Truly a Strange Creation Myth

Here follows the strangest creation tale I think I've ever encountered.  Authorship at bottom.

Let Us Make Gods

There was once upon a time a god who, at the beginning of things, merely existed and had nothing to do. He hung on empti­ness and looked out on space, and, except those parts of himself that he could see, nothing ever moved in his whole horizon, and nothing ever came into sight. He was a worm-like deity, and his movements were quite methodical and regular, a mere pendu­lum-like swing of the tail to and fro: it never occurred to him to do anything else; he did not, in fact, know that he was doing it.

One day, however, something happened—­something wonderful and astonishing—which had never happened to him before. Inside his tail, which he had never before known to have an inside, he felt a pain, and with a sharp twitch, in order to avoid and get away from it, he swung it up and round and hit himself sharply in the mouth. And the evening and morning—if one may speak in parables of things that did not exist—were the first day.

When I say that he hit himself in the mouth, I merely mean that he hit two parts of himself together that had never come together before, and had not had a notion that they could come together or even that they existed. It was only on contact that they began to realize themselves, and to wish, in a vague sort of way, for a repetition of the experience—to get back on each other, so to speak, though so high and exalted an idea as revenge or retribution had not yet occurred to them. So from that time on, for a few centuries, or æons, or whatever the time was under conditions where time could not be measured, the god continued to dis­locate his tail with vague plungings in the direction whither he wished it to go, much as a child plunges its spoon toward the mouth which it cannot yet find. And very gradually, as a result of these plunges, his tail became, not wiser or more experienced, but more muscular. And so every now and again, by a sheer fluke, mouth and tail came together again; and every time that his tail smacked his mouth, the god smacked his lips. Life was becoming sweet to him.

And then one day—if day it may be called—the great thing happened; just as the god’s tail struck, the mouth, responsive, made a sudden grab at it, caught hold of it, and clung. And there they were: the god had joined them together, and marriage in heaven had begun.

Slowly, softly but firmly, the god began chewing his own tail, and the evening and morning were the second day.

At first the tail liked it, and then it didn’t; and the more it disliked it, the more it wriggled to escape. So there was war in heaven: but the mouth still held its own. Peacefully, from its own point of view—if a matter of taste may be so called—it determined to investigate, to its own satis­faction, what its tail really was, or what it was capable of becoming. And so it chewed and chewed.

The tail was now in great pain, and was beginning to communicate its feelings to the brain. But the brain did not understand, or did not know how to deal with the matter; and so when it told the tail to pull it told the mouth to pull also, and the suction and the pain increased greatly, and the mouth, believing that it was enjoying itself greatly, continued to absorb the tail.

In course of time—for at last time was really beginning to shape itself—there came results. The god began to find nourishment in the eating of his own tail; and his body began to put out queer little fins, with feelers and suckers attached to them—some taking after the head and some taking after the tail, as is the way with all things born of double parentage; and the strife, or mutual benefit scheme, according as we view it, which had started between the primordial pair of opposites, was taken up and repro­duced all over the god’s body by a thousand flattering imitators. And whatever the evening and the morning were at this pre­cise stage of affairs, nobody could say that the god was not now alive.

Presently the creative eruption which had broken out over the god’s body extended in the direction of his head; and round the great parent mouth small and very animated heads and tails—fins, feelers and suckers, or whatever you like to call them—­sprang up and began disputing in their own way which should be first. Now and then, turning from each other, they made excited grabs at the parental orifice, disturbing its adjustment, and distracting its attention from its own solid and immemorial feed on the now disappearing tail. “Making them­selves to be as one of us!” ruminated the slow-mouthing deity; and, turning from his own proper employ to take a snap at them, he loosed hold of the tail of things, and, letting, it slip away, recovered it no more.

The tail was now master of the situation; though bruised, flayed and corrupted by the digestive processes, it at last found ground to go upon; and, conceiving the altogether fallacious notion that by mere retrogression it could recover its primitive form, it began to drag its body backwards, and, if ever the head made any sign of resistance or of thinking otherwise, to bash it violently against the obstacles which lay in its path.

Following upon this came a change in the composition of the deity. The synthetic process of creation or self-realization having, come to an end, disintegration took its place: gradually all the fins, feelers and suckers began to separate and fall away from the parent body and start life on their own account. They passed out of view; the deity lost cognizance of them; what became of them he did not know.

Presently, deprived of these excrescences born of earlier conflict, he settled back into peace: head and tail contended no more; pace slackened and became imperceptible; finally it ceased.

The pendulum swing was not resumed; in the course of his changes the deity had found ground; bedrock was under him. Very slowly and slidingly he curled himself round in many coils, close and comfortable; head rested on tail, he dozed. As he did so, merely from old habit and absence of mind, he took his tail once more into his mouth and began chewing it. The tail resisted no more; it seemed unaware of the process which was going on. Gradually it coalesced and was absorbed; the coils of its spiral became fewer; the rate of absorption diminished, but never entirely ceased; back from tail to head it chewed its way; and, unity achieved, rested from its labour, closed eyes, and slept fast. When, many æons later, those separated entities, having found for themselves other forms, came upon him lying asleep, they did not recognize him as a god at all; but they came and hung about his sides, climbed on him, fattened on him, and told stories to themselves of an altogether different god—­one whom they themselves had made.

From Gods and Their Makers and Other Stories (1920), by Laurence Housman, brother of fantasist Clemence Housman and poet A.E. Housman.  The bulk of this volume was originally published in 1897 (though written in 1889). I suspect the above story probably dates from the same time period, but presently I know of no appearance in print before 1920.