The Science of Discworld IV

created, and far below she saw the ocean that covered the Earth. Her husband pushed her into the hole, and she fell. Two birds caught her, and tried to get mud from the ocean floor to make land for her to live on. Finally Little Toad brought up mud, which was spread on the back of Big Turtle. The mud grew until it turned into North America. Then the woman gave birth. One son, Sapling, was kind, and filled the world with all good things; the other, Flint, ruined much of his brother’s work and created everything evil. The two fought, and eventually Flint was banished to live as a volcano on Big Turtle’s back. His anger can still sometimes be felt when the Earth shakes.
    In these myths, there are partial parallels with ancient Egyptian mythology, in which the primal mound or
benben
rose from a sea of chaos. The god Seth wanted to kill his brother Osiris. He constructed a coffin, lured Osiris inside, shut the lid, sealed it with lead and threw it in the Nile. Their sister Isis set out to find Osiris, but Seth got there first and cut him into 14 pieces. Isis located 13 of them, but a fish had eaten Osiris’s penis. So she made an artificial one for him from gold, and sang until he came back to life.
    The world-bearing turtle never made it into the Egyptian pantheon, but it was common in ancient central America, among cultures such as the Olmecs. To many of these cultures, the world was both square and round, and it was also a caiman or turtle floating on a primordial sea, which represented the Earth and might or might not carry it. The world had four corners, one for each cardinal direction, and a fifth symbolic point at its centre. The cosmos was divided into three horizontal layers: the underworld below, the heavens above, and the everyday world in between.
    In another central American culture, the Maya civilisation, thirteen creator gods constructed humanity from maize dough. The world was carried at its four cardinal points by four
bacabs
, elderly deities of the earth’s interior and waters, shown carrying a sky-dragon in early depictions but later believed to be drowned ancestors. Their names were Cantzicnal, Hobnil, Hosanek and Saccimi, and each ruled one of the four directions. fn3 They were closely associated with four rain gods and four wind gods. They can appear as a conch, a snail, a spider web, a bee-like suit of armour, or a turtle. In the
Dresden Codex
the turtle is also associated with the rain-god Chaac, which similarly has four aspects, one for each cardinal direction.
    At the Puuc Maya site at Uxmal there is a building called the House of the Turtles, whose cornice is decorated with hundreds of the animals. Its function is unknown, but the Maya associated turtles with water and earth. Their shells were used in making drums, and seem to have been associated with thunder. The god Pauahutun, who like Atlas carried the world on his shoulders, is sometimes shown wearing a turtle-shell hat. The Maize God is occasionally shown emerging from a turtle’s shell. The Mayan name for the constellation Orion is Ak’Ek’ or Turtle Star.
    The
Popol Vuh
of the Quiché Maya provides more detail. It tells of three generations of deities, beginning with the creator grandparents of the sea and the lightning gods of the sky. The Mayans were corn farmers, so their human-centred worldview naturally related to the cycle of wet and dry seasons: their creator gods brought rain and the corn cycle into being. Their gods came as a standard package. Each god was associated with an aspect of the Mayan calendar, so one function of the calendar was to specify which god was in the ascendant at any given time. Often gods possessed several different aspects, and some of the major deities had four aspects, one for each cardinal direction, each with slightly different responsibilities.
    The
Popol Vuh
tells that before the Earth appeared, the universe was a huge freshwater sea, above which was a blank sky with no stars or Sun. In the sea dwelt the creator grandparents Xpiyacoc and Xmucane. Below was Xibalba, the place of fright, domain of the gods One Death and Seven Death. The gods of sea and sky decided that they would create people to worship them. Since such creatures would need somewhere to live, the gods created the Earth, raising it from the primordial sea and covering it in vegetation.
    That was Mayan cosmogony: the origin of the universe. In their cosmology (the shape and structure of the universe) the Earth was a flat disc,