Orion Mythology
by Richard L. Dieterle
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
(and still being researched)
Contents
Redhorn
in the Context of Orion
The Cognates of the Įčoršika Myth
The Hand, the Eye, and the Hole in the Sky
The Grasping Eye and the Ear-Heads
The Prosopic Ears and Reincarnation
The Sacred Turnip of the Sky
Fauna and M42
Red Man and Red Woman
The Battle against the Waterspirits
The Hatchet
The Headless Man
The Two-Headed Man
The Fire Sticks of Orion
The Hand and the Fire Drill
Deep History and the Fire Below the Drill
Arrows
Old Woman's Grandson, the Gestating Star
The Buffalo Stars
3-Deer
The Mexican Origin of 3-Deer
Appendix
Redhorn in the Context of Orion. Most scholars probably hold the
widespread view that Redhorn, also known as "Wears Faces on His Ears"
(Įčoršika)
is Morning Star. However, the story "Įčoršika and His Brothers"
states something very much at odds with this thesis:
(66) And these three
were stars. The one star that is shining most greatly of the trio, it is he.
The greatly shining white one, and the blue one, and the red one; (67) and Įčoršika
was the yellowish one. And the other ones, his older brothers, are also stars.
They are the trio that are bunched together. [1]
That the stars are
"bunched together" (stonąki) shows that none of the trio is a wandering planet
like Morning Star. The star of Redhorn is a fixed star. For this and other reasons that can be adduced,
Redhorn is not Venus in any of its aspects. An examination of stellar triads
turns up a fairly small inventory, the most prominent among which is the Belt
Stars of Orion (see "bunched
together"). [2] The stellar
code of "Įčoršika
and His Brothers" can be understood in terms of these Orion stars (see Commentary). This shows
that the assumption that the stellar trio is in Orion is consistent with the
story understood allegorically, which goes a very long way towards confirming
the hypothesis, since the story is rich in details. What should succeed in
confirming the stellar identity of Redhorn is to compare the Hočąk material on Redhorn with other
non-Hočąk Orion mythologies. If the Hočąk material on Redhorn fits in with
foreign allegories about Orion, this should be sufficient confirmation of its
identity. What follows brings together Orion mythology from other American
Indian sources and places the Redhorn mythology into the same context.
The Cognates of the Įčoršika
Myth. The
essential core of the Hočąk story, "Įčoršika
and His Brothers", can be mapped onto certain astronomical stories of
other Siouan tribes. There are extensive parallels between "Įčoršika
and His Brothers" and the Orion myths of the Hidatsa and Crow, who are
very closely related to each other, but remote in space, time, and language
from the Hočągara. These cogntes make no
mention of Orion, but some of their variants state that the hand of the bad
spirit Long Arms was transformed into certain stars of Orion. We can set a Crow
variant collected by Lowie [3],
in good narrative order with its corresponding Hočąk myth, as we see below.
|
|
Paradigm |
Crow |
Hočąk |
||
|
Episode
1 |
Episode
2 |
Episode
3 |
|||
|
[1] |
A Bad Spirit |
Long Arms, a bad spirit, |
The disloyal Hena |
A bad spirit |
- |
|
[2] |
rules (within) one of the cosmic
domains |
rules an Above World |
is the leader (on earth) |
rules over an Underworld |
- |
|
[3] |
over certain animals native to that
domain. |
populated by birds, |
of the brothers of Įčoršika,
who are foxes and coyotes, and |
populated by Waterspirits, |
- |
|
[4] |
His subjects (also) include a group of
bad spirits |
and over certain bad spirits |
who are engaged in evil. |
specifically Bad Waterspirits. Also a
witch |
- |
|
[5] |
who live on earth. |
on earth |
They live on earth. |
living on earth |
- |
|
[6] |
These terrestrial subjects were adopted
into his family. |
who were adopted by them. |
They were adopted by the good
brothers of Įčoršika. |
was a sister of the Bad Waterspirits.
The brothers propose that Įčoršika also marry her. |
- |
|
[7] |
The adoptees came into conflict with the
Brothers. |
These latter had come into conflict
with the Twins. |
These adoptees come into conflict
with the three good brothers. |
She came into conflict with Įčoršika. |
- |
|
[8] |
The subjects of the Bad Spirit resent
what (one of) the Brothers had done to the adoptees. |
The Sky Spirits are angry about what
the Twins have done to the adoptees. |
The fact that Įčoršika took the best
woman as his own wife angered his brothers. |
- |
- |
|
[9] |
The subjects of the Bad Spirit
persuade him to capture and kill the offending Brother. |
The Sky Spirits persuade Long Arm to
capture and kill one of the brothers. |
Hena persuades the other brothers to
plot the captivity and death of Įčoršika. |
The brothers persuade the woman to cause
the capture and death of Įčoršika. |
- |
|
[10] |
The captors intend to eat their
captive. |
The captors intend to eat Curtain
Boy. |
- |
The captors intend to eat Įčoršika. |
- |
|
[11] |
The Brothers go out on a hunting
trip. |
The Twins go out on a hunting trip. |
- |
The brothers go out on a hunting
trip. |
Įčoršika hunts for
the woman who betrayed him. |
|
[12] |
The Brothers lie down on the ground. |
The two brothers sleep outside. |
- |
Įčoršika lies down
in the woman's lodge. |
- |
|
[13] |
The Bad Spirit causes one of the
Brothers to pass through a hole leading to another cosmic domain. |
Long Arm reaches down and pulls
Curtain Boy up through the hole in the sky, |
- |
The woman invites him to go to the back
of the lodge where he falls through a hole in the earth |
Įčoršika chases
the woman down a hole in the ground, |
|
[14] |
This hole is not readily visible. |
which is almost impossible to see. |
- |
which was concealed from view. |
which is concealed from view as a
post hole. |
|
[15] |
His other Brother(s) does not know
where he has gone or what has happened to him. |
Spring Boy does not know where
Curtain Boy went or what happened to him. |
- |
His other good brothers do not know where
he has gone or what happened to him. |
- |
|
[16] |
The Bad Spirit encircles the Brother
with bonds. |
Long Arm binds Curtain Boy by
surrounding him with his arms. |
- |
Įčoršika is bound
in irons. |
Įčoršika chases her
through the center of plants and trees. |
|
[17] |
Someone sympathetic to the captive
brother tries to persuade the Bad Spirit to free him. |
Spring Boy tries to persuade Long Arm
to free Curtain Boy. |
- |
Otter tries to persuade the Waterspirit
chief to free Įčoršika. |
- |
|
[18] |
The Bad Spirit refuses to let him go. |
He will not let him go. |
- |
He will not let him go. |
- |
|
[19] |
Someone from the domain of water
tries to persuade the Bad Spirit to free the captive. |
He asks a second time. |
- |
Loon asks the Waterspirit chief to
let Įčoršika
go. |
- |
|
[20] |
The Bad Spirit refuses a second time. |
Again Long Arm refuses to free
Curtain Boy. |
- |
Again the chief refuses to free Įčoršika. |
- |
|
[21] |
One of the Brothers breaks the
captive's bonds. |
Spring Boy cuts the bonds holding his
brother Curtain Boy. |
- |
Įčoršika breaks
his own bonds. |
- |
|
[22] |
One of the Brothers attacks those
holding the captive, killing many of them (including the Bad Spirit). |
Spring Boy shoots Long Arms with an
arrow, killing him. |
- |
Įčoršika attacks
the Waterspirits with firebrands, killing many of them. |
Įčoršika kills the
witch-Waterspirit. |
|
[23] |
The subjects of the Bad Spirit flee. |
His subjects all flee. |
- |
The Waterspirits all flee. |
- |
|
[24] |
The body of the captor(s) is burned
with wood. |
The body of Long Arm is burned with
wood. |
- |
The Waterspirits are burned with
firebrands. |
- |
|
[25] |
The Brothers return to earth from the
Otherworld. |
The Twins descend through the hole in
the sky back to earth. |
- |
Įčoršika returns
to earth. |
- |
|
[26] |
The Brothers allow those subjects of
the Bad Spirit who were birds, to live within the cosmic domain of the Middle
World (earth). |
The Twins allow the birds, the
subjects of Long Arm, to live on earth. |
- |
Įčoršika allows
Loon (and Otter), who were Waterspirits and nephews of the Chief of the Bad
Waterspirits, to live on earth. |
- |
|
[27] |
The Brothers are stars. |
The Twins are stars (Evening Star,
and the last star of the Big Dipper). |
- |
Įčoršika and his
two loyal brothers are stars (the Belt Stars of Orion). |
- |
The first thing to notice
about this set of correlations is that the Hočąk story can be divided into
isomorphic episodes. This fact, more than any other, has made it difficult to
readily see how the Hočąk myth belonged with its Crow
counterpart. Another characteristic obscuring the connection is the realignment
of characters. The paradigm myth has a number of characters: the Bad Spirit,
his subjects (including the adoptees), and the Brothers. Owing to its internal
isomorphism, the Bad Spirit (the Crow Long Arms) is played by three characters
in the Hočąk version: Hena the disloyal
brother, the Chief of the Bad Waterspirits, and the witch who is the sister of
the Bad Waterspirits. The role of the Brothers is played by the Twins in the
Crow reflex, but in the Hočąk the protagonists are the three brothers, although often Įčoršika
plays their role alone. A third feature that estranges the Hočąk waiką from its proper Siouan
context is its inversion. Instead of an obscure hole in the heavens, we have a
hidden hole to the underworld. The Above World has been traded for the Below
World. Yet the degree of divergence may not be as striking as it first appears.
Other Cosmic Domains are most usually thought of on the model of the
terrestrial world, so that both supra-celestial worlds have their own sky and
their own ground. The ground is indeed the top side of the sky familiar to the
terrestrial domain beneath it. Even underworlds are conceived as having their
own sky and their own ground. This would mean that the hole in the terrestrial
surface world would be a hole in the sky of the subterranean world beneath it.
Therefore, a hole in the ground can, and likely is, also a hole in another
world's sky. All the Siouan traditions and those that have borrowed from them,
view this hole as bound up with the progress of the soul to and from the Above
World. The trip back is reincarnation. Yet the Hočągara, its fair to say, are
obsessed with this process, and their mythology of Įčoršika-Redhorn is
often devoted to this spirit's resurrection after a period of death or
quasi-death. Esoterically, this resurrection is astronomically that of a star
that has set with the sun into the underworld only to rise again in the
fullness of time to its pristine glory to its lofty station in the Above World.
This then becomes the model by which we may understand death and resurrection
in human terms. This alternant, inverted, model may also have some antiquity.
There are a few points of
divergence not shown on the table of correlations. The Crow contains a brief
episode in which all the birds of the sky are interviewed by Old Man Coyote to
see if they can shed light on what happened to Curtain Boy. However, they all
prove ignorant of his whereabouts. In the Hočąk version, there is no search for Įčoršika, so no such
interview can take place. The Hočąk contains episodes about how the brothers found wives,
and how Įčoršika
avenged himself upon his errant brothers. Since the Crow Twins do not marry and
have no errant brothers, this episode does not occur in their story.
Setting these
understandable divergences aside, the degree to which the two myths can be
correlated is substantial. In the first episode, Hena, the leader of the
disloyal brothers, is the counterpart to Long Arms, the chief of the Sky
People, as indeed both are to the chief of the Waterspirits. They differ, of
course, by each being from a different cosmic realm. Similarly, in the Crow,
the subjects of Long Arms are birds, whereas in the Hočąk they are respectively canines
(foxes and coyotes) and Waterspirits. All agree, however, that these
subordinates are engaged in a nefarious project. The Waterspirits are even
explicitly said to be Bad (šišik)
Waterspirits. In each version there is a conspiracy afoot. The sky people plot
to capture and kill Curtain Boy, just as Hena and his brothers plot to have Įčoršika
captured and murdered. The Waterspirits operate through their agent, a
beautiful witch, as they plot a grisly fate for their captive. The motivation
behind this plot is rather different in each case. The Sky People are angry
with Curtain Boy and his brother for having killed so many evil spirits living
on earth. These terrestrial spirits, it turns out, have been adopted by
the Sky People. In a striking correspondence, we learn that the disloyal
brothers had all been adopted into the family of Įčoršika and his two
loyal brothers. The difference is that the adoptees and the Sky People are
distinct, but in the Hočąk story, the disloyal brothers are
the counterparts of both the Sky People and the terrestrial bad spirits
simultaneously. The Hočąk brothers are divided into sky
brothers, who are stars, and the adopted brothers who are terrestrial.
Furthermore, the opposition between the birds and the humanoid terrestrial
spirits in the Crow story is reflected in the Hočąk opposition between the humanoid
stellar spirits who are the loyal brothers, and the terrestrial spirits who are
animals (canines of the fox and coyote genera). Episode 2 of the Hočąk story is equally remote both
from the Crow and the Episode 1 of the Hočąk story. She is humanoid, whereas the status of the
Waterspirits might be presumed to be in their non-human form. It is not clear
that she is adopted, as they call her "our woman" (hinųk-hičapwira),
translated "sister", by which is meant in the Crow-Omaha type kinship
system of the Hočągara, that she is a young female
of the speaker's clan. She chooses to adopt a terrestrial existence in
contradistinction to the other Waterspirits, who maintain a subterranean abode.
Although it seems that she is not likely adopted, she is almost evil incarnate
and is happy to participate and even engineer (quite literally as it turns out)
the plot to undo Įčoršika.
There seems to be no common motive for the conspiracy in any of the episodes
except anger and resentment in two of them. Hena and his brothers resent the
fact that Įčoršika
was given precedence, specifically that he was given the best (cį,
"fattest") woman and this made them jealous. The anger of the Sky
Spirits in the Crow version derives simply from the fact that the Twins had
slaughtered and eaten their adopted terrestrial kin. The brothers who
correspond to both the Sky People and the adoptees, are predictably both the
offended party and the victims. What is particularly interesting is the
motivation of the Waterspirits, which seems to be nothing more than to make a
meal out of Įčoršika.
This is the ultimate objective of the Sky People as well. They expect that
Curtain Boy will make a fat and greasy meal since he ate their adopted
relatives. The Bad Waterspirits are actually defined as such by their man
eating proclivities, and are said not have been created by Earthmaker, implying
that they were created by the demonic Herešgnina. Although from opposite
cosmic domains, the Sky People and the Bad Waterspirits share this striking
correspondence. Another shared theme is that of persuasion. The Sky People
persuade Long Arms to capture Curtain Boy, and in a Hidatsa version, Long Arms
actually resists the suggestion making it necessary for the Sky People to be
both persistent and argumentative. This is exactly what we see in the case of
Hena and his brothers, although it is the leader who must convert his
entourage. However, it takes very little effort for the brothers to induce the
Waterspirit witch to join their cause. The theme of the hunting trip occurs in
both the Crow and Hočąk, although in somewhat differing
contexts. The hunting trip sends the brothers to the Outside, the wilderness
beyond the pale of culture, a place symbolic of the Otherworld, in which the
strange events of the supernatural become possible. It is in this situation
that the heroes of the stories come to be the objects of a plot to undo them.
It is there that they come into contact with the supernatural being who will
cause them to fall (literally or figuratively) into captivity. In the Crow
story the Twins lie down outside where they are exposed to danger as they
sleep. Įčoršika
does the opposite: he enters into a lodge, but inside this lodge is a woman who
represents the counterpart to Long Arms and is his special danger. He too lies
down, just as a star does when it sets. He is then invited to lie on the other
side of the lodge where he falls through the concealed hole into the
underworld. Similarly, it is down a hole that Įčoršika chases the
witch when he returns topside to avenge himself. In the Hočąk the emphasis is on the heliacal
setting of stars for a period into the underworld, after which they once again
appear. For the Crow and Hidatsa, the emphasis is upon the ascendancy of the
stars as they dwell in the night sky of the Above World. The hole itself,
whether in the Above or the Below World is not readily visible. It is not
something that ordinary people can see as they look at the heavens, even if
they might know roughly where it is. This same obscurity is rendered by the
hole into which Įčoršika
fall by being actually disguised. In one case the hole to the underworld is a
covered trap, and in the other case, it is hidden at the base of a tent pole.
When the protagonist disappears through the hole, no one on earth has any idea
what happened to him. In the world into which he has been abducted, he is bound
and held captive. This theme seems to be played out in an unusual way as Įčoršika
chases the witch through the underworld, where both of them pass through the
center of various plants, until the witch becomes bound to one as a botanical
tubercle.
After this, follows
another persuasion episode, but unlike that of theme 9, this one ends in
failure. Spring Boy, twice asks Long Arms to surrender his brother unharmed,
and twice he is rebuffed. Occurring at roughly the same spot in the narrative
in the Hočąk is an odd episode in which two
creatures of the Water World step forward and petition for clemency on behalf
of the condemned Įčoršika.
These are Otter and Loon, both of whom are said to be Waterspirits originally.
They bear no ordinary relationship to their chief, as they are his hicųšge
or nephews (sister's sons). As such they bear the Warbundle for him and have a
joking relationship of the highest intimacy. There is no more devoted
relationship between relatives than that of uncle and nephew. But living up to
his wicked (šišik)
nature, the chief denies them their request, despite the evocation of their
bonds of kinship. Otter and Loon are the special subjects of the chief, just as
the birds are the special subjects of Long Arms in Crow-Hidatsa. Of course Loon
just is a bird himself, hinting at the possibility that the preform lying
behind their corresponding themes was characterized by the subjects being
birds. On the other hand, Spring Boy in the Crow-Hidatsa, like his counterpart
among the Hočąk Twins, Little Ghost, is thrown
into the waters immediately after his nativity, and becomes a wild creature of
the Water World himself. This suggests that in the preform the defender of the
captive Brother was also a creature of the Water World, and again it appears as
if he could well have been the Twin who was thrown away into the waters. In a
wider context, this Twin is most usually associated with the beaver — and
we do see the Crow Twins acquire a beaver tail weapon — but among the
Crow he is also associated with the otter, as it is said that he has "sharp
teeth like an otter." [4]
So the choice of the otter is also consonant with a preform in which the role
is played by the aquatic Twin. In between the Bad Spirit's two refusals, in the
Crow-Hidatsa versions, is a display of force that has an obscure meaning.
Spring Boy draws his bow and shoots a medicine stone that Long Arms keeps near
him. When the arrow hits the stone, it bleeds. Does it represent the sun? Or is
it a kind of Omphalos
marking a Center? Perhaps, too, it is the same as the stone dropped on the head
of the woman fleeing from the Above World back through the hole in the sky.
In the next episode, the
other brother breaks the bonds holding the captive. In the Hočąk, since Įčoršika is a lone
brother in this situation he breaks his own bonds, prompting the question of
why he did not do so earlier, or even why he submitted to being bound in the
first place if he possessed such supernatural strength. It again suggests a
preform in which there were two brothers involved in the episode. One of the brothers
the shoots either the Bad Spirit or his subjects. It is typical of Hočąk stories that the whole race is
attacked and nearly annihilated. However, that the Hočąk has also a parallel episode in
which there is just one opponent, the witch, suggests that it is the Bad Spirit
who was slain in the preform. The result, as all the reflexes agree, is that
the Bad Spirit's subjects all flee. Both agree that the Bad Spirit's body was
burnt. It is not clear that this burning has the same esoteric significance in both
reflexes. The burning of the Waterspirits in the Hočąk is the rise of Įčoršika
with the sun, which now becomes his torch to light the surface of the waters
("burn the Waterspirits"). Prima facie the burning of Long Arms might
be the standard procedure in disposing of an evil spirit so that he does not
return. Nevertheless, since it is an astronomy myth, the identity of the flames
with the sun could not be simply dismissed. At this point the narratives of the
two reflexes have a striking correspondence. The Brothers allow at least
certain of the subjects of the Bad Spirit to live on earth. In the Crow these
re birds; in the Hočąk, they are Loon and Otter. The
paradigmatic subjects of the Chief of the Bad Waterspirits. What's interesting
is that they are given the same reward: to live on earth. In the Crow case,
this is a descent; in the Hočąk case, it is an ascent. This, of course, reflects the inverse
relation of the Otherworld (Cosmic domain) that occurs in each tradition.
Finally, both myths agree that the Brothers are or became stars, but they
diverge substantially on what stars they are. Being a Divine Twins myth, the
Crow version goes with the stars that have been preassigned to those tow
spirits. The Hočąk makes them the Belt Stars of
Orion. At first this may seem like an irreconcilable divergence, but as we
shall see in detail below, the Crow was well as the Hidatsa variants to our
present story make out the hand of Long Arms, which was severed by the Twins,
to be none other than Orion. So despite great separations in time and culture, there
remains a clear stellar convergence in the astronomical codes of the two myths.
This myth with its two
inverted reflexes, finds an interesting mediation in a story from a people who
are themselves intermediate in kinship and language to the Crow-Hidatsa and the
Hočągara. These people are the Oglala
band of the Teton Lakota.
The following myth bears significant
similarities to both the Crow-Hidatsa and Hočąk stories. [5]
Iron
Hawk and his wife transformed themselves into buffalo, and in this form his
wife gave birth to a bull calf called "Red Calf". One day Iron Hawk
went to swim in a creek and there encountered a woman on the opposite bank. She persuaded him to ferry her across, while she held
onto his back. [6] When he
reached midway, she suddenly sprouted enormous wings, and taking flight,
carried him through the hole in the sky. [7]
His wife showed up to join him in swimming, but could find him nowhere. Red
Calf had his mother show him where they were to have met. Red Calf put on a
gray cap that his father had given him, and was immediately transformed into a
hawk. As he flew over the middle of the creek, he encountered a whirlwind, and
following its path, he flew through the hole in the sky. There he passed
through one village of birds after another. Finally, he came to a village at
the fork of two creeks. There he as put up for the night by a woman who told
him that a man in the shape of a buffalo was to be killed and eaten on the
morrow. The next day the boy went with the old woman to watch the spectacle.
When Red Calf appeared, his father recognized him. Iron Hawk was held in place
by a Rock Woman (Uŋḣćġila) who was attached to his hip. Red
Calf fired an arrow at her, and the Rock Woman shattered into a myriad of
pieces. Iron Hawk ran off as a buffalo, and Red Calf flew with him as a hawk.
As they fled they came across a little man thought to be a Rock Man. This man
Red Calf also shot dead. When they reached the bird village where they had
started, the birds had devised a plan to rescue the pair: they made a great
nest and lowered them in it through the hole in the sky to safety. Now in their
absence, Yellow Iktomi had abused Red Calf's grandmother by pushing her. When the old woman told them what he had done, Red Calf
beat Iktomi with a dirty teepee skin until he turned from yellow to black. [8]
Here again is another
story of an involuntary ascent through a hole in the sky and an escape back
through it after an ordeal in which the abductee is bound and put on the menu
for dinner. Like the Crow-Hidatsa paradigm, there are two strongly related
males who are the protagonists of the story, although in the Oglala it is not
twins, but father and son.
|
Oglala 1 |
Oglala 2 |
Crow 1 |
Crow 2 |
|
Iron Hawk ferries an Uŋḣćġila
across a creek. |
With the help of his mother, he finds
the spot where his father had disappeared. |
- |
He spots the hole through which his
brother went. |
|
Iron Hawk and his wife had
transformed themselves into buffaloes. |
Red Calf transforms himself into a
hawk. |
- |
Spring Boy transforms himself into an
arrow. Later, Spring Boy transforms himself into a little child. |
|
She sucks him up a whirlwind into the
hole in the sky. |
Red Calf follows the whirlwind
through the hole in the sky. |
Long Arms pulls Curtain Boy through
the hole in the sky. |
Spring Boy shoots himself through
hole. |
|
Iron Hawk's wife shows up to swim
with him, but she can't find him. |
- |
Spring Boy can't find where Curtain
Boy went. |
- |
|
- |
Red Calf comes upon one village after
another of birds. |
- |
Spring Boy comes upon one village
after another of birds. |
|
- |
Red Calf was put up by an old woman
at the last village. |
- |
Spring Boy was put up by an old woman
at the last village. |
|
- |
She told him that a man in the form of
a buffalo was to be eaten on the morrow. |
- |
She told him that a mischievous boy
was to be eaten on the morrow. |
|
- |
He went with the woman to watch the
spectacle. |
- |
He went with the woman to watch the
spectacle. |
|
- |
When Red Calf appeared, his father
recognized him. |
- |
When Spring Boy appeared, his brother
recognized him. |
|
- |
Red Calf was held in place by a Uŋḣćġila
attached to his hip. |
- |
Curtain Boy was bound by the arms of
Long Arms. |
|
- |
Red Calf shot an arrow at her: she
shattered into pieces. |
- |
Spring Boy first shot an arrow at
Long Arms' stone, and it bled; then Spring Boy shot Long Arms dead. |
|
- |
Iron Hawk and Red Calf fled as a
buffalo and a hawk respectively. |
- |
The two brothers fled. |
|
- |
Birds lower the two in a nest through
the hole in the sky. |
- |
The two of them escape by riding
arrows back down through the hole in the sky. |
Iron Hawk and Red Calf
seem to be almost interchangeable. As a father and son combination, they are
the counterparts of the Crow and Hidatsa Twins. Iron Hawk can transform himself
at will into a buffalo, and Red Calf was actually born as a bison. By use of a
magical gray cap, each is able to change into a hawk. Spring Boy in the Crow
version also has the power of metamorphosis, being able to transform himself
into an arrow and like the Hočąk Redhorn, to shoot himself quickly to another point in space.
Superficially, there seems to be little connection between the buffalo
alloforms of the Oglala heroes and the transformations of Spring Boy. However,
if we turn our attention to the Crow's closest kindred tribe, the Hidatsa, we
find an interesting link. In their version, Long Arms captures Spring Boy and
crucifies him on a forked tree. After Spring Boy escapes and avenges himself
upon Long Arms, he institutes the Sun Dance among the Hidatsa, a rite which
they call "Hide Beating". This ceremony is done in remembrance of
Spring Boy's adventures among the spirits of the Above World. In founding this
rite, Spring Boy declared, "Since I have named the buffalo hide as my own
body, the buffalo shall range where people are." [9]
So for the Hidatsa, the buffalo becomes an alloform for Spring Boy, putting him
into better alignment with Iron Hawk and Red Calf.
In all the reflexes, the
boy is in the company of a woman when he discovers the hole in the sky. Iron
Hawk discovers it the hard way, as does Curtain Boy, who is pulled up by Long
Arms. In both cases, the captive ascends by being pulled up. His rescuer
launches himself through the hole by his own supernatural power, although the
basic form of his ascent is the same, in some sense, as that of the captive. In
the Crow story, Curtain Boy is taken aloft in the grip of a hand; Spring Boy
shoots himself through the hole as an arrow. However, the shooting of an arrow
is also done by hand, so Spring Boy can be said to ascend through the sky by
means of a hand. Just as Iron Hawk ascended in conjunction with a whirlwind, so
too does his rescuer Red Calf. The whirlwind is an exemplar (especially in this
contest) of the V-shaped spinning cone of spiritual communication from one
world to another. This cone of communication is what contemporary Oglala call a
kapemni. [10]
After the captive is taken up, his whereabouts are unknown.
The two stories from this
point follow each other very closely. The rescuer goes through four different
villages, populated exclusively by birds. In the last he is given hospitality
by an old woman. She learns that the captive was going to be eaten on the
morrow. He then accompanies the old woman to the spectacle where the captive
recognizes him. The captive is bound by the physical body of his captor. In the
Oglala the captor and the stone have been merged into one being, a Rock Person
or Uŋḣćġila. In the Crow, Long Arms has a
special relationship to the stone, which in some tellings is said to be
"his medicine" (source of power). [11]
Spring Boy merely shoots the stone, which bleeds; then he shoots Long Arms
himself, killing him. In the Oglala the stone and the captor, being one and the
same, are shot at once and killed. The two kinsmen flee, but their means of
escape are superficially different. In the Oglala the birds lower them in a
nest to the earth; in Crow, the Twins descend by riding two arrows each. In
other versions, birds are identified as souls. [12]
A nest is a house for neonate birds, most specifically eggs, which make birds
"twice born", like souls who live in heaven and are born again on
earth. The arrow is identified with the soul as well, as will be discussed in
more detail below. So the seeming divergence
between the accounts at the end may only be superficial.
What is particularly
interesting is that Long Arm is replaced in the Oglala by the female Uŋḣćġila, which Beckwith's translator
rendered as "Rock Person", adding parenthetically, "Petrified
Bones". [13] This
rendering looks like a translator's or narrator's gloss for Beckwith's benefit,
inasmuch as the term is well known. The suffix -la is a diminutive, leaving the stem Uŋḣćġila to answer almost exactly to the
Dakota name, Uŋktḣi. Riggs, who did his research
between 1852 and 1882, tells us that Uŋktḣi means, "the Dakota god of the waters; a fabled
monster of the deep; the whale: an extinct animal, the bones of which are
said to be sometimes found by the Indians, probably the mastodon (see uŋḣćġila)." Under uŋḣćġila he says, "probably the mastodon,
or other large animal, whose petrified remains are found in Dakota
Territory." [14] In a
tabulation of Lakota deities, Uŋḣćġila is said to be a "Land
monster[,] Female Uŋktḣi"; and the Uŋktḣi is described as, "One Who
Kills[,] Water Monster". [15]
That the Uŋḣćġila are female Uŋktḣi reveals the connection between
petrified bones and water monsters. The holy men of the Dakota told Walker,
"the females [of the Uŋktḣi] live on the dry land, and their
bones are often found in the badlands." [16]
Both Uŋḣćġila and Uŋktḣi are quite close to Hočąk Wakčexi, Uakčexi, "Waterspirit".
In the mythic account of "The Feast" given by Little Wound, the well
known horns and tails of the Hočąk Wakčexi
are seen as attributes of the kšeghila as well:
Then others were
invited. The Uŋktḣi who
are the Wakan
[Holy Ones] of the waters. The Unkšegila who are the Wakan of the lands. ... Then Woxpe asks Okaga to do
some favor for each one of the guests, and he promises to do so. Okaga asked Ikćegila
[Uŋḣćġila] what he most desired, and he said to have power over everything. Okaga asked
what part he would have this power in, and he answered that he wanted this
power in his horns and his tail. So he received this power. But his horns were
very soft and his tail was brittle. (Iktomi made them so.) (His women lived on the
earth, and his home was in the waters.) [17]
And in Walker's Literary
Cycle, a good description is given of an Uŋktḣi, making it indubitable that such
a creature is the Lakota counterpart to the Hočąk Waterspirit:
The second day they
traveled thus and in the water, a great beast came toward them. Its body was
like the body of a huge otter. Its head like that of a huge wolf, its tail like
that of a huge beaver and it had horns which it could make long or short as it
willed. As it came, it groaned and growled and gnashed its teeth and slashed
the waters with its tail, making great waves. They knew this to be an Uŋktḣi one
of the monsters. When near it said to them, "Ho, sons of Tate, I will
drag you under the waters and instead of serving the Gods, you shall serve
me." [18]
Given the correspondences
between Lakota Uŋḣćġila and Hočąk Uakčexira, the basic plot of the Oglala
story now can be seen to tilt towards the Hočąk version whose inverted topology thus finds a surprising
reflection in the standard Above World model. We can see a good correspondence
between the main events of the Oglala story and the central episode of the Hočąk Įčoršika myth.
|
Oglala 1 |
Oglala 2 |
Hočąk |
|
Iron Hawk and his wife transform
themselves into a buffalo. |
Red Calf dons his father's gray cap
and is transformed into a hawk. |
- |
|
An Uŋḣćġila
("Rock Woman") persuades Iron Hawk to ferry her across a creek. |
With the help of his mother, he finds
the place where his father was supposed to be. |
A woman who is a witch and a
Waterspirit (Wakčexira),
persuades Įčoršika
to cross over from the front of the lodge to its back. |
|
Having thus tricked him, she sprouted
wings and carried him within a whirlwind through the hole in the sky. |
Red Calf encounters a whirlwind and
follows it through the hole in the sky. |
Having thus tricked him, he fell into
the Underworld through the hole in the false bottom. |
|
|
There he found villages of birds.
Then he came to a village at the fork of two creeks. |
There he was among the Bad
Waterspirits. |
|
|
He was told that the man was to be
killed and eaten. |
He was told that he was to be killed
and eaten. |
|
|
Iron Hawk was pinned in place by a Uŋḣćġila. |
Įčoršika was bound
in irons by the Waterspirits. |
|
|
Red Calf shot the Uŋḣćġila
and broke her up. |
Įčoršika broke his
iron bonds. Then he attacked and killed Waterspirits with a firebrand. |
|
|
As he and his father fled, Red Calf
shot dead another Uŋktḣi. |
The Waterspirits fled as Įčoršika
killed many with his firebrand. |
|
|
The birds helped Iron Hawk and Red Calf
by making a giant nest and lowering them through the hole to the world below. |
Loon (and Otter) tried to help free Įčoršika. |
|
|
Red Calf killed the Uŋktḣi
who were killing the birds. After this the birds "were able to scatter
out over the country".* |
Įčoršika rewarded
them by allowing them to live on earth. |
|
|
Yellow Iktomi abused Red Calf's
grandmother by pushing her. |
Hena had abused Įčoršika's wife and
brothers by using force against them. |
|
|
Red Calf beat Iktomi with a dirty teepee
skin. |
Įčoršika hit Hena
with a firebrand. |
|
|
This turned Iktomi black. |
Hena and his brothers had put
charcoal on their faces in supplication. Being hit with a firebrand
transformed Hena into a red fox. |
*this appears as the last paragraph of
the story after an intervening extraneous episode about Iron Hawk.
The occurrence of the buffalo in this
story marks a strong divergence from its Hočąk
parallel. However, on this point, it does recall the odd antipathy of the Twins
to buffalo foetuses, which derives from the identity of one of the Twins with
Sirius, as is conclusively shown by Lankford. [19]
Aborted foetuses are anathema to him because Sirius, called "Morning
Star" for its well known competition with "the" Morning Star (of
Venus), rises with the sun about the time buffaloes calve, thus presiding over
this blessing of life for buffaloes and their predators alike. However, none of
this exists in the Hočąk
tradition. Red Calf in this story is the Oglala counterpart of Įčoršika.
The name "Įčoršika"
is just one of many born by the figure better known as "Redhorn". The
"horn" in his name refers metaphorically to his braid or scalplock,
which is said to be of a striking red hue. Judging by his name, we might be
justified in concluding that the hair on Red Calf is of much the same color.
Beyond mere color is the odd fact that Red Calf is in form, at any rate, a
buffalo. Redhorn has less of an affinity to the buffalo, although as the
hunting deity Herokaga
("Without Horns"), he is paired with the deer. As will be argued below, Orion is connected to the deer and in the
Oglala tradition, to the buffalo in part. This merely reflects a change in the
primary source of meat. The strange interchangeability of father and son is
another distant echo of the cross generational identities for which Redhorn is
particularly and perhaps uniquely known (see above).
The alternance between hawk and buffalo is unknown in the Hočąk traditions concerning
Redhorn, although it has been argued by James Brown that some Mississippian
peoples had identified their counterpart to Redhorn with a hawk. This notion
arises because the Mississippian deity is, at least on one occasion, portrayed
with prosopic earrings (despite the fact that birds have no external ears). [20]
The sense of both the closeness (in structure) and divergence (in time ?) of
the Oglala and Hočąk
stories is particularly well illustrated in the concluding transformation
episodes. The animals in question would seem to have no relationship: one is a
spider (iktomi)
the other is a fox with coyote associates. Although the zoological status of
the species is totally at variance, their mythological roles are not too far
apart. Iktomi is the exact counterpart to the Hočąk
Wakjąkaga,
"Trickster"; but most akin to Trickster is Coyote, whose species
often plays the fool or the swindler, with the fox less prominant in this role.
The color transformations are reversed: Hena blackens his face with charcoal,
then is turned into a fox, an animal of reddish or orange hue; Iktomi is turned
from yellow to black. Note, however, that Hena is black from charcoal, essentially
the same carbonaceous matter that will turn the interior of a teepee black near
the smoke hole. It is not mere exterior dirt that can turn things black, but
only the soot
of the inside surface of the skin. So both Hena and his counterpart Iktomi are
blackened by the same substance, and the fire turns out to be the ultimate
source of both colorations. Teepee skins are made of buffalo hide, the very
stuff of Red Calf and his father, as the firebrand is esoterically of Įčoršika
— but to show how these are proper counterparts requires an additional
treatise to be given later (see below).
The Hand, the Eye,
and the Hole in the Sky. A number of Siouan tribes and their neighbors see the central stars
of Orion as making up a hand. [21]
The Oglala Lakota concept of this
asterism is seen below. The Hand (Nape) is made up of the Belt Stars of Orion (wrist),
the Sword Stars (thumb), with the addition of Rigel (index finger), and Cursa
(little finger), a star from the neighboring constellation of Eridanus. Goodman
says that a story about a chief's lost arm is the origin myth of the Hand
Constellation. [22] The Oglala
story goes like this. The Thunders rip off the (left) arm of one of the chiefs
among the Star People, and the chief, who is understandably anxious to get it
back, offers his daughter in marriage to any warrior who can retrieve it.
Fallen Star recaptures the arm from the Thunders and their ally, the trickster
Iktomi, as it lies on a mantel above a boiling kettle of water. By use of
various magical artifacts, Fallen Star escapes his pursuers and arrives at his
grandmother's teepee. She grabs an ax and swings it wildly in the air, breaking
up the storm clouds. Fallen Star presents the arm and wins the chief's daughter
in marriage. They soon have a son who is destined to carry on his father's
adventures. [23] This chief
is said to rule over all the Star People. He could
be Polaris, Morning Star, Evening Star, or even Sirius; but the position of the
Thunderbird constellation at least suggests that the arm in question is the
Milky Way. The Lakota Thunderbird asterism, which is essentially Draco plus two
stars in Canis Minor (Little Dipper), is offset from the Milky Way to the same
extent as the hand (Orion) constellation. This means that they are 180 in
opposition (azimuth 270 vs. azimuth 90). That the Thunderbirds should
appropriate the Milky Way as their own seems fitting, since it has that same
misty quality that characterizes clouds. In this context the Thunderbirds can
play the same oppositional role played elsewhere by the Great Serpent and its
variants (see 1 and 2). Whether the Hand
sets or rises, the Thunderbirds constellation does the exact opposite, save
that as a circumpolar asterism, it only approaches the horizon without actually
setting. It is the same tug-of-war at opposite quadrants that we have seen
played out between Orion and Scorpius. During mid-May nearly the whole southern
half of the Milky Way, including the chief's Hand, heliacally sets. At this time
the Thunderbird rises high at the opposite side of the sky. With the
Thunderbird's dominance, the chief's arm disappears from the sky for a brief
period. Thus, the Thunderbirds have "stolen" the arm. Fallen Star
wins the tug-of-war for the chief right at the place and time that the arm is
suspended above the kettle and fire (for this image and symbolism among the Hočągara, see "Bluehorn Rescues His
Sister"). The scene is one in which the Hand asterism is rising with
the sun, suspended over both the Ocean Sea (the kettle) and the red of the dawn
(the fire). This is, astronomically speaking, the point at which Orion is
suspended above the boiling kettle and fire, and the time at which Fallen Star begins
taking it back to the chief (at the opposite end of the celestial sphere). In
the course of the journey, the Hand rises and the Thunderbird (Draco) falls
very near the northern horizon.
It
is among the Hidatsa
that we begin to see some interesting connections to the Hočąk counterpart of Orion. [24] In the Hidatsa story the chief of the stars
is a spirit called "Long Arm". His name also suggests the Milky Way.
The Divine Twins, Lodge Boy and Spring Boy, had killed a number of evil spirits
that lived on the surface of the earth. The sky people became alarmed for their
own safety and petitioned Long Arm to capture Spring Boy, the more aggressive
of the two boys, and bring him to the sky to be executed. Long Arm reluctantly
complied. They took Spring Boy and crucified him on a forked tree. Lodge Boy
noticed a streak of light where the hole in the sky was where Long Arm had
snatched up Spring Boy. He flew through, changed himself into a little boy, and
got himself adopted by an old grandmother. Lodge Boy soon found his brother.
Disguising himself as a spider while everyone was asleep or inattentive, he
climbed up and cut his brother free.
They went out as
spiders and the holy man knew all about it but could do nothing because the two
together were too powerful for him. Long Arm went and placed his hand over the
hole by which they passed through so as to catch them. Spring Boy made a motion
with the hatchet as if to cut it off at the wrist and said, "This second
time your hand has committed a crime, and it shall be a sign to the people on
earth." So it is today that we see the hand in the heavens. The white
people call it Orion. The belt is where they cut across the wrist, the thumb
and fingers also show; they are hanging down like a hand. "The hand
star" it is called. [25]
The Hidatsa model is a
Hand asterism created when Long Arm attempted to manually block the hole in
heaven. His hand was thrust over the hole to prevent the Twins from going back
to earth through it. We learn that the souls of the righteous go through that
same hole when they ascend to heaven, and those souls in the world above who
wish to return to earth, also use the same hole to descend. Since this hole is
found in the center of Long Arm's hand, it must actually go right through his
hand. Just as Long Arm initially lost his hand trying unsuccessfully to stop
the Twins from using the hole, so even now his hand is a vain attempt at
obstruction.
The
Crow, who are very
closely related to the Hidatsa, have a version of the Long Arm myth nearly
identical to that of their Hidatsa cousins. [26]
In
the Arapaho story,
Moon and Sun, who are brothers, go out hunting for wives. In a serious lapse in
judgement, Sun settles upon a toad for a mate, but Moon finds favor in a human
woman. Moon takes the form of a porcupine and induces the woman to climb after
him on an ever-growing tree. Finally, Moon changes into human form and the
woman, who is impressed by his splendid garb, willingly follows him. They enter
into the world above by emerging through a trap door in the sky. There they live for some time, and she gives birth to a
baby boy know as "Little Star" (or "Lone Star"). [27]
One day her husband tells her to go after potatoes, but never to pull up any
withered plant found nearby. Out of curiosity, she pulls up the withered plant
and finds a hole in the heavens from where she can see her old village on the
earth below. She descends with her child through the hole using a rawhide
lariat. However, her rope comes up short and she dangles suspended in midair.
Moon sees her, and decides to bring her back to him in death (as apparently
some of the dead go to the moon). Moon takes a flat, circular, heating stone,
and drops it on her head, taking care to avoid hitting his son. The stone kills
the mother, but the child survives the fall. On earth Little Star is adopted by
Old Woman Night. In time she makes arrows and a special bow, called the
"Coyote Bow". Old Woman Night would always put a little food behind
her lean-back, and told Little Star that it was being saved for lunch. When Old
Woman Night went to check her traps, Little Star looked behind the lean-back
where he found a monster eating all the food. The monster, whose body extended
all the way from the river, had blazing eyes and two horns. Little Star
promptly shot him dead, then knocked off his horns. When Old Woman Night found
out, she was appalled, since the monster was her husband. Later on, Old Woman
Night made Little Star a lance out of his Coyote Bow. Little Star resolved to
make a journey to see Sun. However, when he arrived, Sun said, "It is best
for you to return, since your lance, which is poisonous, is lawless." So
he went back to Old Woman Night, where he hung his lance above the door of her
teepee. He became the Morning Star, also called "the Cross".
"That small group of stars early at night, with a row of stars along the
side represent the hand of Little Star with his lance." [28]
The Arikara
have a number of versions of the story of the hole in the sky and the star
husband. While everyone else was traveling in a religious procession into a
sacred lodge, two women decided to break the rules and lay on top of a drying
scaffold. One of them said, "I really admire that star above. I wish I
could marry him." "Don't say that," said the other, "it is
sacred." After they had gone to bed, a long arm reached down and pulled
both women up into the sky. He was one of the larger stars in the sky, and he
took the first to marry her. In time she bore her star husband a child. Then
the other woman also bore a child. Then the star said to his wife, "Don't
dig any turnips, for you will discover where you came from." Then he hid
her digging sticks. However, when an opportunity presented itself, she stole a
digging stick and cut a hole in the ground. The stick itself disappeared into
the hole, and when she looked for it, she saw a hole in the sky. There she saw
the earth below. Her companion said, "Don't do that, it is not safe."
Later, she consulted Old Woman Spider, who advised
her to make a rope out of buffalo sinew. She took the sinew and lowered herself
and her child down through the hole, but she dangled high above the ground. [29]
Then her husband said to three stones, "You shall help me." He heated
them in the fire. They dropped a stone down upon the head of the woman and
killed her, but they spared the star's son. In time the other woman descended
in like fashion, and she too was killed in the same way, but her son was
spared. The first boy, Drinks Brain Soup, was captured and lived with an old
woman. Drinks Brains brought his mother back to life by shooting arrows into
the air over her scaffold. He himself was the white arrow. In time they
captured the other boy, Long Teeth. He lived in a spring and ate shells, which
he called 'parched corn'. Eventually they caught him and placed him in a sweat
bath, after which he vomited up the shells and other things of the water. He
tried to run away, but they had put an buffalo bladder behind his neck, and he
could not say under the water. Even though they were warned that it was
dangerous, they went out and killed a man who had hot coals tied to his ankles,
and another being who had a gigantic mouth. He is said to have killed their
mother. When the boys and their mother were laying down, the long arm of a
being named "Long Arm" (Wihčs) extended down from the sky. Long
Teeth saw it, and first he chopped off the hand, then the arm. After this,
Drinks Brains cut off another arm at the urging of his brother. Soon there was
a pile of arms there. Long Arm vowed, "It won't be long before I make
slaves out of you!" Later in the night the arm came down again, and when
it touched Long Teeth, it put him to sleep. The arm snatched him up into the
sky, into the very village whence his mother had gone. Long Teeth was hung
spread eagle on a tree where they built a fire. Drinks Brains shot himself into
the sky with four arrows, a yellow one, a black one, a red one, and a white
one. He himself became an arrow. He crawled up to Long Teeth in the form of an
ant and spoke into his ear: "My brother, I have arrived." Then, when
everyone was asleep, they escaped. They came to where Old Woman Spider lived in
the sky world. They asked for her help. She lowered them easily to the earth
below. Then she said to Long Teeth, "This brother of yours is holy, he who
transforms himself into an arrow. This one is an arrow, and you will be like
me, a spider." That is why today arrows are fierce and can kill people,
and it is why when a black spider bites someone they can die. [30]
Lankford uses the Hidatsa
model to make sense of the rather extensive iconography from the Mississippian
southeast. [31]
There are graphics in various media showing a downward pointed hand with an
ocular-like slit in the middle of it. 
The inset at left from Moundville
shows such a hand inscribed on a piece of pottery. [32]
Lankford argues convincingly that these images are of the Hand asterism with
its hole or slot for the passage of souls to (and perhaps from) Spiritland in
the upper world. This is reinforced considerably by
the numerous examples of the belief in the Milky Way as the path of souls. [33]
[...] The hole in Orion is very near this path (which crosses Gemini). It seems
reasonable to conclude that the concept of the Hand constellation and the hole
in the sky which it covers, was once more widely distributed than the few
cultures that now remain acquainted with it. The apparent eye that often
appears inside the hand's slit might be understood in one of at least two ways.
It may be a genuine eye, which in the present astral context should possess its
common valence as a star symbol. This is rather paradoxical, since the center
of the square formed by M42-Alnitak-Mintaka-Algiebba is vacant to the naked
eye, leaving no candidate for a star in the center of the Hand. This very
stellar void is what suggests the center of the square as a celestial hole in
the first place. However, there is a widespread belief that the souls of the
dead transform themselves into stars. This concept of the dead is, for
instance, very important among the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples. The
Lankford thesis asserts that it is through the slit in the Hand asterism that
the departed enter onto the path of souls (the Milky Way), and given the
Hidatsa model, also return this way to earth for reincarnation. To make it clear
that the slit is a portal and passageway for souls, a symbol of the soul might
be expected in its center. Therefore, the eye may indicate the soul of the
deceased in the form of a star. Another widespread connection between the eye
and the soul is expressed in the belief that a person's soul can be seen in the
pupil of his eye. [...] Another possibility suggests itself. The
"eye" figure in the center of the slit may not be ocular at all. It
may instead be a "target" design of concentric circles. Lankford has
also analyzed this in terms of [see Hawk and Hand volume ...]. [34]
I arrived at the same conclusion independently (see Gottschall, a New Interpretation),
seeing the design as another version of the swirling lines of a "cosmic
column" of communication between the upper and lower worlds. Clearly,
nothing can so well exemplify such a pathway as the portal through which souls
travel from one world to the other. Nevertheless, to express these two concepts
— the cosmic column and the progress of the stellar soul — as
exclusive alternatives may be unsubtle. The intention may have been to render
them in a unified concept, the soul's journey through the portal as the
exemplar of the process of inter-world transduction, here captured as a
target-eye icon.
The
coupling of the open hand and eye is even found in the folklore of the Old
World. [35]
However, when we look into the function of the eye it is not too difficult to
see the connection it has to the celestial Hand of the plains. The Hand
belonged to a bad spirit who attempted to use it to bar the escape of the Twins
from the Above World. The Hand is the organ of agency, the executive organ,
which more than any other body part enacts the will of the agent. Thus we see
in plains pictography of more recent vintage, that the presentation of the Hand
(as shown below) symbolized agency itself, expressed descriptively as "I
did it". The hand as an instrument of grasping is used to express capture
as we see in the two examples below, the third of which shows a Lakota warrior
who has captured a Crow man and woman.
|
|
|
|
It is this function that Long Arm's
actions exemplify. His hand is the organ of agency by which he attempts to
grasp and hold the fleeing Twins. For this he loses his arm and the power
symbolized by his hand, which can no longer block the hole in the sky that now
runs right through the center of his palm. Souls that come from the Sky World
have to pass through this hole, so it should follow that they got there
originally by passing through it the other way (as it is the one and only
portal to the celestial realm of souls). So why does the Mississippian version
(on the Lankford model) have an eye subsisting in this hole? The eye and hand
have an important shared function: they both apprehend the objects of their
attention. But the celestial Hand gathers the souls of the departed through its
central hole, making it strikingly similar to an eye. An eye metaphorically
grasps the light through its central hole, the pupil. It is this light, in the
form of an image, that the person "grasps" in perception. Why is the
capture of an image of any pertinence to the transmigration of souls? We find
among the Hočągara
for instance, that the soul, the nąǧirak,
is seen essentially as an insubstantial image itself. This
image can be conceived negatively as a shadow (cf. the ancient Greek concept
of the departed as "shades"); or as a positive image such as can be
seen in a reflection on the face of still waters. Naturally as the surviving
counterpart of a person, the life soul should be in that person's image.
Furthermore, keeping to the Hočąk
exemplar, especially within the Medicine Rite, the essence of a person's being
is called hąp,
which means "light", a term which Radin translates properly as
"Light-and-Life", inasmuch as it is used to refer to someone's life
while retaining its primary meaning as "light". So the insubstantiality
of the soul is understood as an image of light, the essence of life departed.
So when it passes through a celestial hole, it is much like an image of light
that is apprehended by the eye. It is the eye that captures the image of living
light the way a hand captures a solid object. However, the perforated Hand
captures an insubstantial counterpart to the body, and does so necessarily on
the model of the eye, the organ that captures images of light. Far from
refuting Lankford's model of the Hand being a representation of the celestial
portal for the transmigration of souls, the presence of the eye in its center
is a symbolic affirmation of this model.
The Grasping Eye and
the Ear-Heads.
The Chiwere-Winnebago branch of Siouan culture seems entirely devoid of the
mythology of the Hand-Portal. They have an alternant image and mythology which
is actually found coexisting obscurely within the Hidatsa Hand-Portal concept.
The Hidatsa story of the Twins (see above) ends on
a rather unexpected note:
The boys went back to
the place where they had left the arrows sticking in the ground, pulled out the
arrows and went home to their mother. She told them that the people in the sky
were like birds, they could fly about as they pleased. Since the opening was
made in the heavens they may come down to earth. If a person lives well on
earth his spirit takes flight to the skies and is able to come back again and
be reborn, but if he does evil he will wander about on earth and never leave it
for the skies. A baby born with a slit in the ear at the place where earrings
are hung is such a reborn child from the people in the skies. [36]
Perhaps the most striking
thing about the Hidatsa story is the charming account of the rebirth of the sky
people on earth, where we are told that babies born with earring slits give
away their celestial origins. And where do these renovated souls enter into our
lower world? The story makes it clear that it is through the hole in the sky in
the center of the Hand, a hand lopped off when Long Arm tried to cover the
perforation in the heavenly vault. The conclusion of the story says that those
souls coming from the Sky World to be reborn on earth have a sign that
identifies their provenance. This sign is a pair of
slits or holes designed to accommodate earrings, although the earrings
themselves are absent. [37]
The earring holes recall the hole in the Hand through which these returning people
had to have passed in order to depart from their spirit hole in the Sky World.
The correlation is typical of myths, which repeat themselves in a series of
themes and variations. So what do these holes signify esoterically, and what do
they have to do with the perforated Hand of Orion?
We get an important hint
in a gloss at the end of what appears to be an unrelated myth. This is an Ioway
story about a man noted more than all others for earrings, indeed his name is
"Human Head Earrings" (Wąkx!istowi). Of him it is said,
Human-head-earrings
was only a man like the rest of us, but he said that when he died his little
heads should live always. So now when we die the little person invisible to us
that dwells in us (the soul) goes to the other world. [38]
So the head worn on the
ear is, or is at least symbolic of, the soul. As we have seen in the
Mississippian version, the Hand is augmented by an isomorphic and complementary
image — the eye inside that hole. This identifies the hole as a portal
into which the insubstantial, light-image that is the life soul is captured by
the world beyond, just as an eye captures an image of light through its pupil.
The earring model of the soul sees it as an appendage of the ear. So if
this is indeed a model of its Mississippian counterpart, we have the following
analogy:
Head(-Earring)
: Ear :: Soul : Eye
It is easy to draw the
correspondences between head and soul, not only in North America, but even
throughout the Old World. [Head = soul]
What of the
correspondence between ear and eye? This relationship is also based upon an
analogy:
Eye :
Ear :: Light : Sound
Among the Hočągara, sound is a well known symbol
of light. Therefore, the organ of sound apprehension is analogous to the organ
of light apprehension. The eye, as we have concluded, corresponds to the hole
in heaven — the portal of souls — because it too takes within its
hole the insubstantial images of light just as the sky-portal takes in the
insubstantial images of light that are the afterlife of the departed. So the
ear on the Ioway model is like an alternative image to the eye, but with a
head-soul parked right on it. We see something of this symbolic interplay in
far off India where direct influence can be summarily excluded. In the epic Mahābhārata
(), the good spirits (the Danava) have become incarnated to pursue on a human plane a cosmic
struggle with the evil spirits (the Asura). In this fight, the god Sūrya (the Sun), as one of the Asura, has
become incarnate in the form of the champion Karṇa. Karṇa betrays his divine origin in his birth. He comes into
this world wearing a breast plate of gold, and upon his ears hang golden
earrings. His very name means "Ear". So the light of the world is
born as "Ear", adorned from the beginning in gold, including the orb-shaped
earrings. Yet Sūrya himself is most strongly
identified with the eye:
The affinity of the
eye and the sun is indicated in a passage where the eye of the dead man is
conceived as going to Sūrya ([Ṛg Veda] 10.16.3; cp. 90.3, 158.3, 4). In the A[tharva]
V[eda] he is called the "lord of eyes" (AV. 5.24.9) and is said to be
the one eye of created being and to see beyond the sky, the earth, and the
waters (AV. 13.1.45). He is far-seeing ([Ṛg Veda] 7.35.8; 10.37.1), all-seeing ([Ṛg Veda] 1.502), is the spy (spash) of the whole world ([Ṛg Veda] 4.13.3), beholds all beings and the good
and bad deeds of mortals ([Ṛg Veda] 1.50.7; 6.51.2; 7.60.2; 7.61.1; 7.63.4). [39]
The eye of the gods can
be reborn on earth as Ear because light is strongly analogous to sound. So in
the Ioway story, we have Wąkx!istowi with ears that have human head-souls as earrings.
The ear symbolizes more indirectly the eye that we found to symbolize the hole
in the sky in the middle of the stellar Hand. This is the place where the
light-soul is grasped as by perception. In the hand/eye model the soul is
itself not symbolized, but is understood to be an image. In the ear and
prosopic earring image, the earring is the explicit symbol of the soul. The
soul as a head is affixed to the flesh, which as an earlobe is essentially fat,
a substance analogous to marrow. [Onians.] In death these heads live on, but it
would not be in this world. The ear, being analogous to the eye, should stand
for the portal into and out of which the souls proceed. However, although the
Ioway heads are explicitly connected to souls and fit in with the Mississippian
version of the Hand Orion, there is nothing that connects them to the stars,
let alone Orion.
It is when we turn to the
Hočąk version of the myth that the prosopic
earring model makes contact with Orion. The Hočągara also have the spirit Wears
Faces on His Ears (Įčoršika), and his adventures bear close
resemblance to his Ioway counterpart. They appear to be the "same"
personage as he exists in related peoples. Although in the Hočąk we do not get any sense of the
earring heads being souls, we do find that he is explicitly identified with
stars, and in particular given the allegorical story of "Įčoršika
and His Brothers", we
are led to conclude that he is the star Alnilam of Orion. Redhorn comes
into the world like the Hidatsa sky child, reborn from the sky world. The
Hidatsa sky child has already had his ears supernaturally prepared for earrings;
Redhorn, on the other hand, will have his ears supernaturally prepared in his
future when he rubs them with his own saliva and faces magically sprout on his
earlobes. It is interesting that it's saliva that produces the faces on his
earlobes. In another story from the Redhorn Cycle, a number of Redhorn's
friends attempt to remove an arrow from a wounded man. Only Redhorn succeeds
(he is a spirit of the arrow). Then he heals the puncture wound itself by the
application of his holy saliva. So it is the same substance by which a puncture
wound is healed that is used to produce the faces on his earlobes. It is as if
his earlobes had punctures, as in the Hidatsa model, that are now cured and
replaced by living faces. So the hole or blank spot is "cured" by
having faces emerge on it. Here we are reminded of the Ioway model, where the
faces are souls. In the Ioway symbolism, these are living earrings that are put
on, though we may infer the existence of the usual holes that will have been
drilled in his ears. The emergence of the soul out of a hole can only recall
the Hidatsa model — argued as general in some respects by Lankford [40]
— of the hole in the sky whence souls come and go in the cycle of death
and rebirth.
And what is the significance of these
heads to the shared figure of the Ioway and Hočągara?
They are said to do three things in particular: to laugh, wink, and stick out
their tongues. We can understand these as Hočąk
symbols. In astronomy codes, sound is used to symbolize light. Usually it is crying,
the "opposite" of laughter, that is used to symbolize a figure's
light. Laughter serves the purpose better here because of its on-again,
off-again, staccato pattern of sound. What would this pattern be in terms of
light? Clearly, it would be blinking, or in stellar terms, twinkling, which is
what most stars do. Stars are also homologized to eyes, partly because of the
bright whites of the eyes, but also because the eyes blink. This is represented
in the winking of the eyes in the miniature faces. In many American cultures,
the stars are not only eyes, but are the souls of the departed. [41]
As we might expect from the Hidatsa model, this may be, or once have been, the
inspiration for making the faces express both their status as stars through the
actions of their eyes, and their status as souls (as explicitly stated by the
Ioway). This brings us to the final symbol of the triad: the protrusion of the
tongues. The tongue is roughly cylindrical, and is of a reddish hue. This is an
image isomorphic with the red "horn" of hair from which Redhorn
derives one of his names. Redhorn's red hair seems to be the red clouds of the
horizon in which he is immersed when his star (Alnilam of Orion) helically
rises or sets. As a "horn" or queue, it may also have a stellar value
as the Sword Stars, whose central star is M42, a reddish "hairy"
nebula (see above). It is isomorphic to a cloud,
so it is no accident that the name nebula, "cloud", so readily suggests
itself for such an object. The cloud form of his hair is particularly
appropriate to render into the image of the tongue. Clouds are wet, and those
near the horizon, associated as they are with the Ocean Sea (Te Ją),
recall not only the saliva on tongues, but their reddish hue. This
"tongue" of clouds comes to stick out only when the sun begins to
rise, and is pulled back in once the sun is fully up. The tongue, although not
the author of speech like the voice, controls its form and content. As sound
represents light, so the "tongue" of clouds on the horizon that make
up the "hair" of Redhorn are not the source and author of their own
luminance, but control its form and shape after their own actions. We see,
therefore, that each attribute of the ear-faces can be brought into correlation
with Įčoršika's
stellar attributes. So the little faces or heads are an image of the stellar Redhorn. One of the
meanings of naǧirak in Hočąk is a "man's reflection
in the water". [42] This was
once its primary meaning, but in time came to mean "soul" or "ghost"
before all else. This matches the Ioway earring model perfectly, but with the
addition that the faces are both stellar and spiritual at the same time.
The Prosopic Ears
and Reincarnation.
Since we are told that even though the Ioway Human Head Earrings was mortal,
that his earring heads would live on as his souls, it follows that they are
lost at death, leaving the body behind without earrings. The Hidatsa reference
to earring holes and the Ioway gloss actually have some interesting things in
common, as can be seen from the table below.
|
Paradigm |
Hidatsa |
Ioway |
|
[1] When |
When |
When |
|
[2] person P is leaving/returning
to life, |
a sky person returns to life, |
Human Head Earrings left life, |
|
[3] P's earlobes are supernaturally prepared
(perforated) for earrings that they do not now possess, |
his earlobes are supernaturally
prepared with perforations for earrings that the child does not then possess, |
his earlobes were supernaturally
affected with respect to his earring, which he then lacked, |
|
[4] showing that (the soul of) P has left
for/come from the Otherworld of the sky. |
which shows that the child has come
from the Otherworld of the sky. |
showing that the soul had left for
the Otherworld of the sky. |
Here again we have the
theme of the journey of the soul tied to this corpus of myth. However, there is
some apparent inconsistency in the idea that the little heads are
"the" soul. This would make better sense for the son of Human Head
Earrings, who has but one of these heads in the center of his chest. However,
there is a widespread belief in dual souls. [Dual soul doctrine] The other
possibility is that they represent the duality of ghost and flesh, which may
explain why in other Siouan myths, the two prosopic earrings disappear and the
story is set in the mythology of the Twins. The Hidatsa and Ioway episodes deal
with the opposite poles of life, which are both characterized by an absence of
the earrings for which their ears had been supernaturally prepared. In the
Hidatsa, causation is not discussed explicitly, but the appearance of earring
holes in the earlobes nevertheless implies that the child has come from the Above
world. For the Ioway the temporal sequence is from death to the sky. What is
being described is two halves of a cycle.
[ A description of heaven--by Wampasha, an Iowa Indian--was found in the diary of the Reverend S. M. Irvin, a devoted missionary among the Iowas and Sacs. It reads:
"The Big Village (heaven) is situated near the great water, toward the sunrise, and not far from the heads of the Mississippi River. None go there until after they die. A swift person can make the journey in three or four days; if, however, his heart be not right at death, the journey will be prolonged and attended with difficulties and stormy weather till he reaches the land of rest. Infants, dying, are carried by messengers sent for them; the old or infirm are borne upon horses- they have horses, plenty, and fine grass, and infirmities will all be healed in that village. The blind will receive new eyes; they have plenty of good eyes and ears there. Good people will never die again, but the bad may die three or four times and then turn into some bird." Carrie De Voe, Legends of the Kaw (Kansas City, MO: Franklin Hudson Publishing Co., 1904) Chapter 1.]
[illustration]
The Hidatsa are clearly
expressing the idea of reincarnation, since the sky people to whom they refer
are the righteous dead who have gone to the Above world to lead their afterlife.
They are then reborn but carry the mark of the earring with them into this
world. The Ioway concentrate on the prototypic individual who put these living
soul-heads on his earlobes, which then became the locus of his soul(s). When he
died, they lived on. As his soul(s) they represent his identity, and therefore
his self as it exists in the world above. In some symbolic way, he comes into
existence as Wakx!istowi
when he takes these earpieces to himself. Yet it is when we turn to the Hočągara that we find the whole
cyclical scheme richly portrayed.
Like the Ioway, the Hočąk exploration of the cycle of
death and rebirth focuses upon an individual who has the very similar name, Wągščahoršika,
"Wears Man Faces on His Ears", or Įčoršika, "Wears Faces on
His Ears". He is also known as "Redhorn" (Hešučka). Įčoršika is Redhorn's
sacred name, the name the spirits use for him. He established the grounds for
this name on earth by applying his own saliva to his ears, causing living faces
to appear there. The name Įčo-horšika is a compound expression. Įčo
(and išja)
means "face". It is an old word, as can be
seen from its cognates: Biloxi,
it,
"forehead, face"; Dakota, ite,
"face"; it'e, "forehead"; Osage, įštse,
"face". Now it often means "face to face" as in 'įjera,
and as in the compound įjokiphi, which means, "butt to butt, end to end; face
to face, opposing". The more common word for face is hišja, išja. So Įčo-horšika is also known in
one story as Wągščahoršika,
"Wears Man Faces on His Ears". [43]
The second part of the compound in Įčo-horšika's name is horušk (-ka being the definite article used to
indicate a personal name). Both Radin-Marino and Miner agree that this word
means, "to wear in the ears (as earrings)". This sense is illustrated
in the story about Hog, where it says, Kirigi, Xguxgšega ǧ'eǧ'ra
hanąč horuškše ("When he got back, Hog was wearing all the earbobs
in his ears"). [44] The stem
meaning "to wear" (where the part of the body is unspecified) is -kax-, -kix-;
however, most terms pertaining to wearing things are body specific: haj,
"to wear as a skirt"; hakere, "to wear on a scalp lock"; hoją,
hočą, hokiją, "to wear on the foot"; hok'ąk,
"to wear on the head"; honąkišig, "to wear
leggings"; į,
honązį, "to wear over the shoulder". So the word horušk
means specifically "to wear on the ears". Considering that the faces
are alive and animated, it is a bit strange to say that they are
"worn" at all. In the Hočąk story, despite the spirit's name, the faces seem rather to
grow on the earlobes. Yet the closely related Ioway have this same character
who reifies the notion that the faces are actually worn:
There were once ten
brothers, six of whom were good hunters, three poor hunters, while the last was
the hero of this tale. The eldest boys all killed big game, and the other three
killed only turkeys, raccoons, and skunks respectively. One day it was
announced that there was to be a great race around the world, and the tenth boy
told the three poor hunters to get boughs and make a sweat lodge. The boys did
this, while the six who were good hunters jeered and laughed at them and made
their own lodge. However, after they had sweated, and the youngest brother had
pulled at their hair till it was very long, then he too sweated and became
handsome. He put on his best clothes, placed his human head earbobs in his
ears, and came out. When the elder brothers saw how fine the younger ones
looked, they became very jealous. [45]
In this tale, the little
faces have an independent existence as earbobs. The youngest brother actually
places them in his ears. We later learn that they had the power to become
animate, just like the more intimately incarnated faces of the Hočąk Įčoršika. This has led
Hall and others, this time I think correctly, to connect these earpieces with
actual artifacts dating from the Early Mississippian culture. [46]
He calls these artifacts "long nosed god maskettes", a rather odd
designation. It must be observed that a great many of them have short noses.
The idea that they represent gods is a supposition for which there is no
evidence at all. "Maskette" was an unfortunate choice of words, since
it is already employed to denote a kind of headdress worn among the Indians of
the American Southwest. If it is to mean "little masks", it deviates
from the primary sense, inasmuch as the article is not designed to hide
anything. All we can say is that they are prosopic ornaments. So there once
were such little comic faces that men actually wore on the ears and in some
cases elsewhere. [47] That their
mythological counterparts are not necessarily ear pieces is clear enough from
what is said of Redhorn's sons:
At this time, Red
Horn's first wife was pregnant and, finally, the old woman's granddaughter gave
birth to a male child who was the very likeness of his father, Red Horn, having
long red hair and having human heads hanging from his ears. Not long after
this, the giantess also gave birth to a male child whose hair was likewise just
like his father's. Instead of having human heads hanging from his ears, he had
them attached to his nipples. [48]
Redhorn had two sons
who were just beginning to walk, when this [Redhorn's death] happened. One of
them was just like his father and the other one had the man faces on his
shoulders. [49]
So these faces were also
found on the breasts and on the shoulders. However, they remain
paradigmatically ear ornaments. The word horušk probably comes from ru-šik,
"to hang or suspend by hand". This would most often apply to earrings
and earbobs, and so the word became specialized. The Mississippian prosopic
earpieces were apparently much sought after and are widely distributed over the
midwest. Archaeologists have uncovered as many as 30 of these artifacts, made
of bone, shell, and copper. [50]
They were certainly considered items of some value. At least in later times
strings of shells or even attractive loose shells (especially white ones) were
valued above most other things. They could function to some degree as a medium
of exchange, as wampum.
The Hočąk word for wampum is worušik, from wa-ho-ru-šik, "something which
is hung or suspended by hand". This is our familiar word horuck with
the object prefix wa- ("something") attached to it. There is one instance
in Hočąk literature where the noun form
of the word is found, that is, horušikra, where -ra is something of a definite article meaning,
"the one such that (it is)". It is of great interest that the
translation given to it is wampum. [51] So some
earpieces are wampum.
The Hočąk culture may have traces of a
time when Įčo-horušik-ra,
"the faces hung by hand from the ears", were a prized form of wampum. So it
seems likely from the philological argument coupled with the archaeological
artifacts, that the mythic prosopic earpieces were inspired by actual earrings
such as those dating from the Mississippian period. Despite its great
historical interest, it tells us nothing about the esoteric meaning of the
living ear-faces of myth.
At
the end of the first story in one version of the Redhorn Cycle, the hero
himself clarifies the import of his several names. He finds this necessary
because his older brother Kunu's wife has thrown deer lungs at him on account
of one of his names.
Now the little brother
stood up and said, "Those in the heavens who created me did not call me by
this name, He-who-is-hit-with-deer-lungs. They called me
He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings." With that he spat upon his hands
and began fingering his ears. And as he did this, little faces suddenly
appeared on his ears, lau?ing, winking and sticking out their tongues. Then he
spoke again, "Those on earth, when they speak of me, call me Red
Horn." With this he spat upon his hands, and drew them over his hair which
then became very long and red. Now his brothers became fonder than ever of him
and gathered around him lau?ing. The next oldest brother said to him,
"What a wonderful thing you possess." "Come sit next to
me," the little brother said to him. Then he spat upon his hands again and
passed them over the head of his older bother and the latter's hair became
yellow on one side. Then the third brother told his little brother how much he
admired him and the latter said, "Come sit next to me." Then he again
spat upon his hands and passed them over his brother's head and his hair became
very long. Then the little brother said, "This is no ordinary power and I
will use no more of it for you." [52]
We may term this passage
the "Proof Episode", since it is here that Redhorn demonstrates his
extraordinary identity. What precisely has Redhorn proven? Without doubt, he
has demonstrated that he is not just a human being who has been given powers by
the spirits, but that he has prexisted in the spirit world where they had
known him by another name. Now he, like a great many other spirits, had chosen
to be reborn as a human. This extraordinary status was seen in other ways. That
he is also a spirit incarnate is more subtly shown by the fact that he does not
fast. This is because, being a spirit himself, he does not really need the
blessings of other spirits to exercise his supernatural powers. We later learn,
as others assert, that he was created by Earthmaker's own hands, charged to
rescue humanity from its supernatural enemies.
One
of the many extraordinary and strange qualities of Redhorn is seen in his
progeny. In "Redhorn's Father", we are told at the end that Wears
Faces on His Ears is the father of Redhorn. [Quote] However, as we (and the
contemporary Hočąk audience) know, Wears Faces on
His Ears is identical with Redhorn. To say that one is the father of the other
would seem to suggest the impossible. However, this is not the only place where
this paradox is to be found. In the Redhorn Cycle, one of the two sons of
Redhorn is exactly like his father. This is not mere twining: in a later
episode, he is called "Redhorn" and treated uniformly as if he were
indeed one and the same person as his father. One might object that belief in
the proposition is as impossible as the proposition itself. Yet it gets even
more radical. Redhorn also exemplifies what we might term "spatial
reincarnation" — not only does Redhorn succeed himself in his
progeny, but multiple Redhorns have existed simultaneously. Young Man did not
perish when his "son" Redhorn was born. So they both existed
simultaneously as the same person. The same is true of Redhorn and his own doppelgnger
"son". As odd as this is, we do not have to go far to find other such
coeval trinities. The members of the Trinity of the
Hindus —
Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva — certainly coexist, although they may also be
temporally ordered. The Christian Trinity is
no different —
(1:9) And it came to
pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized
of John in Jordan. (10) And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the
heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: (11) And there
came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased. [53]
It is obvious that the
Son (Jesus), the Father (the source of the voice), and the Holy Spirit (the
dove) all were coextant at the moment described in Mark. This idea finds its
proper inspiration among the Greeks. There
we not only have Demeter and her daughter coexisting as identical goddesses,
but we find what appears to be an actual Trinity made of three coexisting forms
of the god of the solar disk:
In
the mother of Helios [the Sun] we can recognize the moon-goddess, just as in
his father Hyperion we can recognize the sun-god himself. This last name means
"he above", "the one overhead" — in other words, the Sun,
to whom Homer gives the same name, calling him not only Helios, but in other
passages Hyperion [54], or by the
double name of Hyperion Helios . [55]
Our ancestors seem to have regarded him as a self-begotten divinity, similar to
the many-named husband and son of the Great Mother, a Daktylos or a Kabeiros. [56]
The other son [of
Helios], Phaethon, "the brilliant", was called by this surname of his
father, who was also called Helios Phaethon [57],
just as his
father was called Hyperion Helios. [58]
So trinities of gods who
are spatio-temporally distinct in body, but are in a deeper reality a single
being, are not unheard of.
In the Hočąk versions, the little heads seem
to have more to do with Orion than they do with reincarnation, although the
bearers of these heads are the foremost exemplars of reincarnation in the Hočąk tradition. In the story of "Įčoršika
and His Brothers", we are told explicitly that Įčoršika and his two
loyal brothers are fixed stars which we concluded to be the Belt Stars (Cingulum) of
Orion. The pattern of these stars are very much like the pattern of the little
faces on Redhorn and his sons, as can be seen in the inset diagram. It may be
noted that Alnilam, which is Redhorn himself, is set apart just slightly from
the other two stars (Alnitak and Mintaka). Two stars are on a line, and one is
a little different. The Cingulum has three important attributes reflected in the mythology
of Redhorn:
1.
the "two plus one" pattern,
2. near identity, and
3. sequential order in time (while rising).
(1) The "two plus
one" pattern of the stars is rendered exactly by the stellar brothers of Įčoršika.
They are three of a kind, the other brothers were adopted and were in essence
foxes and coyotes. Yet Įčoršika is the brightest and most holy and
powerful and therefore is set a little apart. The pattern is then repeated in
Redhorn and his two wives, Redhorn and his two friends, Redhorn and his two
sons, and Redhorn and his two ear-faces. (2) The stars of the Cingulum are
also nearly identical in appearance. This is particularly well expressed in the
story of Redhorn and his two friends, who stand together before the grandmother
of one of them and she cannot tell them apart. Redhorn's two sons are such that
one is essentially his doppelgnger, while the other is only slightly different, having
his miniature faces placed elsewhere on his body. (3) The sequence in which
these stars rise, which is straight up and down from Mintaka to Alnilam to
Alnitak, is reflected in the three generations of Redhorn. Wears Man Faces on
His Ears is the father of Redhorn, and Redhorn is the father of a doppelgnger
who is known by the same name. They are in fact all the same person even though
they are ordered sequentially in time. So the physical patterns in space and
time of the Cingulum
are reflected by various patterns pertaining to the sequencing of three people,
their near identity, and their "two plus one" character.
The Hočąk
model in someways is more like the Hidatsa. A person who dwells in heaven as a
spirit or at least as a ghost, is reincarnated on earth bearing the prexisting
faculty to wear earrings. Furthermore, this faculty is used as proof of the
celestial and spiritual origins of the person who possesses it. Redhorn seems
to be reincarnated in every way conceivable, and in some ways that are perhaps,
properly speaking, inconceivable.
The Sacred Turnip of
the Sky. The
logical place for the hole in the sky would be the blank space in the Square of
Orion which is devoid of stars. This void is a natural hole. The Mississippian
illustrations of the perforated hand seem to suggest just this. However, it may
not always have been thought of as residing in precisely that spot. The
mythology of the sky-hole seems to suggest another concept. In the Hidatsa version,
which serves as something of a paradigm, it is the prairie turnip that is
pulled out of the soil of the sky-world to open a hole to the earth below. [59]
This is the hole in Orion that Long Arm's hand vainly attempted to block. The
prairie turnip (Pediomelum
esculenta) is known by a wide variety of names: "Indian breadroot,
breadroot scurfpea, prairie potato," pomme de terre, and tipsin or tipsinna. The latter two are borrowed
from some of the Sioux dialects. Tipsin and tipsna are Dakota, but the Teton Lakota call it
tipsinla.
The Omaha and Ponca call it nugthe; the Pawnee, patsuroka. The Hočąk word for this plant, tokwehi,
actually means "hunger". This plant is the same as the
"contrayerba", which the Canadian voyageurs called the pomme blanche.
[60] Although the plant is a member of the bean
family (Fabaceae),
the edible parts are found in its tubers. The tough brown husk is peeled off
exposing the white edible portion of the tuber. It is said to taste like a
sweet turnip, its composition being 70% starch, 9% protein and 5% sugars. It
was a staple of Native American diets, where it was eaten raw, cooked, or
powdered and made into a porridge. The plant flourishes precisely when Orion
disappears from the sky, erupting with 20-30 bluish-purple flowers from May-July.
Just as the mythic hole in the sky is concealed by the plant, so the plant
itself conceals its own roots, as Gilmore states, "The top of the plant
breaks off soon after ripening, and is blown away, scattering the seed, so the
root is then almost impossible to find." [61] The standard way of finding the plant is
highly unusual:
The top usually has
three or four branches. When the women and children go to the prairie to gather
the roots, on finding a plant the mother tells the children to note the directions
in which the several branches point and a child is sent in the general
direction of each branch to look for another plant, for they say the plants
"point to each other." [62]
However, what is
particularly interesting about this plant in the present mythological context
is the strange "hairs" that seem to cover its every exterior surface,
even its flowers. The whole plant presents a fuzzy appearance. This strongly
suggests that it was chosen as the plant of the sky-hole because that hole was
originally M42, the Orion Nebula. The nebula is itself "fuzzy" in
appearance, giving rise to homologues that replicate this feature.
Besides the Hidatsa,
there are many other cultures who use this plant to symbolize the hole in the
sky. In an Oto variant, the woman
escapes her star husband by uprooting a turnip, then striking once more in the
hole with her adze. Through the perforation in the sky, she can see her
village. [63]
In the Crow story of Kricbaptuac, his mother discovers the hole in the sky when she
uproots a "wild turnip". [64]
In another variant of the same story, she digs up a forbidden "bushy
stemmed" turnip and sees the earth below. [65]
In the Arikara version, the star husband who has a
long arm, tells his wife, "It is not a good thing to dig turnips (WIsuka)."
Just to make certain that she did not harvest turnips, he hid her digging
stick. Nevertheless, she found the stick and when she dug into the ground, she
was able to see the earth below. [66]
The kindred Pawnee say
that the star wife dug a hole in the sky when she used a buffalo shoulder blade
to uproot a wild turnip. [67]
In the Lakota versions of the sky-hole myth, the plant that plugs this hole is
said to be a "male turnip". [68]
This might be a disguised reference to the prairie
turnip, since its tubers have a decidedly phallic appearance — it is one
of the plants that the Hočągara say was made out of part of
Trickster's severed penis. [69]
However, among the Sioux the hole in the sky is located in the trapezium of the
Big Dipper [70],
so the botanical plug among the Sioux need not be the tipsin, and could
certainly be the actual turnip, although given the coincidence of the English
versions of the name, this seems unlikely. Reinforcing this conclusion is the
great difficulty that the woman in the story has of uprooting the plant.
Gilmore says, "Growing as this plant [prairie turnip] does, on the dry
prairie in hard ground, with the enlargement of the root several inches below
the surface, it is no easy task to harvest it." [71]
In one version of the myth, it is so hard to extract that the woman has to call
on the aid of two white cranes, who are enemies of the Star People. The Lakota
version of Medicine Wolf makes the Sun the jealous guardian of the "great
turnip" that conceals the hole in the heavens. The prairie turnip is very
much a solar plant, as it demands sunshine and cannot grow in the shade. Also
relevant to the sun is a dangerous side effect in this plant if the wrong
portions are eaten. Some people (and animals) react with photosensitization, a
process resembling sunburn that afflicts lightly pigmented areas of the skin.
It arises from liver deficiencies under the presence of ultraviolet radiation.
The Arapaho say that
while the woman prepares to dig for various potatoes, her husband the Moon
warns her not to uproot any withered plant that she may encounter in the
fields. He does not, of course, tell her what the consequences might be. So,
predictably, she finds just such a plant and cannot resist her impulse to pull
it up. Once she does, she discovers the hole in the heavens through which she
can see the earth below. [72]
The outwards signs of withered plants are that they have turned brown and have
lost their vitality. This image fits quite well the condition of a nebula like
M42, which has a reddish hue; but another striking feature of the nebula is the
fact that unlike the stars around it, it has a hazy and dim light, a loss of
its stellar vitality, as though it had, in astral terms, "withered".
So the Arapaho story too is consistent with the idea that M42 was at least the
original hole in the sky.
Stories of a hole
in the sky that is sealed with a plug or stopper are also found in the Siberian
homeland of the Indian nations. [73]
Fauna and M42. Not only are flora used to express the fuzziness of Orion's M42, but fauna as well. The Hočąk story has an important episode in which we learn something about the animal identity of the rebellious bro