The following are a small selection of entries from a growing archive of creation myths
collected from various sources over some years. With the help of scientists from the
Optoelectrics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, these myths have been
written onto a 5D eternal disc of nanostructured fused quartz and etched using a
femtosecond laser that will, it is claimed, last billions of years.

Uitoto

First there was only a vision, an illusion that affected Nainema, who was himself the illusion. Nothing else existed. Nainema took the illusion to himself and fell into thought. He held the vision by the thread of a dream and searched it, but he found nothing. Then he searched it again, and he tied the emptiness to the dream thread with magical glue. Then he took the bottom of the phantasm and stamped on it until he could sit down upon this earth of which he had dreamed. As he held onto the illusion, he spat out saliva and the forests grew. He lay down on the earth and made a sky above it. Gazing at himself, the One who was the story created his story for us to hear.

The Uitoto are an indigenous people of the Amazonian jungle in Colombia. In this creation story the illusion of reality exists before reality itself. Nainema is also known as ‘Father with an Illusion’ - he dreams and thinks the world into existence. This myth explores the relationship between illusion and reality, asking whether we and our world might be merely illusion. Although the saliva and glue in the myth seem real and physical enough, ultimately creation appears to be a function of the creator’s gaze as he gazes at the illusion that is himself.

Banks Islands

Once there was light everywhere all the time. The light shone on the mother-stone, Quatgoro, and one day she broke open to release Quat and his eleven brothers, all named Tangaro and each representing a characteristic or a plant. The brothers grew up immediately. Quat carved the first humans from different parts of a tree, and then he pieced them together into puppet-like figures. When he had six of these figures, he lined them up and danced in front of them until they began to come to life. Then he beat his sacred drum and they began to dance. Finally, Quat made six of the puppets into men and six into women, and they became mates. Tangaro, the Foolish One, thought he could do what his older brother Quat had done. Using a different kind of tree, he carved six puppets and danced them into life, but then he buried them and forgot about them for a while. When he came back and dug them up they were dead and rotten, and so it is that we have death in the world. 

As for Quat, he continued with his creative work. When he made pigs that walked on two legs, his brothers made fun of him, saying his pigs were silly-looking and too much like humans. Quat shortened the pigs’ front legs and they began to walk on all fours.

Quat made everything: canoes, plants, animals, rivers, and so forth. Then the brothers began complaining about all the light, so Quat got into his canoe and paddled to the edge of the world to Oong (night). Oong was completely dark and without light. It taught Quat about sleep and gave him dark eyebrows and a piece of itself to take back to his own world.

On his way home Quat stopped at the Torres Islands to exchange a piece of night for some birds. From then on birds have always followed night with their chirping so that we may be ready for day when it comes. At home where his brothers were waiting, Quat taught them about beds (made of coco leaves) and sleep. He made them all lie down, then he released pieces of night so that the sun began to disappear. 

“What is happening?” the brothers asked. Quat comforted them and told them to be quiet. As soon as they began to drift off to sleep, they became frightened. Maybe they were dying? Quat reassured them: “It’s only sleep,” he said, and they became quiet. While the Tangaro and the others were sleeping, Quat cut a little hole in night with a sharp, red stone. When the birds welcomed the light and woke the brothers, they saw the red sunrise for the first time and were very happy. They began their day’s work. So it still happens.

The Banks Islands are a group of volcanic islands in northern Vanuatu, South Pacific. In this myth the sun god Quat’s major task in creation is the discovery of darkness, a reversal of the usual pattern which begins with the chaos of darkness and progresses to light. Life is born from the mother-stone, a type of cosmic egg, and the conflict between the good and the foolish brothers who are the archetypal twins, a mirror of the conflict between darkness and light that is the primary theme of the myth. Quat here acts both as creator and culture hero. His brother is a version of the archetypal trickster who undermines Quat. As in so many creation myths, the sense of an essential duality in creation is evident here.

Assyrian

After the great goddess is praised and her feet kissed, she goes with the other gods to the House of Fate, where fourteen mother-wombs (in the ritual they are embodied by pregnant women) are assembled. The great god Ea sits next to the goddess and asks her to begin the incantation. She does so, drawing fourteen figures in the clay before her and then pinching off fourteen pieces, placing seven to her left and seven to her right with a brick between them. Then Ea kneels on a mat, opens his navel, and calls on the mother-wombs to bring forth seven males and seven females. Then the Great mother-womb, Ninhursag, forms the new beings. During the incantation, the mother in the birthing house is encouraged to act for herself as the goddess and to bring forth her child safely.

The Assyrian Empire of ancient Mesopotamia spanned from 25th century BCE up to the 6th century BCE. Assyrian creation stories vary greatly between periods, depending in part on the power of various deities at any given time. In this Assyrian myth the goddess Ninhursag (also Nintu or Mama, goddess of Earth) creates humans. This myth was apparently used as part of a birth incantation. The ritual itself depicts the birth process. It seems this is a society that was once dominated by a mother religion that has, over centuries, become patriarchal. 

Wapangwa

Before there was a sun, a moon, or stars, there was only the wind and a tree where some ants lived. There was also the Word, which controlled everything, but the Word could not be seen. The Word was a catalyst for creation.

Once the wind became angry at the tree for standing in its way, so it blew particularly hard, tearing off a branch on which there were white ants. When they landed, the ants were hungry, so they ate all of the leaves on the branch, sparing only one, on which they defecated a huge pile. Then they had no choice but to eat their own excrement, and over time, as they ate and redeposited their excrement, the pile became a mountain that finally spread to the original tree. By then the ants preferred excrement to leaves, and they continued the process of adding to the pile until it became the earth. The wind still blew on the world so strongly that parts of the excrement pile began to harden into stone. The world gradually formed, until the Word sent snow and then warm wind, which melted the snow and brought a huge flood. The waters killed the ants; water covered everything.

Later the earth and the world tree joined, and the trees, grasses, rivers, and oceans took form. The air gave birth to beings that flew about singing. These beings came to Earth and became animals, birds, and humans, each with its own song or language.The new beings were hungry. The animals wanted to eat the Tree of Life, but the humans defended it. This led to a huge war between humans and animals, and to the tradition of humans and animals eating each other. The war was so ferocious that the earth shook, and bits and pieces of it flew off, gained heat, and became the sun, moon, and stars.

After the war there was the creation of gods, rain, thunder, and lightning. A long-tailed sheep with a single horn was so happy at the end of the great war that she leapt into the air, caught fire, and became the source of thunder and lightning. 

The new gods who sprang up were harsh with humans. One of them told the people that the sheep that had sprung into the air had killed the Word, the ultimate creator, and that the people would be reduced in size and in the end would be consumed by fire.

The Wapangwa, a people from Tanzania, tell a chaos-based creation story. The non-anthropomorphic creator, the Word, is reminiscent of the Greek concept of logos, which is central to the creation myth of St. John. It also can be said to be an archetypal relative of the Hindu concept of the impersonal but ever-present Brahman who is also associated with the primal word, Ohm. The Wapangu story presents an original view of the world tree motif, with the animals wanting to eat it. At the heart of this myth is a somewhat pessimistic understanding of the overall makeup of things in this world,  exemplified by the great war between humans and animals and the belief that creation itself was the product of excrement.

Bagobo

In the beginning there was only the creator, Melu. He lived in the heavens, he was white and had gold teeth. He constantly polished his whiteness and he made the Earth out of the dried skin that came from this polishing. Then he made two small people in his image, but these first people had no noses, so Melu’s brother offered to make them. Against his better judgment, Melu agreed. But Melu’s brother was not very smart, and he made the noses upside down, so that when it rained for the first time, the first people almost drowned, until they stood on their heads under a tree. Melu came along and asked them what they were doing. Then he saw the upside-down noses and turned them around. Everything with noses has been alright since then.

The Bagobo people of Mindanao Island, southern Philippines are, for the most part, a non-Muslim group who have preserved a distinct cultural identity. They survive by way of subsistence agriculture. A conspicuous feature of this myth is its humor - the creator is as concerned with polishing his notably white skin as he is with the creation. It is likely that the myth is based on perceptions of the white Spanish conquerors of the islands and the elite ruling class in general. There is also a sense that life in the heavens reflects the lives of people on Earth.

Celtic

In the beginning Heaven and Earth were so close that there was little room for creation between them. One of the children of Heaven and Earth separated the pair by castrating the father, from whose skull the gods’ children made the sky and from whose blood they made the sea. The evil son who castrated the father became god of the underworld and the good children became the gods of the sky and earth.

This myth depicts Heaven and Earth as the original parents, resembling Geb and Nut in Egypt and Gaia and Ouranos in Greece. The castration motif might suggest a struggle for power among the ancestors of the ancient Celts or a tradition of conflict between older leaders and younger ones for sexual priority. At the center of many creation myths featuring the separation of world parents is the sense that new creation requires the space achieved by breaking apart of the status quo.

Haida

There was a time when only the sea existed and Raven (who was a god then) was flying over it. He spied a tiny island below, commanded it to become earth, and it did. When the new earth had grown a lot, Raven cut it up, making Queen Charlotte Island out of a small piece and the rest of the world out of a large one.

On one of Raven’s walks around the world it heard a sound coming from a small clamshell and saw a small face there. After a lot of coaxing, five little faces appeared and then five little bodies. These clamshell-beings were the first people.

Later Raven, in good trickster fashion, stole the sun.

The Haida people of the Queen Charlotte and Prince of Wales Islands are a matrilineal people known for their artistic talents, particularly in woodcarving. Their myths were often borrowed from neighboring tribes and adapted to their own way of life. Animals play a role in their mythology: fish and other sea animals are actually deities and spirits in disguise or descendants of deities. Like other northwest coast tribes the Haida tell stories of the creator/trickster - the Raven, sometimes known as Old Man. There is a sense in this creation myth that the Haida take their religion somewhat casually, seeing the comic element in life and in themselves. In spite of his creative powers, Raven could be extremely foolish. 

Ceram

The nine original families emerged from bunches of bananas and then came down from Mount Nunusaka to the place now called Nine Dance Grounds in West Ceram. One man, Ameta, was much darker than the others, and he was very much a loner. He went hunting one day and killed a wild pig with a coconut caught on its tusk. At that time, no one had ever seen coconuts or coconut trees, so Ameta took it home and wrapped it for safekeeping in a cloth designed with a snake figure. That night a man came to him in his dreams and instructed him to bury the nut. This Ameta did in the morning, and within days it was a fine, tall palm bearing coconut blossoms.

Ameta climbed the tree to harvest some fruit but cut his finger. When he returned to the tree after fixing his cut, he found that his blood had mixed with the tree’s sap to form a face, and in a few days he found a little girl there. The dream man appeared to Ameta in the night and told him to wrap the girl in his snake cloth and bring her home. This Ameta did, and he named the girl Hainuwele. In a few days Hainuwele was grown, and amazingly, she defecated things like dishes and bells, which her father sold.

It then came time for the nine families to perform the nine nights of the Maro dance at Nine Dance Grounds. As was customary, the women of the families sat in the center of the dance grounds handing out betel nut to the men, who danced around them in a spiral. Hainuwele was at the very center. On the first night she handed out betel nut, but on the second she gave the dancers coral instead, and on the third night she gave out fine pottery. In fact, she gave out more and more valuable objects each night. The people became jealous of her obvious wealth and decided to kill her. On the ninth night, having dug a deep hole at the center of the dance place, they surrounded her during the dance and edged her into the hole and covered her with earth.

Ameta missed his daughter and, guessing that something had happened to her, used his oracular skills to discover that she had been killed during the Maro dance in Nine Dance Grounds. He took nine pieces of palm leaf to the grounds and stuck them into the earth. The ninth one he placed at the very center of the grounds, and sure enough, when he pulled it out he found bits of his daughters blood and hair. He dug up the body, cut it into many pieces, and buried all but the arms in the dance grounds. Immediately there grew the plants that are the staples of the Ceram people to this day.

Ameta took Hainuwele’s arms to the goddess Satene, who then went to Nine Dance Grounds, built a huge gate there and stood behind it holding out the maiden’s arms. She called the nine families and announced to them that in revenge for their killing of Hainuwele she would leave them, but that everyone would first have to try to pass through the gate to her. Those who succeeded would remain people, those who did not would become animals and spirits. So it was that animals and spirits came into being. Satene then traveled to the Mountain of the Dead, and anyone who follows her there must die.

The Ceram people live in the Molucca Islands of Indonesia. Ceramese society is agricultural, dependent upon successful planting and harvests. This is as much a myth about the origin of the people as the universe. It suggests the sources of various aspects of Ceramese life, the heroine of the myth becomes a culture hero, teaching the people how to live. Appropriately, their creation myth is an example of burial, and rebirth, planting and harvesting. The heroine, Hainuwele, becomes, in effect, the Great Mother of this creation, establishing the connection between the gifts of the earth and her femininity.