In every spiritual tradition, the beginning of everything was simply caos.
The chaos sometimes looks like a primordial ocean and sometimes like a sea fire, and every time, it birthed goddesses who went on to create everything that now exists.
Across cultures that never made contact with each other, people understood that the beginning of the world was something vast and feminine.
These 9 goddesses came first before the idea of religion even truly existed!
1. Gaia
Gaia is the primordial deity that the whole world knows.
According to the myth, she wasn’t born of anyone. She emerged directly from chaos, in the shape of solid ground coming out of the darkness.
Gaia isn’t the goddess of the earth; she es the earth!
On her own, she created Uranus (the sky) and Pontus (the sea), so the entire physical world is her doing.
Taking Uranus as her mate, the two of them created the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Hundred-Handers.
Much like the earth, Gaia is both nurturing and cruel. When Uranus turned into a tyrant, she forged the first sickle and convinced her son, Chronus, to castrate his own father.
She remained very relevant even with the new generation of gods, participating in the war against Zeus and speaking prophecies.
She was the first thing to exist, and no one was allowed to forget that.
2. Nammu
Sumerian mythology is one of the oldest recorded mythologies in the world, along with its primordial goddess, Nammu.
Before Marduk existed, she was the formless salty ocean that existed before the sky and the earth were even separated!
Sumerian texts call her “the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth."
Unlike Gaia, Nammu isn’t presented as a specific personality. She is simply a quiet and elemental force of nature.
In some accounts, she’s the actual creator of humanity. She shaped the first people from the clay pulled from her waters, with the help of Enki.
Her primordial ocean represented the universe, and she created us from that very universe, which actually fits the scientific explanation that we’re made up of atoms from outer space!
3. Tiamat
In the Babylonian myth, Tiamat is the saltwater ocean, and she’s paired with Apsu, the freshwater.
These two primordial deities were the source that created every single god in the mythology.
But the younger gods got restless, so Apsu wanted to destroy them, but he ended up dying first.
The grief and rage that followed turned Tiamat into something else, a monstrous goddess who created an army of dragons and scorpion-men to destroy her own descendants!
When Marduk managed to defeat her, Tiamat’s creation of the world continued.
He cut her enormous body in half, using one part to make the sky and the other to make the earth. Rivers, mountains, and clouds all came from her dead body.
Tiamat confirms that ancient mythologies treated creation and destruction as two sides of the same coin.
4. Izanami
Izanami joined forces with her husband, Izanagi, to stir the primordial ocean with their jeweled spear. The drops that fell from the tip of the spear created the first island of Japan.
From there, they went on to create the rest of Japan and many nature gods, mountains, rivers, wind…
But then she gives birth to Kagutsuchi, the fire god, and the birth burns her fatally; she’s sent to the land of the dead.
Izanagi was heartbroken, so he followed her down, but he made the expected mistake: he looked at her too soon.
He saw her decaying body and fled in horror, leaving her enraged and humiliated. Because of this, she vowed to kill a thousand people a day.
Izanagi fought back by saying he would cause fifteen hundred births.
This is how Japanese mythology explains the never-ending balance between life and death.
5. Nut
Nut is the primordial sky goddess of ancient Egypt. Her whole body is the sky! She hovers above the earth, supported by her hands and feet, and the stars are the freckles on her skin!
This is how Egyptian art presents her.
She’s separated from her earthbound lover, Geb, by their father Shu, who physically keeps them apart forever.
Nut’s cosmic role is very strange and very beautiful. Every evening, she swallows the sun god Ra, and every morning, she gives birth to him again.
This death and rebirth cycle was how ancient Egyptians explained sunrise and sunset.
Nut is also the mother of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys.
She is the mechanism that keeps the cycle of night and day going!
6. Mahishasuramardini
Mahishasuramardini is a primordial goddess, too, but she didn’t come from the void. She was intentionally created to do something no one else could.
She’s a slayer of the Buffalo Demon.
The demon was unkillable by any man or god, and so it ran wild, conquering the heavens and throwing gods off their thrones.
Since no god could defeat him individually, they combined their powers, and from them emerged the goddess, riding a lion, and carrying multiple weapons.
She fought the demon for days, shape-shifting multiple times, until she finally managed to pierce it with a trident.
7. Nüwa
Nüwa is one of the oldest figures from Chinese mythology, usually presented with a human torso and a serpent’s tail.
This primordial goddess is said to be the creator of humanity. She molded yellow clay to create the first people.
However, her greatest feat is yet to come.
After a catastrophic war between two gods caused the crack of the pillar that held up the sky, Nüwa was the one to repair it.
The crack caused a hole in the heavens, which released floods and fire all across the world.
Nüwa melted down five colors of stone to patch up the sky, and then she cut off the legs of a giant turtle to replace the pillar.
8. Coatlicue
Aztec depictions of the primordial goddess Coatlicue are overwhelming, intentionally so.
Su skirt is woven from living snakes, she wears a necklace with human hearts, hands, and skulls, and instead of a head, she has two snakes!
She represents the force that generates life and death simultaneously.
According to myth, she was sweeping a temple when feathers started falling from the sky. When they touched her, she became pregnant.
Her existing four hundred children felt betrayed by this, so they rallied to kill her!
But right as they attack, her son Huitzilopochtli is born, fully grown and armed. He defended Coatlicue and slayed his siblings.
There’s a very interesting pattern of these primordial creators having to battle with their own children.
9. Ananke
Ananke’s name translates to necessity or inevitability.
She emerged in the beginning, alongside Chronus, the time, sometimes depicted literally intertwined with him as a serpent.
The two of them circle the cosmic egg until it eventually cracks open into everything else.
The goddesses of fate, the Moirai, are frequently described as her daughters, meaning that all the threads of mortal and immortal life lead back to this primordial goddess.
In his Republic, Plato imagined the universe’s axis spinning on her lap, with Fates sitting around her!
Unlike most Greek deities, Ananke is quiet. Still, she is the influence behind everything!
A little Aquarius, devoted to writing and embroidery. Through my writing, I hope to empower readers to align with their true selves and navigate life’s mysteries with confidence.