What Is a Primordial Ocean? Creation Stories That Start With Water

The starting condition is characteristically described as water without form, boundary or distinction, sometimes dark, sometimes mixed with mud, and generally not created by anyone but simply present. Creation then proceeds by separation rather than by making, with land emerging or being raised, light being divided from darkness, and the waters being pushed apart to make a space in between. The result is a bounded world surrounded by the original water, which persists above the sky and below the earth rather than being destroyed, and that persistence matters because it makes the ordered world an enclosure within chaos rather than a replacement for it. Flood is then always possible, since the containment could fail, which connects creation accounts directly to the flood stories found in many of the same traditions. Order in this picture is an achievement that is maintained rather than a permanent state.

The traditions are widely separated and the outline recurs:

• •Mesopotamian accounts beginning with mingled fresh and salt waters, from which the gods and then the world emerge
• •The Hebrew opening, with a formless deep over which a wind moves and waters divided to make a space
• •Egyptian accounts in which a mound rises from an inert primeval water, with several cities each claiming to be that mound
• •Vedic hymns describing an initial condition without existence or non-existence, covered by water
• •Earth diver stories across Siberia and North America, where an animal dives into the original water and brings up mud that becomes land
• •Polynesian, African and Chinese accounts with comparable openings and very different developments

Several explanations operate together. Water is the most obvious formless substance available to observation, taking the shape of whatever contains it and having no shape of its own, which makes it the natural image for a condition before form existed. It is also both essential and destructive, and any society near a river, coast or floodplain experiences it as the thing that gives life and takes it, which is exactly the ambivalence these accounts express. Flooding provides direct experience of a world being covered and re-emerging, and land appearing as water recedes is a literal observation in silt-depositing river systems, which may explain the prominence of a mound rising from water in exactly those civilisations. Diffusion accounts for some of the similarity, since several of these traditions were in contact and the Mesopotamian material demonstrably influenced its neighbours, while the traditions across the Pacific and the Americas were not.

A recurring companion to the watery beginning is a creature identified with it that has to be defeated or divided before the world can exist. Mesopotamian tradition has the salt water personified and split to form sky and earth after a battle. Hebrew texts outside the opening chapter refer to a sea monster subdued at creation, which sits alongside the calmer account and preserves an older pattern found across the region. Vedic tradition has the serpent that withheld the waters and had to be killed. Norse tradition has a world-encircling serpent in the ocean. The pattern connects these creation accounts directly to the storm deity stories, since the figure who defeats the water monster is usually the same kind of figure, and it makes the founding act a victory over something rather than a construction from nothing, which is a substantially different idea about where order comes from.

These stories are doing more than describing a past event, which is the point most easily lost when they are read as failed science. They establish that the present arrangement is not inevitable, having been separated out of something else and requiring maintenance. They frequently assign that maintenance to a deity, to a ritual or to a king, which makes the account a justification for an institution, and the recitation of creation at a new year festival to renew the world is a documented practice rather than an interpretation. They explain why destruction is possible without making it arbitrary. And they establish a vocabulary, since the contrast between formed and formless, dry and drowned, bounded and boundless recurs throughout the literatures that these openings begin, so that later texts invoking water are drawing on the creation account whether or not they mention it.

The starting condition is formless water that nobody made, and creation proceeds by separating land, light and a space between the waters rather than by making from nothing. The water persists above and below, so the world is an enclosure within chaos and flood stays possible. The pattern appears in traditions that were in contact and in traditions that were not.