A collaboration between the Joseph Campbell Foundation, OPUS Archives, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. Join the conversation, create the vision, deepen the study of myth.
The stories and myths that we tell reflect our consciousness, our beliefs and assumptions about the world. Bringing that truth to light is one reason to tell them. The light gets even brighter when we learn and listen to the stories of others, to stories from foreign places and different times, told by people with a different set of assumptions. One reason that native American stories and trickster tales in particular seem so strange is they reflect a different kind of consciousness. There are many Coyote stories in which he responds to the needs of the "people" or organizes the "people" to act but hey, there's not one human being in the story. People?
When we talk about Prometheus and his gift of fire, the "fire" is frequently understood as consciousness, that special brand of human self-awareness. Coyote brings fire to the people (see the story posted 7/14), but it is literal fire, fire as a tool to cook food and stay warm. Does that mean that the people who tell this story just don't understand the fire as consciousness? That they don't employ that symbol, make that connection? Maybe. But a cursory examination of native American cultures reveals a sophisticated cosmology of spirit and consciousness.
What lurks behind the action of the Coyote Brings Fire story is the understanding that all the beings involved, the skookums and the animal people who run the relay, already have consciousness--they clearly have language--and they comport themselves with a sense of self and identity that we tend to deny. (I watch my smart cat Harry sometimes and wonder, "Does he know that's he's a cat? Or rather, how does he understand the differences between us? Count legs?) In the Coyote tale, this kind of consciousness and language are not, as we commonly believe, the sole province of the human. In the story about Coyote and His Name (see post 7/6) you get the sense that the new people, the humans, will be another tribe among many with their special place and mission just like everyone else.
The notion of a web of relationship, of an extended family of beings that includes everything, is a common native idea. Certainly I have heard it and understood the words, abstractly, but I never felt the difference between my inherited world of inanimate objects and inferior beings until I learned and told this tale. Robert Avens writes that modern individuals will never find their soul until they find the soul in every other being. Something to ponder, and practice.
