whiscash, and Swapert to form the bases of the new land masses.
Afterwards several wild species known for building their own habitats were transplanted into the area to naturally form what is now called the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is still considered one of the great wonders of the modern world as well as the largest known example of ecological engineering to date.
The other, and possibly more fascinating reason I consider Creationism unique is that it is one of the few religions around the world that have a confirmed legend. While Groudon and Kyogre remain in the realms of myth, Rayquaza has been scientifically confirmed to exist. Yes, you heard me, the sky god is real.
The actual Rayquaza seems to be a unique existence, that is, there is only one of them. They spend almost the entirety of their time in the far exosphere, on the very edge of earth's gravity and atmosphere, where it has been observed eating meteorites and asteroids, which has led to speculation that it may be a rock type. On very rare occasions it has been observed making steep dives back into the atmosphere proper, though the reasons for this behavior have not been confirmed. They are actually one of those legends that became independently worshiped in different religions around the world, though that is not the current focus.
It is likely during one of these dives that the people of Hoenn became aware of its existence and wove it into Creationism. The primary temple of Rayquaza in Creationism is Sky Pillar, a combined archeological and heritage site that only select people are allowed to enter, including the remains of the Draconid tribe and high level Ace Trainers and Rangers. It is 50 floors tall and according to my research contains an altar on top called Dragonhark Altar that can supposedly be used to ask Rayquaza for help, though whether that is truth or myth I can only speculate.
On that topic, Creationism, as you might have figured out, is a religion of many altars and shrines. In modern Hoenn it is said that there is no road or settlement without some form of dedication to local Pokémon, but some are grander and more important than others. I said some earlier, The Temple of Groudon which resides near the halfway point on the old path from Lavaridge to Mt .Chimneys caldera, Spear Pillar is located on an island to the north-east of Pacifidlog Town that is considered a reserve. Other notable locations include the Cave of Origin, by Sootopolis, where life is said to have begun and its counterpart Mt. Pyre, south-west of Lilycove City, a mountain sized graveyard where life is said to end. Creepy! The primary temple to Kyogre was supposedly an 'island guided by the tide' which has been lost to time but scholars believe to have been a boat the size of a town or city and lead by a 'prince of the sea'. Not much is known for sure though.
Back to the religion itself, modern Creationists consider it less of a religion and more of a philosophy, one that is even spreading beyond Hoenn's borders. The philosophy in question entreats people to live respectfully of both nature and Pokémon, specifically in the protection and befriending of wild Pokémon. Notable proponents of this philosophy include Prof. Columbo Birch, Celebrity Mikuri Wallace, and Champion Steven Stone.
That’s all for this week's episode of Cyn Shows! As always, if you enjoyed the video like and subscribe for more. This is Cyn Sims, signing off.”