The Cosmos and Creation

This group gathers the beliefs in the atlas whose main subject is how the world came to be and how it is ordered: accounts of creation, the origin and structure of the cosmos, and the place of people within it. Wikipedia defines a creation myth as a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it, and defines cosmogony as any model concerning the origin of the cosmos or the universe. It notes that members of cultures often ascribe varying degrees of truth to their creation myths, and that in the society that tells it such a myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths metaphorically, symbolically, historically or literally. Beliefs are placed here by their own recorded subject, so a reader can compare how different traditions answer the same question, and each belief entry keeps its own tradition, wording and sources.