Sunday, February 3, 2013

Hungarian Creation Myth

I did the Hungarian creation myth for my creation story.  It would be classified as the "earth diver" creation story, like the majority of the class, but I really liked it because of the little details, even though I did not add many of the little details when I was telling it to the class.  Here is the full version, which I got from "Magic Tales", http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.


The seeds of the Holy Sea break out of your shell.
The eternal sea's waves are waving, and rolling.
Their waves are rocking and their foam is hissing.
There is no earth yet anywhere, but in the immeasurable heights,
Above in his golden house, sits the great heavenly father on his golden throne.

He is the old, white haired and white bearded God of eternity.
On his black robes there are thousands of sparkling stars.
Besides him sits his wife, the Great Heavenly Mother.
On her white robes (palast) there are thousands of sparkling stars.
She is the ancient material of which everything is made.
They have existed from eternity in the past and will exist for all eternity to come.

In front of them stands their beautiful golden sunbeam haired son,
The sun God Magyar. The boy asks of his father:
"When shall we create the world of the humans my dear father?"

The Eternal Sea just waves and rolls.
Its waves are rocking and its foam is hissing.
The old gray-haired heavenly father lowers his head .
He ponders the question a while and a little longer,
Then he lifts his white haired head and talks to his son.

-- My dear sweet golden haired son, let us create then
For the humans their own world, so that they, who will be
Your children shall have a place to live in.

-- How shall we create such a world, my dear father?
-- This is the manner in which we can create it:
In the depths of the waving, blue Sea of Eternity are the
Sleeping eyes (seeds), sleeping seeds [sem=eye/small seed]
The sleeping Magya's [ Mag=seed, Magyar=man].

Descend therefore to the depths of the Great Sea.
Bring up the sleeping seeds and dreaming eyes, so that
We can create a world out of them.

The son followed the direction of his father.
He turned himself into his image of a golden bird, into a golden diving duck.
Then he flew down to the expanses of the Endless Sea.

He swam for a while on top of the water,
Rocked by the waves of the sea for a while.
He then dived down into the depths of the blue,
Searching for the bottom, but unable to reach it.
Out of breath, he was forced to resurface.

He swam on top again, rocked by the waves,
He gathered his strength, for a long time.
After taking deep breaths he submerged again into the blue depths,
Diving deeper, into the darkness, slowly releasing his air
Which like vibrating pearls rose to the top and popped on the surface of the rolling sea.

However now his beak hit the bottom of the sea, into its sand.
He took some of it into his beak and like an arrow,
He shot up to the top of the water with it
From the surface of the sea bed, he brought up the
Sleeping eyes/seeds, silver white "ügyücske" [small eyes?].
The sleeping eyes awoke, the sleepy eyes opened and grew up and became living beings.


There were a lot of things that were repeated throughout the three days of storytelling.  The main ones that I picked out were tears, the body of a diety, clay, eyes, water, and the earth diver.  The tears and the body were significant to me because tears usually were involved in the creation of human beings, while the body of a diety usually was used to create the landscape of the Earth, generally after their death.  Clay was prevalent in the creation stories of tribes, where clay was used to create people.  Eyes were usually the sun or some other part of the universe.  And water was one of the few things that were usually in existence before anything else was created, which showed its importance.  And the earth diver was important for a lot of reasons, it was repeated many times in so many stories, and it was used to bring sand or other things to the surface in order to create life.

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