Читать книгу The Mythology of Cherokee, Iroquois, Navajo, Siouan and Zuñi - James Mooney - Страница 94

Among the people of the far west, the Californians and Chinooks, an outstanding deity is, strangely enough, the Coyote. But whereas among the Chinooks he was thought to be a benign being, the Maidu and other Californian tribes pictured him as mischievous, cunning, and destructive. Kodoyanpe, the Maidu creator, discovered the world along with Coyote, and with his aid rendered it habitable for mankind. The pair fashioned men out of small wooden images, as the gods of the Kiche of Central America are related to have done in the myth in the Popol Vuh. But the mannikins proved unsuitable to their purpose, and they turned them into animals. Kodoyanpe's intentions were beneficent, and as matters appeared to be going but ill, he concluded that Coyote was at the bottom of the mischief. In this he was correct, and on consideration he resolved to destroy Coyote. On the side of the disturber was a formidable array of monsters and other evil agencies. But Kodoyanpe received powerful assistance from a being called the Conqueror, who rid the universe of many monsters and wicked spirits which might have proved unfriendly to the life of man, as yet unborn. The combat raged fiercely over a protracted period, but at last the beneficent Kodoyanpe was defeated by the crafty Coyote. Kodoyanpe had buried many of the wooden mannikins whom he had at first created, and they now sprang from their places and became the Indian race.

This is, of course, a day-and-night or light-and-darkness myth. Kodoyanpe is the sun, the spirit of day, who after a diurnal struggle with the forces of darkness flies toward the west for refuge. Coyote is the spirit of night, typified by an animal of nocturnal habits which slinks forth from its den as the shades of dusk fall on the land. We find a similar conception in Egyptian mythology, where Anubis, the jackal-headed, swallows his father Osiris, the brilliant god of day, as the night swallows up the sun.

Another version of the Coyote myth current in California describes how in the beginning there was only the primeval waste of waters, upon which Kodoyanpe and Coyote dropped in a canoe. Coyote willed that the surf beneath them should become sand.

"Coyote was coming. He came to Got'at. There he met a heavy surf. He was afraid that he might be drifted away, and went up to the spruce-trees. He stayed there a long time. Then he took some sand and threw it upon that surf: 'This shall be a prairie and no surf. The future generations shall walk on this prairie!' Thus Clatsop became a prairie. The surf became a prairie."9

But among other tribes as well as among the Chinooks Italapas, the Coyote, is a beneficent deity. Thus in the myths of the Shushwap and Kutenai Indians of British Columbia he figures as the creative agency, and in the folk-tales of the Ashochimi of California he appears after the deluge and plants in the earth the feathers of various birds, which according to their colour become the several Indian tribes.