Curated category
Creation myths
- Book of GenesisThe Book of Genesis opens with a single Hebrew word: bereshit, meaning "in the beginning". That word became the book's name in Jewish tradition, taken…
- Adam and EveAdam and Eve are the first man and first woman in the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. From them flows a startling claim.
- MetamorphosesThe Metamorphoses, written in 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid, opens with a declaration of intent that borders on audacity: "In nova fert animus mutatas dicere…
- Ancient Egyptian creation mythsAncient Egyptian creation myths stretch back to the Old Kingdom, a civilization that flourished roughly from 2700 to 2200 BC, and what survives from that era…
- CosmogonyCosmogony is the study of how everything began. Not stars, not galaxies, not even atoms, but the origin of the cosmos itself.
- Uranus (mythology)Uranus is one of the oldest divine figures in Greek religion, a being so ancient and so vast that he was not a god who ruled the sky but the sky itself.
- TheogonyThe Theogony is a poem by Hesiod, composed sometime around 730 to 700 BC, and it does something no other Greek work before it had attempted: it tries to…
- Ogdoad (Egyptian)The Ogdoad were eight primordial deities worshiped at Hermopolis in ancient Egypt, a name the Greeks translated as "the Eightfold." Egyptian priests grouped…
- VöluspáVöluspá is the first poem most students of Norse mythology encounter. It begins not with a god or a hero but with a woman.
- EnneadThe sun god Atum sat upon a mound rising from the primordial waters of Nun. His children Shu and Tefnut stood beside him as air and moisture personified.
- Chaos (cosmogony)Chaos is not what you think it is. Long before the word came to mean disorder or mayhem in everyday English, Chaos was a name, a place, and a being, the very…