u/WillNotFightInWW3

I was interested in why a lot of cultures believe in a water world as the origin of life and was reading Creation Myths: Water as Origin and another piece that I can't find any more, but basically the theory is that ancient peoples noticed that pregnant women's water breaks before they go into labour and birth children. So they concluded the origin of life comes from chaotic waters or "lakes".

However the origin of chaos is Greek khaos / χάος which translates to "hole, empty space", or abyss / chasm.

So life emerged from a vast nothingness of water.

On the other hand, some cultures such as the Norse believe that life came into existence from the destruction caused by the clashing of two lands, land of fire and land of ice, creating water (again). This belief comes from literal observations of volcanoes and glaciers in Iceland

Per Norse mythology "As the heat touches the ice for the very first time, a single droplet of water melts off of a glacier, landing in the chaos. As more droplets of water fall, they slowly form into Ymir, a terrible and powerful giant who is both man and woman." So the first beings were giants, that we also see in Dark Souls universe.

"As more of the ice melts, a gigantic cow named Audhumla is formed. She lumbers over to Ymir and provides the giant with milk, sustaining the godlike being’s strength. To keep herself alive, she licks the salty ice around Ginnungagap. As her tongue wears away the ice over time, the first god, Buri, is exposed within it. Buri’s son, Bor, marries the daughter of one of the great giants. Their children are both gods and giants at once, and they are named Odin, Vili, and Ve." Odin is the father of Thor, the god of thunder and lightning bolts. It also explains why the original Lords of Anor Londo were of giant like sizes.

However "giants" in Norse mythology is not exactly accurate, they were Jötunn which translates to devourers or eaters, they were chaotic forces of nature, some were large and some were small enough to marry the gods. Ymir was a large being and when the gods finally killed him his flesh became the earth and his bones were the mountains. So the gods "tamed" the chaos of devouring ancient beings but did not kill them all.

Finally some cultures like the Chinese believed Pangu was the first living being born out of an egg (water says hi again) and dragon-human deities Nuwa and Fuxi created the rest of humanity. Chinese probably believed in ancient dragons because Shaximiao Formation in Sichuan is a hot bed for dinosaur fossils which 300BC historians like Chang Qu regarded as "dragon bones".

Anyway, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls "the Old One" lore is a mishmash of various cultures origin stories of how the universe and life was created.