Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [271]
*Steeped in the myths and traditions of the Yoruba are the writings of Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), a Nigerian playwright, essayist, and poet who became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986. He has been imprisoned on several occasions for his political views.
*In strict terms, the term “shaman” refers specifically to such people in the Siberian and Central Asian tribes, where the word originates. But it is now used more widely and generally to describe many healers and spiritual leaders, including the Celtic Druids, and especially those who use the ecstatic trance as part of their practice.
*The oft-quoted saying “It takes a village to raise a child” is usually cited as an African proverb. That assertion has never been documented as coming from any specific African source, although there are similar sentiments expressed in many other African proverbs. Now something of a political hot potato since Hillary Clinton used the phrase as a book title, the communal concept behind the proverb can be found in a great many other cultures as well.
*This story is told in many other versions in which the statue is sometimes called Gum Girl. It is also familiar as the origin of the figure of the “tar baby” in the Uncle Remus stories.
*The stories also formed the basis for the Disney film Song of the South, much criticized for its stereotyped portrayal of African-Americans. One of the few Disney features never released on video, the film did inspire the popular Disney theme-park ride “Splash Mountain.”
*What to call these people who greeted Columbus? Of course, he called them los indios thinking he arrived in India or the East Indies, and the name “Indian” has stuck, although not always happily for many of those so identified. The term still provokes disagreement in scholarly, legal, and other circles. For the purposes of this book, the term “Native American,” while admittedly imprecise, is used. It is preferred by many living Native Americans, and is also used to avoid confusion with the “other” Indians of chapter 6. A “correspondent” on the very amusing Daily Show once clarified this confusion by asking a self-identified “Indian” if they meant “Gandhi Indianor Sitting Bull Indian.” Using “Native American” seems a graceful and polite way of avoiding that rather dubious distinction.
*The original native cultures of the Caribbean Islands were so devastated that there is very little information with which to assess them and their myths. Since the slave era, with its huge influx of Africans, these areas were dominated by the fusion religions discussed in chapter 8.
*That one of the participants in the construction of this telescope was the Vatican Observatory is, of course, a delicious irony. Four hundred years earlier, the same Vatican was putting Galileo on trial for looking through a telescope. Pope John Paul II had also spoken in Arizona, in 1989, of the importance of native people’s maintaining their customs. The story of the observatory is told in Sacred Lands of Indian America.
*Expected to attract 600,000 visitors each year, the museum is not a cause for celebration among some Native Americans, including those who wanted to call it the “Museum of the American Indian Holocaust.”
*The word “medicine man” was first applied to many Native American religious leaders by the English in the seventeenth century, according to The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions.
*That copy of the Popol Vuh is now the property of Chicago’s Newberry Library. Four other Mayan books written in hieroglyphics survive. Each is known as a “Codex,” and they are in various libraries around the world.
†This creation account parallels both Greek and Chinese Creation stories, which also feature several generations of flawed attempts at making humans.
*Europeans knew nothing of corn until Columbus brought some corn seeds from Cuba back to Spain. By the late