Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Creation Myths gathers fourteen accounts of how the world, humanity or a particular people came to exist, spanning body become cosmos accounts, separations of sky from earth, speech acts, and founding ancestor pairs.

Several build the world from a primordial being's own body. Pangu's Creation has a giant separate sky from earth by standing between them for eighteen thousand years before his death, his body becoming the world's features. Ymir's Dismemberment has Norse gods build the cosmos the same way from a slain frost giant's corpse, earth from flesh and sea from blood. Enuma Elish has Marduk kill the chaos dragon Tiamat and split her body into heaven and earth, fashioning humanity from the blood of her executed general.

Others separate an already embracing sky and earth. The Separation of Rangi and Papa has the Maori forest god Tane force his locked parents apart to let light in. The Creation by Izanagi and Izanami has the primordial siblings stir the sea with a spear to form the first island before generating Japan itself. The Creation in Six Days brings the world into being through divine speech alone, separating light from darkness and waters from waters across an ordered week.

Several found a people rather than the cosmos. Lac Long Quan and Au Co's hundred sons found Vietnam's Hung dynasty; Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, sent by the sun god Inti, found Cusco; uNkulunkulu and Malakas at Maganda both bring the first humans from a natural medium, reeds and a split bamboo stalk. Mawu-Lisa and the Serpent Aido-Hwedo, the Nommo and Dogon Cosmology, and the Kumulipo's chant ground creation differently, twin divine principles, culture bringing spirit twins, and a chant tracing existence upward from primordial darkness through steadily greater complexity.