Read Don’t Know Much About® Mythology Online
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Congress had also stepped into controversial territory when it passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), signed into law by President George Bush in 1990. Designed to protect American Indian grave sites from looting and archaeological investigation, NAGPRA also required museums to repatriate certain tribal objects to their tribes of origin. (The bill applies only to federal lands, not private property.) For centuries, Indian burial sites have been systematically looted of skeletons and burial objects. While many states have enacted similar legislation, removing bodies or objects from Indian graves is not a crime in many states. NAGPRA was invoked in the case of Kennewick man, the oldest known skeletal remains in North America, but in 2004, a federal court ruled that these remans were not covered, since Kennewick man was apparently unrelated to any tribe.
But there the situation stands. Religion and myths are still in the eyes of the beholder, as historian Jake Page convincingly demonstrates in his book
In the Hands of the Great Spirit
:
Most non-Indians do not look out upon the landscape and see spirits out there, spirits of such things as trees and rocks and lightning and wind. Indeed, such beliefs are considered by most Christians, at least, to be pagan and improper, even childish, and many conservative Christians today find such beliefs the work of the devil, just as the Puritans and the Spanish Franciscans and French Jesuits did five hundred years ago, in what one would like to think were less enlightened times. On the other hand, many traditional Indians find it peculiar, to say the least, that Christians and others can build a house for God, go there once or maybe twice a week, and whenever it seems like a good idea, proceed to tear God’s house down and build another one, with say a bigger parking lot, on the other side of town. If the gods reside in a mountain, it is not so easy to relocate them. For Indians, a sacred site remains sacred under most circumstances.
THE MYTHS OF THE PACIFIC
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were few places on earth unseen or unspoiled by Europeans and the rest of the “civilized” world. Most of these “last places” were islands in the vast Pacific Ocean, which occupies fully one-third of the earth’s surface area. These islands would soon experience a replay of the same ruthless colonial story that had become the sad biography of Africa and the Americas.
There are literally tens of thousands of islands arranged in a rough triangle in the Pacific Ocean, with Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the south, and Easter Island (so named by a Dutch explorer who found it on Easter Sunday in 1722) in the east. Inhabited by people who had moved out of southwestern Asia tens of thousands of years ago, the people of the Pacific islands and Australia may have island-hopped on foot when ocean levels were 400 to 600 feet lower, perhaps also using boats to settle these islands. Many of these early ocean voyagers developed separate mythologies often traceable to the Polynesians. Polynesia, which means “many islands,” occupies the largest area in the South Pacific, stretching from Midway Island in the north to New Zealand, 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) to the south. While not part of Polynesia, Hawaii in the northern Pacific was first settled by Polynesians 2,000 years ago, and the island’s myths reflect that tradition.
MYTHIC MILESTONES
Australia and the Pacific Islands
Before the Common Era
c. 8000–6000
Land bridge connecting Australia and Tasmania disappears; rising sea also covers New Guinea land bridge.
c. 6000
Migrations from southeastern Asia to Pacific islands.
c. 4000
Austronesians reach southwestern Pacific islands.
c. 2500
The dingo introduced to Australia from southeastern Asia.
c. 1500
Earliest evidence of colonization of Fiji.
c. 1000
Polynesian culture emerges on Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa.
Common Era
c. 300
Easter Island is settled.
c. 850
Polynesian ancestors of Maori settle New Zealand.
1000
First carvings and stone statues on Easter Island.
1606
Portuguese explorer Luis Váez de Torres sails around New Guinea and discovers Australia.
1642
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman finds Tasmania and New Zealand; over the next several years he will find and map Tonga, Fiji, New Guinea, and coasts of Australia.
1768
British captain James Cook’s first of three voyages of discovery into the Pacific; in 1772, on his second voyage, Cook reaches Botany Bay, Australia, and claims it for Britain; in 1779, on his third voyage, Cook is killed in the Hawaiian Islands.
1788
First British settlement at Botany Bay, Australia.
First penal settlement established at Port Jackson (future Sydney), and the “first fleet” of convicts lands in New South Wales.
1789
Smallpox ravages the Aborigines of New South Wales in Australia.
Mutiny on the HMS
Bounty
; mutineers settle on Pitcairn Island.
1797
First Christian missionaries reach Tahiti.
1810
Hawaiian islands united by King Kamehameha.
1851
Gold discovered in Australia; thousands of settlers flock to Victoria, Australia.
1864
The practice of transporting prisoners to Australia is abolished.
1892
The queen of Hawaii is deposed; U.S. troops move to annex the islands.
1894
Sanford Dole proclaims the Republic of Hawaii. Hawaii is annexed by the United States in 1894 and made a U.S. territory in 1900.
Which mythic character created the Pacific Islands?
Probably the most famous Polynesian demigod was the trickster Maui, for whom the Hawaiian island of Maui is named. According to some myths, the trickster Maui is born very small, so his mother throws him away in the ocean. Surviving this attempted infanticide, Maui grows up into an oversexed trickster hero, who creates the Pacific islands by fishing them up from the bottom of the sea. The possessor of a prodigious penis, as so many tricksters are, Maui is chosen to satisfy the boundless desire of the goddess Hina. Both the bringer of fire and the cause of death, he is also credited with slowing down the sun to make days longer, either by using the jawbone of his dead grandmother or by lassoing the sun with a rope made from Hina’s hair.
In one Polynesian myth, Maui is challenged by the sun god to enter the body of the goddess of death and pass from her vagina to her mouth. If he succeeds, Maui will become immortal. Attempting to accomplish this feat as the goddess sleeps, Maui is foiled when a bird sees him and laughs, waking the sleeping goddess. She kills Maui, ensuring that humanity would always suffer death.
M
YTHIC
V
OICESThe most puzzling question for whites was…why these people should display such a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property…. Certainly they had few external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or of communal prayer…. They carried their conception of the sacred, of mythic time and ancestral origins with them as they walked. These were embodied in the landscape; every hill and valley, each kind of animal and tree, had its place in a systematic but unwritten whole. Take away this territory and they were deprived not of “property”…but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their “dreaming”…. To deprive the Aborigines of their territory…was to condemn them to spiritual death.
—R
OBERT
H
UGHES
, The Fatal Shore
What is Dreamtime?
A different but very rich tradition of the Pacific world belongs to the ancestors of today’s Aborigines, or indigenous people,
*
who first arrived in Australia from southeastern Asia perhaps as much as 65,000 years ago. Rock engravings in Australia have been dated to 45,000 years ago, and evidence of the world’s first known cremation dates to 26,000 years ago in southern Australia. Presumably these people had hopscotched the land bridge that existed between the Pacific islands at times when Ice Age climate kept sea levels lower than they are today. The number of Aborigines in Australia at the time the British arrived to create a massive penal colony in 1788 range from 300,000 to 750,000 people, scattered among at least 500 tribes. As in Africa and the Americas, a number of diverse factors nearly brought about the extinction of the Aboriginal people. These factors included disease, fighting with the British colonists, and the general depredations of a colonized people losing their land and traditional ways of life.
According to a very ancient Aboriginal Creation myth, all life today is part of a connected universe that goes back to the great spirit ancestors who existed in Dreamtime. While many tribes have variations on this concept, the idea of Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, is almost universal in Australia. It goes like this: In the beginning, the earth was in darkness. Life existed below the surface, sleeping. In the Dreaming world, the ancestor beings broke through the crust of the earth, and the sun rose out of the ground. The ancestors then traveled the land and began to shape it, creating the mountains and other features of the landscape along with all the animals, plants, and other natural elements. They also created society, teaching the songs, dances, and ceremonial rituals, and leaving behind spirits of people yet to be born. Finally, tired from this activity, the mythical ancestors sank back into earth and returned to sleep. These beings never died, but merged with nature to live on in sacred beliefs and rituals. Some of their spirits were turned into rocks, trees, or other sacred places that dot the Australian landscape.
Dreamtime is more than just a period in the past—it is ever present, and reached through sacred rituals such as the walkabout, a tribal spiritual journey taken to sacred places to renew the clan’s relationship with Dreaming and the sacred landscape. An individual can go on walkabout to where the tribe originally came from, or some other place of sacred “belongingness.”
Other tribal variations of native Australian myth often include a rainbow serpent—a powerful spirit of creation and fertility—whose curving movement through the sands creates river beds and other natural features. When treated carefully, the snake sleeps, but if disturbed, it creates storms and flooding. One of these snakes, called Yorlunggur, lives by a water hole. When one of two sisters falls into the hole, her menstrual blood pollutes the water, angering the serpent. The snake swallows the sisters and causes a great flood. When the floodwaters recede, the snake spits out the sisters, and the place where this happened becomes the sacred spot where adolescent boys are initiated into adulthood, a central rite for native Australians.
Another great ancestral snake called Bobbi-bobbi is responsible for what may be Australia’s most identifiable “icon.” The serpent drives flying-fox squirrels out into the open for people to eat, but these elusive creatures are not easy to kill. From his underground hiding place, the great serpent sees the difficulty and tosses one of his ribs up to a group of men. This becomes the first boomerang, which the men use to kill the flying foxes. Later, the men throw the boomerang into the sky and make a hole, which makes Bobbi-bobbi angry, so he takes the boomerang back for a time.
There are many other myths of Australia and the Pacific islands, a legacy of ancient people who moved across vast expanses of land and open seas. One of these ancient myths seems especially salient today. It is a story told by many of the people of the Pacific islands about a mythical race of Pygmies, two feet tall. While these “little people” sometimes shot tiny arrows at careless travelers, they otherwise lived peacefully in caves.
In October 2004, scientists announced the discovery, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, of the skeletons of a race of people whose adults stood three and a half feet tall. The diminutive “Floresians,” as the scientists named them, lived in a cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali. This other race of humans lived there until about 13,000 years ago—a miniature version of prehistoric man.
Myths indeed are as fresh as the headlines. And perhaps, after all, Shakespeare was right:
There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.