Comparative Cosmogony Matrix

Chaos takes shape before all things

Hesiod opens with Chaos coming to be. The verb gives it a beginning, and the poem says nothing at all about what stood before it. The word means a gap, a chasm that opens. Next come broad-breasted Gaia, the everlasting seat of the gods, and misty Tartarus in the depths of the wide earth, and Eros, handsomest of the immortals, the limb-loosener who wrecks the judgement of gods and men alike. Chaos then bears Erebos and black Night, and the two of them produce Aether, the bright upper air, and Day.

Ginnungagap, the yawning void

First there was only Ginnungagap, a gaping emptiness. To the north lay Niflheim, where the spring Hvergelmir sent out eleven rivers, the Élivágar; the venom they carried hardened like slag, the slag froze, and layer on layer of rime pressed into the void. To the south lay Muspellheim, so hot that no stranger could stand it, with Surtr sitting at its border holding a flaming sword and sparks flying out of it. Where the rime met the warm blast, it began to thaw and drip.

Nun, the water that does not move

Before anything else there was Nun: limitless, lightless, motionless water, with no shore and no up or down. The Egyptians never say it was made and never say it went away. It still lies outside the sky and under the ground, and the Nile flood is that water seeping back in. At Hermopolis the priests broke this state into eight gods, four frog-headed males and four snake-headed females in pairs: Nun and Naunet (water), Heh and Hauhet (endlessness), Kek and Kauket (darkness), Amun and Amaunet (hiddenness).

When heaven had not been named

The poem opens on a world that has not yet been named: heaven is not called heaven, earth is not called earth. There are only two waters — Apsu the fresh water, who begot them, and Tiamat the salt sea — mingled together in a single body, with no marsh, no reed bed, not a handspan of dry ground. No god has been brought into being, and no destiny has yet been fixed.

Earth bears the starry sky by herself

Gaia, needing no partner, first produces Ouranos, the starry sky, made her own size so that he covers her completely. She also brings forth the mountains and the unresting sea, Pontos. With Ouranos she then bears the twelve Titans, of whom Cronus is the youngest and the most dangerous; the three Cyclopes, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, each with a single round eye; and the three Hundred-Handers, Kottos, Briareos and Gyges, with fifty heads and a hundred arms apiece. Ouranos loathes his children and stuffs each one back into the hollows of Earth as it is born, keeping them from the light.

Ymir and the cow Auðumbla

The drops of melting rime quickened into a giant, Ymir. Snorri says the frost-giants call him Aurgelmir, which is the name Vafþrúðnismál gives to the giant who grew out of the drops of the Élivágar. He sweated in his sleep: a man and a woman grew under his left arm, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other, which is where the frost-giants come from. The same thaw produced a cow, Auðumbla, whose four rivers of milk fed Ymir. She licked the salty rime-stones, and on the first day a man's hair came out of the stone, on the second a head, on the third the whole man: Búri. Búri's son Borr married Bestla, daughter of the giant Bölþorn, and they had three sons: Óðinn, Vili and Vé.

Atum rises on the first mound

A patch of dry ground pushed up through the water: the primeval mound. Atum, who had no father and no mother, brought himself into being on it — his name can be read both as 'the complete one' and as 'the one who does not yet exist'. The Pyramid Texts have him rise in Heliopolis as the benben, the tapering stone standing in the Mansion of the Phoenix. Later images set the Bennu bird on that stone, and its first cry was reckoned the first sound ever made. Temple sanctuaries were built as copies of the mound, their floors rising step by step as you walk inward.

Gods rise from the two waters; their uproar wakes the deep

From the mingling waters the generations come: Lahmu and Lahamu, then Anshar and Kishar, then Anu the sky, and Anu fathers Ea (Enki). The young gods band together and surge back and forth until Tiamat's belly is churning, and their uproar never stops. Apsu gets no rest by day and no sleep by night. He plots with his vizier Mummu to destroy them all, and Tiamat objects: how can they wipe out what they themselves brought forth?

The grey sickle

Cramped and groaning with the children packed inside her, Gaia makes a jagged sickle out of grey adamant, gathers her sons, and asks which of them will act. Only Cronus takes the blade. When Ouranos comes at nightfall and stretches himself over Earth, Cronus reaches out from his hiding place, lops off his father's genitals with the sickle, and flings them away behind him without looking. The blood that falls on Gaia produces the Erinyes, the Giants, and the ash-tree nymphs; the severed flesh drifts on the sea, foam gathers round it, and Aphrodite grows there, coming ashore first at Kythera and then at Cyprus. Sky pulls back, and stops lying on Earth.

The skull raised, the sparks set

Ymir's skull was lifted up to make the sky, with a dwarf set under each of its four corners: Norðri, Suðri, Austri, Vestri. His brains were flung up as clouds. The gods fetched sparks out of Muspell and fixed them overhead as sun, moon and stars. In Völuspá the sun did not yet know where her hall was, the stars did not know their places, the moon did not know his own strength; so the gods took their judgement seats and gave names to night and to the phases of the moon, to morning and midday and afternoon and evening, so that years could be counted. Night and Day each drive a horse: rime drips from Hrímfaxi's bit, and Skinfaxi's mane lights the earth.

Shu holds up the sky

Shu stepped in between his children, put his hands under Nut and pushed her clear of Geb, and the gap he opened is the air that living things breathe. Coffin lids and papyri draw it the same way for two thousand years: Geb lies below with his knees drawn up into hills; Nut arches over him, naked and covered in stars, fingertips and toes braced on the horizons; Shu kneels between them with his arms raised. At dusk Nut swallows the sun, which travels through her body all night and is born again from between her thighs at dawn. Even after the parting she bore five children — Osiris, Horus the Elder (not the same Horus that Isis later bore), Set, Isis and Nephthys — on the five days added on outside the 360-day year. Four of them, Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys, join Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb and Nut to make up the nine gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead; Horus the Elder is not counted among the nine.

Split like a fish for drying

Ea goes out against her and turns back; Anu goes and turns back. Marduk agrees to fight only once the assembly has granted him supreme kingship. He spreads a net at the four quarters, and when Tiamat gapes to swallow him he drives the evil wind into her mouth, so that her belly swells and her lips cannot close, then splits her heart with an arrow. Standing on the corpse, he takes the Tablet of Destinies off Qingu's breast, and cleaves her in two like a fish set out to dry: one half he lifts as the sky, bolted shut with guards posted to keep her waters from escaping, the other he spreads out below, facing the Apsu.

The silver egg splits; the First-Born takes wing

This stage does not continue from the last one; it is a separate tradition running alongside it. The Orphics told several theogonies. In the late Rhapsodic version, known chiefly through the Neoplatonist Damascius, Chronos, Time, fashions a silver egg; the egg splits and out comes Protogonos, the First-Born, also called Phanes, a shining bisexual god with golden wings from whom everything else proceeds. Aristophanes was already sending this up in the Birds, where Night lays a wind-egg in the boundless lap of Erebos and golden-winged Eros hatches from it. The Birds was staged in 414 BCE and the Rhapsodies are a compilation of several centuries later, so the egg is a great deal older than the text that preserves the fullest version of it.

A world cut out of a corpse

Borr's sons killed Ymir. So much blood ran from the wounds that it drowned every frost-giant but Bergelmir, who got away with his household on a lúðr, a word Snorri takes to mean a boat. The brothers dragged the body into the middle of Ginnungagap and cut the world out of it: the flesh became the earth, the blood the sea, the bones the mountains, the teeth and splintered bones the rocks and scree, and the hair the trees. Maggots that had bred in the flesh were given human shape and wits by the gods, and became the dwarfs who live in stone and soil.

Ptah thinks it, then says it

The priests of Memphis did not accept that any of this started at Heliopolis. On the Shabaka Stone the craftsman god Ptah conceives a thing in his heart, then pronounces its name with his tongue, and the thing exists. The Ennead is nothing but Ptah's teeth and lips, and Atum is one of the names he spoke. In this way he made the bodies of the gods, the towns and the nomes, the shrines and the offerings, and fixed for every thing the place that belongs to it. Then, the stone says, Ptah was satisfied, and rested. Memphis ran this account alongside the Heliopolitan one for a thousand years and more, each priesthood reciting its own, neither giving way.

Stars and rivers made from a corpse

Marduk lays out stations in the sky for the great gods, sets the constellations as their images, fixes a year of twelve months with three stars to each, and pegs Neberu at the zenith as the marker that holds the rest in place. He brings out the crescent moon to rule the night and wax and wane by the day. Then he goes back to the body: her spittle becomes the clouds that carry wind and rain, her head is heaped into a mountain range, her eyes are pierced to become the springs of the Tigris and Euphrates, her udders are piled into peaks, and her tail is knotted into the great bond that ties the heavens fast.

No distinct independent narrative recorded for this stage in classical sources.

Ask and Embla on the shore

Borr's three sons, walking along the sea-shore, found two trees and made people of them: one gave breath and life, one gave wit and movement, one gave face, speech, hearing and sight. The man was called Ask, the ash tree; the woman Embla, usually read as elm, though the etymology is contested and some read it as vine. The gods fenced a stronghold for them in the middle of the earth out of Ymir's eyebrows, and that is Midgard. Völuspá gives the three gods as Óðinn, Hœnir and Lóðurr, and a different set of gifts: breath, mind, and blood and good colour.

People out of the creator's tears

The Eye brought Shu and Tefnut back and found that a second eye had taken its place. It flew into a rage; Atum set it on his forehead as the uraeus cobra. Then he wept over the children he had got back, the tears ran down out of that Eye, and where they fell there were people. The Egyptian word for people, remetj, sounds like the word for tears, remyt, and the whole account rests on that pun — in the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus the creator states it flatly in the first person: I wept over them, and people came from the tears that came out of my Eye. Esna and Elephantine told it differently: the ram-headed Khnum sits at a potter's wheel and turns each human body out of clay, along with its ka, its life force.

Man knotted together from a rebel's blood

Marduk announces that he will knot blood together and make bone, and set up a thing called lullu to carry the drudgery of the gods. Ea proposes that the instigator be handed over; the Igigi name Qingu as the one who pushed Tiamat into war. He is bound and brought before Ea, his arteries are cut, and from his blood Ea fashions mankind — born to serve the gods, to carry the basket and dig the canals. The six hundred gods are then divided, three hundred set in heaven and three hundred below.

The father who ate his children

Warned that a son of his will unseat him, Cronus swallows each child as it is born: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. When Zeus is due, Rhea hands her husband a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes and he gulps that down instead, while the baby is hidden away in a cave in Crete. Grown, Zeus forces him to bring the others back up. The stone comes first, and Zeus plants it at Pytho, under Parnassus, as a token for men to look at. Then ten years of war with the Titans, until Zeus frees the Hundred-Handers from under the earth and they send three hundred boulders over, one on top of another, until the Titans are buried under them. The Titans are chained in Tartarus, so deep that a bronze anvil would fall nine days from heaven to earth, and nine more from earth to reach them.

The Fimbulwinter and Surtr's fire

First comes the Fimbulwinter: three winters running with no summer between them, and brothers killing each other for nothing. The wolf catches the sun and swallows her, the stars fall out of the sky, and Yggdrasil shakes from root to crown. Fenrir snaps his fetter, Jörmungandr comes ashore spitting venom, and Naglfar, the ship built from dead men's nails, works loose from its moorings. Surtr rides up from the south with a sword brighter than the sun and Muspell's sons break Bifröst under their hooves. Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn. Fenrir swallows Óðinn, and Víðarr sets a foot on the wolf's lower jaw and tears him apart; Thor kills the serpent, walks nine paces, and drops dead of its poison. Surtr flings fire over everything and the earth sinks into the sea.

Seven thousand jars of red beer

Ra ruled on earth until he grew old: bones of silver, flesh of gold, hair of true lapis lazuli. Mankind saw the state of him and plotted rebellion. Ra called the gods into council, then sent his Eye down as Hathor to do the killing. She waded in blood, took pleasure in it, and would not stop, and from that slaughter she is called Sekhmet, the Powerful, the lion-headed one. So Ra had barley ground overnight and seven thousand jars of beer brewed, stained with red ochre brought down from Elephantine, and poured over the fields three palms deep until the land looked flooded with blood. At dawn Sekhmet saw her own face in it, drank until she was drunk, and forgot the slaughter, and what was left of mankind stayed alive.

Apsu is killed, Tiamat raises eleven monsters

Ea strikes first: he chants a spell that puts Apsu to sleep, strips off his crown and his aura, kills him, binds Mummu, and builds his own dwelling on top of the dead god's water. There Marduk is born, four-eyed and four-eared, fire spilling from his lips. Anu gives his grandson the four winds he has made; they raise waves that leave Tiamat no peace, and the older gods goad her — when Apsu was killed you sat still. So she arms: she spawns eleven monsters, the venomous snake-dragon, the scorpion-man, the fish-man and the bull-man among them, makes Qingu her commander, and fastens the Tablet of Destinies on his breast.

The lots are drawn

One challenger is left: Typhoeus, son of Gaia and Tartarus, a hundred snake heads growing from his shoulders and fire in his eyes. Zeus burns him down with the thunderbolt and throws him into Tartarus, where he stays; the gale winds that wreck ships come off him. The gods press Zeus to be king and he parcels out their honours one by one. Then, warned by Gaia and Ouranos that Metis is carrying a son who would grow stronger than his father, he swallows her while she is still pregnant. Homer's version of the settlement is a draw of lots between three brothers: Zeus takes the broad sky, Poseidon the grey sea, Hades the murk below, while earth and Olympus stay common ground. There the story stops. Greece has no end of the world, only Hesiod's aside in Works and Days that Zeus will finish off this iron race too, once babies start being born grey at the temples.

Green earth comes up out of the sea

The earth comes up out of the sea a second time, green, with an eagle fishing over the falls and grain growing in fields nobody sowed. The surviving gods gather again at Iðavöllr: Víðarr and Váli, and Móði and Magni carrying Mjölnir, and Baldr and Höðr come back from the dead, and in the grass they find the golden gaming pieces they once played with. People survive too. Líf and Lífthrasir hid in the wood of Hoddmímir and lived on the morning dew, and mankind descends again from those two, while the daughter the sun bore before the wolf took her runs her mother's course. Völuspá ends with a hall thatched with gold at Gimlé, brighter than the sun, and also with Níðhöggr flying over the plain with corpses in his feathers; the two manuscripts differ sharply here.

Ra withdraws; the end goes back into Nun

After the killing Ra had had enough of the earth. He climbed onto the back of Nut, who turned into a cow, and rose into the sky: Shu holds up her belly from below, and eight Heh-gods, two to a leg, steady her four legs. The gods no longer ruled in person; pharaoh governed in their place, and maat, right order, had to be held up by daily offering. The sun enters the Duat every night, fights the serpent Apep every night, and is reborn every morning, and that is how the world keeps going. Spell 175 of the Book of the Dead supplies the ending: Atum tells Osiris that one day he will destroy everything he made, that the land will sink back into the water of Nun and be as it was at the start, that the two of them alone will be left — and that he will by then have turned himself into a serpent no man knows and no god has seen.

The Flood withdraws; kingship descends and Babylon rises

After the Flood the gods relent and take up other means of holding the population down: Atrahasis ends by instituting infant mortality, barren women, and classes of priestess forbidden to bear, so that people now die piecemeal instead of being wiped out together. The Sumerian King List says that once the Flood had swept over, kingship descended from heaven a second time and came to rest at Kish. In Enuma Elish the Anunnaki take up the brick mould and make bricks for a full year; in the second they raise the head of Esagila to match the Apsu, and Babylon stands for Marduk, whose fifty names are proclaimed at the banquet. A Seleucid ritual text records the sequel: on the fourth day of the new year festival the priest recites the whole poem, start to finish.