Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (67 page)

Viracocha
The “foam of the lake” (or the “lake of creation”), Viracocha is a pre-Inca Peruvian deity whom the Incas adopted as their own when they conquered the region. Although there are several versions of his story from Spanish colonial sources, Viracocha is always presented as the creator who lives in Lake Titicaca and oversees sun, water, storms, and light. He is also depicted as a sad old man weeping tears of rain over his disappointing first creation—men. When Viracocha destroys his creation by—what else?—a flood, they turn into a race of giant stones. Today the remnants of these stones are believed to stand near Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest lake, which is located on the border between Peru and Bolivia. Some of the many islands in the lake have ruins of civilizations that existed before the Spanish conquest.
In a second creation, Viracocha makes the divine ancestors of the Incan rulers. While those rulers emerge from one cave, ordinary mortals come out of another.
Viracocha’s wife (and sister) is
Mama Cocha
, the goddess of wind and rain.
As Incan myth and religion evolved, Viracocha is presented as the son of Inti. Because the sun temple in Cuzco contains images of Viracocha and all the other Incan gods, it is believed that these gods are all manifestations of Inti.

THE MYTHS OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICA

Canada, Mexico, Massachusetts, Utah. It is difficult to go anywhere in continental North America without seeing these place names and realizing that this place is Indian country. As Alvin M. Josephy Jr. writes in
500 Nations
, “What is little understood even today…is that almost every community in Canada, the United States and Mexico was once an Indian community and those communities before the arrival of the whites were part of unique Indian nations that blanketed the entire continent.” As many as six hundred different languages were spoken, and there were probably just as many sacred traditions. The first Europeans were fascinated by these people and where they had come from. And the speculation, debate, and controversy over that question continues today.

But each tribe knew exactly where they were from. And like every other culture throughout history, they had sacred stories to explain their beginnings. Many of the tribes of the Southwest told a story of how the first men had emerged from a sacred hole in the ground. Other traditions tell of races of great animals that lived before man, tricksters that created people, or mother goddesses who brought forth humanity and made earth fertile. But above all, the native people of North America had reverence for the sacredness of earth and everything in it, a primal idea that is found in almost all their myths.

Is there a “North American” mythology?

Whether it is an elegiac Edward Curtis photo of a lone chief on horseback, an action-filled Frederic Remington painting of mounted hunters, or a John Wayne movie in which massed braves on war ponies appear threateningly on a ridge, American Indians and their horses are indelible icons.

But as late as 1700, many North American tribes had no horses. The animal that transformed much of the Native American world arrived in the 1500s with the Spanish, who guarded them carefully, not wanting to surrender the great military advantage they possessed. As historian Jake Page writes in
In the Hands of the Great Spirit
, “It would not be until decades into the next (18th) century that the horses would almost totally transform the cultures of the Plains and…Southwest, producing some of the finest light cavalry ever known on Earth.”

Native Americans connected in a state of “oneness” with their horses is one of the persistent stereotypes of the American native past. There are others, including Hollywood’s stock images of “Indians” as savage, dangerous, elusive, and untrustworthy characters—” Indian givers”—unless they happen to be Lone Ranger’s reliable sidekick, Tonto. The stereotypes were underscored in pidgin-English dialogue, like “You speak-um with forked tongue” and “We smoke-um peace pipe.” While the worst of this nonsense has been eliminated, there was still Disney’s 1995
Pocahontas
. Playing fast and loose with history, Disney turned the story of the mercenary soldier John Smith, who ran Jamestown with an iron fist, and the ten-year-old native girl Pocahontas into a colonial version of
Romeo and Juliet
. After seeing the film, a Native American school principal noted that
Pocahontas
was the equivalent of teaching the Holocaust by having Anne Frank fall in love with a German soldier.

Once past these stereotypes, the challenge comes in getting a handle on who the North American natives were and what they believed. One of the problems is sheer numbers. There are almost as many traditions and deities as there are tribes—and there are hundreds of tribes. Even so, as Native North American myth authority David Leeming points out, “As various as Indian cultures had become by the time they moved into North America, they had and have in common an identifiable collective mythological tradition…. These common themes, in many cases, can be traced back probably not only to Asian roots, but also to the process by which the various people migrated across the continents….”

A fundamental connection between many of these tribes is the idea that everything in life has a spiritual component. Not only was there a supernatural power or spirit present throughout the Creation, this power is also present in daily life—in the preparation for planting or hunting, constructing a home, or settling a dispute. Another common idea is that the creation of the earth and its people involves a supreme god, usually a male sky god, sky father, or “all father,” but often a Mother Earth or great goddess as well. When the supreme deity is male, the messy details of Creation are often left to a helper, such as the “earth divers”—usually animals who create the earth by bringing up pieces of dry land from beneath a primal ocean. In other traditions, the helper deity is a goddess. A number of scholars point out that this scenario is a lot like “the men bring home the bacon and the women run the household.” In what tribe have you heard that?

Other common threads that run through the North American traditions include shamanism, drumming, chanting, sweat lodges, and pipe smoking. All of these traditions are believed to stem from the prehistoric roots that are widely shared by the people of North America. But perhaps the most familiar “public” face of the North American native traditions is sacred dancing, a form of communal prayer that brought spirituality to life in pulsing, rhythmic performances—some outdoor, some indoor; some very secret, others public—that connected the people with the “mysteries” surrounding them. The vivid image of Native Americans dancing in a circle in a parched field as they look to the sky and implore the Great Spirit to send rain to nurture the wilting corn crop is almost iconic. But the rain dance is only one of a wide range of sacred and secular dances that exist throughout many tribes. One of many others is the feather dance, a rite held whenever an eagle feather from a ceremonial dress accidentally fell to the floor. Because the eagle was considered a sacred bird, its feather would be retrieved and “reconsecrated” in a group dance. For the Iroquois, the feather dance was also a sacred expression of thanksgiving.

Perhaps the most famous “dance” from Native American tradition is the sun dance. Typically a four-day rite, the sun dance usually took place to welcome the revival of nature after winter. In preparation for the dance, a tree was cut down and erected as a sacred pole. After two or three days of feasting, sweat lodge purification rites, and fasting, the dancers attached themselves to the pole by piercing themselves with pegs secured by long grass ropes. They then danced, straining against these tethers until their skin broke or they collapsed to the ground from exhaustion and hunger. When the ordeal ended, it was believed that the dancers had absorbed the pain and suffering of the tribe for the year to come. Missionaries and government agents eventually banned the dance in the nineteenth century.

Dancing was also typically linked to fertility rites. Among many of the southwestern tribes, there was a corn dance, which was eventually merged with Catholic feast days. And the basket dance of the Pueblos took its name from the baskets symbolizing fertility and was originally held in spring. After Catholicism was introduced, the basket dance was moved to winter, because the missionaries did not want any ritual dancing during their holy days of Lent.

The ghost dance, whose name referred to the spirits of departed ancestors and the nearly depleted buffalo, was a reaction to the coming of whites and the destruction of native ways. Appearing in 1870, the dance grew out of a religious movement initiated among the Northern Paiute in Nevada by a tribal leader named Wodziwob. A new type of religious leader, Wodziwob was regarded as one of a number of “prophets” who appeared among several tribes to restore conditions to the way they were before the white man arrived. Among his many reforms, which included a prohibition on alcohol, he proposed performing a ghost dance to the ancestors to help make this happen. This communal prayer in the form of a continuous circular dance culminated when the dancers achieved a state of ecstasy.

But in 1890, another messianic movement grew among the Paiutes. This time it was led by another prophet, Wovoka, who also wanted to return to a time before the white man’s coming. Wovoka’s relatively benign message included a call to perform a five-day ghost dance to bring about that change. His message spread to the Plains, which sent a delegation, including Sitting Bull, to learn more about Wovoka’s vision. As the movement gained followers, it took on more militant aspects, especially among the younger Sioux, some of whom wore “ghost shirts,” which, they believed, would protect them from bullets. The movement provoked hysteria among white settlers, who saw it as a dangerous conspiracy. Eventually military action was called for, resulting in the arrest and death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of more than 300 ghost dancers—Lakota men, women, and children—at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, marking the practical end of the ghost-dance movement.

WHO’S WHO OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIVE GODS

The following list includes some of the most typical and intriguing North American deities and mythic figures. These include Great Spirits—the somewhat passive, “all-father” Creator gods shared by many North American tribes—and Earth Mothers, twins, and tricksters. (Tribal origins and locations are listed.)

Coyote
(many tribes and areas) The trickster god of the North American Indians of the western and southwestern United States, Coyote is the mischievous, cunning deity who causes numerous disasters to befall the world. As Richard Erdoes writes in
American Indian Trickster Tales
, “Coyote, part human, part animal, taking whichever shape he pleases, combines in his nature the sacredness and sinfulness, grand gestures and pettiness, strength and weakness, joy and misery, heroism and cowardice that together form the human character…. [He is] the godlike creator, the bringer of light, the monster-killer, the miserable little cheat, and of course, the lecher.”
Coyote has many origins. The Maidu (California) believe that Coyote emerges from the ground and watches the creator Wonomi (“no death”) make the first man and woman. When Coyote tries to do the same thing, the humans he creates are blind. So, Coyote decides it would be more interesting to make sickness, sorrow, and death to plague mankind. In short order, he accomplishes his goal.
But the joy quickly fades when Coyote’s son is killed by a rattlesnake bite. Coyote tries to revive the corpse by submerging it in a lake. But the boy remains dead, so Coyote leaves the corpse to rot. Seeing what has happened, Wonomi realizes that Coyote will always be a torment, and decides to leave the earth and its affairs to his wily adversary.
In other tales, Coyote is a lecherous character with a colossal and magical penis. In a tale of the Shasta (northern California), Coyote sees two pretty maidens in a creek and desires them both. Turning himself into a salmon, Coyote/Salmon swims between the two girls and enters their bodies. As the girls ask each other if they feel something strange, Coyote emerges in his true form and laughs at them. In another Shasta tale, Coyote sees a girl digging for roots by a stream, changes his penis into the stalk of a plant, and stretches it across the stream so that it can enter her. When the girl sees the stalk, she taps at it with her digging tool. Coyote howls in pain and has to pull back his “stalk.”