Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [235]
Sky Woman buries her daughter and raises her twin grandchildren, although she cannot love the evil twin. One day the good twin digs up his mother’s body, forms a sphere from her face, and makes the sun. From the back of her head he makes more spheres, which become the moon and stars. That is how day and night are created. Watered by her mother’s tears, Earth Woman’s corpse starts to sprout vegetables. Over time, maize and beans grow from her body. The good twin and the evil twin then make the rest of Creation, with the good twin creating trees and cool water and the evil twin creating dangerous mountains. And for the Hurons, that’s how the world came into existence.
Tirawa (Pawnee, Great Plains) Great Spirit and Creator god Tirawa holds a council and assigns tasks to the other gods. The sun god Shakaru is ordered to give light and warmth; the moon goddess Pah gives sleep and rest in the night; and the stars—Bright, Evening, Great, and Morning—are told to hold up the sky. The first humans are born when the sun and moon marry and have a boy called Closed Man. When the Evening Star and Morning Star finally couple, they produce a girl—known as “Daughter of Evening and Morning Star.” The Pawnee believed that they were decended from these first children of the heavens.
But Tirawa gets angry and destroys his creation with a fire and then a great flood. The only survivors are an old man who carries a pipe, fire, and a drum; and his wife, who carries maize and pumpkin seeds. These two, who have been protected in a cave, re-create the human race.
White Buffalo Woman (Sioux, Northern Plains) A beautiful, long-haired figure in a white buckskin dress, White Buffalo (Calf) Woman is one of the most significant deities of the Plains tribes. Once, when the people are starving, two scouts go and search for food. They see a blur in the distance and, as it approaches, one of the scouts realizes it is the sacred White Buffalo Woman. The woman, who can read the bad thoughts of one of the young men, invites him to embrace her. But as he reaches toward her, a white cloud appears and lightning strikes the lusty man, who is killed instantly. His body is turned into a skeleton and then devoured by worms.
The second scout returns to the village to set up a great teepee for her. Once this is done, White Buffalo Woman instructs the tribes in all the sacred ceremonies. She explains how to use the pipe and teaches them seven sacred rites, including the sweat lodge, vision quest, the “ghost-keeping ceremony,” in which the soul of the dead is purified, the sun dance, the hunka ceremony (designed to establish binding relationships among fellow human beings), girls’ puberty rites, and the “throwing of the ball,” a ceremony celebrating knowledge, in which a buffalo-hide ball is tossed to people standing in the four compass directions.
As she talks to the chiefs, White Buffalo Woman is a woman. But when she leaves, the people see her roll in the dust four times, bow to each corner of the universe, and then become a white buffalo before vanishing, perhaps to return again one day.
To the Plains people, no animal was more sacred than the buffalo, which completely sustained their way of life.
Which goddess gets her own “planet”?
If the Roman goddess Venus represents everything that is beautiful and good, the Inuit goddess Sedna may be her complete opposite. Queen of the underworld, Sedna gets mixed up in acts of trickery, kidnapping, murder, dismemberment, cannibalism, and revenge. The only thing that she shares with Venus is the fact that each has a heavenly body named in her honor.
While Venus was first observed by the earliest “astronomers” in prehistoric times, the Inuit goddess Sedna joined the celestial charts when the discovery of a small object orbiting the sun was announced in March 2004. Too small to qualify as a planet in the view of most astronomers, Sedna is essentially a large chunk of rock caught in a regular orbit of the sun and now thought