The creation of First Woman and First Man; The birth of humanity; the birth of death; The old gods and the Far Walk; Man’s grave becomes the Cradle of Men.
Content warning: Death, bodily transfiguration, sexual themes typical of a creation story.
[Long description:
The cosmic Snake coiled lethally or perhaps amorously around First Man, who clutches a bundle of arrows in his fist.]
When the world was young, and the bones of the earth had not yet settled into place, and the Snake and the Osprey’s great jostling constantly made and remade the land, our ancestors had not yet come to pass. But the ones who made us—the ones who are not our ancestors—still walked the earth. They were powerful spirits, and clever enough to slip past the thundering Urs whenever they dashed the world to pieces. These spirits fashioned themselves gods, like the old gods of high Asthaom, and asserted themselves over the shapeless earth as its creators.
Of course, they did not actually create the earth. The world was already full of stones, water, creatures, and other spirits who had learned how to live without clambering over one another. But those old bone-breakers were spirits of change, and they did change many things about the world. They spent a lot of time here, gardening things to their liking. I guess it was like a new home after the loss of their old one.
As the world settled down, and the Urs’ rumblings grew further and further away, the old spirits grew more and more fearful of what would happen when the Snake and the Osprey returned. They liked this world, and they did not want to lose everything and start over again. And then there was the matter of the Snake’s hunger. If the Urs’ great warring didn’t destroy the world first, then the Snake would surely return and make a meal of it.
The old ones were tricky, this is how they lived through the last world. They knew they could not sate the Snake or stop the Urs from fighting. But they might be able to distract them.
They formed a creature out of clay, or carved it from sangrengado, or stitched it together from a whaleskin, it depends on who you ask. Those old spirits had changed many things, but they had never created anything. Still, they sang on it, breathed on it, and tried to give it life.
It didn’t work. They tried again, this time filling the creature with seawater. They sang on it, breathed on it, but it didn’t come to life. The old ones grew frustrated and decided to start over. They tossed the creature into a fire and burned it as trash. The fire leapt up into the creature and mixed with the water, bringing it to life.
This creature was First Woman. The old ones had made her to be small and completely helpless. She had no instincts to guide her. She was declawed, defanged, without thorns, spines, or even fur to protect her. But she was a kiln, she had fire inside of her. She could create things—something that even her creators couldn’t do by themselves. This made her pleasing, in their minds, to the Snake, who also had no creative faculties of its own.
The old ones were clever, and they were also cruel. First Woman was never meant to survive. She only needed to be novel enough to distract the Snake for a while, maybe forever. And if she was not novel enough to distract the Snake—well—she needed to be soft and easy to swallow while they made their escape.
First Woman knew her purpose, but she didn’t yet know the world or her makers or the thunderous Urs, so she had not yet learned to be afraid. She had also not yet learned how to live, and the old ones neglected to teach her. First Woman had to learn from the waters and the plants and animals, which already had their own way of life… I’ll tell those stories to you another time.
After a time, that old troublemaker, the False Coyote, learned of the spirits’ cruel trick and took pity on First Woman. She told her what she already knew-–that her purpose was to please the Snake. First Woman had already learned and grown by this point, and became skeptical of this. Then the False Coyote told her what she didn’t know—that she was never meant to survive her fateful encounter with the Snake.
This hurt First Woman more deeply than any of the bruises from her short and fragile time on earth. She was sad, and afraid, and hopeless, but more than that, she was furious.
Her anger led her to wash her tears in a river, perhaps the Ghost River or the River Roan. This is where the story becomes confused among our siblings. You will see why. I believe it says more about us and less about First Woman, but I digress.
Knowing the truth now, First Woman did not want to be what she was made to be. She couldn’t bear the idea of suffering for people who didn’t love her. But she wasn’t hard-hearted. She cared for her teachers, the other creatures of the earth. She did not want them to suffer either. How could she stop the Snake from collecting the earth’s ancient debt without becoming the thing she was made to be? She didn’t want to be a toy for the Snake or the old spirits or anyone at all. She was petrified.
This is when the False Coyote taught her something very important. Some say it was deceit, though the False Coyote had not yet become False. Some say it was how to change, how to become something new… Skills which her makers never taught her. Some say this is when she learned to weave, tattoo, or fletch, activities that were traditionally done by the men of our northwestern siblings. Charming that they learned it from First Woman, who learned it from the False Coyote. I wonder if she knew that her mischief would become our tradition.
Regardless, First Woman never lost her tears. But she did lose something else in the water, that day. She cut away a part of herself.
Our Basedti siblings say that she carved out part of her stomach. The Ka-Sarikote, the Akiat—they say it was her hair, but for different reasons. The Akiat think she cut off a lock of her hair out of grief. I believe this may be a gift of the Beyent, where it is customary to shear one’s hair after loss. Our Ka-Sarikote siblings say it was to defy the old ones, who had given her long and lovely hair to charm the Snake. Or maybe it was to disguise herself… Surely a mark of Xanti gender norms rubbing off on our sisters, either way. The Ser say she cut into her groin, or maybe carved it out, and bled the way that some of us do when the cycle of the moon turns over. Maybe this explains the physical nuances between us, which seem to dissolve in Ser society. They know better than most that we are merely fragments of the whole. As for our people, we don’t name what she cut off. I think it’s been intentionally forgotten.
And so First Woman became First Man. She emerged from the water changed. But the False Coyote cautioned her that the old ones wouldn’t suffer her decision to remake herself lightly. She would need to use everything she had learned to survive.
First Man had already been taught how to cut and kill to protect herself. She knew how to eat and how to spark a fire. She knew violence. Now she knew deceit and change. She used these to defy her makers, and set out to stop the Snake on her own terms. In so doing she became everything they did not make her to be: bloodsoaked destroyer, vengeful warrior… She never wanted anyone else to feel the way she did, and she worked tirelessly to make it so.
On the day the Snake came back, she went out and faced it—not as a fearful offering, but as a challenger.
They fought. First Man was canny and full of tricks, and she left many marks on the Snake that day. But she soon came to realize that the odds were impossible. In the end, she only bought time for the old ones to make their escape. Her defiance meant nothing. She would be dashed to pieces on the Snake’s teeth with the rest of the earth, her only home. Hopelessness petrified her as the Snake closed its teeth on her at last.
And then the Snake did something unusual. It came upon her as an unstoppable monster… and it paused.
No creature had ever struggled in the Snake’s jaws, especially not one so small and inconsequential. Nor had it ever encountered a thing capable of transforming itself. In fact, it had never seen itself in any other creature at all, except its ancient enemy. Perhaps First Man rhymed with the Osprey in the way that hate and love sometimes do.
One must imagine First Man’s surprise when the Snake’s lethal coils began to caress her. By remaking herself and defying her creators, First Man had become the very thing that the old ones could never hope to create—a thing that could charm even the Snake. First Man could not help but laugh. The irony pleased her, and it pleased the Snake. They became infatuated with one another.
And so their struggling turned to coupling, as First Man’s fight with the Snake became her first time with the Snake. They were very in love with one another, and formed this union many times. Some of the marks lain on high Asthaom’s canyons and mountains are thought to be remnants of their lovemaking.
This impossible coupling caused them to bear several impossible children. These children were strange and incomplete, and couldn’t get around very well. Some didn’t have heads or hearts, and others didn’t have navels, legs, or throats. Snake and First Man laughed at each other. First Man said, “Look, they fit together, like us.” and assembled their children together into a different shape. This is how humans were made.
“They will not last very long,” the Snake said. “They will grow hungry, as I do, and they will fall apart and change, as I do.”
As the Snake said that, one did fall apart and change. The stomach, the throat, the umbilical cord all leapt out and slithered away. This is how biting snakes were made, they are our siblings. The Ur was clever, and it knew death would come to us because we are its children. Biting snakes inherited its power to kill. We inherited dying, later.
When First Man coupled with the Ur again, she was uncertain. She thought of her children, their strangeness and deaths. If the old ones discovered that the Snake had mothered them, they would surely kill them. She wanted to protect them. So First Man called to the Snake. She said, “My dear, my dear, I want you, I want you, but I’m afraid of what will come from this.”
The Snake answered her with affection. She did not understand, but the Snake was clever. When it made love to something, it changed into something else. It coiled around First Man, and they became mistletoe and dodder. There they hid in plain sight, endlessly twining with one another.
The old ones soon returned from hiding. They did not know who had fathered the strange, helpless creatures crawling over the earth, and they did not care very much. They had bigger problems. As the Snake’s love for First Man grew, the earth became matted and tangled with vines. The old ones needed to prune back their garden.
But as they went to cut up the thicket, it let out a shriek—and it changed. The Snake leaped out of the tangle with First Man in its coils. The spirits fled to the four winds, terrified of the Snake. They only stopped when they spotted the precious burden hidden in the Snake’s coils. They realized that their plan had worked… But that it worked perhaps too well.
The old ones had a new problem. First Man had succeeded in stopping the Snake, but now the Snake had traded hunger for desire. The old ones feared that their monstrous offspring would overrun the earth. Worse, they had suffered the ultimate indignity of First Man’s defiance.
Now, those old spirits may have been cowards, but they were also prideful. First Man needed to be punished, and the Snake and all its monstrous children needed to go away. But the old ones were terrified of freeing the Snake from its amorous snare. They could never hope to leave a mark on the Snake, but they knew how fragile First Man was. If they could just scare her away, the Snake would surely follow.
So the old ones boldly pursued the Snake and First Man. They slaughtered their children, punished their teachers, and terrorized the two lovers. The Snake had never feared for anything before. It was unmatched except by its old enemy. Now it knew the bitter taste of loss. It was afraid, perhaps for the first time in its long and ambling existence, of losing First Man.
The Snake joined with First Man once again. They changed shape to escape the spirits three times. They became as snakes, eels, and worms. The fourth time, they paused.
Some say the old spirits grew tired of chasing down the lovers, and took extreme measures to force them out. They used all of their strength and hauled down the North Star, the spoke of the sky. It fell to earth. The impact killed the Snake’s children, most creatures of the earth, and even the spirits themselves. The old ones’ bodies settled in to become earth-bones, while our organs became some of the sea animals, the salps and eels. This is how the inner sea came to be, it was to be the Grave of Men. But a part of us survived, to be mothered by the sea in another time. This is how the Grave of Men became the Cradle of Men.
Some say a few of the old spirits survived the slaughter and slipped between the Snake’s teeth, just as they had done before. They must have thought to themselves “good riddance,” and traded this world for another one.
Others say that the old ones cornered the Snake and its lover, and it finally struck back—with tragic results. In its anger it consumed the old spirits and much of the earth. Some of its own children were killed in the process. First Man was stricken with grief, and hid away from the destruction. As the world fell into disarray, the surviving spirits of the earth petitioned her to stop the Snake once again.
In any case, First Man came out to meet with the Snake one last time. Seeing the wreckage of their presence, they decided to withdraw from the world. First Man climbed into the Snake’s mouth, and it swallowed her, carrying her to the stars so that they could be together in peace. They quit this world, but left their orphan children behind.
As the Snake reunited with the Osprey at last, the Osprey said “My dear, they tricked you.” And the Snake said “I know, but I don’t feel tricked.”
Variations
The Inner Sea and The Old Spirits
Many foreigners come away from this story confused at how the inner sea figures so strongly into our family history. First Man and the Snake birthed humankind, but we typically name the inner sea as our mother. It seems to defy reason. Seawater was only an oblique ingredient of First Woman’s creation, and the inner sea was, in fact, made to be our grave.
The truth is, the birth of humankind was not an isolated event. We were born multiple times, but, for a variety of reasons, we did not survive long. In these stories we tend to “fall apart” into our base components, such as clay, seawater, or fire, until another agent comes along and reassembles us. There is an intriguing sentiment among the Basedti that a human being isn’t intrinsically human, like offspring in a family tree. Instead, a human being is more like a shape that can be assembled or assumed by other beings. This is why some Houseless clans trace their lineages to various plants and animals.
Our siblings with more intimate ties to the sea, the Ser, Satikkeans, and Basedtis, say that our worldly cohabitants emerged from the previous world through a primordial ocean in the jaws of the Snake. The components that were used to create us had already been mothered by the ocean. Some time after the old ones reigned down our slaughter, the lapping waves of the inner sea reassembled our bodies, and we emerged again. The Ser believe that humankind, like most things, has been created, swallowed, spat out, and re-created by the sea many times.
Many versions of this story will trade the old ones for the primordial ocean, or the ocean black. Its actions are impersonal but equally cruel. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that cataclysm had to mother the inner sea, a body of water sheltered from the ocean black, so that conditions would be safe enough for humans to exist.
First One and The Urs
Our Brundel neighbors propose a rather different creation for humankind. As you know, they were mothered by the ocean black, not the inner sea. Some think this points to an even earlier account of creation that split us apart, like the island Mercasor from mainland Asthaom. I can’t help but think of the fallibility of our ancestors. Perhaps our accounts have simply drifted away at a faster rate than our neighbors because of the inconstancy of our people.
In any case, the Brundel echo Basedti notions of humanity as a thing that you become, not something that you are. The first human was a shapechanger. They could know another being absolutely, because they could become it. First One was made, like all things, by the ocean black and the endless dance of the Snake and the Osprey. Other creatures had long separated from this state of constant motion and settled down, but First One was still young and lively and terribly curious. I have heard some refer to this unformed version of First One as a spirit of play. An unsurprising claim from the people who gave us science.
Like our imagining of First Woman, First One came into this world guileless and helpless. They wanted to know many things, and chased the four winds to learn them. But in all their knowing, they never did come to know their creators, the Snake and the Osprey. The cosmic dance, it seemed, was something best observed and not undertaken. The other creatures of the world warned First One that the Urs were loving and wise, but inaccessible. The very motions that made First One could easily unmake them. I cannot tell you why they were unsatisfied with this answer. Perhaps this is where we get our inimitable desire to know our makers.
First One approached the Snake and the Osprey in the midst of their dancing-lovemaking, and humbly asked to participate. The Snake and the Osprey had never been asked this before. I can’t imagine they had never dreamed this possibility in their long and meticulous dance, but dreaming is very different from watching it actually play out.
The Snake and the Osprey were charmed by First One’s naïveté, but they were honest. They told First One that the dance would probably kill them. The Urs were big and mighty, mighty enough to move the world, and First One was vanishingly small. They could easily be crushed without their makers even knowing.
I am not sure why First One was not satisfied with this answer, either. Perhaps they believed their formlessness would protect them, or perhaps they didn’t really trust the Urs to give them an easy answer. Anyway, First One insisted. Death was still the last great mystery, after all.
The Snake and the Osprey patiently agreed to First One’s request, knowing it would probably not end the way that they imagined. Now, the creators were wise. They knew that a wound opens to death, but it also opens to other things, like knowledge. They would teach this lesson to First One kindly, as few other teachers would show restraint.
So it was that First One crawled into bed with the Snake and the Osprey, and participated in the cosmic dance. They understood, for the first time, the nature of their makers. And then they were ripped to shreds.
The makers were not surprised, but they were not mean-spirited creatures, either. They took pity on First One and collected the pieces of their poor, mangled body. With them they danced again, and with this motion, the motion of the ocean black, they molded First One’s body into new bodies.
They were humans. Women, men, those who walk between, those who walk without. The great mystery lived in them still, but it was broken up. Some say diluted… Maybe this is why we long to be with one another, why we can only know something to be true if we know it together.
Gender and Language
The Diasporas often dispute the genders of First Man and the Snake. In Basedt and among the Ka-Sarikote, they are chiefly male. The Akiat echo the plurality of the Sarikote, and consider First Man and First Woman to be dynamic designations, not fixed. First Woman is a woman, but this does not preclude him becoming First Man, just as Autumn does not preclude the promise of Spring. He moves to become something new while containing past experiences inside of him. The Snake, interestingly, is his own creature until he comes into contact with First Man, at which point he adopts a faintly masculine likeness.
Southern Satik doesn’t have a linguistic class for gender, and the Ser don’t distinguish First Man from First Woman. They only state that the First One transformed herself in some fashion. When speaking about First One in languages with grammatical gender, they mimic Old Mora’s charming habit of arbitrarily gendering the topic of a sentence.
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Old Mora famously asked the fiddler, “What am I?” to which he responded “A woman.” That seemed to settle it. She declared “Then we [the entire Diaspora] are women.”
Old Mora was fully aware of how ridiculous this would sound to the colonists, but it was clever shorthand for a concept that her neighbors evidently had trouble grasping.
It does not tell us anything meaningful about gender in Ser society, or the genders of First One and the Snake. From what I understand, they are simply “uninterested in small words.” This outlook mirrors the attitudes of their Brundel neighbors, who maintain that the Snake, Osprey, and First One came about long before the Arish language.
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