COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Before there was sky or earth, Atum stood alone on the first mound in the waters of Nun, and from him came the nine gods of Heliopolis. The Egyptians told it in pieces, in spells written down over two thousand years, and other temples told the beginning in other ways.
Read story 9 min readShe carried soil in her skirt to build Hallasan, and drowned in a bottomless pool on its slopes. Her traces are all over Jeju, yet the shamans have no song of her own, and scholars still argue over whether she was ever a goddess.
Read story 10 min readThe gods made the first woman as the price of fire, and she lifted the lid of a great jar that let countless evils loose among men. In Hesiod it is a storage jar: it became a box in 1508, in a book by Erasmus.
Read story 11 min readAt the beginning, says a hymn of Zarathustra, two spirits made their choice: one chose the truth, the other the lie. Later books tell how the evil one broke into the world, and how it will end in a river of molten metal and a world made new.
Read story 11 min readBefore the first sunrise, the gods of the K'iche' Maya made animals, then a body of mud, then people of wood, and only at the last attempt people of maize who could speak and give thanks. The book that tells it was written in the 1550s, after the Spanish conquest, and survives only in a priest's copy made in the early 1700s.
Read story 14 min readFour worlds came before ours, and each was destroyed: by jaguars, by wind, by a rain of fire and by a flood, though the old texts disagree on the order. Then at Teotihuacan a god covered in sores leapt into a fire to become the Fifth Sun, the sun that, the elders said, will end in earthquakes.
Read story 11 min readA god spoke to a reed wall, a man built a boat, and after the flood the gods gathered like flies at his sacrifice. Gilgamesh hears it from Utnapishtim himself, but scribes were copying the story a thousand years before the epic's Nineveh tablets, with the hero called Atrahasis.
Read story 13 min readMarduk killed the sea goddess Tiamat, split her like a fish and made heaven and earth from her body, and the poem was recited to his statue at Babylon's New Year festival. It never describes Tiamat as a dragon, and the famous relief said to show their fight portrays another god and another monster.
Read story 14 min readBefore earth or sky, a giant took shape out of melting rime, and the gods built the world from his body. Three Eddic poems know him, but only Snorri Sturluson, a Christian writing in 13th-century Iceland, tells the whole story, and parts of it are his alone.
Read story 10 min readThe wolf breaks loose, the serpent rises from the sea and Surtr's fire burns the world. Then the earth comes up green from the waves a second time. Two old poems tell it in glimpses; a Christian Icelander of the 1220s joined them into one story.
Read story 10 min readThe world began as an egg, and Pangu grew inside it until heaven and earth stood ninety thousand li apart. When he died, his body became the world. Yet no book names him before the third century CE, and scholars still argue over where he came from.
Read story 8 min readJapan's oldest book does not begin with a king but with brine: two gods stir the sea with a jewelled spear, circle a pillar, get it wrong once, and give birth to the islands.
Read story 5 min readShe shaped people from yellow earth and patched the broken sky with five-coloured stones. But was Nüwa really half serpent? The oldest texts, the tomb art and the later novels give three different answers.
Read story 7 min read
