Chinese
Pangu and the Cosmic Egg
For eighteen thousand years a giant grew inside a shell of chaos, holding the raw sky and the raw earth apart with his own body; when at last he died, there was nowhere left for him to go but into the world.
Cosmogony, origin of the world, gods, and humankind.
For eighteen thousand years a giant grew inside a shell of chaos, holding the raw sky and the raw earth apart with his own body; when at last he died, there was nowhere left for him to go but into the world.
A jade-railed paradise in the northwest where four world-rivers rise, deathless trees grow and a stair of three tiers climbs out of the earth and into Heaven itself.
She had ten children and every one of them was a sun. In a gulf of sweet water at the edge of the world she bathed them, and sent them out one at a time to cross the sky.
He looked up at the images in heaven and down at the patterns on earth, and out of that reading drew the eight trigrams, the fishing-net, and the first law of husband and wife.
Serpent-bodied and human-faced, she patted the first people out of yellow mud, then smelted five-coloured stones to patch a sky that had split from pole to pole.
With the sea dead beneath his foot, the champion turned to a quieter labour: fixing the stations of the sky, dividing the year, and handing the moon a monthly work-order. This is the creation of measured time, spoken into being at the world's first dawn.
The gods are digging canals and weeping over the work when their oldest mother carries their tears down into the deep to wake her sleeping son. What she is called, and what she made, is a question two thousand years of clay cannot quite settle.
A single clay writ, sealed and laid over the heart, carried the right to decree the fate of the whole created order. Whoever held it ruled the universe, so the history of Mesopotamian kingship is the history of who held it next.
Forty years the lesser gods dug the rivers by hand. Then they burned their tools and surrounded their master's house in the dark, and the only way to end the strike was to build a creature that could take the work off them.
The young storm-god who alone dared face the salt-water chaos, drove the winds down her throat and split her body into the sky, and traded a single victory for the kingship of all the gods.
The first being in the Babylonian cosmos was fresh water that did nothing but rest, until noise drove it to murder its own children. Then the poem killed it off the page.
The Sumerians never wrote the poem in which heaven and earth are torn apart. They only ever mention it, in the breath before a story begins: once, in the first days, the sky was prised off the ground and the two were shared out among the gods.
Before heaven had a name there were two waters, and they mingled. Everything that followed, the gods, the quarrel, the war that split a body into a sky, began in that first commingling of the fresh and the salt.
Once a year the most powerful man in Babylonia was stripped of his crown, struck on the cheek and made to weep, so that a council of gods could settle his fate and the land's for the twelve months to come.
She was the salt ocean before the ocean had a shore, the mother of every god, and the body a younger god would one day split open to roof the sky. This is Tiamat as a being: her names, her monstrous brood, and how her carcass became the world.
One short, forbidden tablet maps the Babylonian universe as six stone floors stacked in open air: three heavens above, three earths below, each a coloured slab laid down by a single arranging god. It is a diagram, not a story, and it argues with itself.
For eleven days each spring the priests of Babylon washed a god, stripped a king of his crown and slapped him until he wept, then carried the whole company of the gods out through the glazed gate to renew the year.
Three storm-gods, three chaos-serpents, three ways to win. Indra and Zeus burn their dragons with the thunderbolt, but the god of Izumo does something neither of them does: he pulls a sword out of the dead beast.
One sentence, copied and revised across roughly eleven hundred years, tells the emperors of Japan why they may rule: because the sun-goddess told their ancestor to, and told him it would last as long as heaven and earth.
How the Japanese cosmos stacks in three storeys, and how gods and the dead move between them: a heaven above, a reed-plain between, a country of the dead below, and the doors, roads and one-way seals that join them.
Odin raises a dead wise-woman to make her speak, and she gives him the whole arc of the world: its making, his own hidden secrets, and the fire that ends it all.
Downward and northward, under a root of the world-ash, lies the cold country that takes everyone who dies quietly: nine lightless valleys, a river that clangs, a gold-roofed bridge and a gate so high a god must leap it.
Three maidens mighty in wisdom come up from a dwelling beneath the world-ash, cut marks into wood, and lay down the lives of the sons of men.
Two gods stand on a bridge above a formless sea, lower a jewelled spear into the brine and stir until it curdles: how the first island rose from the drippings, and how a botched courtship had to be done over before Japan could be born.
He followed his dead wife into the land of the dead to bring her home, lit a single forbidden light to look at her, and fled a rotting queen: the myth that gave Japan its death, its cleansing rite, and its three brightest gods.
A rich man shot arrows at a rice-cake for sport, and the wasted rice rose up as a white bird and flew to a mountain where rice began to grow: the founding legend of Japan's most-worshipped kami, whose name means the rice becomes.
Born from the right eye of a god washing himself clean of the dead, the moon drew his sword on a goddess who fed him from her mouth, and for that the sun turned her face away: the quiet god whose one act set the sun and moon apart.
Not a mountain and not a sky-city but a plain: the celestial country of rice-fields and river-councils where the sun-goddess reigns, the cosmos opens, and the line of emperors takes its first breath.
A mirror forged to trap the sun, a sword drawn from a monster's tail, and a string of curved jewels: how three objects became the proof that Japan's emperors were born to rule.
A shadowy country of rot and gloom where a single mouthful of the dead's cooking binds you forever: the underworld of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the day it was sealed off from the living.
The radiance that shone through all six quarters at birth, the goddess who armed herself like a warrior against her own brother and then shut the door on the world: ancestress of the emperors and light of the High Plain of Heaven.
He stirred the sea to a curd and raised the first island from a spear-tip, then lost his wife to the underworld and came back to wash the pollution off: from the water of his cleansing were born the sun, the moon and the storm.
She spoke first at the pillar and bore the world a crooked child, then bore it right: the islands of Japan and the gods of sea and wind and fire, until the last birth killed her and made her queen of the dead.
A ram-headed sun hauled by ropes through a valley of the dead, a serpent staked with knives, a rebirth out of a monster's tail: the Egyptian underworld the sun and the dead must cross before dawn.
To bite the ground is to bite a god. He is the floor of the world, the judge at the head of the Nine, and the father who hands the throne of Egypt down to his son.
The god of Memphis made no clay and spilled no seed. He devised the cosmos in his heart and spoke it with his tongue, then built the very bodies the other gods would live inside.
She never lifts a claw and never speaks a line: the beast who crouches by the scales in the Hall of the Two Truths does one thing only, and it is the worst thing the Egyptian afterlife could imagine.
Felt like wind through feathers and never seen, the self-made creator of Thebes whose very name means concealment: how a local city-god rose to become Amun-Re, king of all the gods.
A sun-disk cradled in the notch between two hills: the Egyptian sign for the horizon was also a place, the gated seam where sky, earth and the underworld meet and the sun goes in and out of the world.
She arches over the whole earth and holds it in her arms; the dead king is her firstborn, the stars are her thousand souls, and each night she swallows the sun to give it back at dawn.
Before the world there was only dark water, and one god who made himself: how Atum rose on the first dry hill, spat the twins Shu and Tefnut from his own body, and fathered the Nine gods of Heliopolis.
The completed sun going down, whose name means both 'finished' and 'not-be': the Heliopolitan creator drawn as a pharaoh, who lifts the dead king to the sky and will one day draw the whole world back into the flood.
Beetle at dawn, blazing disk at noon, a tottering old man sinking into the west: the creator sun-god of Heliopolis who sails the sky by day and fights his way through the underworld by night.
Not a twilight but a doom: the wolf runs free, the serpent floods the land, a ship of dead men's nails breaks loose, and the gods ride knowingly to a battle the prophecy says they cannot win, on a field a hundred miles square.
How poetry got into the world: a murdered sage, a mead brewed from his blood, and the god who slept three nights with a giant's daughter to steal it, then left her to grief.
Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.
The great ash that binds the worlds is not a serene axis but a creature in perpetual pain: gnawed above, rotting within, torn from below, and still standing green over the well where the Norns pour their clay.
He hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well, and in return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom: the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.
The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.
Born from sea-foam and the severed flesh of Heaven, the goddess whose power bent gods and beasts alike, and whom only three could resist.
For ten years the sky itself hung in the balance, until Zeus loosed the hundred-armed prisoners of the deep and the world caught fire.
There is no ancient list of the Twelve. What the oldest poets give us instead is a household with a throne room, a swallowed generation, and a family quarrel that never quite ends.
Before there was a world there was only a gap, and out of that yawning dark the first gods came to be.
The god who overthrew his father by cunning and force, and then made himself the guardian of oaths.