This distinction is essential for religion. As we have seen in considering the creation itself, myths often speak of archetypes in terms of prototypes. They describe the absolute nature of reality as the first and original one. But to understand their point you have to realize that by “first” they mean “always.” Adam is relevant to us because he represents the essential man (an archetype), not just the first man (prototype). His “original sin” is thus ours; it is inherent in the human condition. We do not inherit such sin just through time, genetically, like some sort of proclivity for contracting a disease or for playing the piano. Rather, we inherit it to the extent we inherit our humanity; we inherit it through the form. Similarly, the Jews celebrate Passover not just because it describes the prototypical act of deliverance whose benefit they inherit historically as free men; religiously, they celebrate Passover because it symbolizes the archetypical deliverance of all men (now as well as then; always) from enslavement (to Egyptians, or to an oppressor in any form).
While creation myths often speak of events as prototypical, then, their real interest lies in recognizing them as archetypical. This is as true of the “origin” of the state or the individual as it was of the “creation” of the world. Myths talk about temporal limits because they are a simple, if roundabout, way of determining definitions. Limits are merely definitions put negatively. To say that you were born and will die is one way of defining the temporality and dependence of the life that stretches between. This somewhat misleading way of defining by limits is used even by the “historical” religions of the West; even they are interested in historical events primarily for their timeless truths. Jesus, the Christians claim, rises from the tomb and transcends his relativity always, now as well as on the first Easter. And Allah, for Islam, wondrously creates the light every day, not only on the first day of creation.
The archetypical beginnings described in creation myths are absolute and essential. Their truths are always valid. We are so accustomed to thinking historically and linearly, placing the past “back there,” that this notion is somewhat difficult for us to grasp right away. But it is not inscrutable if you think of time cyclically, repeating itself like the seasons, rather than progressively, marching along some imaginary line. It is also easier to understand if you envision the past as “deep within,” at the core, like the first age ring of a tree’s growth.
The attempt of creation myths to reflect and express our recognition of such essences sometimes seems to make for faulty history, later rewrites of what “actually” was. The Declaration of Independence, to use a current myth, argues that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, presumably at the beginning. But when did that happen? Did the first human beings understand the absoluteness of their “rights” on the sixth day? Later on, in Old Testament times? Were they recognized in the Middle Ages or even in the Europe from which the Declaration’s authors fled? Of course not, but the proclamation of these rights is couched in such historical terms only to make the mythic statement powerful. The “factual” nature of such mythical history is not at issue. What has happened is that a positive judgment concerning the human condition of personal freedom, perceived as essential and absolute, has been expressed mythologically as being established at the beginning, in timelessness. A value judgment made in the eighteenth century is understood as absolutely true; transferred into a temporal structure, it is expressed as always true—therefore, true from the beginning.
Such mythological revolutions are fairly common. The Assiniboine Indians, for instance, claim that horses were created along with men by the wolf-god Inktonmi in the beginning. The fact that these people of the American plains only acquired horses in real numbers in the eighteenth century and that their association with them is therefore relatively recent may render this claim bad “history” but it is still good myth: it appropriately reflects the self-understanding of the Assiniboine as riders; it affirms their essential identity now as horsemen. The fault is not in the myth but in our own attempt to read it as history.
It is particularly important to remember the dangers of this confusion of myth with history when you read myths of transition, myths which describe overtly how old attitudes toward reality were discarded for new ones. Such myths use historical events to make their point, but they are not “historical” themselves. The creation myth of the Chiricahua Apache, for instance, sadly reflects their conquest by the white men and the Christian religion they imposed; more importantly, it expresses their understanding of such a conquest as essential to their being as Indians:
There were many people on earth. They did not know God. They prayed to Gaye [mountain-dwelling gods], Lightning, and Wind. They did not know about the living God. So the ocean began to rise and covered the earth. These people of ancient times were drowned. Just a few were saved….
After the water had gone down, a bow and arrow and a gun were put before two men. The man who had the first choice took the gun and he became the white man. The other had to take the bow and he became the Indian. If the second man had got the gun, he would have been the white man, they say.
Some myths reflect such historical changes covertly. When one group of people conquers another, their creation myth often reveals their new perception of the absolute in the conquest itself. It shows how that conquest reveals an absolute pattern by describing similar triumphs in the divine realm. Frozen at the moment of transition, these myths tell of great battles between the old, degenerate gods of the conquered people and the young, energetic deities of the conquerors. The great Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish, for instance, describes warfare between primarily Sumerian gods (Anu, the power of the sky; Enlil, that of the earth; Apsu, that of the ocean, and so on) and the triumphant young local deity of Babylonia, Marduk, and his followers. And as Marduk slays the monsters of chaos and establishes a great and meaningful order, an order that pervades nature and culture, so did the Babylonians who honored him. Similar myths appear all over the world: Hesiod’s Theogony and the Olympian Creation Myth reveal the victory of the masculine sky gods of the invading Aryans over the fertile and feminine earth goddesses of the Pelasgians and Cretans; the Earliest Creed of the Celts and the Maori Cosmologies both tell of the successful rebellion of divine sons against their primordial parents and reflect the triumph of new cultures over indigenous ones; and the Melanesian myth of Qat from the Banks Islands presumably echoes similar social upheavals in its portrayal of the successful creator (god of the conquerors) and his witless brother (god of the conquered). That these myths of transition also have validity in understanding our own personal growth (each child’s eventual victory over his parents, each generation’s progressive conquest over the prior one) further contributes to their usefulness as a way of perceiving the world. But what is important is that, whether the context is social or personal, an absolute dimension of relative reality is revealed. The myths change because people’s perception of that absolute changes.
From the outside, such myths may look like projections, attempts on the part of believers to justify their current situation by announcing its sanction by the gods. But if you consider the myths more profoundly, you will find that they are not projections but revelations. As religious expressions, they begin with the absolute reality of the Holy and show how it pervades all relative realities—this society, the one which it supplanted, and the one which will eventually overthrow it—the status quos and the revolutions. Having focused on one particular manifestation of the Holy, they do not mean to say it is the only one. That again is idolatrous, a confusion of a symbol of the Holy and the Holy itself.
CREATION MYTHS attempt to reveal the absolute dimension of the relative world. They proclaim the Holy as the ground of being and, taking into account the human experience of alienation from this ground, proclaim it also as the goal of all being. They encourage people to understand themselves, physically, mentally, and spiritually, in the context of the cyclic flow of being and not-being and ultimately in the abso
lute union of these two.
In a time when old myths are being rejected and “faith” is under attack, these myths rise above the dogmatism and institutionalism which plague all established religions to serve as a testament of their common concern. While showing the provinciality of each religion, they demonstrate the universality of the religious. And they vividly express the fundamental religious point that, while the worldly is meaningless, the world is full of meaning: people, their cultures, and nature itself are all revelations of the Holy, occasions in which the transcendent absolute is immanently manifest. The myths are still valid, because they show how life is a symbol to be lived.
ONE
AFRICAN MYTHS
BUSHMAN
Cagn Orders the World
The Bushmen of Southern Africa are related to the Pygmies and Hottentots in their short stature, complex languages, and rich mythology. As nomadic hunters, their social groupings were necessarily small, rendering them vulnerable to the Bantu and white settlers who moved into their territory south of the Zambezi River. Those who survived with their culture intact moved to the more remote desert regions of Namibia, South Africa, and southern Angola.
The Bushmen believe not only in a good creator god (Kaang, Khu, or Thora, depending on the specific tribe) but also in an evil deity (Gauna or Gawa, god of the dead and of wicked spirits), the source of all trouble in the world. Some scholars have argued, however, that these high gods reflect Bantu influence. All agree that the main feature of the Bushmen’s religion is belief in animal spirits, the most prominent of which (Cagn) is the hero of this myth.
Sometimes confused with Kaang, as he is here, Cagn is a perfunctory creator at best. His real interest lies on earth, where he reigns as the great magician and organizer. Ordering the world, enjoying endless adventures, and even slaying monsters, Cagn himself finally dies and is reborn—a sacred event whose story is repeated during the initiation of young men so that they may die to their youth and be reconstituted in a similar manner.
CAGN was the first being; he gave orders and caused all things to appear, and to be made, the sun, the moon, stars, wind, mountains, and animals. His wife’s name was Coti. He had two sons, and the eldest was chief, and his name was Cogaz; the name of the second was Gewi…. He was at that time making all animals and things, and making them fit for the use of men, and making snares and weapons. He made then the partridge and the striped mouse, and he made the wind in order that game should smell up the wind—so they run up the wind still….
A daughter of Cagn became cross because her father had scolded her and she ran away to destroy herself by throwing herself among the snakes (qabu). The snakes were also men, and their chief married her and they ate snake’s meat, but they gave her eland’s meat to eat, because the child of Cagn must eat no evil thing. Cagn used to know things that were far off, and he sent his son Cogaz to bring her back, so Cogaz went with his young men, and Cagn lent him his tooth to make him strong. When the snakes saw Cogaz approaching with his party, they became angry and began to hide their heads, but their chief said, “You must not get angry, they are coming to their child,” so the snakes went away to hunt, and his sister gave him meat, and they told her to tell her husband they were come to fetch her and she prepared food for the road and they went with her next morning, and they prepared themselves by binding rushes round their limbs and bodies, and three snakes followed them. These tried to bite them, but they only bit the rushes; they tried to beat them with reins, but they only beat rushes, and they tried throwing sand at them to cause wind to drive them into the water, not knowing he had the tooth of Cagn, and they failed. The children at home, the young men with the chief of the snakes, knew that when those snakes came back they would fill the country with water. So they commenced to build a high stage with willow poles, and the female snakes took their husbands on their return and threw them into the water, and it rose about the mountains, but the chief and his young men were saved on the high stage; and Cagn sent Cogaz for them to come and turn from being snakes, and he told them to lie down, and he struck them with his stick, and as he struck each the body of a person came out, and the skin of a snake was left on the ground, and he sprinkled the skins with canna, and the snakes turned from being snakes, and they became his people….
Cagn sent Cogaz to cut sticks to make bows. When Cogaz came to the bush, the baboons (cogn) caught him. They called all the other baboons together to hear him, and they asked him who sent him there. He said his father sent him to cut sticks to make bows. So they said—“Your father thinks himself more clever than we are, he wants those bows to kill us, so we’ll kill you,” and they killed Cogaz, and tied him up in the top of a tree, and they danced around the tree singing (an untranscribable baboon song), with a chorus saying, “Cagn thinks he is clever.” Cagn was asleep when Cogaz was killed, but when he awoke he told Coti to give him his charms, and he put some on his nose, and said the baboons have hung Cogaz. So he went to where the baboons were, and when they saw him coming close by, they changed their song so as to omit the words about Cagn, but a little baboon girl said, “Don’t sing that way; sing the way you were singing before.” And Cagn said, “Sing as the little girl wishes,” and they sang and danced away as before. And Cagn said, “That is the song I heard, that is what I wanted, go on dancing till I return”; and he went and fetched a bag full of pegs, and he went behind each of them as they were dancing and making a great dust, and he drove a peg into each one’s back, and gave it a crack, and sent them off to the mountains to live on roots, beetles and scorpions, as a punishment. Before that baboons were men, but since that they have tails, and their tails hang crooked. Then Cagn took Cogaz down, and gave him canna and made him alive again.
Cagn found an eagle getting honey from a precipice, and said, “My friend, give me some too,” and it said, “Wait a bit,” and it took a comb and put it down, and went back and took more, and told Cagn to take the rest, and he climbed up and licked only what remained on the rock, and when he tried to come down he found he could not. Presently he thought of his charms, and took some from his belt, and caused them to go to Cogaz to ask advice; and Cogaz sent word back by means of the charms that he was to make water to run down the rock, and he would find himself able to come down; and he did so, and when he got down, he descended into the ground and came up again, and he did this three times, and the third time he came up near the eagle, in the form of a huge bull eland; and the eagle said, “What a big eland,” and went to kill it, and it threw an assegai, which passed it on the right side, and then another, which missed it, to the left, and a third, which passed between its legs, and the eagle trampled on it, and immediately hail fell and stunned the eagle, and Cagn killed it, and took some of the honey home to Cogaz, and told him he had killed the eagle which had acted treacherously to him, and Cogaz said, “You will get harm some day by these fightings.” And Cagn found a woman named Cgorioinsi, who eats men, and she had made a big fire and was dancing round it, and she used to seize men and throw them into the fire, and Cagn began to roast roots at the fire, and at last she came and pitched him in, but he slipped through at the other side, and went on roasting and eating his roots, and she pitched him in again and again, and he only said “Wait a bit until I have finished my roots and I’ll show you what I am.” And when he had done he threw her into the fire as a punishment for killing people. Then Cagn went back to the mountain, where he had left some of the honey he took from the eagle, and he left his sticks there, and went down to the river, and there was a person in the river named Quuisi, who had been standing there a long time, something having caught him by the foot, and held him there since the winter, and he called to Cagn to come and help him, and Cagn went to help him, and put his hand down into the water to loosen his leg, and the thing let go the man’s leg, and seized Cagn’s arm. And the man ran stumbling out of the water, for his leg was stiffened by his being so long held fast, and he called out, “Now you will be held there till the winter,” and he went to th
e honey, and threw Cagn’s sticks away; and Cagn began to bethink him of his charms, and he sent to ask Cogaz for advice through his charms, and Cogaz sent word and told him to let down a piece of his garment into the water alongside his hand, and he did so, and the thing let go his hand and seized his garment, and he cut off the end of his garment, and ran and collected his sticks, and pursued the man and killed him, and took the honey to Cogaz.
The thorns (dobbletjes) were people—they are called Cagn-cagn—they were dwarfs, and Cagn found them fighting together, and he went to separate them, and they all turned upon him and killed him, and the biting ants helped them, and they ate Cagn up; but after a time they and the dwarfs collected his bones, and put them together and tied his head on, and these went stumbling home, and Cogaz cured him and made him all right again, and asked what had happened to him, and he told him; and Cogaz gave him advice and power, telling him how to fight them, that he was to make feints and strike as if at their legs, and then hit them on the head, and he went and killed many, and drove the rest into the mountains.
—J. M. Orpen. “A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen.” The Cape Monthly Magazine, 1874. Reprinted in Folklore, 1919, pp. 143–152.
HOTTENTOT
The Supreme Being
The Hottentots were the first native people to encounter the Dutch settlers who emigrated to their land c. 1650. Dispossessed of their territory on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope, enslaved, and killed, the Hottentots were all but destroyed. Remnants of the people now live mainly in Namibia and in the northwestern part of South Africa.
Primal Myths Page 6