Morgan Freeman: My home is here in Mississippi.
I've lived in many other places.
New York, la, San Francisco, Chicago,
but this place defines me.
June-bug.
Got him when he was four and a half months old,
undernourished, but he had attitude.
Got a great walking gait.
It's the smell of grass in the spring,
the sound of birds.
I just know I'm home.
My parents lived right here on this land and
you can't understand me without understanding where
I was created.
Every religion has a creation story,
so, what do those stories tell us about who we are and
where we came from?
I'm setting out to discover where we began...
Jodi magness: Jerusalem is conceived of as Eden,
as paradise.
Morgan Freeman: To unearth civilization's oldest roots...
Man: This is the Mayan part.
Richard Hansen: This is the Maya Genesis story.
Morgan Freeman: To locate the Genesis of religion itself...
Amy bogaard: People are literally living with ancestors.
Morgan Freeman: And I'll go back to the dawn of time...
Benda paranjape: Hindus do not believe in one creation.
They say that these are cycles of creation.
Morgan Freeman: To discover if science and religion,
can co-exist.
Monsignor sorondo: The big bang is not creation because
we don't know what was before the big bang.
Morgan Freeman: There are billions of us on this planet.
It's hard to believe we all came from one man
E
but we did.
Who were they?
When and where did they live?
Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions trace us
all back to Adam and Eve.
The book of Genesis says they came from a
place called Eden,
near the tigris and euphrates rivers somewhere
in the ancient near east.
No-one has yet found the location of the garden of Eden,
though many have tried, but why do we want to find it?
Well, the reason is interesting.
The garden of Eden doesn't just represent the beginning
of humanity, it is the beginning of our conversation
with god and finding out when and where that took place
would tell us an awful lot about who we are.
So I'm off to Jerusalem.
This is one of the oldest cities in the world.
There's evidence of people living around here for more
than 7,000 years.
Today, it's the religious center of the Jewish world.
It was around here that Genesis was first written down,
about 2,500 years ago.
Archaeologist Jodi magness is taking me to the church of the
holy sepulcher, where there is a little known link
to the garden of Eden.
So this is it, this is the church of the holy sepulcher.
Many christians believe this is the site where Jesus
was crucified and buried, but another ancient tradition
says it's also the burial place of Adam.
Jodi magness: The area that we're walking into here
is underneath the rock of golgotha,
which is the rocky outcrop on which christians believe
Jesus was crucified.
And this is called the chapel of Adam.
There's a tradition which goes way back in christianity
which connects this spot to Adam, the first man.
When Jesus was crucified on top of the rock above us...
Morgan Freeman: Mm-hmm, yeah?
Jodi magness: His blood flowed down through a crack in
the rock and Adam, the first man,
lay buried underneath and when Jesus' blood flowed onto Adam,
Adam was then resurrected.
Morgan Freeman: Almost 1,700 years ago,
when Roman emperor constantine built the church,
he also made a shrine around this crack in the
rock of golgotha, the chapel of Adam.
But doesn't this contradict that section of the Bible that
says that the garden of Eden was located somewhere
near the euphrates and the...
Jodi magness: Tigris.
Morgan Freeman: Tigris?
Jodi magness: Well, the version of the story that
ended up in the book of Genesis seems to place the
garden of Eden somewhere in mesopotamia,
which is the area of modern Iraq.
Morgan Freeman: But how do think tradition...
Jodi magness: Mm-hmm.
Morgan Freeman: Of Adam gets to be here in Jerusalem?
Jodi magness: Well, i think Adam probably does have
a very special connection with Jerusalem.
The garden of Eden, or paradise,
becomes conceptualized as the spot where the presence
of god dwells.
In early judaism, in the time of Jesus,
the presence of god dwelled in the temple,
on the temple mount, and hence Jerusalem was conceived
of as Eden, as paradise.
Morgan Freeman: So you are saying Eden could also
be a metaphor?
Jodi magness: Right, well, yes, of course,
Adam was the first human and in Hebrew the word Adam,
Adam just means man.
Morgan Freeman: Hold up, hold up.
You just said something now, the word just means man.
Jodi magness: Yes.
Morgan Freeman: Adam...
Jodi magness: Yes, also, the name Adam,
if you take off the a and you just leave d-a-m,
in Hebrew, dam, that means blood.
Or if you add an a-h to the end,
adamah, means land.
Morgan Freeman: Land itself into blood.
Jodi magness: Yep.
Morgan Freeman: Ok, all right.
Could the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the
garden also have metaphorical meanings?
Adam and Eve lived in a land of plenty,
but when they ate the fruit of the forbidden tree,
they were cast out and forced to work the land.
In other words, they became the first farmers.
I'm heading to a region where researchers are digging
up some of humanity's oldest farming communities,
in central Turkey.
I'm interested in finding out if the birth of farming
and the birth of belief in god are connected.
Could this have been Eden?
Amy?
Amy bogaard: Hello, come on over.
Morgan Freeman: Archaeologist Amy bogaard has been digging
with a team here at chatalhöyük for two decades.
Amy bogaard: Welcome.
Morgan Freeman: Thank you.
So, chatalhöyük, 9,000 year old settlement.
9,000 years old.
Amy bogaard: Amazing, isn't it?
So at its maximum extent, it's 13 hectares.
That would be like 20 football pitches,
Morgan Freeman: Ok.
Amy bogaard: In extent.
Morgan Freeman: Mm-hmm, right, NFL football pitches
or soccer pitches?
Amy bogaard: I don't know, probably soccer.
Morgan Freeman: Ok, but they're all pretty much
the same size.
Amy bogaard: Yeah, you can see that these houses are
densely crowded together.
There isn't much space between them.
Morgan Freeman: There is no space between them.
Amy bogaard: Yeah.
Morgan Freeman: They had no windows or doors.
Amy bogaard: Every house would have its own
entrance from above.
Morgan Freeman: It would?
Amy bogaard: Yes.
Morgan Freeman: Chatalhöyük was a city with no streets.
The people who lived here walked across town
over the rooftops.
Roofs were also where they worked.
The people of chatalhöyük were some of the world's
first city dwellers,
but I want to know whether they were also some
of the first believers.
Did they think their world was created by a god?
Amy takes me to a house that may hold the answers.
What's the point of that, red rimmed hole that looks
like a very definite, has a definite reason?
Amy bogaard: It's a typical sort of feature
that's found at chatal which is a niche for hiding
things away, like the cash obsidian, you know,
volcanic glass, 'cause it's a valued, you know,
cutting material.
Morgan Freeman: You actually don't find it everywhere.
Amy bogaard: Right.
Morgan Freeman: The most important hiding places
archaeologists have found at chatalhöyük are
beneath the sleeping areas.
Ok, so what are those holes up there?
Amy bogaard: Those are actually burial places,
those are burial pits, where...
Morgan Freeman: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait.
A human being is not gonna fit in there.
A baby, maybe.
Amy bogaard: The way they can fit mature adults in pits
like that is to bind them up very, very, very tightly
in a flexed position and the holes are periodically
reopened and new individuals added through the lifetime
of the house.
Morgan Freeman: Wow.
Amy bogaard: People are buried under the platforms
so that people are literally living with ancestors.
Morgan Freeman: It sounds like this has
some religious content.
Amy bogaard: I think you're right,
and they start to raise questions about what you might
call ritual practice, which seemed to have been crucial
for life in this community.
Morgan Freeman: Could these burials be evidence
of belief in god?
Anthropologist Harvey whitehouse is trying to get
inside the heads of these early city dwellers.
Harvey whitehouse: So this is a pretty authentic mock-up
of what a typical kind of house in chatalhöyük
would have looked like.
These are the kinds of objects that we'd expect to
find in one of those houses.
Over here, we've got examples of wall art.
You know, here we've got bull heads.
We often find these inserted into the walls.
In one case, I've seen them arranged almost like a sort of
protective shield around one of these clean spaces;
and we know that these clean spaces were used
for sleeping on.
Morgan Freeman: So, Harvey, you're an anthropologist...
Harvey whitehouse: Mm-hmm.
Morgan Freeman: So you're more into what people are
mentally into, right?
Harvey whitehouse: Well, my imagination runs riot
in an environment like this because I've seen the
kind of stuff that comes out of the walls and
that they've been taking out of the floors.
We know that there were very interesting rituals
surrounding the burial of human remains,
but those objects would be periodically in
many cases brought out.
What they were doing with them,
we don't really know, but in many cases they were
put back very carefully and replaced.
It's almost as if this isn't just a domestic dwelling,
this is like a kind of living temple.
Morgan Freeman: You used that word, temple.
Harvey whitehouse: Temple.
Well, what is a temple, you know, if not a sort of,
an environment in which the ritual life of a
community is conducted?
And I think that's what is going on in these houses.
Morgan Freeman: Here in chatalhöyük,
there were obviously all kinds of rituals,
particularly burial rituals, but no sign of an organized
religion, so the question remains unanswered for me.
Did religion allow man to live together,
grow food?
Or did civilization give rise to our belief in god?
While in chatalhöyük, i heard about another excavation
just a few hundred miles to the east that may hold
the answer for me.
It's an 11,000 year old site that lies between the tigris
and euphrates rivers, the biblical location of Eden.
Harvey whitehouse: Ok, we're now in enclosure d,
the best preserved of the enclosures that we have here,
so we've had radiocarbon data and they've come back
as 9,400 bc, plus or minus.
Morgan Freeman: It's called göbekli tepe and here I may
find evidence of the very first moments humans
worshipped the divine.
Stone age architects built 20 monumental sectors
here made from large t-shaped pillars.
Archeologist Lee Clare leads the team trying
to decipher its mysteries.
Lee Clare: The two central pillars stand in the middle of
a round oval building and the wall surrounding it,
at regular intervals we see smaller t pillars.
Morgan Freeman: Fearsome animals were carved
into some of the pillars,
but the stones' t shapes may represent the human form.
They could be men or they could be gods.
Lee Clare: If you look closely around the top,
the t is the head and then we have on the side,
the broad side, the arm coming down.
You can see a belt buckle here.
They could be mythological ancestors.
Alternatively, they could be really the first deities,
first gods, that these people were possibly
worshipping in this circular structure.
Morgan Freeman: Lee and most archaeologists believe
these stone circles were used for rituals,
but no-one appears to have actually lived here.
The people of göbekli tepe were roaming hunter gatherers,
not settled farmers, so why did they build a permanent
place to worship tied to one spot?
Lee Clare: It's one of the main questions we ask our self
at this site, so why did they come?
Now, the thing is, at this time the communities were
growing larger and larger and there was more stress on
the local resources and because communities
were growing, there was obviously a risk of conflict.
People have problems keeping track of relationships,
keeping track of networks.
Morgan Freeman: The growing population meant that people
who scarcely knew each other had to work together.
That was a recipe for conflict.
[Grunting and thuds]
The religious rituals at göbekli tepe may have eased
those conflicts.
Possibly for the first time in human history,
people from different groups came together around shared
beliefs and, in those first formative moments of religion,
they may have shared stories about where they all came from,
stories that celebrated a shared past
and drove them together to the future.
Göbekli tepe traces the birth of religious worship
back more than 11,000 years,
long before there were muslims, christians,
Jews, hindus, Buddhists.
People came together to talk, eat, worship.
It could be that the driving force behind our
greatest achievement.
Civilization, was god.
But today, we no longer share one story of creation.
We live in a global society made up of many different
cultures and science has given us a new
perspective on creation.
It even claims to know the ultimate secret of
our cosmic origins.
Can science and religion agree on creation?
Morgan Freeman: The story of our creation has
puzzled me ever since I was a boy.
It began right here,
in a church in greenwood, Mississippi.
♪ ♪
♪ [congregation members singing inaudibly] ♪
Morgan Freeman: I was about their age when it happened.
I remember the minister reading from the
book of Genesis.
Minister: There are 807,361 words in the Bible.
It doesn't take 807,000 words for me
to believe the Bible.
It only takes ten words.
"In the beginning,
[congregation exclaiming].
God created."
Are y'all gonna be with me?
"The heavens and the earth."
Morgan Freeman: But for me,
this beginning was a profound puzzle.
One moment there was nothing, the next everything.
You're looking good.
Man: Trying to make it.
Morgan Freeman: If god created the universe,
who was around to create god?
When I got older, i heard scientists had found
evidence of the big bang.
According to that theory, the entire universe burst out
of a single point in an instant of fiery creation;
and now that science knows so much about our cosmic origins,
what place is there for religious belief
in the beginning?
I want to know about the islamic story of creation,
so I'm going to Cairo...
One of the largest and oldest cities in the
Muslim world.
Islam has deep roots in science.
Muslim astronomers were charting the heavens soon
after the time of Mohammed.
I hadn't noticed that before.
What is it?
Ahmed ragab: This is the minaret of al-Hussein mosque.
Morgan Freeman: Harvard historian of islam Ahmed ragab
is taking me to one of Cairo's spiritual centers,
the al-Hussein mosque.
♪ [Imam singing in foreign language]. ♪
Ahmed ragab: So they start by forming lines all facing mecca
and the lines are all closed.
You shouldn't have any kind of gaps.
Morgan Freeman: Space between?
Ahmed ragab: Yeah.
Morgan Freeman: In other words,
they just go toe to toe.
Ahmed ragab: Mm-hmm.
Morgan Freeman: Right, right.
Muslims come here every day to give thanks to god
for all that he creates.
And afterwards, some head just around the corner
to the two and a half century old El fishawy coffee shop.
Speak to me about the islamic concept of creation.
Ahmed ragab: In islam, the beginning of the story starts
with this massive cloud of smoke,
from which the heaven and earth are pulled from inside
the smoke and then the earth after that gets formed into
what it looks like before the beings are created.
Morgan Freeman: Interestingly, that is very, cosmic.
Ahmed ragab: Right.
Morgan Freeman: You think right away about the clouds of
dust in the cosmos that formed worlds.
Ahmed ragab: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, so this ideas about these
massive clouds and things coming out of them is actually
very powerful in a lot of mythological traditions around
the world and it is part of this islamic
narrative of creation.
Morgan Freeman: In islam, the moment of creation exists
alongside the scientific view of earth's formation.
The same is true for traditions much
older than islam.
Aboriginal people have lived in central Australia
for tens of thousands of years.
They've told the story of this land's creation for as
long as anyone can remember.
Duane hamacher: Oh, this is beautiful.
Warren Williams: My grandfather's family have been
caretakers for this place and now it's gotten
passed down to me.
Morgan Freeman: Warren Williams and the arrernte
people call this place home.
Duane hamacher: This place is so big,
you'd have to see it from space.
You could probably see it on satellite image.
Warren Williams: Well, yeah.
Morgan Freeman: Cultural astronomer Duane hamacher
tries to connect aboriginal creation stories
to modern science.
So Warren is taking him to where his ancestors say
it all began,
a bowl shaped basin called tnorala.
It's traditional for the arrernte to tell their
creation story at night,
when they can see their creators,
the sky guards.
Warren Williams: This sky tonight,
it's gonna be really good tonight.
Duane hamacher: Oh, they're all coming out now.
Warren Williams: Wow.
Morgan Freeman: The story takes place in an era called
the dreaming, when the sky guards lived in the milky way.
Warren Williams: The dreaming is a period of
creation when everything was beginning,
when the ladies were dancing at a ceremony and
one of them had a little baby in her arms.
So she put the baby in a Turner,
like a, it's a wooden cradle, but all
that dancing started vibrating,
shaking the milky way and the Turner fell out,
and it fell to earth and created the crater
that we see now.
Duane hamacher: That's fascinating because,
according to scientists, it was an asteroid or a
comet that hit the ground and what it did,
you know, a massive explosion,
created this big meteorite crater.
Morgan Freeman: Duane wants to know more about the Turner,
or cradle, that Warren and his ancestors see as the
cause of their creation.
Warren Williams: This one here.
Duane hamacher: So you can see the milky way quite clearly
and that looks like that Turner from the front falling
out of the milky way.
Warren Williams: Yeah.
Duane hamacher: In western astronomy,
we call that corona australis.
That constellation means the Southern crown.
But you're right, it looks exactly like a Turner falling
out the milky way.
Warren Williams: It looks like an upturned cradle.
Morgan Freeman: At daybreak, Duane asks Warren to show him
exactly where the star baby landed.
Duane hamacher: Goes right through here?
Warren Williams: Yeah.
Duane hamacher: Check it out.
Morgan Freeman: It's right in the center of the meteor
impact crater geologists called gosses bluff.
Duane hamacher: So this is it?
Warren Williams: Yeah, this is where it began.
Well, the rocks fell down here to the ground and formed this
and the first man got created,
the first woman got created and, like,
now I'm here because of them.
It started here, just fell from the sky at night,
made all this.
Duane hamacher: Science has never really considered some
of these old creation stories to have any validity,
and what we're finding out is that the creation story
from the aboriginal perspective and from the
scientific perspective, here at tnorala,
Warren Williams: Mmm.
Duane hamacher: Are identical, they're exactly the same.
Morgan Freeman: For the arrernte,
life began here and tradition requires a greeting
to the ancestors whenever you enter this sacred space.
Warren Williams: Hey!
[Foreign dialog].
Morgan Freeman: Science can live side by side with
aboriginal and islamic accounts of our origins,
now I'm curious about science and the
judeo-Christian creation story.
So I've come to Rome, where Michelangelo's breathtaking
sistine chapel ceiling depicts the book of Genesis.
In six days, god creates light,
makes the sun and the moon and creates man.
I've come to speak with the pope's chief science
representative, monsignor Marcelo Sanchez sorondo.
Now, you are the chancellor of the pontifical
academy of sciences.
Monsignor sorondo: Exactly.
Morgan Freeman: When did that get started and why?
Monsignor sorondo: In 1603.
Morgan Freeman: 1603?
Monsignor sorondo: And three, yes,
and the leader of the first generation was Galileo and the
idea is to have a new academy to develop the
scientific reason of things.
Morgan Freeman: So we have the two different approaches
to the idea of creation.
There is Genesis and then as the big bang.
Monsignor sorondo: The big bang is not creation exactly
because we don't know what was before the big bang.
Morgan Freeman: My question exactly.
Monsignor sorondo: And for this reason,
creation is nothing to do with the big bang.
The other thing is the idea of the Bible is not a
scientific idea of creation.
Morgan Freeman: In other words,
science can't prove it or disprove it.
Monsignor sorondo: Exactly.
We say in the Bible is the idea of creation,
but in the geological sense of creation,
not the scientific...
Morgan Freeman: Not in scientific.
Monsignor sorondo: Sense of creation.
Morgan Freeman: Thank you, thank you, indeed.
The catholic church no longer sees the book of Genesis
as the literal description of creation.
In fact, the first scientist to propose the big bang,
George lemaître, was a priest and a member of the
pontifical academy of science.
So how exactly does belief in god fit into modern cosmology?
So this incredibly high vaulted ceiling,
it's just like reaching for heaven.
Father tanzella-nitti: Yes, in a certain sense.
This is a representation of heaven.
Morgan Freeman: Oh!
Father tanzella-nitti: Of a theological heaven.
Morgan Freeman: I'm meeting with father giuseppe tanzella-nitti,
a scientist at the Vatican observatory.
I'm very, very fascinated by you.
You are an astronomer and you are a holy man.
Father tanzella-nitti: Yes, my field of study was radio
galaxies, quasars, extra galactic objects and it was
another kind of heaven.
I remember that, when we take a galaxy spectra,
I used to pray during the waiting for the spectra and to
say, "god, I thank you for this marvelous universe
that you gave us."
Morgan Freeman: There must have come at some point a
question for you about the nature of creation.
We think that there's, like, a big schism between the
biblical sense of creation and the other one is the
scientific sense, the big bang, and it's all very different.
Father tanzella-nitti: Creation from a theological
point of view is perfectly compatible with the big bang,
because you need always a first cause.
God the creator is outside space time.
It's before any time, so the act of creation is an
everlasting act because creation is the way in which
god continuously holds the universe.
Morgan Freeman: For giuseppe and others like him,
cosmology not only allows room for divine creation,
it offers new ways to understand god as the master
of space and time.
I like what father giuseppe
says about creation as a continuum,
that it didn't begin and end with the big bang,
that it is god's ongoing activity which
includes evolution.
Think what he was saying is god does not
exist outside space and time.
God is space and time.
The idea that creation is ongoing sounds like a new one,
but it's not.
In the depths of the Guatemalan rainforest,
lost cities reveal the endless creations of
the ancient Maya.
Morgan Freeman: What if there was not one moment
of creation, but many?
I'm heading out to explore the remains of the
ancient Mayan empire...
Richard Hansen: There's a little swampy grounds
where we're going.
Morgan Freeman: Where a new discovery sheds light
on their Genesis story.
Few roads cut through the dense jungle of northern
guateala today, but archaeologist Richard Hansen
tells me that 2,000 years ago this was one of the
great cities of the world.
Richard Hansen: We like to think of Los Angeles and
New York as being a modern city,
but these guys had the same perspective of their own cities.
Morgan Freeman: Right.
They had water delivery systems,
they had freeways...
Richard Hansen: Oh yeah, very first freeway system
in the world.
Welcome to El mirador.
This pyramid is one of the largest structures in the
world in terms of volume.
It's more than a half a mile long at the base.
Morgan Freeman: At a site called El mirador,
Richard found the remains of an ancient city the Maya
knew as the snake kingdom.
It's such a rich archaeological site,
he set up a permanent camp in the jungle to explore it.
Richard Hansen: This is the laboratory.
This is our doctor.
If you ever get in a problem,
he can fix you right there.
Morgan Freeman: Really?
Richard Hansen: He's an outstanding doctor.
Morgan Freeman: I got this.
[Foreign dialogue].
Miguel: Miguel.
Morgan Freeman: Miguel?
Morgan.
Miguel: Morgan Freeman, si.
Man: Nice to meet you.
Morgan Freeman: Yeah, it was nice to meet me, wasn't it?
Man: It was, it was very nice to meet you.
[Foreign dialogue].
Morgan Freeman: Set?
Richard Hansen: Ok, let's do it.
Morgan Freeman: Richard is taking me to see something
he's only just uncovered.
Richard Hansen: Ok, this is one of the most interesting
excavations we have right now.
Morgan Freeman: Oh my goodness!
Richard Hansen: This is art that was carved in stucco
hundreds of years before Christ and it has incredible
scenes showing the entire pantheon of
the Mayan religion.
Morgan Freeman: So what we're talking about is,
this is the actual story of creation here.
This is the Mayan Bible.
Richard Hansen: This is the Maya Genesis story with all
the deities that are needed to tell the story.
Morgan Freeman: Yeah, this is unbelievable.
I mean, if you just think about the fact that it wasn't
done in the 15th century or the 16th century.
It was done 2,000 years ago at least.
This is the oldest version of the Maya's sacred story of
creation that's ever been found.
The focus is on two swimmers carrying a severed head.
Richard Hansen: It's this head right here that gave us
the clue who this might be at the first place.
We think this is hunahpu.
This is father of the hero twins that serves
the whole process of creation.
Priestess: Gracias a hau.
Gracias al corazon del cielo.
Gracias al corazon de la tierra,
gracias al corazon del agua.
Morgan Freeman: Fragments of this creation story
survive even to this day in a religious ritual in
which I am privileged to take part.
Ritual leader: Gracias, al corazon de fuego.
Morgan Freeman: The ritual recalls the saga of the corn
god being tricked into going down to the underworld,
where he's decapitated.
His sons, known as the hero twins,
set off to rescue him but they can only get to
the underworld by being burned to ash.
Richard Hansen: The ash represents the hero twins.
She'll mix up the corn with the ashes and that goes
into the water.
Morgan Freeman: As their ash sinks into the
subterranean waters, the hero twins regenerate.
They return to earth with the corn god's head and
plant him in the ground.
It is from this corn that the first Maya
people are made.
Richard Hansen: Now the hero twins are in the river,
so this is what they're gonna be serving and passing around.
In a sense, we all become a part of the hero twins'
story by doing this.
♪ ♪
Morgan Freeman: We don't perform rituals to celebrate
Adam and Eve, but the hero twins were crucial
to Mayan culture.
Their story of death and rebirth was tied to the growth
of their staple crop, corn, an act of creation that
the Maya depended on every year.
And, Richard tells me, their architecture also
focused on creation.
It mirrored a source of power they saw in the heavens.
To show me how, he takes me 40 miles away to
the ruins of the city of tikal.
♪ ♪
The temples here are arranged in groups of three,
a triad.
So Richard, now, I can sense here that there is
a pattern, but something's missing.
What am I missing?
Richard Hansen: Well, there is a pattern,
Morgan, this is a definite pattern here and
it's consistent through centuries of time.
There's one big building over here with
the stairway facing inward,
another building over here with the stairway
facing inward.
Morgan Freeman: Ok, and a third one, what, what?
Richard Hansen: The third one was right in front of us.
Morgan Freeman: Oh.
Richard Hansen: There's the third structure.
It's been dismantled, of course, it's gone now,
but the big building was right in front of us,
it was as high or higher,
which was built to make the triad, three stones.
Morgan Freeman: Richard and other experts believe
that this arrangement of stone temples is a deliberate
echo of a triangle of stars in the constellation Orion.
At the center of the three stars is a fiery nebula,
a cosmic cloud of star creation.
Richard Hansen: We know from contemporary Maya that
there is a celestial heart.
The inside of...
Morgan Freeman: A celestial...
Richard Hansen: Orion, it's in the constellation of Orion.
Morgan Freeman: Even today, when the Maya light a
traditional fire, they begin by flagging three stones.
A fire of creation emanates from their center,
just as it does with the triad of stars in Orion.
You're telling me that the Mayans got this triad,
this manifestation of creation,
from the constellation Orion?
Richard Hansen: It looks like this is what they
were looking at.
We know that they were very aware of three primary stars,
so the Maya were able to replicate that pattern with
these three stones in these three structures and
that is replicated over and over and over again.
They're tying us to the heavens.
They're letting us see the creation symbolically.
Morgan Freeman: Looking around here,
I'm struck by the scale of what the Maya created.
Huge cities, colossal pyramids.
It was a civilization whose religion was focused on
creation and the continued regeneration of creation.
And yet it all crumbled.
Everything the Maya created, collapsed.
It strikes me that we don't spend enough time celebrating
the paths our ancestors trod to get here,
or giving thanks for the forces that sustain our lives.
But there is one culture that gives thanks for its
creation every day and I'm in varanasi, India to see it.
India is home to a billion hindus,
the third largest faith in the world.
It has many gods and many creation stories.
One of the best known centers around the river
that gives them life...
The Ganges or ganga.
Benda paranjape: Morgan, now we are at the river ganga.
Morgan Freeman: Ganga.
Benda paranjape: Ganga, the holiest of the holy rivers
and the center of hindu universe.
It only exists because it is the sacred, the pure,
the holy from the heaven.
Morgan Freeman: It only exists because...
Benda paranjape: You believe.
Morgan Freeman: You believe it's true.
Benda paranjape: Yes.
Morgan Freeman: Ah, ok, love that.
I love that.
Historian benda paranjape takes me to a shrine to ganga.
Benda paranjape: Careful.
Morgan Freeman: Yes, ganga's not only a river,
but a goddess.
Benda paranjape: So the idea is that you bow down even
before you enter the shrine,
but not for a short person like me.
Morgan Freeman: Ah!
[Laughs].
Benda paranjape: And then you'll come to a place
where you see mother ganga.
Morgan Freeman: What's she holding in her
upper left hand?
Benda paranjape: She's holding a lotus.
That is supposed to be a...
Morgan Freeman: A lotus?
Benda paranjape: A mark of purity,
Morgan Freeman: Right.
Benda paranjape: Because lotus emerges out of mud,
but it does not take any stains of mud.
Morgan Freeman: In the beginning,
hindus believe ganga flowed in the heavens,
but she was held captive by the creator god brahma.
Then brahma decided to send the river ganga down to earth.
Benda paranjape: But there is one problem,
that ganga has got such mighty force and if she
comes in the earth, the earth will drown.
Morgan Freeman: So the god Shiva,
blocked ganga's fall, gathering her waters in
the locks of his hair.
Benda paranjape: So Shiva just opened one lock of
his hair and the ganga flow.
She's the mother because she gives birth to everything.
Morgan Freeman: This holy river came from the river in
heaven that we call the milky way.
Benda paranjape: They say that milky way actually is a
reflection that you see in those waters which
are still beyond.
Morgan Freeman: Scientists have dated the universe to
about 14 billion years, best we can figure.
Hindus have it at what?
Benda paranjape: Hindus do not believe in one creation.
They say that these are cycles of creation,
Morgan Freeman: Ok.
Benda paranjape: And the primordial creation could be
something like 8.6 billion years old.
Actually, this whole creation,
it is very difficult to comprehend because we
say that gods like brahma has created the universe,
but then they ask a question,
"who created brahma?"
Morgan Freeman: Right.
Benda paranjape: And then...
Morgan Freeman: That's always the question, though.
Creation happened and then the gods happened.
Benda paranjape: They say that the sages,
when they were in their trance,
they got that revelation, that how the creation happened.
But since it isn't that level of consciousness,
you and me, we commoners will not understand it,
so we believe that it's beyond us.
Morgan Freeman: The hindu philosophy is not to try to
solve the riddle of creation that happened long ago.
It's to give thanks every day for the forces
that allow us to be here and continue to sustain us,
including the river Ganges.
Benda paranjape: You can come a little close.
We are going to see the ritual,
which they call it aarti.
Morgan Freeman: Aarti?
Benda paranjape: Yeah, it means showing the lamb
to the god.
Morgan Freeman: The aarti has taken place on the
banks of the holy river every night for
hundreds of years.
Benda paranjape: The prayer is that
'god, you are like my father, you are like my mother, '
Morgan Freeman: My mother.
Benda paranjape: 'My whole existence is you.'
Morgan Freeman: My whole existence is you.
Benda paranjape: You.
I'm just like a shadow.
Morgan Freeman: I am a vessel.
Benda paranjape: That contains you.
That's wonderful.
Morgan Freeman: Seven priests offer
all the elements to ganga...
Water, air, earth in the form of flowers,
and the most important of all, light,
which represents our souls.
♪ ♪
As the ceremony closes, people gather at the water's
edge to place the light of their own souls
in a tiny vessel.
Benda paranjape: This is our individual way of
offering ourselves to the river and, uh, candles
that take our soul to the river.
Morgan Freeman: It's the light of my soul.
Benda paranjape: My soul and it says that you take it
wherever you think it good for me.
♪ ♪
Morgan Freeman: The hindu version of creation
appeals to me.
It says the gods weren't even around at
the original creation.
They have this great saying from the rigveda
about the beginning.
There was neither non-existence nor existence.
It's saying the idea is beyond human definition,
beyond human intellect.
Just, accept it.
[Explosion]
Where did we come from?
A man and a woman banished from paradise,
who began to work the land?
Hero twins planting the corn they need to
start a civilization?
A great river that gives life to an entire people?
These ideas about where we came from are
the oldest stories we have.
They are shared words and distant memories that
form the glue of our civilization.
We don't all share the same creation story.
We all come from different places,
but all of us, whatever we believe,
can share in one thing,
the wonder and gratitude that we are here at all.
It is my fervent hope that people will open their
hearts and minds and see that,
our beliefs don't have to divide us.
They have the power to unite us,
to allow us together to achieve remarkable things.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
world without end.