Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (82 page)

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Early human beings apeared more than a million years ago in what is now China. By about 10,000 BCE, a number of New Stone Age cultures had developed in the Yellow River area and, from them, a distinctly Chinese civilization gradually emerged. One of these was the Longshan culture, which spread over much of what is now the eastern third of the country. China’s first dynasty, the Shang Dynasty (1523–1027 BCE), arose from the Longshan culture during the 1700s BCE.

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Yellow was considered a regal color in recognition of the rich, yellowish silt, or loess, that is deposited by the Huang He, or Yellow River. The yellow loess was the life-sustaining source of good crops in China, just as the Nile’s black earth was for Egypt. When the imperial Forbidden City was later built, its roof tiles were yellow.

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All post-Confucian, the Four Books are Great Learning; the Mean, on moderation; the Analects, a collection of Confucian sayings; and the Mencius, the collected wisdom of Confucius’s successor. Their study remains influential today.

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When the famed photographer Edward S. Curtis filmed a sacred Hopi dance in the American Southwest in the early twentieth century, the performance, never before seen by a white person, turned out to be a complete fabrication for the benefit of the camera.

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“Sub-Saharan” means that part of the African continent that lies south of the Sahara Desert. Ancient Egypt, discussed in chapter 2, and much of northern Africa developed largely separated from the sub-Saharan areas, as the world’s largest desert created a mostly uncrossable barrier until the widespread use of the camel around 750 CE.

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Many questions about human evolution and origins remain unresolved, but the idea that the human species began in Africa is widely accepted. The question of the origin of
modern Homo sapiens
is still open, and recent discoveries have led to two main schools of thought. One argues that modern humans evolved more or less simultaneously from “archaic” humans in several areas. The second holds out for an African origin of all modern humans. According to the Smithsonian Institute, the oldest known evidence for anatomically modern humans comes from about 130,000 years ago, from sites in eastern Africa.

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The term
San
is now preferred to the more commonly used “Bushmen,” the tribe prominently featured in the popular 1984 film
The Gods Must Be Crazy
. The film is a kind of modern myth in which a “gift of the gods”—a Coke bottle dropped from a passing plane—becomes a most unwanted gift, and the tribe decides it must be returned to the gods, requiring one man’s quest and a perilous encounter with “civilization.”

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African art and myth had a powerful impact on a generation of modern Western artists, including, among others, Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, whose 1907 painting
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
includes figures wearing African tribal masks. New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the first American shows of African sculpture as art in 1935.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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
.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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This creation account parallels both Greek and Chinese Creation stories, which also feature several generations of flawed attempts at making humans.

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Europeans knew nothing of corn until Columbus brought some corn seeds from Cuba back to Spain. By the late 1500s, corn had become a well-established crop in Africa, Asia, southern Europe, and the Middle East.

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The name of this Spanish explorer and conquistador is spelled in a variety of ways. This is the version in the
American Heritage Dictionary
.

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Reflecting the “omphalos” concept in which a place is viewed as the center of Creation, Cuzco means “navel” in the Incan language called Quechua.

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The story of Pizarro’s ruthless subjugation of the Incas is the subject of “The Collision at Cajamarca,” a fascinating recounting found in Jared Diamond’s
Guns, Germs, and Steel
.

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A complex Incan recording system called
quipu,
or
khipu
, involved knotted, dyed strings that could only be interpreted by priests. The system is still not fully understood today, and some experts, such as Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton, believe
khipu
was a form of Incan writing.

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Pipestone is a soft red stone that is sacred to many native groups. It is used in making the sacred pipes central to belief, ritual, and ceremony across Native North America.

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This decision would seem to contradict the 1993 ruling about Santeria practices cited earlier. The difference is that this case involved compliance with an otherwise valid law governing conduct that the state can regulate—the use of illegal drugs. In other words, using illegal drugs is different from killing chickens for ritual purposes.

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“Aborigines” was the word first used by the British for the native Australians they found. The word comes from the Latin phrase “ab origine,” meaning “from the beginning.” When spelled with a small “a,” the word “aborigine” now refers to any people whose ancestors were the first to live in a country. In Australia, the official term for descendants of the native Australians is now “indigenous.” Many of these Australians prefer to be referred to by their specific tribal names.