Where the World and Its Peoples Come From: Creation and Origin Myths

The Babylonian creation epic opens the path with a cosmos made by violence: the god Marduk kills the chaos-dragon Tiamat and splits her body to form heaven and earth, then fashions humankind from the blood of her general Kingu to serve the gods. It was recited on the fourth day of the Babylonian New Year festival, the Akitu, so it was a liturgy as well as a story.

The Kalevala offers a very different cosmos: the primal maiden Ilmatar drifts on the waters for seven centuries, and a teal lays eggs on her raised knee. When the eggs break, their pieces become the earth, sky, sun, moon and stars. Vainamoinen is then born as the first man and the first singer. Elias Lonnrot compiled this episode in 1849 from oral runic songs.

Here land itself is a catch. The trickster Maui hauls it up from the sea floor with his enchanted hook Manaiakalani, and in the Maori telling the catch becomes the North Island of New Zealand, the fish of Maui. Hawaiian versions have him try to draw the islands together, with the effort failing before it is complete. Grey and Beckwith recorded it from living oral tradition.

The Chinese tradition begins with a goddess who first fashions humanity from yellow clay, then saves the cosmos after a catastrophic battle tears a hole in the sky. She melts five-colored stones to patch the heavens and props up the sky with the legs of a giant turtle. Later art often shows her paired with Fuxi, as serpent-bodied figures.

Genesis tells of the first man and woman in a garden, a single forbidden tree and an expulsion, and the Qur'an retells it with Iblis rather than a serpent as the tempter. The three traditions read the consequences differently: Christianity develops a doctrine of inherited fallen nature, Judaism reads it as the start of moral responsibility, and Islam holds that Adam repented and was forgiven.

The Tagalog account brings the first humans out of a split bamboo stalk: Malakas, the Strong One, and Maganda, the Beautiful One. The bamboo motif is recorded as early as Miguel de Loarca in 1582, but the pair's names are not securely attested until the twentieth century, and the role of the god Bathala varies between regional tellings.

The Hopi story moves the beginning underground. Humanity climbs upward through earlier, flawed worlds, each lost to wrongdoing, and emerges into the Fourth World through the sipapu. The Hopi place that emergence in the Grand Canyon region, at the Sipapuni near the Little Colorado River, and every kiva holds a small sipapu in its floor. Scholars have challenged the methods of the most widely read modern account, Book of the Hopi.

The Zuni also tell of an ascent, but toward a center. The ancestors climb from the dark fourth underworld through three further underworlds, guided by the twin war gods Ahayuda, to find Itiwana, the Middle Place, where Zuni Pueblo now stands. Ruth Bunzel found in 1932 that Zuni tradition holds a long cycle of overlapping versions rather than one fixed account.

For many Aboriginal Australian traditions the beginning is not a past event but an ongoing reality: the era in which totemic Creator Beings shaped the land and set the laws and ceremonial obligations that still order life. Specific Dreaming narratives are restricted by law, gender, age or clan, so this entry describes only the shape of the system as published by scholars and custodians.

The path turns from the origin of the world to the origin of a nation. In the Samguk Yusa, Hwanung descends to Taebaeksan, and a bear that endures one hundred days on mugwort and garlic becomes the woman Ungnyeo, who bears Dangun, founder of Gojoseon. The Samguk Yusa was compiled around 1281, centuries after the events it claims to record.

The final stop ends with a people descended from a union of opposites. The Dragon Lord Lac Long Quan and the mountain immortal Au Co produce a sac of one hundred eggs, hatching into one hundred sons; fifty follow the father to the sea and fifty the mother to the mountains, and the eldest becomes the first Hung King. It is the charter for the Vietnamese self-description as children of the dragon and the fairy.