page_title: Creation myth
section_title: Classification
hierarchical_section_title: Creation myth / Classification
caption_attribution_description: Eighteenth century Vaishnava painting decipting Vishnu,on the serpent Anant Shesha with consort Lakshmi,pressing his feet; sage Markandeya paying his respects to Vishnu, while Brahma emerges in a lotus from Vishnu's navel
context_page_description: A creation myth is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it. While in popular usage the term myth often refers to false or fanciful stories, members of cultures often ascribe varying degrees of truth to their creation myths. In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes in a historical or literal sense. They are commonly, although not always, considered cosmogonical myths – that is, they describe the ordering of the cosmos from a state of chaos or amorphousness.
  Creation myths often share a number of features. They often are considered sacred accounts and can be found in nearly all known religious traditions. They are all stories with a plot and characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals, who often speak and transform easily. They are often set in a dim and nonspecific past that historian of religion Mircea Eliade termed in illo tempore.
context_section_description: Mythologists have applied various schemes to classify creation myths found throughout human cultures.  Eliade and his colleague Charles Long developed a classification based on some common motifs that reappear in stories the world over. The classification identifies five basic types:
  Creation ex nihilo in which the creation is through the thought, word, dream or bodily secretions of a divine being.
  Earth diver creation in which a diver, usually a bird or amphibian sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which develops into a terrestrial world.
  Emergence myths in which progenitors pass through a series of worlds and metamorphoses until reaching the present world.
  Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being.
  Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as the cracking of a cosmic egg or a bringing order from chaos.
  Marta Weigle further developed and refined this typology to highlight nine themes, adding elements such as deus faber, a creation crafted by a deity, creation from the work of two creators working together or against each other, creation from sacrifice and creation from division/conjugation, accretion/conjunction, or secretion.
  An alternative system based on six recurring narrative themes was designed by Raymond Van Over:
  Primeval abyss, an infinite expanse of waters or space.
  Originator deity which is awakened or an eternal entity within the abyss.
  Originator deity poised above the abyss.
  Cosmic egg or embryo.
  Originator deity creating life through sound or word.
  Life generating from the corpse or dismembered parts of an originator deity.
caption: Brahmā, the Hindu deva of creation, emerges from a lotus risen from the navel of Viṣņu, who lies with Lakshmi on the serpent Ananta Shesha.
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