earth were subsequently made. Rather must we take it as a short heading, refering to the creation which is about to be described. And in any case, the manner in which there came to be anything at all out of which heavens and earth could be constructed is not considered. We are left apparently to suppose that matter is coeval with the Deity; for the author never faces the question of its origin, which is the real difficulty in all such cosmogonies as his, but hastens at once to the easier task of describing the separation and classification of materials already in existence.
Somewhat similar to the Hebrew legend, both in what it records and in what it omits, is the story of creation as told by the Quichés in America:—
"This is the first word and the first speech. There were neither
men nor brutes, neither birds, fish, nor crabs, stick nor stone, valley nor
mountain, stubble nor forest, nothing but the sky; the face of the land
was hidden. There was naught but the silent sea and the sky. There
was nothing joined, nor any sound, nor thing that stirred; neither any
to do evil, nor to rumble in the heavens, nor a walker on foot; only the
silent waters, only the pacified ocean, only it in its calm. Nothing was
but stillness, and rest, and darkness, and the night; nothing but the
Maker and Moulder, the Hurler, the Bird-Serpent" (M. N. W., p. 196.—Popol
Vuh, p. 7).
Another cosmogony is derived from the Mixtecs, also aborigines
of America:—
"In the year and in the day of clouds, before ever were either years
or days, the world lay in darkness; all things were orderless, and a
water covered the slime and the ooze that the earth then was" (M. N.
W., p. 196).
Two winds are in this myth the agents employed to effect
the subsidence of the waters, and the appearance of dry land.
In another account, related by some other tribes, the muskrat
is the instrument which divides the land from the waters. These
myths, as Mr. Brinton, who has collected them, truly remarks,
are "not of a construction, but a reconstruction only, and are
in that respect altogether similar to the creative myth of the
first chapter of Genesis."
