HOW THE WORLD WAS BORN

A cosmogony according to the children of the class of Györ
Györ, Hungary, 2008
Storyteller : Attila Kszel

Original Hungarian version

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” First there was nothing, only big dark emptiness.

Then once, in the big nothing a tiny point of light appeared. This point of light started to grow, then finally it made a big flash and the Magician appeared.

The Magician is a spirit: the spirit of a very old man with white beard, big tagged ears and a hood on his head. Green light was looming around him. The Magician came from the spiritual world - because there’s an existing spiritual world somewhere as well. He started to knead the nothing with his hands and he condensed it into a smaller and smaller invisible ball, and when the ball became so small that it could stay in his palms, he threw it all around him. That’s how the planets were born, just as the Earth.

At the beginning the planet Earth was bleak, dry and uninhabited. It revolved for long, but nothing has happened with it.

But once suddenly a meteorite slammed to the Earth. It broke through the crust and created a big hole. From this hole the water - which was already there inside the Earth, but it couldn’t come out - burst out.

Then the rain started to fall.
It rained for very long.
The water exfoliated the mainland and then, floating on the water, the continents started to diverge from each other. That’s how the seas and the continents were born. The colour of the Earth became blue.

The Magician saw all this and he decided to create animals and plants. He kneaded a big seed from the nothing and he brought it into the interior of the planet. There he planted it and gave it some water. The seed started to grow deep in the Earth, then it outcropped to the surface and it became an enormous tree.
This tree then covered the whole planet.

The Magician started to knead the nothing again and conjured tiny eggs. He carried them around and put them at different points of the Earth and the seas and left them alone. The eggs came up and they transformed into different animals: fishes, birds and dinosaurs for example. They started to reproduce themselves and populated the seas and the midlands.

After this the Magician created the people.
He went to a forest and collected all kinds of plants onto the middle of a clearing. Then he brought some meat of dinosaurs and put it on the top of the pile. Then finally he put a heart - that he pulled out from his robe - on the top of everything. It was his own heart, a heart of purple colour. On the heart he put two small pebbles, a white and a black one. Then finally he poured purple liquid on everything.
Millions were born suddenly.
Men and women.

This is how the world was born.

And when the Magician saw all this, he disappeared into nothing trough that small gate of light where he came from and the spot of light that he left behind became the sun on the sky…”