Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448Cushing, Frank Hamilton
History
Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448
Cushing, Frank Hamilton
Zuni mythology
of supplication, and walking or dancing around them, holding them
firmly to draw them upward until they had rapidly grown to the tallness
of themselves, then to embrace them together. Behold! the grasses were
jointed where grasped four times or six according to their tallness;
yea, and marked with the thumb-marks of those who grasped them; twisted
by their grasp while circling around them and leaved with plume-like
blades and tasseled with grass-like spikes at the tops. More wonderful
than all, where their persons had touched the plants at their middles,
behold! new seed of human origin and productive of continued life had
sprung forth in semblance of their parentage and draped with the very
pile of their generation. For lo! that when the world was new all
things in it were _k‘yaíuna_, or formative, as now is the child in the
mother's womb or the clay by the thoughts of the potter. That the seed
of seeds thus made be not lost it needed that Paíyatuma, the God of
Dew and the Dawn, freshen these new-made plants with his breath; that
Ténatsali, the God of Time and the Seasons, mature them instantly with
his touch and breath; that Kwélele, the God of Heat, ripen them with
the touch of his Fire-brother's torch and confirm to them the warmth
of a life of their own. Nevertheless, with the coming of each season,
the creation is ever repeated, for the philosophy of ecclesiasticism is
far older than ecclesiastics or their writings, and since man aided in
the creation of the corn, so must he now ever aid in each new creation
of the seed of seeds. Whence the drama of the origin of corn is not
merely reenacted, but is revived and reproduced in all its many details
with scrupulous fidelity each summer as the new seed is ripening.
And now I may add intelligibly that the drama of primitive man is
performed in an equally dramaturgic spirit, whether seen, as in its
merely culminating or final enactment, or unseen and often secret, as
in its long-continued preparations. In this a given piece of it may be
likened to a piece of Oriental carving or of Japanese joinery, in which
the parts not to be seen are as scrupulously finished as are the parts
seen, the which is likewise characteristic of our theme, for it is due
to the like dramaturgic spirit which dominates even the works, no less
than the ceremonials, of all primitive and semiprimitive peoples.
So also it seems to the Zuñi that no less essential is it that all the
long periods of creation up to the time when corn itself was created
from the grasses must be reproduced, even though hastily and by mere
signs, as are the forms through which a given species in animal life
has been evolved, rapidly repeated in each embryo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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