Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (68 page)

Glooskap
(
Gluskap
) (Algonquian, Abenaki of the Northeast) A creator and trickster, Glooskap is a patriarch who makes the sun, moon, plants, animals, and people from Mother Earth’s body. His troublesome brother,
Malsum
, creates insects, reptiles, and other nuisances. After Glooskap defeats his evil brother, he uses his trickster’s ability to change shapes and defeat the witches, spirits, and sorcerers who threaten mankind. Glooskap performs other heroic feats, including riding on the back of a whale before leaving the world. He promises to return in times of peril.

Hahgwedhdiyu
(Hodenosaunee, Northeast) Creator of the Iroquois, Hahgwedhdiyu is the son of the sky goddess
Atahensic
. His evil twin is
Hahgwehdaetgan
. After the twins’ mother dies, Hahgwedhdiyu forms the sky and turns his mother’s face into the sun; the moon and stars are made from her breasts, and the earth is made fertile with her body. The evil twin counters his brother by making floods, earthquakes, and other disasters. The brothers ultimately fight, and the evil sibling is defeated and banished to the murky underworld.

Hinun
(Iroquois or Hodenosaunee, Northeast) The great thunder spirit and guardian of the sky, Hinun is portrayed as a powerful brave armed with a bow and arrows of fire. With help from his wife,
Rainbow
, and his friend
Gunnodyak
, Hinun fights the great serpent of the Great Lakes. When the serpent swallows Gunnodyak whole, Hinun rescues the young warrior and takes him up to the sky. After applying a magic ointment to his own eyes, Hinun is able to see the serpent in the lake and shoot it with his arrows. The great snake dies but makes a great noise as it writhes in death throes. Terrified by the noise, heaven and earth fall silent. Hinun also slays the ferocious giant stone people who dwell in the west and are planning to attack the Iroquois.

Igaluk
(Inuit, Arctic regions) Igaluk is the supreme god who directs everything. He is also the moon. When Igaluk discovers that he has slept with his sister, the sun, there is great upset. His sister tears off her breasts and rises into the sky. Eventually the pair build a house in the sky that is divided in two sections. That is where they coexist.

Iktome
(also
Ik-to-mi
) (Sioux, Plains) Known as Spiderman, Iktome is a trickster who does things backwards but is still a sly and cunning teacher. To the Assiniboine (Plains), he is the Creator who orders the animals to dive for bits of earth (see Mythic Voices). A man with the attributes of a spider, Iktome has a hearty sexual appetite, like his friend and frequent companion, Coyote.
In one story told by the Brule—with a slight overtone of the Little Red Riding Hood tale—Iktome tricks a beautiful young maiden he sees walking one day. Dressing himself in the clothes of an old woman, he approaches the girl and asks for permission to accompany her across a stream. She notices that his legs are very hairy, and Iktome explains that it comes with age. When he hikes up his robes, she says his backside is hairy, too, and he responds that this happens to older people. When he lifts his robe farther, the girl gasps at the sight of his penis and asks what it is. Iktome explains that it is a wart put there by a sorcerer and will only go away if he puts it between her legs. The girl complies, and the “wart” grows smaller, but Iktome suggests that if he puts it between her legs again, it may go away altogether. Despite several tries, the “wart” remains, so Iktome suggests they keep going until it disappears. The girl, who has forgotten forgot why she set out across the river, readily agrees.

Kitchi Manitou
(Algonquian, Northeastern woodlands) A manifestation of the Great Spirit, Kitchi Manitou is the divine energy that lives in all things. Man tries to control the “manitou” of small things, such as fire and wood, in order to gain control over the larger forces, such as the sun, wind, and rain.

Kwatee
(
Kivati
) (Puget Sound, Washington) A trickster god, Kwatee transforms the old world that is filled with giant animal people into the world that exists today. When the giant animals discover what Kwatee is doing, they try to kill him. Kwatee then rolls balls of his own flesh into human beings. After his creation is complete, he sits on a rock and leaves the world to join the setting sun.

Nayenezgani
(Navajo, Southwest) “Slayer of alien gods,” the translation for Nayenezgani, is the great hero and protector of the Navajo as well as the son of
Changing Woman
. Together with his twin brother
Tobadzastsini
, Slayer patrols the world, always on the lookout for evil spirits. While going to visit their father the sun god, the twins meet
Spider Woman
, who warns them of the dangers they will face on their journey. She gives them two magic feathers: one will subdue any enemy and the other will preserve life.
When they reach the sun god, he tries to kill them. First he throws sharp spikes at them. Then he tries to boil them in a great pot, but the water will not boil. The magic feathers have protected them, but now their power is used up. The brothers are about to die when
Caterpillar
gives them magical stones and they are saved. Realizing that these boys are powerful warriors, the sun god gives them weapons they can use to protect the Navajo tribe from its enemies.

Raven
(Haida and others, Pacific Northwest) A trickster, Raven wants to bring fire to the world when he sees smoke coming from the village of the fire people. With his friends
Robin
,
Mole,
and
Flea
, he tries to steal the fire. But in a series of missteps, Robin’s feathers are scorched and Mole burrows underground. Raven finally decides to steal the chief’s baby and hold it for ransom. To get his baby back, the chief gives Raven fire and two stones with which to make sparks.

Sky Woman
(Hurons, Northeast) Atahensic, or Sky Woman, is the central figure in a Creation myth of the Hurons. In the beginning, there is only water below and sky above, where the sky people live. Sky Woman is sick, and her father is afraid that she will die. A member of the tribe dreams that if they dig up the corn tree, and Sky Woman sits next to it, she will be cured. Some of the tribe object, because the tree feeds the tribe. But Sky Woman’s father urges them to help his daughter. When the tree is uprooted, it falls over and opens a dark hole in the ground. A young man gets angry and kicks Sky Woman through the hole.
Falling through darkness toward the infinite sea, Sky Woman is caught by
Loon
and carried on the back of
Tortoise
. Tortoise tells the other animals to dive to the bottom of the sea and bring back a little earth from the sea floor.
Beaver
goes first, then
Otter
, then
Muskrat
, who is dead when he surfaces but has a speck of dirt in his mouth. Tortoise gives the dirt to Sky Woman, and she spreads it around his shell until it becomes a fertile island.
With land to walk on, Sky Woman gets well, and then mysteriously becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter,
Earth Woman
. While Earth Woman is digging potatoes, she faces east and the wind impregnates her. She gives birth to twins, a good twin and an evil twin. But the evil twin’s entry into the world is rough—he breaks through his mother’s side and kills her.
Sky Woman buries her daughter and raises her twin grandchildren, although she cannot love the evil twin. One day the good twin digs up his mother’s body, forms a sphere from her face, and makes the sun. From the back of her head he makes more spheres, which become the moon and stars. That is how day and night are created. Watered by her mother’s tears, Earth Woman’s corpse starts to sprout vegetables. Over time, maize and beans grow from her body. The good twin and the evil twin then make the rest of Creation, with the good twin creating trees and cool water and the evil twin creating dangerous mountains. And for the Hurons, that’s how the world came into existence.

Tirawa
(Pawnee, Great Plains) Great Spirit and Creator god Tirawa holds a council and assigns tasks to the other gods. The sun god
Shakaru
is ordered to give light and warmth; the moon goddess
Pah
gives sleep and rest in the night; and the stars—Bright, Evening, Great, and Morning—are told to hold up the sky. The first humans are born when the sun and moon marry and have a boy called
Closed Man
. When the Evening Star and Morning Star finally couple, they produce a girl—known as “Daughter of Evening and Morning Star.” The Pawnee believed that they were decended from these first children of the heavens.
But Tirawa gets angry and destroys his creation with a fire and then a great flood. The only survivors are an old man who carries a pipe, fire, and a drum; and his wife, who carries maize and pumpkin seeds. These two, who have been protected in a cave, re-create the human race.

White Buffalo Woman
(Sioux, Northern Plains) A beautiful, long-haired figure in a white buckskin dress, White Buffalo (Calf) Woman is one of the most significant deities of the Plains tribes. Once, when the people are starving, two scouts go and search for food. They see a blur in the distance and, as it approaches, one of the scouts realizes it is the sacred White Buffalo Woman. The woman, who can read the bad thoughts of one of the young men, invites him to embrace her. But as he reaches toward her, a white cloud appears and lightning strikes the lusty man, who is killed instantly. His body is turned into a skeleton and then devoured by worms.
The second scout returns to the village to set up a great teepee for her. Once this is done, White Buffalo Woman instructs the tribes in all the sacred ceremonies. She explains how to use the pipe and teaches them seven sacred rites, including the sweat lodge, vision quest, the “ghost-keeping ceremony,” in which the soul of the dead is purified, the sun dance, the
hunka
ceremony (designed to establish binding relationships among fellow human beings), girls’ puberty rites, and the “throwing of the ball,” a ceremony celebrating knowledge, in which a buffalo-hide ball is tossed to people standing in the four compass directions.
As she talks to the chiefs, White Buffalo Woman is a woman. But when she leaves, the people see her roll in the dust four times, bow to each corner of the universe, and then become a white buffalo before vanishing, perhaps to return again one day.
To the Plains people, no animal was more sacred than the buffalo, which completely sustained their way of life.

Which goddess gets her own “planet”?

If the Roman goddess Venus represents everything that is beautiful and good, the Inuit goddess Sedna may be her complete opposite. Queen of the underworld, Sedna gets mixed up in acts of trickery, kidnapping, murder, dismemberment, cannibalism, and revenge. The only thing that she shares with Venus is the fact that each has a heavenly body named in her honor.

While Venus was first observed by the earliest “astronomers” in prehistoric times, the Inuit goddess Sedna joined the celestial charts when the discovery of a small object orbiting the sun was announced in March 2004. Too small to qualify as a planet in the view of most astronomers, Sedna is essentially a large chunk of rock caught in a regular orbit of the sun and now thought to be the most distant object from the sun. The scientists who found this piece of the flotsam and jetsam in a very distant reach of space called the Kuiper Belt decided to name it after the Inuit sea goddess who plays a role in many myths.

In one myth, an Arctic seabird known as a fulmar, and noted for its foul (no pun intended) smell, sees Sedna and falls in love with her. Assuming human form, the bird makes himself a parka, woos Sedna, and invites her home. When they arrive, Sedna realizes that she has been tricked by the birdman and desperately calls for her father, Anguta, to help her. But he doesn’t hear her cries, and she has to spend months in this awful place. When Anguta eventually finds Sedna, he kills the mischievous bird. Discovering the murder, the other birds surround the father’s kayak, flap their wings in what seems like a Hitchcockian scene from
The Birds
, and create a storm that tosses the kayak in the waves.

Afraid the boat will capsize, Sedna’s father decides to look out for number one—himself! To lighten the boat’s load, he tosses his daughter into the sea. When she clings to the boat, Anguta takes out his knife and hacks off her fingers, one by one. In one version of the tale, each of Sedna’s fingers turns into a sea animal.

Angry at her father, Sedna seeks revenge. She calls on a team of dogs to attack him and gnaw on his hands and feet. He curses and screams until the earth opens up and they all tumble into the underworld. That is where Sedna lives and reigns as queen, blessing hunters with animals and creating terrible storms. The only thing she cannot do is comb her hair, since she has no fingers.

In another myth, Sedna begins life as a beautiful young woman but later becomes a one-eyed giantess who populates the sea with ocean life while Anguta, her father, makes the earth, sea, and heavens. But Sedna’s appearance is so hideous that only medicine men can bear to look at her. And some of her personal habits are pretty awful, too. On one occasion, which mirrors a scene from
Night of the Living Dead
, she feels the urge to eat some human flesh and begins to nibble on her mother and father. They wake up and discover what is going on, take Sedna far out to sea, and cast her overboard. Once again, as in other myths about her, Sedna desperately clings to the side of the boat, prompting her father to chop off her fingers. In this myth, Sedna’s severed fingers turn into whales, seals, and fish as they touch the water. Sedna then sinks to the bottom of the sea, where she lives, ruler of the underworld, keeping guard over the ungrateful dead. These include her own parents, who have been devoured by sea animals.