Cosmic ocean
A cosmic ocean, cosmic sea, primordial waters, or celestial river is a mythological motif that represents the world or cosmos enveloped by a vast primordial ocean. Found in many cultures and civilizations, the cosmic ocean exists before the creation of the Earth. The cosmic ocean can also represent or embody the chaos that some myths perceive as predetermined.
The primacy of the water in some creation myths corresponds to the cosmological model of land surrounded by the world ocean. The sky is often thought of as something like the upper sea. The emergence of our Earth with its air and visible eruptions of fire from a pre-existing chaos or even freshwater ocean like the Mesopotamien Abzu is usually presented as a elementary factor of a first cosmic order, followed by the narrative of a flood catastrophe. Current research shows that these globally widespread flood myths – described in the epic Athrahasis as the gods' intention to destroy their human creations – probablyhave a real background, namely the relatively sudden rise in sea level at the end of the last ice age.
The cosmic ocean takes form in the mythology of Yazidism, Ahl-e Haqq, Alevism, Ancient Egyptian mythology, Ancient Greek mythology, Canaanite mythology, Ancient Hindu mythology, Ancient Iranian, Sumerian, Zoroastrianism, Ancient Roman mythology and many other world mythologies.
Background
In ancient creation texts, the primordial waters are often represented as having filled the entire universe and are the first source of the gods. The act of creation is the establishment of an inhabitable space separate from the enveloping waters. The cosmic ocean is the shape of the universe before creation.The ocean is boundless, unordered, unorganized, amorphous, formless, dangerous, terrible. In some myths, its cacophony is noted, opposed to the ordered rhythm of the sea.
Chaos can be personified as water or by the unorganized interaction of water and fire, The transformation of chaos into order is also the transition from water to land. In many ancient cosmogonic myths, the ocean and chaos are equivalent and inseparable from each other. The ocean remains outside space even after the emergence of the land. At the same time, the ability of the ocean to generate is realized in the appearance of the Earth from it and in the presence of a mythological creature in the ocean that promotes generation or, on the contrary, zealously defends the "old order" and prevents the beginning of the chain of births from the ocean.
Common themes
Yu. E. Berezkin and E. N. Duvakin generalize the motif of primary waters as follows: "Waters are primary. The Earth is launched into the water, appears above the water, grows from a piece of solid substance placed on the surface of the water or liquid mud, from an island in the ocean, is exposed when the waters subsided, etc."The idea of the primacy of the ocean as an element, from the bowels of which the Earth arises or is created, is universally prevalent. This representation is present in many mythologies of the world.
In Asia and North America, the Earth-diver myth is found. In this myth a creator god dives into the cosmic ocean to bring up and form the Earth. A diving bird, catching a lump of earth from the primordial ocean, often appears in the mythologies of the Native Americans and Siberian peoples. In totemic myths, bird people are often presented as ancestors. Eggs are a common theme in creation myths. A waterfowl extracts silt from the sea, from which land is gradually created.
In Polynesian mythology, Maui fishes islands. In Scandinavian mythology, the gods raise the Earth, and Thor catches Jörmungandr from the bottom of the ocean. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the Earth itself comes to the surface in the form of a mound. In Hindu Puranas, when Hiranyaksha hid the Earth in the cosmic ocean, Lord Vishnu took the Varaha avatar to save it.
In the mythologies of many Asian countries, in which there is an image of an endless and eternal primordial ocean or sea, there is a motif of the creation of the Earth by a celestial being descending from the sky and interfering with the water of the ocean with an iron club, spear or other object. This results in condensation which gives rise to the Earth. In Japanese mythology, the islands of Japan arose from dirty foam raised by mixing the waters of the ocean with a spear of gods. In the mythologies of the Mongolian peoples, the role of the compactor of the ocean waters is played by the wind, which creates a special milky substance out of them, which then becomes the earth's firmament. According to the Kalmyks, plants, animals, people and deities were born from this milky liquid. Hindu Mythology has a similar myth about the Churning of the Ocean.
Myths about the world's oceans are universally accompanied by myths about its containment when the earth was already created, and myths about the attempts of the ocean to regain its undivided dominance. In Chinese mythology, there is the idea of a giant depression or pit that determines the direction of the ocean waters and takes away excess water. In many mythologies there are numerous narratives regarding the flood.
The opposition of two types of myths is known – about the Earth sinking in the ocean, and about the retreat of the ocean. An example of the first type is the legend about the origin of Easter Island, recorded on this island. In the creation myth of the Nganasan people, at first the Earth was completely covered with water, then the water subsides and exposes the top of the Shaitan ridge Koika-mou. The first two people fall to this peak – a man and a woman. In the myth of creation of the Tuamotu Islands, the creator Tāne, "Spilling Water", created the world in the waters of the lord of the waters, Pune, and invoked the light that initiated the creation of the Earth.
The motif of the cosmogonic struggle with the serpent and its killing is widespread in terms of suppressing water chaos. The serpent in most mythologies is associated with water, often as its abductor. It threatens either with a flood or a drought, that is, a violation of the measure, the water "balance". Since the cosmos is identified with order and measure, chaos is associated with the violation of measure. The Egyptian Ra fights and kills the underground serpent Apep, the Hindu Indra fights and kills the demon Vritra, who took the form of a snake, the Mesopotamian Enki, Ninurta and Inanna fight with Kur and kill him, the Iranian Tishtry – with the deva Aposhi Tishtry kills Aposhi. The killed Apep, Vritra, Kur and Aposhi hold back the cosmic waters. Marduk defeats and kills the progenitors Tiamat and Apsu before resurrecting them back together, the deities of the dark waters of chaos, who has taken the form of snakes. There are stories in Canaanite mythology about the struggle of the Canaanite deities with monstrous snakes, which also represents water chaos and these monstrous snakes are all killed by the Canaanite deities. Yu the Great's heroic struggle with the cosmic flood ends with the killing of the insidious owner of the water Gungun and his "close associate" – the nine-headed Xiangliu.
The transition from the formless water element to land is the most important act necessary for the transformation of chaos into space. The next step in the same direction is the separation of the sky from the Earth, which, perhaps, essentially coincides with the first act, given the initial identification of the sky with the oceans. But it was precisely the repetition of the act – first down, and then up – that led to the allocation of three spheres – earthly, heavenly and underground, which represents the transition from binary division to trinity. The middle sphere, the earth, opposes the watery world below and the heavenly world above. A trichotomous scheme of the cosmos arises, including the necessary space between Earth and sky. This space is often represented as a cosmic tree. Earth and sky are almost universally represented as feminine and masculine, a married couple standing at the beginning of a theogonic or theocosmogonic process. At the same time, the feminine and masculine principles are associated with the element of water and with chaos; usually they are conceived on the side of "nature" rather than "culture."
Mythical creatures from chaos, defeated and victorious, shackled and released, overthrown and restored, always continue to exist on the outskirts of space, along the shores of the oceans, in the underground "lower" world, in the above ground "upper" world. Other evil creatures were killed in these mythologies by the deities also. So, in Scandinavian mythology, frost giants precede time, and in space they are located on the outskirts of the Earth's circle, in cold places, near the oceans.
In world cultures
Egyptian mythology
In Ancient Egyptian mythology, in the beginning the universe only consisted of a great chaotic cosmic ocean, and the ocean itself was referred to as Nu. In some versions of this myth, at the beginning of time, Mehet-Weret, portrayed as a cow with a sun disk between her horns, gives birth to the Sun, said to have risen from the waters of creation and to have given birth to the sun god Ra in some myths. The universe was enrapt by a vast mass of primordial waters, and the Benben, a pyramid mound, emerged amid this primal chaos. There was a lotus flower with Benben, and this when it blossomed emerged Ra. There were many versions of the Sun's emergence, and it was said to have emerged directly from the mound or from a lotus flower that grew from the mound, in the form of a heron, falcon, scarab beetle, or human child. In Heliopolis, the creation was attributed to Atum, a form of the sun god Ra, who was said to have existed in the waters of Nu as an inert potential being.The concept of chaos is etymologically associated with darkness, but primarily about water chaos in the form of the primary ocean or, in the Hermopolitian version, four divine pairs of primordial deities representing its different aspects. The primary hill is place of the sun god Ra and the sun goddess Raet as the creator deities in Heliopolis. Water chaos is opposed by the first earthly mound protruding from it, with which Ra is associated in Heliopolis, and in Memphis and Thebes, Ptah with Sekhmet and Amun with Amunet as the creator deities there respectively. Initially, the existing ocean contains the two primordial deities who are called as the "father and mother of the deities" Nu and Nunnet. In the historical era, the ocean, which was placed underground, gave rise to the river Nile. In the Heracleopolis version of the myth, an internal connection between the ocean and chaos is noted.