Table of Contents
Almost every creation story I have collected starts in the same place: before there was land, sky or time there was a dark, formless state, often pictured as water. The Greeks called it Chaos. On this site it appears in Greece, Babylon, Israel, Egypt, China and West Africa, and in each case the first act of the gods is to bring order out of it. These are the pages where it comes up.
The first thing that came to be
What Are Creation Stories? quotes the opening of Hesiod’s Theogony:
Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods…
Hesiod, Theogony
On A genealogy of the gods Chaos is the yawning void at the beginning of everything, and from Chaos come Erebus and Nyx, who in turn produce Aether and Hemera, brightness and day. On Uranus – The primordial Age the cosmos is a swirling chaos of raw energy, and out of it comes Uranus, the sky, who covers Gaia. The deepest part of that early world became the prison of the gods, which I follow on Tartarus.
Tiamat and Apsu mingle their waters
The Babylonians pictured the beginning as two bodies of water. The same page on creation stories quotes the first lines of the Enuma Elish:
When in the height heaven was not named,
Enuma Elish, Tablet I
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
On Enuma Elish: Tablet I the epic is the story of Marduk’s victory over the forces of chaos and the order he sets up at the creation of the world. On Hea/Ea, Lord of the Earth and Guardian of the Apsu it is Ea who first defeats Apsu, the primal waters of chaos. Marduk’s war against Tiamat has its own page, Marduk. Earth was pulled from Tiamat reads the same battle as a memory of a planet torn apart. In Canaan the storm god fights the sea in the same way, which I come back to on The Baal Cycle.
Without form, and void
Genesis opens in the same waters. On Kavod (glory), Ruach (spirit) and Merkaba (chariot) the verse is quoted in the King James wording:
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:2 (KJV)
On Genesis 1 – Six days of creation I read the same verse with the Elohim moving over the surface of the waters, as new conditions created in the atmosphere of the earth. To me the deep of Genesis and the mingled waters of Babylon are the same picture told by neighbors.
Nu, the watery abyss of Egypt
On Nu/Nun Nu is the primordial watery abyss that existed before creation, one of the eight deities of the Ogdoad, and the chaos from which the primordial mound arose and the sun god Ra was born. Nu holds both creation and destruction and had no cult of his own. The same page lines the name up with Noah, Nuh in Arabic, which ties the waters before creation to the waters of the flood.
The cosmic egg and the formless water
On Pangu Creation Story the universe begins as a featureless, formless primordial state known as chaos, which coalesces into a cosmic egg over some 18,000 years. Pangu splits it into murky yin, the earth, and clear yang, the sky. On In the beginning I set short versions of this side by side: before heaven and earth chaos reigned in silence in Japan, the Dao was formless in China, and in the Orphic version Nyx laid the cosmic egg out of eternal Chaos.
Africa has the same opening. On The Bumba Creation Myth of the Kuba there is only water before creation, a state of chaos and nothingness. On Amma and Yurugu the Dogon creator Amma shapes the cosmos from primordial chaos, and his first attempt is disrupted by disorder before balance is reached.
Chaos as a force, not only a beginning
Chaos does not disappear once the world exists. On The world’s beginnings Set stands for chaos and destruction against Osiris as order, with Horus as the force that restores balance. On The Origin of the World the Gnostic text speaks of the seven authorities of chaos, and of a great shaking at the end of the age that brings down the powers of chaos. On Mesopotamian Creation Myths Enki assigns the gods their tasks precisely so the world is well managed and does not slide back into chaos.
Related pages
- What Are Creation Stories?
- A genealogy of the gods
- Enuma Elish: Tablet I
- Hea/Ea, Lord of the Earth and Guardian of the Apsu
- Kavod (glory), Ruach (spirit) and Merkaba (chariot)
- Nu/Nun
- Pangu Creation Story
- In the beginning
- Amma and Yurugu
For every page I tagged with Chaos, see the Chaos tag archive.
