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PANGU: THE GIANT WHO CREATED THE WORLD
• BY SYLVIE GOULET
The story goes that before the world existed, the universe was like an enormous egg in which the Sky and the Earth were intermingled. Within the egg, everything was chaos and darkness. Yet Pangu slept there peacefully. When he awoke, he opened up his huge hands and, in a powerful clap that sounded like thunder, smashed the shell of the egg that had become too small for him. All the elements that had been frozen for thousands of years were scattered in all directions.
Pangu then had to work for another 18,000 years to put them all back in place. He began by holding the Sky at arm’s length to separate it from the Earth. Eventually, exhausted from his exertions, he collapsed. His body then began to be transformed. His flesh turned into fertile soil, his blood into rivers, his sweat into rain, his bones into precious stones, his hair into trees and plants, his eyes into the Sun and the Moon, his breath into the wind, his voice into thunder, and his body’s lice and fleas into human beings.
