Nearly every people has a story of how the world began, and the variety is astonishing. Yet when scholars compare them, a handful of recurring patterns appear: order won from the waters, an animal diving for mud, parents pushed apart, an egg, a giant's body. Knowing the patterns helps a reader notice what each tradition did with them, which is where the real interest lies.

Order from the waters

Many traditions begin with water, dark and formless. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, probably composed in the late second millennium BCE and named for its first words, opens before anything had a name. In L. W. King's 1902 translation: "When in the height heaven was not named, / And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name..." Two primal waters, Apsu and Tiamat, mingle and produce the gods. In time the young god Marduk defeats Tiamat in battle and splits her body in two, making the sky from one half and the earth from the other. He then creates humans from the blood of a rebel god so that people will do the gods' work. Creation here is a victory of order over chaos, and it ends with Marduk enthroned in Babylon, a story that also exalted Babylon's own god and city. In Egypt, the creator Atum rose from the endless waters of Nun onto the first mound of earth; a later text from Memphis says the god Ptah created by thinking in his heart and speaking with his tongue.

The opening of Genesis also begins with waters and darkness, but its God faces no rival and creates by speech in an orderly sequence of days: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (King James Version, 1611). Many scholars read Genesis as partly answering older Mesopotamian stories. The deep is no goddess, the sun and moon are lamps rather than gods, and humans bear God's image instead of serving as laborers for the gods.

The earth-diver

A pattern found widely across North America and northern Asia begins with water everywhere and no land. In earth-diver stories, an animal dives to the bottom of the primal sea and brings up mud that grows into the land. In a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) telling, Sky Woman falls from a world above. Birds catch her, and after stronger animals fail, Muskrat brings up a little mud that is spread on Turtle's back, which becomes the earth. That is why some Native peoples call North America Turtle Island.

World parents

In Maori tradition, Ranginui the sky and Papatuanuku the earth lay locked together, their children crowded in darkness between them. Tane, god of forests, pushed his parents apart, letting in light and space. Rangi's tears are the rain and dew. One brother, Tawhirimatea of the winds, was so angry that he has warred with the others ever since. Separated sky and earth parents also appear in Egypt, where the air god Shu holds the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb.

The cosmic egg and the sacrificed giant

A Chinese myth first recorded in the third century CE tells of Pangu, who grew inside a cosmic egg for eighteen thousand years, pushed heaven and earth apart, and at death became the world: his breath the wind, his eyes the sun and moon, his body the mountains. Closely related is creation by sacrifice, in which a primal being's body becomes the world. In Norse myth, Odin and his brothers kill the frost giant Ymir and make earth from his flesh and sky from his skull. In a hymn of the Rig Veda, the gods sacrifice the cosmic person Purusha, and from his mouth, arms, thighs and feet come the four social classes. That verse was later used to give caste a divine origin, and it was challenged by reformers who insisted on the equal worth of all people.

Making humans

Stories of making people often reveal what a culture thought humans are for. In the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya book written down in the 1550s, the gods made people of mud, which dissolved, then of wood, which had no hearts or memory of their makers, and finally of maize. In a Yoruba account, the high god Olodumare sent Obatala down a chain with a shell of earth and a hen, which scratched the earth into dry land at Ile-Ife. Obatala then shaped human bodies, and in one telling he shaped some people with disabilities after drinking palm wine, and afterward vowed to protect them. Many Yoruba regard such people as under Obatala's special care.

Worked example: two births of light

Compare the Maori and Genesis openings. Both start in darkness, and both bring light through separation: Tane separates his parents, while God separates light from darkness and the waters above from the waters below. But the moods differ. Genesis is calm and commanding; the Maori story is a family drama of grief and quarrels that echo in every storm. Genesis has one maker; the Maori world is opened by children acting against their parents' embrace.

A structural reader would note the shared opposition of joined and separated. A functional reader would note that Maori genealogies, whakapapa, trace every person back through these gods, which made the story a charter of kinship with land, forest and sea. Comparing does not erase differences; it makes them visible.