Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [214]
Summarizing tricksters, Native American myth expert Richard Erdoes writes, “Always hungry for another meal swiped from someone else’s kitchen, always ready to lure someone else’s wife into bed, always trying to get something for nothing, shifting shapes (and even sex), getting caught in the act, ever scheming, never remorseful.” Tricksters are, he adds, “clever and foolish at the same time, smart-asses who outsmart themselves.”
The Shaman. A figure revered in many worldwide traditions, the shaman, or “medicine man,”* plays a central role in many tribes throughout the Americas. Widely thought to be a carryover from the ancient Siberian beginnings of Native America, and sometimes related to the trickster, the shaman in Native American tradition is the person considered to have magical powers that come from a direct contact with the supernatural, usually through ecstatic trances or dream visions. Shamans were often healers who used a combination of herbal remedies and “spiritual” healing—traditions that continue today across the Americas.
American tribal names for the shaman vary, and it is not a term used by American tribal people. For the Arctic Inuit, the shaman or medicine man is Angakoq, who is the repository of lore and magic and the actual connection to the spirit world. To the Oglala Sioux, the shaman is a wichasha wakon, a holy man like Black Elk, who, at the age of nine, had a powerful spiritual vision. Serving as tribal priests, diviners, and healers, the shamans underwent training that usually included a “vision quest,” in which the initiate sought to communicate with the spirit world. The shaman’s apprenticeship might last anywhere from a few days to many years, as novices had to experience extreme hardships to learn how to control “spirit helpers.” In Peru, centuries after Catholicism was established, the Church continued to “investigate” what it called idolatrias (“idolatries”), which involved curers and diviners who persisted in the traditional worship of sacred Incan places in the mountains. Like many Native American tribes and cultures, the Incas regarded many places and things as huaca (“sacred”). These included springs, stones, caves, and mountain peaks, each of which had its own spirits.
The Totem. Somewhat unique to Native Americans, but similar in some respects to the African fetish, the totem is a symbol of a tribe, clan, or family. But it is also an object imbued with spirit power. As writer Jonathan Forty describes it in Mythology: A Visual Encyclopedia, “The totem was a coat of arms, an altar, shrine, flag, and a family tree all rolled into one.”
Although “totem” is most often associated with the great carved poles that lined the village streets of the Northwest and Alaskan tribes, the word comes from the Chippewa (or Ojibwa) of the Great Lakes area. In the broader sense, “totem” is a powerful symbol that united people who sometimes occupied vast territories. In discussing the importance of the totem to people in what he calls the “primal world,” religion authority Huston Smith writes in Illustrated World’s Religions, “To be separated from the tribe threatens them with death, not only physically but psychologically as well. The tribe, in turn, is embedded in nature so solidly that the line between the two is not easy to establish. In the case of totemism, it cannot really be said to exist. Totemism binds a human tribe to an animal species in a common life. The totem animal guards the tribe, which, in return, respects it and refuses to injure it, for they are ‘of one flesh.’” That idea is so powerful that a clan might have rules against killing or eating the species to which their totem—a bird, fish, animal, plant, or other natural object—belongs. (Maybe you