The Birth of a Universe

Chaos or Creation?

The greatest acts of creation in myth are always preceded by an act of destruction. That is something that stood out to me as I trawled through myths from Hesiod to the Enuma Elish and the Norse tale of Ymir as I considered my own tale of creation. Chaos is a theme that emerges time and again as well. There seems to be a conscious recognition of a cycle nature of things, that destruction and chaos to some could be order and creation to others.

In building my own cosmos and birthing a universe, I wanted to capture these feelings, as they seemed to be something innate in the human psyche and our instinctive understanding of how our strange existence may have come into being. I felt this was an important step in my world building, to make Kolgennon feel real and believable it needed to contain themes and elements that seemed to resonate with us on a deep, unconscious level. So, in my own Cosmogony, we see the common themes of chaos, destruction and the cosmic egg. Inclusions that I hope evokes some primal understanding in all those who read the story or listen to the tale.

Layers of Creation

However, there is another layer that I wanted to build in, central to my own thoughts on building a world and how we interact with it as humans, but I think more subtly implied. That is the forces that are portrayed in these tales, though often anthropomorphised or at least conceived as conscious thinking beings, be they gods, monsters, dragons or giants, are in essence difficult to comprehend physical forces. Those of chaos and creation, the explosion of sudden activity and elemental power that is contain in all these tales. Then comes the consciousness, irrational and emotional at first perhaps, but conscious, nevertheless. It is often this injection into the tale that moves the story forward and starts to bring some level of organisation to a world of immense force.

Often these types of gods and monsters then fade into the background, as if their job is done, and then we move to a subtler more conscious layer of gods and men, monsters and heroes, acting with a level of conscious rational thought that seems missing from these earlier works. However, fading is perhaps the wrong word. The physical world those forces created is the canvass on which everything else plays out, its form shapes those people and those tales. The emotion and irrational acts that gave it shape, are the echoes that come down to the present, driving the actions in what otherwise may appear a more rational act.

Although the Cosmogony may not have an immediate impact on the stories set in Kolgennon, the very act shaped the land, the nature of the act informs all that comes afterwards, each of the stories that I tell in the presence have a shadow that stretches right back to the ocean of chaos and the great void which came before.

Gennon - the creator of the world