Creation Stories!

Throughout the world of mythologies, there are many different backgrounds to these stories. Specifically for creation stories, there are five different categories that myths may fall into.
First off, "Ex Nihilo" stories are myths that start from a void or nothing. This nothingness is often referred to as "Chaos". One example of these types of myths may include the Greek myth "The Creation of the Titans and the Gods". The sentence that starts off this story is "Out of the original emptiness, which was called Chaos, emerged the first three immortal beings..." (World Mythologies, 84).

The second type of creation story is known as "Earth Diver". An animal in these myths dives down into the sea or ocean and retrieves some sort of grain of substance which then eventually becomes an island or the earth. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is an Iroquois myth which conveys an Earth Diver format. "Muskrat's body suddenly reappeared on the surface of the water. He was dead. However, Muskrat had been as skillful as he was courageous, for clutched in his claws and lodged inside his mouth was earth from the bottom of the sea" (World Mythologies, 628).

A third type of myth in the creation stories is a category known as "Primal Unity". In these myths, an egg may crack where the creatures of the earth come out of, or better known, the heavens above and the earth below are separated where humans can then come to existence. A type of Primal Unity myth may be the Nigerian myth "The Creation of the Universe and Ife". Primal Unity can be seen in the second sentence where it states "In the beginning the universe consisted only of the sky above and the water and the wild marshland below. Olorun, the god who possessed the most power and the greatest knowledge, ruled the sky, while the goddess Olokun ruled the endless waters and wild marshes" (World Mythologies, 510).

Dismemberment is a fourth type of creations story in mythologies. When a monster or giant is killed and separated, his body parts are turned into different parts of the earth. The flesh may turn into the human beings while the blood becomes the rivers and oceans. A vocabulary word often used in these myths is "sparagmos" meaning the tearing to pieces of a live victim. A myth that begins as Primal Unity and eventually becomes Dismemberment is the myth "Enuma Elish". Dismemberment comes into play near the end of the story "Marduk then divided Tiamat's body into two parts like a shellfish. Half of Tiamat he set up as the sky; the other half he formed into the earth. From Tiamat's saliva, he created the clouds and filled them with water, but he himself took charge of the winds, and the rain, and the cold. He put Tiamat's head into position to form the mountains of the earth, and he caused the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers to flow from her eyes" (World Mythologies, 10).

One final type of creation story is "Emergence". During these myths, life just appears.