Anthropogony

Anthropogony is the account a tradition gives of the origin of human beings. It is distinct from cosmogony, the origin of the world, though it is usually attached to one, and comparative study identifies a small number of recurring patterns.

Fashioning from earth or clay is the most widespread. Genesis 2:7 has God form the human from the dust of the ground and breathe life into it, and the Hebrew plays on the relation between adam and adamah, earth. The Mesopotamian Atrahasis and Enuma Elish have humanity made from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god, which supplies both the material and the animating element. Egyptian tradition has Khnum shaping people on a potter's wheel. Greek accounts assign the making to Prometheus. West African, Chinese, Nuwa working clay by the riverbank, and many other traditions have the same motif, which is unsurprising given that pottery is the obvious model for making something in the shape of a thing.

Emergence is characteristic of many Native American traditions of the Southwest, in which people ascend into this world from previous worlds below. The Hopi and Zuni accounts are the best documented, and the sipapu, the place of emergence, is built into Puebloan ritual architecture as a feature of the kiva floor.

Descent from divine beings, from a primal couple, or from a named first ancestor is very widespread. And in some accounts humanity is produced from a body or from other material: the Norse Ask and Embla shaped from trees found on the shore, or the social orders produced from the parts of the cosmic Purusha.

Two features recur and carry theological weight. Many accounts attach a purpose: humans are made to labour for the gods and relieve them of work in the Mesopotamian material, to serve and till in Genesis 2, or simply to worship. And many attach an explanation of mortality, humans are made of material that decays, or are offered immortality and lose it through a mistake, a theft, or a message garbled in transmission. The last is a widespread African motif in which a chameleon sent with the message of life is overtaken by a lizard sent with the message of death.

Modern accounts of human origins are evolutionary, and the relation between these and traditional anthropogonies is handled differently by different communities: as literal history in competition with the sciences, as figurative accounts of meaning and purpose compatible with them, or as distinct registers held together without a synthesis being attempted. All three responses are found within every major tradition, and the disagreement inside traditions is frequently sharper than the disagreement between them.

Beyond the fashioning and emergence motifs described in the main entry, a distinct and widely distributed motif addresses why, having been made, humans do not live forever, and it recurs with striking narrative consistency across traditions with no plausible contact.

The most thoroughly documented instance is the African message that miscarried, attested across a wide range of Bantu, Khoisan and other sub-Saharan traditions in broadly consistent form: a high god sends a slow-moving messenger, commonly a chameleon, with news that humans will live forever, then changes his mind or sends a faster messenger, commonly a lizard or hare, with the contrary message of death, and the second messenger arrives first, so death rather than immortality becomes humanity's condition through an accident of timing rather than fault or punishment. The moral weight of the story falls on bad luck rather than wrongdoing, a different structure from the Genesis narrative discussed elsewhere in this collection, where mortality follows specifically from a human choice.

Comparable "message" or "chance" accounts of mortality appear elsewhere without the same density: some Melanesian and Southeast Asian traditions describe a test involving a stone and a banana, the stone representing durability and the banana perishability, the choice of the banana explaining why humans reproduce and die rather than persist unchanged like stone. Folklorists generally treat the message-miscarried type as one of the clearest cases of a traceable regional motif, concentrated densely enough within one cultural-linguistic zone to support inference about shared origin or contact, unlike the more scattered fashioning-from-clay motif discussed in the main entry.