Myth and Time
Many mythologies begin in immemorial times, with the appearance of an awareness of the existence of a creator god, such as the Egyptian Ra (see mitologia_egipcia). Ra himself is described as the consciousness of a divine being present in all things, Nebertcher, the lord without limits.
Mythological time implies a time outside of time, which moves in a cyclical fashion, meaning that history repeats itself over and over again. It is a specific event that sets it in motion, as in Egypt, the song of the Bennu bird upon alighting on the primordial earth (see mitologia_egipcia). The conclusion will come at the moment when the heaven of creation begins anew.
The mythology of the Maya and the Aztecs, like that of North American natives such as the Navajo (see mitología_americana), holds that the world in which we live is the fifth. Indeed, for the Navajo, the first four worlds lay beneath the present one… humanity thus emerged through a matter of “emergence.” For the Aztecs, in earlier creations there were four suns before the one we see today; the world of the sun Nahhui Ollin is driven across the firmament by the breath of the god Quetzacoalt.
The Finitude of Time
The Maya believed that the cycle of creation had begun on 12 August 3114 BC. They did indeed make predictions about the future reaching as far as AD 4772; however, they did not believe that time would continue forever.
"All the moons,
all the years,
all the days,
all the winds,
reach their culmination
and are extinguished."
Chilam Balam (sacred book of the Maya)
Even the dualist philosophy of Mazdaism (see mitologia_irani), with its gods of good and evil in opposition, holds that the world had its origin when the god of eternal time, Zurvan, gave birth to the twin gods. And the human notion of time (the limited time of creation) is merely a trick of Ahura Mazda to curtail the power of Ahriman.
At the end of time, all will be purified and, as in Norse mythology, an entirely new creation will arise.