The Hero with a Thousand Faces

One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both — the woman and the child, her son — of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, “You must be people,” and then he covered it up and left it, and went away. The next morning he went to the place and took the covering off, and saw that the clay shapes had changed a little. The second morning there was still more change, and the third still more. The fourth morning he went to the place, took the covering off, looked at the images, and told them to rise and walk; and they did so. They walked to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na’pi, Old Man.

As they were standing by the river, the woman said to him, “How is it? Will we always live, will there be no end to it?” He said: “I have never thought of that. We will have to decide it. I will take this buffalo chip and throw it in the river. If it floats, when people die, in four days they will become alive again; they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them.” He threw the chip in the river, and it floated. The woman turned and picked up a stone, and said: “No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats, we will always live, if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other.” The woman threw the stone into the water, and it sank. “There,” said Old Man, “you have chosen. There will be an end to them.”^[45]

The arranging of the world, the creation of man, and the decision about death are typical themes from the tales of the primitive creator. It is difficult to know how seriously or in what sense these stories were believed. The mythological mode is one not so much of direct as of oblique reference: it is as if Old Man had done so-and-so. Many of the tales that appear in the collections under the category of origin stories were certainly regarded more as popular fairy tales than as a book of genesis. Such playful mythologizing is common in all civilizations, higher as well as lower. The simpler members of the populations may regard the resultant images with undue seriousness, but in the main they cannot be said to represent doctrine, or the local “myth.” The Maoris, for example, from whom we have some of our finest cosmogonies, have the story of an egg dropped by a bird into the primeval sea; it burst, and out came a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a pig, a dog, and a canoe. All got into the canoe and drifted to New Zealand.^[46] This clearly is a burlesque of the cosmic egg. On the other hand, the Kamchatkans declare, apparently in all seriousness, that God inhabited heaven originally, but then descended to earth. When he traveled about on his snowshoes, the new ground yielded under him like thin and pliant ice. The land has been uneven ever since.^[47] Or again, according to the Central Asiatic Kirghiz, when two early people tending a great ox had been without drink for a very long time and were nearly dead of thirst, the animal got water for them by ripping open the ground with its big horns. That is how the lakes in the country of the Kirghiz were made.^[48]

Figure 63. Khnemu Shapes Pharaoh’s Son on a Potter’s Wheel While Thoth Marks Life Span (papyrus, Ptolemaic, Egypt, c. third–first century b.c.)

A clown figure working in continuous opposition to the wellwishing creator very often appears in myth and folktale, as accounting for the ills and difficulties of existence this side of the veil. The Melanesians of New Britain tell of an obscure being, “the one who was first there,” who drew two male figures on the ground, scratched open his own skin, and sprinkled the drawings with his blood. He plucked two large leaves and covered the figures, which became, after a while, two men. The names of the men were To Kabinana and To Karvuvu.

To Kabinana went off alone, climbed a coconut tree that had light yellow nuts, picked two that were still unripe, and threw them to the ground; they broke and became two handsome women. To Karvuvu admired the women and asked how his brother had come by them. “Climb a coconut tree,” To Kabinana said, “pick two unripe nuts, and throw them to the ground.” But To Karvuvu threw the nuts point downward, and the women who came from them had flat ugly noses.^[49]