The Separation of Heaven and Earth

Summary

The separation of heaven and earth is the first act in many creation stories. Sky and earth were one thing, stuck together or mixed, until someone came between them, and a space opened in which people live and work.

One of the oldest continuous tellings is the Sumerian Song of the Hoe. The poem says that Enlil hastened to separate heaven from earth and hastened to separate earth from heaven, then suspended the axis of the world at Dur-an-ki, a name meaning "bond of heaven and earth" in Sumerian, so that humans could grow in a place called "Where Flesh Came Forth". With the hoe daylight broke; Enlil distributed daily tasks and set wages for the hoe and the carrying basket. Then he set the hoe to work in that place and put the first model of mankind in the brick mould, and his land began to break through the soil towards him.

The poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld opens in the same time and lists what belongs to it: when bread was first tasted in the shrines of the land, when its ovens were made to work, when heaven was separated from earth and earth delimited from heaven, when the name of mankind was established, when An took heaven for himself and Enlil took earth for himself, and the netherworld was given to Ereshkigal as a gift.

Many other mythologies know the same act. In Egypt Shu, the air, stands between his daughter Nut, the sky, and his son Geb, the earth, and holds the sky above him. In Hesiod Ouranos lies over Gaia and keeps their children shut inside her, until his son Kronos cuts him with the sickle. In Babylon Marduk splits the body of Tiamat as a fish is split for drying and raises half of it as a roof. In China Pangu stands between sky and earth for eighteen thousand years, growing as they draw apart. Among the Norse the sons of Borr raise up the lands and set Ymir's skull as the sky on four dwarves. In the Rigveda Varuṇa and Indra hold the two worlds apart and prop them. In Japan Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven above a land that has not yet set firm.

These tellings agree on three things: two things that were joined or mixed, an agent who comes between them, and a space that does not stay open unless something props it. The agent and the tool differ: air standing between the two, a son cutting with a sickle, a king splitting the body of his enemy after killing her, a body that grows, brothers raising a skull on four corners, a god propping sky and earth as an axle holds two wheels. The idea these stories turn on is that the place where people live did not exist before, that it was made by separating, and that whoever separated became master of it: Enlil takes the earth, Marduk becomes king of the gods, Kronos rules after his father. Then comes work in the opened space: the hoe, the brick mould and wages in the Sumerian poem, bread and ovens in the Gilgamesh prologue.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Qur'an names the act with two opposed words: "Have those who disbelieve not seen that the heavens and the earth were ratq, closed up together, and We fataqnā, split them apart, and made every living thing from water?" In Lane ratq is closing up a rent, repairing it and sewing it together, and fatq is its opposite: slitting a thing, unpicking its seam, parting one part from another. Lane gives four explanations of the verse: Ibn ʿArafa said they were closed with no gap between them and God split them with rain and plants; al-Layth said the sky was closed with no rain coming down and the earth closed with no crack in it, until He split them with rain and plants; al-Azharī said He split them into seven heavens and seven earths; al-Zajjāj said they were joined and He split them with the air He placed between them. With this same word the project's Chinese essay reads the name Pangu as fataq: Arabic f for the p that Arabic lacks and q for k, the first splitter who broke the egg and parted sky from earth.

Attestations by Culture

Sumer

The Sumerian poems place the separation at their beginning as the time the story starts from, and do not make it a battle. In the Song of the Hoe Enlil separates heaven from earth and earth from heaven, suspends the axis of the world at Dur-an-ki, and then works with the hoe: daylight breaks, the model of mankind is set in the brick mould, and people come out of the soil at "Where Flesh Came Forth". In the prologue to Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld the realms are shared out after the separation: heaven to An, earth to Enlil, the netherworld to Ereshkigal. The god list An = Anum calls Namma "the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth", so for the Sumerians the two were born together from one mother before they parted; the word for earth in these poems is Ki. Song of the Hoe, 1–27, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, 8–13, Namma in ORACC.

Babylon

In Enūma eliš the separation happens in the body of the sea itself. Marduk kills Tiamat with the wind and the arrow, and the poem says: "He split her in two like a fish for drying; with half of her he set up the heavens and made a roof" (Tablet IV, 137–138). The image comes from fishing: a fish was cut in half so that it would dry faster, and "split fish" is the word for dried fish in third-millennium administrative records. Marduk then makes the Tigris and Euphrates from her eyes and the mountains from her breasts, and creates what the poem calls the durmu, the bond that holds the regions of the universe together (V 59). Selena Wisnom notes that the poem has Marduk take Enlil's place at the head of the gods, and that Enlil appears in Sumerian texts as both fisher and fowler.

Egypt

Shu, the air, stands between his two children: Nut the sky above him, Geb the earth beneath him, and his task is to hold Nut up and keep sky and earth apart. The genealogy of this family is in the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus: the creator says he was in the first water, Nun, before the sky existed and before the earth existed; he spat out Shu and expectorated Tefnut, his father Nun raised them, and from them Geb and Nut were born. In this account sky and earth are brother and sister and husband and wife, and their father lifts his daughter above his son, the image the funerary papyri draw.

Greece

In the Theogony Gaia, the earth, bore Ouranos, "starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side" (126–128). Then she lay with him, and whenever a child was born he hid it inside her and would not let it come up into the light. Gaia made a sickle of flint and hid Kronos in ambush; Ouranos came, bringing on night and longing for love, and spread himself full upon the earth, and Kronos reached out with the sickle, cut off his father's members and threw them behind him (173–182). The poem does not say that anyone lifted the sky afterwards: the sickle is what parted them, and after it Ouranos stays far above the earth, a giver of counsel to his children and grandchildren.

China

The Sanwu liji, as quoted in the encyclopedia Yiwen leiju, preserves the oldest account of Pangu: sky and earth were mixed together like a hen's egg, and Pangu was born inside it. After eighteen thousand years they opened: the clear part, yang, became sky, and the turbid part, yin, became earth. Pangu was between them: each day the sky rose one zhang, a Chinese measure of length, the earth thickened one zhang, and Pangu grew one zhang, for another eighteen thousand years, until the sky reached its greatest height, the earth its greatest depth, "and that is why heaven is ninety thousand li from earth", the li being a Chinese measure of distance. The Huainanzi, chapter 3, tells the same separation without a person: the clear, light qi rose and became heaven, the heavy, turbid part congealed and became earth, so heaven was completed first and earth settled after. Then Gonggong butted Mount Buzhou and the pillar of heaven broke; in chapter 6 Nüwa cuts the legs of a great turtle to set up the four pillars.

Japan

The Kojiki begins "when Heaven and Earth first became active": deities appear in the High Plain of Heaven, while the land below is "still young, like floating fat, and drifting about like a jellyfish". The heavenly deities then command Izanagi and Izanami: "Put in order, solidify, and complete this drifting land!", and give them a jewelled halberd. Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, they plunge the halberd into the sea and stir the brine with a kōro kōro sound; when they lift it, the salt dripping from its tip piles up into the island of Onogoro. The Kokugakuin University commentary explains that the Kojiki preface describes the beginning as "the initial separation of yang and yin" and "the opening up of Heaven and Earth", and that the first passage of the Nihon shoki takes its words for "primordial opening" and "initial division" from Chinese accounts such as the Huainanzi and Sanwu liji. In the Japanese story itself heaven is above from the start and the first act is making the land firm; the separation comes in Chinese language, in the preface and the Nihon shoki.

The North

In Völuspá the seeress says that early in the ages there was neither sand nor sea nor cool waves, no earth and no sky above, only a yawning gap, Ginnungagap, "before the sons of Burr raised up the lands, they who created glorious Miðgarðr"; then the sun shone from the south on its stones and the ground grew green with leek (stanzas 3–4). The sons of Borr are Odin and his brothers Vili and Vé. Snorri adds in Gylfaginning that they took Ymir's skull and made the sky of it, set it up over the earth with four corners, and put a dwarf under each corner: Austri, Vestri, Norðri and Suðri, East, West, North and South. Then they fixed the sparks flying from Múspell in the sky to give light, "and from that day were distinguished day and night and the count of years" (chapter 8).

India

The hymns of the Rigveda do not tell a full story of the separation; they praise the god who achieved it. Hymn 7.86 says of Varuṇa: "he who propped apart the two wide worlds, pushed up the high and lofty vault, and spread out the earth". Hymn 2.15 says of Indra: "in the beamless space he propped the high heaven, filled the two worlds and the space between, held the earth and spread it wide; in the exhilaration of Soma Indra did these things". Hymn 10.89 says: "he who by his powers propped earth and heaven apart, as an axle holds two wheels". The verb in all three places comes from one Sanskrit root, stambh, to prop and make firm, from which stambha, a post, pillar or support, is formed.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In three tellings the agent is the air or close to it. Shu is the air and the empty space between earth and sky, and his page reads his name as shāʿa, to spread and fill what lies between two things. The Babylonian essay reads Enlil's name as "lord of the night" and makes him lord of the dark space between sky and earth, and the Sumerian rereading makes him the air that parted them. In Enūma eliš Marduk's winds enter Tiamat before he splits her. This is al-Zajjāj's explanation of fatq quoted by Lane: He split them with the air He placed between them.

The project's pages read the names of the sky in Egypt and Greece as distance: Nut as "the far one", from naʾā, she who was taken far from her husband, and Ouranos from ʿaran, distance, with ʿarānīn, the heights. An is "the high one who appears", from ʿanā and ʿanān al-samāʾ. The names of the earth in the same readings describe a flat open face: Ki from qiyy and qāʿ, flat bare land, and Geb from jabūb, the face of the earth and its soil. The names keep the result of the separation: a sky far and high, and an earth spread out beneath it.

The opened space needs someone to keep it open. Shu stays with his arms raised, the four dwarves stand under the corners of the skull, Pangu fills the space between sky and earth with his body, Enlil suspends the axis at Dur-an-ki, and Marduk makes the bond of the universe. So the stories also know the prop breaking: Gonggong butts Mount Buzhou, the pillar of heaven snaps and the sky tilts to the north-west, and in another passage of the same book the four pillars fall and Nüwa sets them up again from a turtle's legs. At Ragnarök the sky splits and the sons of Múspell ride out of it.

The tellings differ in what the separation costs. In Hesiod and in Babylon it comes from violence inside a family: a son wounds his father, a distant grandson kills the first grandmother, and in both cases the one who separates takes the kingship; the page Theogony and Enūma eliš compares that succession, and Tiamat's killing belongs to the stories of divine combat with the sea. In Egypt and China there is no killing: Shu lifts his daughter off his son, and Pangu grows. In the North and in Babylon the sky is made from a killed body, Ymir's skull and half of Tiamat, the cosmic body pattern with which Pangu's own story ends when he dies. In India the hymns do not tell what came before; they praise the act itself, the god propping the two worlds so that they do not fall.

Symbolic Reading

The project's rereading essays read the separation as a description of natural phenomena, and three of them meet on the air. The Sumerian essay makes the parting of An from Ki the first differentiation in the cosmos and makes Enlil the air that came between them, the atmosphere. The Egyptian essay reads "Shu lifts Nut from Geb" as air separating sky from earth and links it to the horizon that appears when the Nile flood recedes. The Chinese essay makes Pangu's standing between sky and earth the atmosphere, and the rising of the light and sinking of the heavy a differentiation by gravity.

The Greek essay reads Ouranos lying over Gaia as a first, thick sky of vapour pressing on the earth, and makes Kronos's sickle the time that parts them, since it reads Kronos as qarn, an age, and reads the flint sickle as the first tool made by human hands. The Babylonian essay reads the splitting of Tiamat as the differentiation of space and planets, and politically as Babylon's victory over the older cities. The Babylonian structural essay makes the splitting of Tiamat the source of the act in Genesis, when God made the firmament in the midst of the waters to divide waters from waters, and the Babylonian Semitic essay says: "dividing water from water = splitting Tiamat".

The texts themselves tie the separation to livelihood. The Sumerian poem moves from the separation to the hoe, the brick mould and wages within a few lines, and the Gilgamesh prologue sets the first bread and the first oven beside the parting of heaven and earth and the sharing of the realms. Ibn ʿArafa and al-Layth make fatq rain coming down from the sky and plants splitting the earth, and the prayer for King Rim-Sîn asks An to "open the breasts of the brilliant heavens" and make the rain fall, and to gather years of abundance from the heart of heaven. The space the separation opens is, in these texts, the place of rain, crops and houses. In most of them the one who separates holds the rule: Enlil takes the earth, Marduk is made king, Kronos reigns, so the stories trace the right to govern a place back to whoever opened and ordered it. And that order still needs someone to hold it up every day, as Shu's arms keep the sky raised, and pillars break and are set up again.