HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



it must have been in the first spring when, after the battle between 

 Marduk and Tiamat, the organized world came into being. 



The Hebrew account of creation is somewhat like a pale copy of 

 the Babylonian: Before heaven and earth were separated, there was 

 a dark water waste (Tehom = Tiamat). From this, God called forth 

 light, and then divided the waters; the upper waters he shut up in 

 heaven, and on the lower he established the earth (Genesis, I, 2-8). 



In ancient Egypt different theories regarding the beginning of the 

 world were held in the individual priestly colleges. The most wide- 

 spread of all, probably worked out in Heliopolis (the Biblical On), 

 was that in the beginning there was a great primordial body of water, 

 personified under the name Nun, which contained all male and female 

 germs of life. Out of it issued Ra, the sun-god. In this water, too, lay 

 the earth-god Keb, and the heavenly goddess Nut, locked in close 

 embrace until the god of the atmosphere, Shu, parted them from one 

 another and carried the goddess of heaven in his arms to the upper 

 regions. 1 In Egyptian art Shu is sometimes represented upholding 

 Nut over his head. 



Turning to the cosmogonies of the New World, Milller has pointed 

 out as a characteristic of the culture stage of the "redskins that they 

 do not speak of the creation of the world as a whole, but of the earth 

 as solid land in contrast to the water which they conceive as primal 

 and as having existed from eternity." 2 



According to the myth of the Achomawi, 3 "at first there existed 

 the shoreless sea and the clear sky. A small cloud appeared thereupon, 

 which gradually increased in size until it became the silver-gray fox, 

 the creator. Then arose a fog which, condensing, became Coyote." 

 Similarly the Maidu set at the beginning "only the great sea, calm 

 and unlimited, to which, from the clear sky the creator came, or on 

 which he and Coyote were floating in a canoe." 4 



The Hopi myths likewise assume water as primal. "In the under- 

 world there was nothing but water; two women, Huruing Wuhti of 

 the East and Huruing Wuhti of the West, . . . decided to create 

 land and they divided the waters that the earth may appear." 5 



The Zuhi tales of the origin of the world remind one of the meta- 

 physical and mystical conception of a gradual emanation of the 

 material world from the substance of the deity which is found in the 



1 Georg Steindorff, The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 35 f. 



2 J. G. Mtiller, Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 108. 



3 I am largely indebted for many of the references to the cosmogonic myths of the New World 

 to the articles of Lewis Spence and Robert H. Lowie in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and 

 Ethics, IV, 126-128 and 168-174. 



4 J. N. B. Hewitt in Handbook of American Indians, 1, 972. 



6 Hartley Burr Alexander, Mythology of all Races, vol. x, North American, p. 204. 



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