Primal Myths

by Barbara C. Sproul

  In the course of time Lone Man looked upon the creation and saw mankind multiplying and was pleased, but he also saw evil spirits that harmed mankind and he wanted to live among the men that he had created and be as one of them. He looked about among all nations and peoples to find a virgin to be his mother and discovered a very humble family consisting of a father, mother and daughter. This virgin he chose to be his mother. So one morning when the young woman was roasting corn and eating it he thought this would be the proper time to enter into the young woman. So he changed himself into corn and the young woman ate it and conceived the seed. In the course of time the parents noticed that she was with child and they questioned her, saying, “How is it, daughter, that you are with child when you have not known man? Have you concealed anything from us?” She answered, “As you say, I have known no man. All I know is that at the time when I ate roast corn I thought that I had conceived something, then I did not think of the matter again until I knew I was with child.” So the parents knew that this must be a marvel since the child was not conceived through any man, and they questioned her no more.

  In course of time the child was born and he grew up like other children, but he showed unusual traits of purity and as he grew to manhood he despised all evil and never even married. Everything he did was to promote goodness. If a quarrel arose among the people he would pacify them with kind words. He loved the children and they followed him around wherever he went. Every morning he purified himself with incense, which fact goes to show that he was pure.

  The people of the place where he was born were at that time Mandans. They were in the habit of going to an island in the ocean off the mouth of a river to gather ma-ta-ba-ho. For the journey they used a boat by the name of I-di-he (which means Self Going); all they had to do was to strike it on one side and tell it to go and it went. This boat carried twelve persons and no more; if more went in the boat it brought ill luck. On the way to the island they were accustomed to meet dangerous obstacles.

  One day there was a party setting out for the island to get some ma-ta-ba-ho and everyone came to the shore to see them off and wish them good luck. The twelve men got into the boat and were about to strike the boat on the side for the start when Lone Man stepped into the boat, saying that he wanted to go too. The men in the boat as well as the people on the shore objected that he would bring ill luck, but he persisted in accompanying them and finally, seeing that they could not get rid of him, they proceeded on the journey.

  Now on the way down the river, evil spirits that lived in the water came out to do them harm, but every time they came to the surface Lone Man would rebuke them and tell them to go back and never show themselves again. As they neared the mouth of the river, at one place the willows along the bank changed into young men who were really evil spirits and challenged the men in the boat to come ashore and wrestle with them. Lone Man accepted the challenge. Everyone with whom he wrestled he threw and killed until the wrestlers, seeing that they were beaten, took to their heels. Then he rebuked the willows, saying that he had made them all and they should not turn themselves into evil spirits any more. When they reached the ocean they were confronted by a great whirlpool, into which the men in the boat began to cast trinkets as a sacrifice in order to pacify it, but every time they threw in a trinket Lone Man would pick it up saying that he wanted it for himself. Meanwhile, in spite of all they could do, the whirlpool sucked them in closer. Then the men began to murmur against Lone Man and complain that he brought them ill luck and lament that they were to be sucked in by the whirlpool. Then Lone Man rebuked the whirlpool saying, “Do you not know that I am he who created you? Now I command you to be still.” And immediately the waters became smooth. So they kept on the journey until they came to a part of the ocean where the waves were rough. Here the men again began to offer sacrifices to pacify the waves, but in spite of their prayers and offerings the waves grew ever more violent. And this time Lone Man was picking up the offerings and the men were trying to persuade him not to do so, but he kept right on,—never stopped! By this time the boat was rocking pretty badly with the waves and the men began to murmur again and say that Lone Man was causing their death. Then he rebuked the waves, saying, “Peace, be still,” and all at once the sea was still and calm and continued so for the rest of the trip.

  Upon the island there were inhabitants under a chief named Ma-na-ge (perhaps water of some kind). On their arrival, the chief told the inhabitants of his village to prepare a big feast for the visitors at which he would order the visitors to eat all the food set before them and thus kill them. Lone Man foresaw that this would happen and on his way he plucked a bulrush and inserted it by way of his throat through his system. So when the feast was prepared and all were seated in a row with the food placed before them, he told the men each to eat a little from the dish as it passed from one man to the next until it reached Lone Man, when he would empty the whole contents of the dish into the bulrush, by which means it passed to the fourth strata of the earth. When all the food was gone, Lone Man looked about as if for more and said, “Well! I always heard that these people were very generous in feeding visitors. If this is all you have to offer I should hardly consider it a feast.” All the people looked at the thirteen men and when they saw no signs of sickness they regarded them as mysterious.

  Next Ma-na-ge asked the visitors if they wanted to smoke. Lone Man said “Certainly! for we have heard what good tobacco you have.” This pleased Manage, for he thought he would surely kill the men by the effects of the tobacco. So he called for his pipe, which was as big as a pot. He filled the pipe and lighted it and handed it over to the men. Each took a few puffs until it came to Lone Man, who, instead of puffing out the smoke, drew it all down the bulrush to the fourth strata of the earth. So in no time the whole contents of the pipe was smoked. Then he said he had always heard that Ma-na-ge was accustomed to kill his visitors by smoking with them but if this was the pipe he used it was not even large enough to satisfy him. From that time on Ma-na-ge watched him pretty closely.

  (You may put in about the women if you want to).

  Now Lone Man was in disguise. The chief then asked his visitors for their bags to fill with the ma-ta-ba-ho, as much as each man had strength to carry, and each produced his bag. Lone Man’s was a small bag made of two buffalo hides sewed together, but they had to keep putting in to fill it. The chief watched them pretty closely by this time and thought, “If he gets away with that load he must be Lone Man!” So when the bag was filled, Lone Man took the bag by the left hand, slung it over his right shoulder and began to walk away. Then Ma-na-ge said, “Lone Man, do you think that we don’t know you?” Said Lone Man as he walked away, “Perhaps you think that I am Lone Man!” Ma-na-ge said, “We shall come over to visit you on the fourth night after you reach home.” By this he meant, in the fourth year.

  When they reached home, Lone Man instructed his people how to perform ceremonies as to himself and appointed the men who were to perform them. He told them to clear a round space in the center of the village and to build a round barricade about it and to take four young cottonwood trees as a hoop. In the center of the barricade they were to set up a cedar and paint it with red earth and burn incense and offer sacrifices to the cedar. Lone Man said, “This cedar is my body which I leave with you as a protection from all harm, and this barricade will be a protection from the destruction of the water. For as Ma-na-ge said, they are coming to visit you. This shall be the sign of their coming. There will be a heavy fog for four days and four nights, then you may know that they are coming to destroy you. But it is nothing but water. When it comes, it will rise no higher than the first hoop next to the ground and when it can get no higher it will subside.

  After he had instructed them in all the rites and ceremonies they should perform he said, “Now I am going to leave you—I am going to the south—to other peoples—and shall come back again. But always remember that I leave with you my body.” And he departed to the south. And after fou
r years Ma-na-ge made his visit in the form of water and tried in every way to destroy the inhabitants of the village, but when he failed to rise higher than the first hoop he subsided.

  —Martha Warren Beckwith. Mandan-Hitatsa Myths and Ceremonies. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, 1938, 1–7. New York: J. J. Augustin, for the American Folklore Society, 1937.

  ASSINIBOINE

  The Making of Men and Horses Many Plains Indians tell of a great sky god and many lesser, intermediary spirits (thunder, lightning, sun, moon, and stars) who travel through their sacred world in search of game until one falls down a hole into the chaos of earth below and creates the world. This Assiniboine myth is missing that preface: it begins with a flood, a state of chaotic potentiality, and Inktonmi, the orderer who caused dirt to be brought out of the water and land to be made.

  The creation of horses is an interesting part of the myth. The Assiniboine, like other tribes, did not have horses in any number until the eighteenth century, and yet they still credit the creation of horses to the wolf-god Inktonmi in the beginning of the world. The overwhelming importance of horses to relatively modern Assiniboine culture is thus expressed mythologically as essential, original, and determined from the start. What is essential becomes “first” when temporalized.

  A particularly charming feature of this myth is its portayal of determination: having been silenced and even killed by the creator in an argument over the length of winter, the frog still makes his point with body language.

  ALL THE EARTH was flooded with water. Inktonmi sent animals to dive for dirt at the bottom of the sea. No animal was able to get any. At last he sent the Muskrat. It came up dead, but with dirt in its claws. Inktonmi saw the dirt, took it, and made the earth out of it.

  Inktonmi was wearing a wolf-skin robe. He said, “There shall be as many months as there are hairs on this skin before it shall be summer.” Frog said, “If the winter lasts as long as that, no creature will be able to live. Seven months of winter will be enough.” He kept on repeating this, until Inktonmi got angry, and killed him. Still Frog stuck out seven of his toes. Finally, Inktonmi consented, and said there should be seven winter months.

  Inktonmi then created men and horses out of dirt. Some of the Assiniboine and other northern tribes had no horses. Inktonmi told the Assiniboine that they were always to steal horses from other tribes.

  —R. H. Lowie. “The Assiniboine.” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1909, 4 (1), 1.

  CHEROKEE

  How the World Was Made The Cherokee were the largest tribe in the southeastern part of the United States, inhabiting the mountainous regions of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, until gold was discovered on their lands and they were forcibly removed by military troops in 1838. Several thousand Cherokee died on that long march to the Indian Territory (in what is now Oklahoma); those who survived it established a new community with its own public school system, newspapers, and so on.

  When De Soto visited the Cherokee in 1540, he found a settled and advanced agricultural society. The smoky river pearls he was given as a welcoming gift had been part of the finery associated with the great Mound Builder cultures of the Mississippi and Ohio regions. Several rituals, such as the Cherokee’s sacred ball game, attest to connections between these civilizations and the people who eventually established the Aztec empire, but contact seems to have been broken off before the Aztec era. The religion and myths of these southeastern Indian cultures gradually devolved under pressure from white settlers, disease, and war, and many of their important religious figures became, like Br’er Rabbit (once a powerful trickster deity), the heroes only of “children’s fairy tales.”

  This Cherokee myth bears little stamp of the specifically southeastern Indian culture. It envisages a three-tiered universe held together by five cords, the formation of land by the earth-diver Water-Beetle and its hardening by the Great Buzzard (similar to the Ainu myth), the proper positioning of the sun and the creation of plants, animals, and people. Uncertainty of origins, most understandable in a brutalized and resettled people cut off from their land and traditions, is evident in the myth’s confusion about the identity of the creator.

  THE EARTH is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

  When all was water, the animals were above in Galun’lati, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dayuni’si, “Beaver’s Grandchild,” the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

  At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Galun’lati. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.

  When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way, and Tsiska’gili, the Red Crawfish, had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled; and the Cherokee do not eat it. The conjurers put the sun another hand-breadth higher in the air, but it was still too hot. They raised it another time, and another, until it was seven handbreadths high and just under the sky arch. Then it was right, and they left it so. This is why the conjurers call the highest place Gulkwa’gine Di’gal-un’latiyun, “the seventh height,” because it is seven hand-breadths above the earth. Every day the sun goes along under this arch, and returns at night on the upper side to the starting place.

  There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything—animals, plants, and people—save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this underworld, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underworld are different from ours, because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the outer air.

  When the animals and plants were first made—we do not know by whom—they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights, just as young men now fast and keep awake when they pray to their medicine. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. To these were given the power to see and to go about in the dark, and to make prey of the birds and animals which must sleep at night. Of the trees only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel were awake to the end, and to them it was given to be always green and to be greatest for medicine, but to the others it was said: �
��Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your hair every winter.”

  Men came after the animals and plants. At first there were only a brother and sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply, and so it was. In seven days a child was born to her, and thereafter every seven days another, and they increased very fast until there was danger that the world could not keep them. Then it was made that a woman should have only one child in a year, and it has been so ever since.

  —J. Mooney. Myths of the Cherokee. 19th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Part 1. Washington, D.C.: 1897–1898, pp. 239–240.

  YUCHI

  Creation of the Earth Along with the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Chichasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)—60,000 in all—the Yuchi people were also deported from their lands in Georgia to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma in 1838. In addition to the real severities of the march itself, the experience of resettlement was deeply wrenching. The Yuchi had a matrilineal social structure, but in Oklahoma assignments of land were made to men, food was rationed to men as heads of their households, election of male officials was accomplished on a territorial and not kinship basis, and inheritance was determined on the male, not the female, line. Gradually those of the tribe who survived changed their way of being and adopted a patrilineal structure more common among whites and the local Plains Indians.

  This Yuchi creation myth, recorded in the early 1900s, still retains some matrilineal features: the Sun is deified, as is common in many planting cultures, but when anthropomorphized appears atypically as a woman, the mother of people who sprang from a drop of her blood. This myth is also distinguished by its recognition of the life-giving power of chaos not only as the source of matter, the stuff of the creation, but also as the basis for healing medicine. The great serpent of fertility and infinity (he is often shown swallowing his own tail, thereby forming an unending circle) is finally killed on a cedar tree, usually sacred to Plains Indians, and the great medicine is found there.