Cosmic ocean and primordial waters

The primordial waters are among the most widely attested images in the world's cosmogonies: an undifferentiated watery expanse existing before the ordered world, out of which or upon which creation takes place.

The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish opens with Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea, mingling their waters before anything has been named. Egyptian cosmogony begins with Nun, the inert waters, from which the primeval mound emerges, an image whose plausibility in a land shaped by an annual inundation has often been noted, since the Egyptians watched land emerge from water every year. Genesis 1:2 has darkness upon the face of the deep, tehom, and the spirit or wind of God moving over the face of the waters; tehom is related to the same Semitic root as the name Tiamat, though scholars caution that a shared root does not by itself establish literary dependence. Indian cosmogony has Vishnu asleep on the serpent Shesha upon the cosmic ocean, and the Rigveda's creation hymn (10.129) describes water as what was there when there was neither being nor non-being. Chinese, Polynesian, and many African and Native American accounts have comparable openings, and the earth-diver narrative, an animal fetching mud from beneath a universal sea, is among the most widely distributed stories on earth, found across northern Eurasia and North America.

What the image supplies is something for creation to be a creation from. The waters are typically formless rather than evil, and creation is the imposition of distinction upon them: separating, bounding, drawing out dry land. In several traditions the waters are additionally personified as a monster to be subdued, which is where this motif meets Chaoskampf, and the two are frequently combined in the same text.

The image persists after cosmogony. It reappears in the flood narratives, where the ordered world is threatened by the return of the waters and the boundaries set at creation are temporarily unmade, a connection Genesis makes explicit when the fountains of the great deep are broken up and the windows of heaven opened, undoing the second and third days in reverse. And it persists ritually in the near-universal use of water for purification and initiation, with Christian baptismal theology drawing deliberately on both the creation and the flood.

The main entry's brief mention of the earth-diver narrative as "among the most widely distributed stories on earth" deserves fuller treatment, since the motif's specific logic, an animal diving beneath a primordial sea to retrieve the material of land, is distinct enough from the general primordial-waters theme to merit its own description.

In the standard form, attested across Siberian, Native American, and Central and Eastern European, particularly Finno-Ugric and Slavic, traditions, the world before creation is entirely covered by water, and a creator sends one or more animals, commonly a loon, duck, muskrat, beaver or turtle depending on the region, diving beneath the water to bring up mud from the bottom, from which the whole habitable earth forms by expansion from that small quantity. Many versions include a competitive or morally weighted element: several animals fail the dive before one succeeds, or two rival creative beings, one benevolent and one deceptive, each send divers, the deceptive one's diver bringing back an inferior portion that becomes the origin of evil or hardship, a pattern well attested in Central Asian and some Native American dualistic cosmogonies.

Folklorists have used the earth-diver motif's unusually detailed distribution, concentrated heavily across northern Eurasia and North America but essentially absent from the Southern Hemisphere, as a test case for reconstructing prehistoric contact, some scholars arguing the distribution tracks plausible routes of ancient human movement across Beringia closely enough to support genuine transmission, a stronger claim for shared origin than can usually be made about widely distributed motifs, most better explained as independent responses to a near-universal experience of water and flood.