The Emergence of Men
Stories of humanity appearing in the world vary wildly. They range from man appearing naturally, springing from the earth or emerging from the sea, through to their creation by accident, or their conscious creation by a deity. There is also the contrast with how the gods treat these newcomers. Often this attitude maps onto the circumstances of man’s creation, from complete incuriosity, through to making use of them for work, as in Mesopotamian creation stories, or to making them the object of their hopes for the future.
Beyond this, we also have the ways in which humans find land in which to settle. Springing directly from the earth, autochthonal, as in the way the Athenians saw themselves, or discovering their homeland after an arduous trek, as in the Dorians or the biblical Israelites.
This gives us a breadth of stories to explore, and for our purposes, a wide range of inspiration from which to draw for our own creation.
The seeding of Humanity
Another factor we must consider is whether there are multiple creation stories, competing and complementing each other within one culture’s tradition. The Xosu certainly have this idea, perhaps reflecting an uncertainty of their true origin and an attempt to reconcile different stories of creation. Throughout the lands of the Xosu we find stories of the people emerging from a variety of places and sources. There is a common thread however that draws all this together, divine blood. All the collected tales of the creation of men in the Xosu canon agree that divine blood spilled on the ground sowed the seed and from that men sprung. Where the inconsistency and the contradictions lay are the places in which we can delve a little deeper and attempt to uncover some truths about the ancient origins of the Xosu.
No clean cut
To make a world feel like a living and breathing place, filled with all the inconsistencies and incongruence we find in our own world, competing claims to creation give a perfect window onto this mindset. A culture that cannot agree on its own origin and people who are not certain where humans first came from is not an incomplete or confused world. Rather it is a sign of a living vibrant space, in conversation with itself over where it came from and where it is going.
