Parallels in Supernatural to Native American Mythology
I hesitate to call this a meta because it's not, really, and no one on Supernatural has ever alluded to basing any mythology on Native American myth (ETA: OK, well Kripke apparently mentions in the S2 Companion that he did for the Trickster.)
ETA: Kudos to everyone who read this the first time with all the typos! I have fixed them all, I think.
One thing to keep in mind is the connection that the First People saw to the world around them. Even though many stories involve their ancestors as emerging from the Dark World (one of four, and hey, there's that key word, "emerging"), and they emerged onto this plane, the Earth or First World, they emerged into it as it was - already populated with the means to learn and survive. Telling stories where animals and plants and elements are equals or metaphors for mankind's life challenges is a popular theme. (The "Great Spirit" theme that is popular in many of their cultures today was, in most cases, actually a means of incorporating Christian thematics into their history.)
Ultimately, the point of bringing all of that up is that mankind vs. nature, or mankind vs. its Dark Origins, is a cyclical allegory. Throughout time, mankind's understanding of the gray of the other three worlds lessens and fades until it becomes more black and white. Dichotomy increases as we incrementally forget the past. The return to more gray, as the collective consciousness becomes more and more aware of realities outside the first world, is a sign of progression backward to "original knowledge" and should be sought rather than feared. This, I feel, is one of the most basic archetypal mythologies within Supernatural.
All text in quotes is a series of excerpts from a book titled "The Storytelling Stone", a collection gathered by Susan Feldmann of traditional Native American myths and legends.
From the Introduction:
The story of the hero brothers, in many instances twins, who subdue the giants monsters of the primeval age, appears in a great number of cosmogonic myths; the episodes in the story of the testing of the Sun's children recur in the hero tales of the Pacific Northwest and other areas. The brothers usually live with their grandmother, a personification of Earth, who equips them with various charms whereby they withstand trials and reach the end of their quest. In the Navaho myth ... Son of the Waters and Son of the Sun journey to the House of the Sun and, with magic aids, pass through [various elemental trials, such as boiling sands and tests that are meant to kill them] until, failing, the Sun finally accedes to their request for weapons with which to fight the monsters that are devouring mankind. The brothers return to the earth and in a series of adventures, rid the world of man-devouring monsters. On a second visit to the Sun, they [return with the tools] by means of which their mother raises the great storm that brings to end the Age of Monsters ... In the Navaho myth, the brothers represent the upper and the underworld, powers of nature. Significantly, they quarrel ... and proceed to create a world independently [of each other]. (emphasis mine)
While Navaho and particularly Winnebago recount stories of Creator/Hero Brothers in various ways, this one struck fairly close to home. While some parts will make you laugh, other sections will have you wide-eyed.
I have included it here verbatim, without permission:
The Plains Crow tale of Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away
Once upon a time there lived a couple, the woman being pregnant. The man went hunting one day, and in his absence a certain wicked woman named Red-Woman came to the teepee and killed his wife and cut her open and found boy twins. She threw one behind the teepee curtain, and the other she threw into a spring. She then put a stick inside the woman and stuck one end in the ground, to give her the appearance of a live person, and burned her upper lip, giving her the appearance as though laughing.
When her husband came home, tired from carrying the deer he had killed, he saw his wife standing near the door of the teepee, looking as though she was laughing at him, and he said: "I am tired and hungry. Why do you laugh at me?" and pushed her. As she fell backwards, her stomach opened, and he caught hold of her and discovered she was dead. He knew at once that Red-Woman had killed his wife.
While the man was eating supper alone one night a voice said: "Father, give me some of your supper." As no one was in sight, he resumed eating, and again the voice asked for supper. The man said, "Whoever you are, you may come and eat with me, for I am poor and alone." A young boy came from behind the curtain, and said his name was Thrown-Behind-The-Curtain. During the day, while the man went hunting, the boy stayed home. One day the boy said, "Father, make me two bows and the arrows for them." His father asked him why he wanted two bows. The boy said, "I want them to change about." His father made them for him, but surmised the boy had other reasons, and concluded he would watch the boy, and on one day, earlier than usual, he left his teepee and hid upon a hill overlooking his teepee, and while there, he saw two boys of about the same age, shooting arrows.
That evening when he returned home, he asked his son, "Is there not another little boy your age about here?" His son said, "Yes, and he lives in the spring." His father said, "You should bring him out and and make him live with us." The son said, "I cannot make him, because he has sharp teeth like an otter, but if you will make me a suit of rawhide, I will try and catch him."
One day, arrangements were made to catch the boy. The father said, "I will stay here in the teepee annd you tell him I have gone out." So Thrown-behind-the-curtain said to Thrown-in-spring, "Come out and play arrows." Thrown-in-spring came out just a little, and said, "I smell something." Thrown-behind-the-curtain said, "No you don't; my father is not home," and after insisting, Thrown-in-spring came out, and both boys began to play. While they were playing, Thrown-behind-the-curtain disputed a point of their game, and as Thrown-in-spring stooped over to see how close arrow came, Thrown-behind-the-curtain grabbed him from behind and held his arms close to his sides, and Thrown-in-spring turned and attempted to bite him, but his teeth could not penetrate the rawhide suit. The father came to the assistance of Thrown-behind-the-curtain, and the water of the spring rushed out to help Thrown-in-spring; but Thrown-in-spring was dragged to a high hill where the water could not reach him, and there they burned incense under his nose, and he became human. The three of them lived together.
One day, one of the boys said, "Let us go and wake up Mother." They went to the mother's grave and one said, "Mother, your stone pot is dropping," and she moved. The other boy said, "Mother, your hide dresser is falling," and she sat up. Then one of them said, "Mother your bone crusher is falling," and she began to arrange her hair, which had begun to fall off. The mother said, "I have been asleep a long time." She accompanied the boys home.
The boys were forbidden by their father to go to the river bend above their teepee; for an old woman lived there who had a boiling pot, and every time she saw any living object, she tilted the kettle towards it, and the object was drawn into the pot and boiled for her to eat. The boys went one day to see the old woman, and they found her asleep, and they stole up and got her pot and awakened the old woman and said to her, "Grandmother, why have you this here?" at the same time tilting the pot towards her, by which she was drowned and boiled to death. They took the pot home and gave it to their mother for her own protection.
The father told them not to disobey him again and said, "There is something over the hill I do not want you to go near." They were very anxious to find out what this thing was, and they went over to the hill, and as they poked their heads over the hilltop, the thing began to draw in air, and the boys were drawn in also; and as they went in, they saw people and animals, some dead and others dying. They thing proved to be an immense alligator-like serpent. One of the boys touched the kidneys of the thing and asked what they were. The alligator said, "That is my medicine; do not touch it." And the boy reached up and touched its heart and asked what it was, and the serpent grunted and said, "This is where I make my plans." One of the boys said, "You make plans, do you?" and he cut the heart off and it died. They made their escape by cutting between the ribs and liberated the living ones and took a piece of the heart home to their father.
After the father had administered another scolding, he told the boys not to go near the three trees standing in a triangular shaped piece of ground; for if anything went under them, they would bend to the ground suddenly, killing everything in their way. One day the boys went toward these trees, which bent violently and struck the ground without hitting them. They jumped over the trees, breaking the branches, and they could not rise after the branches were broken.
Once more the boys were scolded and told not to go near a teepee over the hill; for it was inhabited by snakes, and they would approach anyone asleep and enter his body through the rectum. Again the boys did as they were told not to do and went to the teepee, and the snakes invited them in. They went in and carried flat pieces of stone with them, and as they sat down, they placed the flat pieces of stones under their rectums.
After they had been in the teepee a short while, the snakes began putting their heads over the poles around the fireplace and the snakes began to relate stories, and one of them said, "When there is drizzling rain, and when we are under cover, it is nice to sleep." One of the boys said, "When we are lying down under the pine trees and the wind blows softly through them and has a weird sound, it is nice to sleep." All but one of the snakes went to sleep, and that one tried to enter the rectum of each of the boys and failed, on account of the flat stone. The boys killed all the snakes but that one, and they took that one and rubbed its head against the side of a cliff, and that is the reason why snakes have flattened heads.
Again the boys were scolded by their father, who said, "There is a man living on the steep-cut bank, with deep water under it, and if you go near it, he will push you over the bank in the water for his father in the water to eat." The boys went to the place, but before going, they fixed their head-dresses with dried grass. Upon their arrival at the edge of the bank, one said to the other, "Just as he is about to push you over, lie down quickly." The man, from his hiding place, suddenly rushed out to push the boys over, and just as he was about to do it, the boys threw themselves quickly upon the ground, and the man went over their heads, pulling their head-dresses with him, and his father in the water ate him.
Upon the boys' return, and after telling what they had done, their father scolded them and told them, "There is a man who wears mocassins of fire, and when he wants anything, he goes around it and it is burned up." The boys ascertained where this man lived and stole upon him one day when he was sleeping under a tree, and each one of the boys took off a mocassin and put it on, and they awoke him and ran about him, and he was burned and went up in smoke. They took the mocassins home.
Their father told them that something would yet happen to them; for they had killed so many bad things. One day while walking the valley, they were lifted from the earth and, after traveling in midair for some time, they were placed on the top of a peak in a rough high mountain with a big lake surrounding it and the Thunder-Bird said to them, "I want you to kill a long otter that lives in the lake; he eats all the young ones that I produce and I cannot make him stop." So the boys began to make arrows, and they gathered dry pine sticks and began to heat rocks, and the long otter came towards them. As it opened its mouth, the boys shot arrows into it; as that did not stop it from drawing nearer, they threw the hot rocks down its throat, and it curled up and died afterwards. They were taken up and carried through the air and gently placed upon the ground near their homes, where they lived for many years.
There are other versions of this story retold in other ways, one version in particular by the Bellacoola, who told it as only one brother leaving the earth and facing many additional trials all meant to destroy him, only to marry the daughter of his rival and so defeat him, finally returning to the earth and his earth wife, where his brother no longer recognizes him. To him, it had been only four days, but on earth it had been a year.
ETA: I just realized that there might be an interest in the metaphors for the animals mentioned in this story. These are very general, as each people supplied objects with their own traditional meanings.
Snakes are the metaphor for medicine (if it eats itself) and resurrection (especially as a totem, as in this story) as well as wisdom (in Native interpretation) and deceit (in Christian interpretation). Quite a trifecta.
Otters represent the female influence and/or sexuality, intelligence, and unconventionality.
The ThunderBird is the most powerful creature of the sky. It is a metaphor for powers derived from the spirit world.
Trees represented the ability to reach into that sky or spirit space, so the tree attacking them would mean a lack or resistance of connection with the spirits - a very bad thing.
The water and fire have so many metaphors, but the most simple being the manipulation of nature elements by using men rather than the other way around, or even more simply, the disaster vs. husbandry of natural power.
There are other parallels in Native American tales, but I will save the Trickster for another time. :)
ETA: Kudos to everyone who read this the first time with all the typos! I have fixed them all, I think.
One thing to keep in mind is the connection that the First People saw to the world around them. Even though many stories involve their ancestors as emerging from the Dark World (one of four, and hey, there's that key word, "emerging"), and they emerged onto this plane, the Earth or First World, they emerged into it as it was - already populated with the means to learn and survive. Telling stories where animals and plants and elements are equals or metaphors for mankind's life challenges is a popular theme. (The "Great Spirit" theme that is popular in many of their cultures today was, in most cases, actually a means of incorporating Christian thematics into their history.)
Ultimately, the point of bringing all of that up is that mankind vs. nature, or mankind vs. its Dark Origins, is a cyclical allegory. Throughout time, mankind's understanding of the gray of the other three worlds lessens and fades until it becomes more black and white. Dichotomy increases as we incrementally forget the past. The return to more gray, as the collective consciousness becomes more and more aware of realities outside the first world, is a sign of progression backward to "original knowledge" and should be sought rather than feared. This, I feel, is one of the most basic archetypal mythologies within Supernatural.
All text in quotes is a series of excerpts from a book titled "The Storytelling Stone", a collection gathered by Susan Feldmann of traditional Native American myths and legends.
From the Introduction:
The story of the hero brothers, in many instances twins, who subdue the giants monsters of the primeval age, appears in a great number of cosmogonic myths; the episodes in the story of the testing of the Sun's children recur in the hero tales of the Pacific Northwest and other areas. The brothers usually live with their grandmother, a personification of Earth, who equips them with various charms whereby they withstand trials and reach the end of their quest. In the Navaho myth ... Son of the Waters and Son of the Sun journey to the House of the Sun and, with magic aids, pass through [various elemental trials, such as boiling sands and tests that are meant to kill them] until, failing, the Sun finally accedes to their request for weapons with which to fight the monsters that are devouring mankind. The brothers return to the earth and in a series of adventures, rid the world of man-devouring monsters. On a second visit to the Sun, they [return with the tools] by means of which their mother raises the great storm that brings to end the Age of Monsters ... In the Navaho myth, the brothers represent the upper and the underworld, powers of nature. Significantly, they quarrel ... and proceed to create a world independently [of each other]. (emphasis mine)
While Navaho and particularly Winnebago recount stories of Creator/Hero Brothers in various ways, this one struck fairly close to home. While some parts will make you laugh, other sections will have you wide-eyed.
I have included it here verbatim, without permission:
The Plains Crow tale of Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away
Once upon a time there lived a couple, the woman being pregnant. The man went hunting one day, and in his absence a certain wicked woman named Red-Woman came to the teepee and killed his wife and cut her open and found boy twins. She threw one behind the teepee curtain, and the other she threw into a spring. She then put a stick inside the woman and stuck one end in the ground, to give her the appearance of a live person, and burned her upper lip, giving her the appearance as though laughing.
When her husband came home, tired from carrying the deer he had killed, he saw his wife standing near the door of the teepee, looking as though she was laughing at him, and he said: "I am tired and hungry. Why do you laugh at me?" and pushed her. As she fell backwards, her stomach opened, and he caught hold of her and discovered she was dead. He knew at once that Red-Woman had killed his wife.
While the man was eating supper alone one night a voice said: "Father, give me some of your supper." As no one was in sight, he resumed eating, and again the voice asked for supper. The man said, "Whoever you are, you may come and eat with me, for I am poor and alone." A young boy came from behind the curtain, and said his name was Thrown-Behind-The-Curtain. During the day, while the man went hunting, the boy stayed home. One day the boy said, "Father, make me two bows and the arrows for them." His father asked him why he wanted two bows. The boy said, "I want them to change about." His father made them for him, but surmised the boy had other reasons, and concluded he would watch the boy, and on one day, earlier than usual, he left his teepee and hid upon a hill overlooking his teepee, and while there, he saw two boys of about the same age, shooting arrows.
That evening when he returned home, he asked his son, "Is there not another little boy your age about here?" His son said, "Yes, and he lives in the spring." His father said, "You should bring him out and and make him live with us." The son said, "I cannot make him, because he has sharp teeth like an otter, but if you will make me a suit of rawhide, I will try and catch him."
One day, arrangements were made to catch the boy. The father said, "I will stay here in the teepee annd you tell him I have gone out." So Thrown-behind-the-curtain said to Thrown-in-spring, "Come out and play arrows." Thrown-in-spring came out just a little, and said, "I smell something." Thrown-behind-the-curtain said, "No you don't; my father is not home," and after insisting, Thrown-in-spring came out, and both boys began to play. While they were playing, Thrown-behind-the-curtain disputed a point of their game, and as Thrown-in-spring stooped over to see how close arrow came, Thrown-behind-the-curtain grabbed him from behind and held his arms close to his sides, and Thrown-in-spring turned and attempted to bite him, but his teeth could not penetrate the rawhide suit. The father came to the assistance of Thrown-behind-the-curtain, and the water of the spring rushed out to help Thrown-in-spring; but Thrown-in-spring was dragged to a high hill where the water could not reach him, and there they burned incense under his nose, and he became human. The three of them lived together.
One day, one of the boys said, "Let us go and wake up Mother." They went to the mother's grave and one said, "Mother, your stone pot is dropping," and she moved. The other boy said, "Mother, your hide dresser is falling," and she sat up. Then one of them said, "Mother your bone crusher is falling," and she began to arrange her hair, which had begun to fall off. The mother said, "I have been asleep a long time." She accompanied the boys home.
The boys were forbidden by their father to go to the river bend above their teepee; for an old woman lived there who had a boiling pot, and every time she saw any living object, she tilted the kettle towards it, and the object was drawn into the pot and boiled for her to eat. The boys went one day to see the old woman, and they found her asleep, and they stole up and got her pot and awakened the old woman and said to her, "Grandmother, why have you this here?" at the same time tilting the pot towards her, by which she was drowned and boiled to death. They took the pot home and gave it to their mother for her own protection.
The father told them not to disobey him again and said, "There is something over the hill I do not want you to go near." They were very anxious to find out what this thing was, and they went over to the hill, and as they poked their heads over the hilltop, the thing began to draw in air, and the boys were drawn in also; and as they went in, they saw people and animals, some dead and others dying. They thing proved to be an immense alligator-like serpent. One of the boys touched the kidneys of the thing and asked what they were. The alligator said, "That is my medicine; do not touch it." And the boy reached up and touched its heart and asked what it was, and the serpent grunted and said, "This is where I make my plans." One of the boys said, "You make plans, do you?" and he cut the heart off and it died. They made their escape by cutting between the ribs and liberated the living ones and took a piece of the heart home to their father.
After the father had administered another scolding, he told the boys not to go near the three trees standing in a triangular shaped piece of ground; for if anything went under them, they would bend to the ground suddenly, killing everything in their way. One day the boys went toward these trees, which bent violently and struck the ground without hitting them. They jumped over the trees, breaking the branches, and they could not rise after the branches were broken.
Once more the boys were scolded and told not to go near a teepee over the hill; for it was inhabited by snakes, and they would approach anyone asleep and enter his body through the rectum. Again the boys did as they were told not to do and went to the teepee, and the snakes invited them in. They went in and carried flat pieces of stone with them, and as they sat down, they placed the flat pieces of stones under their rectums.
After they had been in the teepee a short while, the snakes began putting their heads over the poles around the fireplace and the snakes began to relate stories, and one of them said, "When there is drizzling rain, and when we are under cover, it is nice to sleep." One of the boys said, "When we are lying down under the pine trees and the wind blows softly through them and has a weird sound, it is nice to sleep." All but one of the snakes went to sleep, and that one tried to enter the rectum of each of the boys and failed, on account of the flat stone. The boys killed all the snakes but that one, and they took that one and rubbed its head against the side of a cliff, and that is the reason why snakes have flattened heads.
Again the boys were scolded by their father, who said, "There is a man living on the steep-cut bank, with deep water under it, and if you go near it, he will push you over the bank in the water for his father in the water to eat." The boys went to the place, but before going, they fixed their head-dresses with dried grass. Upon their arrival at the edge of the bank, one said to the other, "Just as he is about to push you over, lie down quickly." The man, from his hiding place, suddenly rushed out to push the boys over, and just as he was about to do it, the boys threw themselves quickly upon the ground, and the man went over their heads, pulling their head-dresses with him, and his father in the water ate him.
Upon the boys' return, and after telling what they had done, their father scolded them and told them, "There is a man who wears mocassins of fire, and when he wants anything, he goes around it and it is burned up." The boys ascertained where this man lived and stole upon him one day when he was sleeping under a tree, and each one of the boys took off a mocassin and put it on, and they awoke him and ran about him, and he was burned and went up in smoke. They took the mocassins home.
Their father told them that something would yet happen to them; for they had killed so many bad things. One day while walking the valley, they were lifted from the earth and, after traveling in midair for some time, they were placed on the top of a peak in a rough high mountain with a big lake surrounding it and the Thunder-Bird said to them, "I want you to kill a long otter that lives in the lake; he eats all the young ones that I produce and I cannot make him stop." So the boys began to make arrows, and they gathered dry pine sticks and began to heat rocks, and the long otter came towards them. As it opened its mouth, the boys shot arrows into it; as that did not stop it from drawing nearer, they threw the hot rocks down its throat, and it curled up and died afterwards. They were taken up and carried through the air and gently placed upon the ground near their homes, where they lived for many years.
There are other versions of this story retold in other ways, one version in particular by the Bellacoola, who told it as only one brother leaving the earth and facing many additional trials all meant to destroy him, only to marry the daughter of his rival and so defeat him, finally returning to the earth and his earth wife, where his brother no longer recognizes him. To him, it had been only four days, but on earth it had been a year.
ETA: I just realized that there might be an interest in the metaphors for the animals mentioned in this story. These are very general, as each people supplied objects with their own traditional meanings.
Snakes are the metaphor for medicine (if it eats itself) and resurrection (especially as a totem, as in this story) as well as wisdom (in Native interpretation) and deceit (in Christian interpretation). Quite a trifecta.
Otters represent the female influence and/or sexuality, intelligence, and unconventionality.
The ThunderBird is the most powerful creature of the sky. It is a metaphor for powers derived from the spirit world.
Trees represented the ability to reach into that sky or spirit space, so the tree attacking them would mean a lack or resistance of connection with the spirits - a very bad thing.
The water and fire have so many metaphors, but the most simple being the manipulation of nature elements by using men rather than the other way around, or even more simply, the disaster vs. husbandry of natural power.
There are other parallels in Native American tales, but I will save the Trickster for another time. :)