THE CONCEPT OF MYTHIC CREATION IN THE “OGHUZNAMES”

Abstract

The purpose of examining the concept of mythic creation in the “Oghuznames” is to reveal the Ancestor’s innate, entirely unique and distinctive approach to nature, the human being, and existence as a whole. The article analyzes and synthesizes views on this subject and arrives at the necessary conclusions. In essence, mythic creation in the “Oghuznames” refers to the Ancestor’s worldview — his understanding of the world, life, the human being, and himself. That is, every-thing that the Ancestor once considered meaningful and rendered into imagery is approached in a divine manner, grounded in an elevated, singular, spiritual, and national foundation. This process manifests itself through the disclosure of the Turkic character, cognition, self-expression, and, most importantly, the formation of tradition.
The study demonstrates that individual cognition lies at the core of national consciousness; divine worship becomes an expression of individual stability. As the foundations of social behav-ior (the unity initiated around Oghuz) are strengthened, the impact of mythological consciousness on reality reveals itself in new creative variations; essentially, the path from coexistence to unity (embodied in Oghuz and realized through his leadership) is consistently regulated. This trajectory directs the formation of a state-building (unifying) mode of thought that draws strength from the Ancestor’s mythological sensibility and operates at the level of creating reality.
Within this development, because the Ancestor’s Tengrist (Tanrıçılıq) worldview was not canonized in written form and did not subsequently evolve—remaining largely unrenewed over centuries and millennia as it moved from individual to collective thought—representations of the world grounded in the Islamic perspective gradually took shape in creative thinking, became dog-matized, and, within epic consciousness, came to replace the primordial mythic concept of creation that derived from Oghuz.
The widespread depiction of conquest in the “Oghuznames,” on the one hand, expresses the Ancestor’s mastery of the world and his real power, understood — relative to its era — as an an-ticipated future or as an impulse capable of influencing the existing condition. At the same time, however, it also indicates that, regrettably, the Ancestor Turk, from the standpoint of national-spiritual creativity based on a foundational idea, did not continue to develop as before.
The investigation of the mythic concept of creation in the “Oghuznames,” by juxtaposing the Tengrist dimension (level) of the Ancestor’s conviction in his participation in the creation of the world with the theistic (Allah-centric) dimension of fate as preordained (destiny), makes it possible to arrive at conclusions regarding the outcomes of the national spirit and national life in their transformation from a divine mythological sensibility into lived reality.