Lecture #2: Archaic Religions in North America

Course: Eastern Religious Traditions

Lecture #2: Archaic Religions in North America

The Maoris of New Zealand

Most early (pre-European) Maori belief was concerned with securing supernatural help with food supplies and materials.
Maori religion declined progressively because of the new ways introduced by missionaries.
The Maori world order was genealogically connected, and in one chant (in which histories were retained and transmitted) the beginning is Nothing (Te Kore) and leads thru Night, Dawn, and Light of Day, to the Sky (a male, Rangi) and Earth (a female, Papa.)
Their children were confined between the bodies of their parents until they were able to separate from them. These are the gods. and relate to the important areas of nature.
The most important is Tane, who defeated and banished the powers of darkness, was the author of all vegetation and created the first woman. Rain and mist express the sorrow of Earth and Sky, and their longing for each other. These gods occur throughout Polynesia.
All elements in nature, including humans are linked together in kinship, and may therefore be called upon when help is needed. The main Maori gods were male, and the needed female was fashioned out of earth. The basic opposition between earth and sky is preserved in male and female.
The Earth is for transitory beings while the Sky is permanent. There is a similar duality between spirit and substance, or between life and fate, but there is no opposition between good and evil.

The Holy

The Maori view of the world was strongly influenced by a respect for things tapu or holy. Almost anything could become Tapu if it had been in contact with the supernatural order. Thus fire lit by priests, water used for religious rites, sun, moon, and stars. The moon was appealed to by women in childbirth.
Priests had tapu so strongly that even their shadow had to be avoided.
Men and women both had tapu in their blood, though men more strongly. If you were made a slave you lost your tapu.
Chiefs also had tapu. They and priests were frequently fed by another person and even their mouths did not touch the eating utensils.
To violate a tapu not only endangered the violator but also took something from the tapu person.
A dead body was more tapu than a living person, though there were procedures for removing tapu.

Power over Fate

A person with tapu had some mana, or power by which he or she could prevail over fate.
Those who were successful had Mana, and this resided particularly in chiefs and priests.
When mana failed, it was because tapu had been broken, although certain things were impossible. The Sky cannot conquer the Earth, nor the spirit conquer the body.
On occasions when it was essential for the male spirit to remain unbroken, as in warfare or when building a meeting house or canoe, the men kept away from the women until the tapu had been removed by a priest.

Priests

Several classes of specialists in art, magic, knowledge, or healing or function as a medium. Their power might outweigh that of a chief. Captured slaves could be used as human sacrifices, for ex. being buried under the center pole
The priest was indispensable since he guided and prepared for most the important activities, including agriculture, hunting, building, war and sickness.
A village might have several priests of different status, depending upon both their power and their skill in the spiritual world.
The possession of power had to be established, and success increased a priest's mana, although he became tapu in proportion to his mana, and that could be easily infringed.

Rites and worship

No worship in the European sense.
Crucial religious events were associated with tapu and with death.
Ritual conducted at death was to speed the soul on to the spirit land and to ensure that it properly left the body.
Death was thought to be incomplete and so burial was temporary, until the flesh had decomposed, were moved to a permanent burial place. when the bones
The gods were not worshiped but were contacted for communication and control. sacrifices were used to secure help with food supplies and materials.
Ritual formulae with powers to influence spiritual beings were recited.
Only images used were God sticks, a carved head on a stem bound with flax. These were not worshiped but were used by a priest to command the attention of the relevant god. reverence was mainly for human ancestors, for the laws of tapu, and for some sacred places.

Maori religious life now

Response to Christianity in the 1820 was confusion, because of the fragmentation of their land, social structure and mana.
Many syncrestic solutions have resulted. Maori have a religious attitude towards the world and although they belong to the main Christian denominations they are not much involved in formal church going.
The potent religious groups are still related to kinship. Christianity has not so much set up specifically religious groups as to introduce new symbols which have transformed Maori religious thought.
Religious observances tend to include Maoris from several denominations and conventional barriers are only loosely observed. Funerals conducted by Christian ministers still exhibit vestiges of Maori beliefs, and a Christian minister may be called to remove a tapu or to open a meeting house.

Aboriginal Religion

Aboriginal religion, like many other religions, is characterized by having a god or gods who created people and the surrounding environment during a particular creation period at the beginning of time.
Aboriginal people are very religious and spiritual, but rather than praying to a single god they cannot see, each group generally believes in a number of different deities, whose image is often depicted in some tangible, recognizable form. This form may be that of a particular landscape feature, an image in a rock art shelter, or in a plant or animal form.
Landscape features may be the embodiment of the deity itself, such as a particular rock representing a specific figure, or they may be the result of something the deity did or that happened to the deity in the Creation Period, such as a river having formed when the Rainbow Serpent passed through the area in the Creation Period, or a depression in a rock or in the ground representing the footprint or sitting place of an Ancestral Being.
Aboriginal people do not believe in animism. This is the belief that all natural objects possess a soul. They do not believe that a rock possesses a soul, but they might believe that a particular rock outcrop was created by a particular deity in the creation period, or that it represents a deity from the Creation Period. They believe that many animals and plants are interchangeable with human life through reincarnation of the spirit or soul, and that this relates back to the Creation Period when these animals and plants were once people.
There is no one deity covering all of Australia. Each tribe has its own deities with an overlap of beliefs, just as there is an overlap of words between language groups.
Aboriginal deities have many roles and no single description or term can describe all of these. Based on their primary role, they fall into three main categories, and any one deity may belong to one, two, or all three of these categories:

(a) Creation Beings (also: Creation Figure). Many are involved with the creation of people, the landscape, and aspects of the environment, such as the creation of red, yellow or white pigments, so can be called "Creation Figures" or "Creation Beings".

(b) Ancestral Beings. In many examples, these deities are regarded as the direct ancestors of the people living today and so they are "Ancestral Beings."

Ancestral Beings have taught the first people how to make tools and weapons, hunt animals and collect food, they have laid down the laws that govern their society, and the correct way to conduct ceremonies.

Even though regarded as ancestors of the people, such deities may not appear in a human form, but may be plant or animal, for example. In Aboriginal religious belief, a person's spirit may return in human, animal or plant form after death. So an Ancestral Being may have the appearance of a plant or animal, but have done deeds similar to a human in the past.

(c) Totemic Beings. / Totemic ancestors. A Totemic Being represents the original form of an animal, plant or other object (totem), as it was in the Creation Period. The concept of a Totemic Being overlaps with that of a Creation Being and an Ancestral Being because the Totemic Being may create the abundance of species, and people see themselves as being derived from the different Totemic Beings.

Society is divided into two groups, called moieties, each with specific Totemic Beings belonging to it. Every person belongs to one or the other moiety. These moieties are further divided into sections or subsections, sometimes based on totemic beings. Every individual has come from at least one Totemic Being, and these help define a person's origins and connections with the world, their relationships with the past, present and future. One way incest is prevented is you can’t merry a person in your own clan or tribe.
For example, a person connected with a yam (native potato) totem might believe that he was a yam in a previous life, that some yams are his relatives, and that a particularly prominent rock feature in his clan estate represents the embodiment of his yam ancestor. This, or another area nearby, might also be an "increase center" where rituals are performed to ensure the maintenance of this food supply. Each clan will have several totems, so this person will have a close human relative living on the same clan estate who is not of the yam totem. That person might belong to the kangaroo totem and similarly be related to kangaroos and have another feature of the landscape representing their kangaroo totem.

Ancestral Beings

There are hundreds of Ancestral Beings throughout Australia, recorded by Aborigines in their stories, songs, body paintings and art. This includes recordings in the rock paintings and petroglyphs (rock carvings) dating back thousands of years.
Some Aboriginal stories relating to Ancestral Beings were recorded by early Europeans and published as children's story books.
Ancestral Beings (or Totems) are an intrinsic part of Aboriginal belief and everyday thought. As one moves through the day, walking past a particular rock or creek, spearing a particular animal, catching a goanna (large lizard), or collecting other bush foods, the Ancestral Beings who created these places and things come to mind. Even making tools and weapons will bring to mind the myths and legends of the Ancestral Beings who taught the Aborigines these skills.
Each Ancestral Being has its own creation story, has performed specific activities in the Creation Period, and has played a specific role in relation to laying down the laws for people to follow or in creating the landscape. This information is contained in the body of songs, dances, stories and paintings for each clan or tribe and is revered during certain ceremonies.

The Creation Period - The Dreamtime

Similar to other religions, there was a time in Aboriginal belief when things were created. This "Creation Period" was the time when the Ancestral Beings created landforms, such as certain animals digging, creating lagoons or pushing up mountain ranges, or the first animals or plants being made. The Aboriginal word for this Creation Period varies throughout Australia and each linguistic region has its own beliefs pertaining to that particular area.
Aboriginal people often interpret dreams as being the memory of things that happened during this Creation Period. Dreams are also important because they can be a time when we are transformed back into that ancestral time. This linking of dreams to the Creation Period has led people to adopt the general term "The Dreamtime" in order to describe the time of creation in their religion. The term "Dreamtime" in Aboriginal mythology is not really about a person having a dream, but rather, a reference to this Creation Period.
All aspects of Aboriginal culture are full of legends and beings associated with this Creation Period, or Dreamtime. Each tribe has many stories, often with a lesson to be learned or a moral tale, about the Creation Period deities, animals, plants, and other beings. These stories are told to children, discussed around campfires, and are sung and acted out in plays and dances during the times of ceremony. When an adolescent progresses through their phases of initiation, they learn the more important, senior and secret parts of these stories, and this knowledge is reinforced by the acting-out of more secret-sacred rituals, songs and dances.
Images relating to the Creation Period are a feature in art forms on weapons, utensils, body painting, ground designs, bark paintings, and rock art. The stories of The Dreamtime form the basis of Aboriginal religion, behaviour, law and order in society.
How long ago was the Creation Period in the minds of Aboriginal people? What is their concept of its timing, since they had no written chronicle of time?
Archaeological studies currently show that Aboriginal people have been in Australia at least 60,000 years. In the 1970s that figure was thought to be 40,000 years, which is the limit of how far back carbon dating can go. This latter figure was widely publicized at the time and many Australian people, including Aborigines, know the 40,000 year figure. So, if you ask an Aboriginal person today, they will tell you the Creation Period / Dreamtime goes back before 40,000 years. But what was their concept before this knowledge? This question was put to people in the past, and the answer was about five or six generations of people previous to the existing time. In other words, a person would have a knowledge of their father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great-great grandfather, but the next generation or a few more before that was when their relatives lived in the Creation Period and were kangaroo people, plant people, or took on some other form.
This shortened concept of time may be universal within the origin of religions. For example, in the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible's Old Testament tells how God created the entire universe, including the four major rivers local to Babylon (now Iraq and Iran), in 6 days. It then goes to great lengths to describe many of the people who lived following Adam and Eve, the first people. The earliest bible stories may have only been in oral form, and read as though the time of creation was about 4,000 B.C.. However, since modern dating techniques have placed the earth's age at about 3,600 million years, many people embracing those religions today still believe that God created mankind and the universe, but imagine this happening over a different time scale to that described in the bible. For all of us, the concept of a million years of humanity and thousands of millions of years of existence for our planet is beyond our comprehension.

Ceremonial Life

To this day, ceremonies play an important part in aboriginal life ceremonies, or rituals, are still practiced in some remote areas in Arnhem Land and Central Australia, in order to ensure abundance of plants and animal foods. These take the form of chanting, singing, dancing, etc. to invoke the Ancestral Beings to ensure a good supply
The most important ceremonies are connected with the initiation of boys and girls into adulthood. Such ceremonies sometimes last for weeks, with nightly singing and dancing, story telling, and the display of body decoration and ceremonial objects. During these ceremonies, the songs and stories connected to each of the Ancestral Beings are told and retold, some being "open" for women and children to see and hear, others being restricted or "secret-sacred", only for the initiates to learn.
Funeral ceremonies: Another important time for ceremonies is on the death of a person, when people often paint themselves white, cut their own bodies to show their remorse for the loss of their loved one, and conduct a series of rituals, songs and dances to ensure the person's spirit leaves the area and returns to its birth place, from where it can later be reborn.
Burial practices vary throughout Australia, people being buried in parts of southern and central Australia, but having quite a different burial in the north. Across much of northern Australia, a person's burial has two stages, each accompanied by ritual and ceremony.
The primary burial is when the corpse is laid out on an elevated wooden platform, covered in leaves and branches, and left several months for the flesh to rot away from the bones. The secondary burial is when the bones are collected from the platform, painted with red ochre, and then dispersed in different ways. Sometimes a relative will carry a portion of the bones with them for a year or more. Sometimes they are wrapped in paperbark and deposited in a cave shelter, where they are left to disintegrate with time. In parts of Arnhem Land the bones are placed into a large hollow log and left at a designated area of bushland. The hollow log is a dead tree trunk which has been naturally hollowed out by the action of termites.
Aboriginal rock art records ceremonies dating back tens of thousands of years, yet still continued to this day.

North America

North American Indians

In the middle of the 16th century, when the first Europeans began settling in Indian territory, there were more than 2,000 Independent Indian tribe living there, frequently in a state of War
Modes of life of the tribes varied according to natural resources available.
Salmon fishing in the North East coast, caribou hurting in the sub-arctic zone of Canada, stag hurting in forest regions and buffalo hunting on the great plains.
Where climate permitted, maize (corn) was grown, for example, by the Iroquois in the east, in the great lakes area, and to an even greater extent by the pueblo tribes in the lower Colorado valleys of the southwest.
There were no other means of subsistence, wild crops were gathered by several tribes, the worst off being some hunter-gathering tribes in southern California who lived mainly on acorns
The basic economy dictated the type of habitat in each case: permanent villages for farmers, tents for the semi-nomadic hunters who followed game (by the way, horses that were brought in by the Spanish in the 17th cent. furnished fresh incentive for the raiding Indians of the plains.)
Linguistically, the tribes belonged to different families: those found in the great lakes area were the Algonquins, Sioux, and Iroquois.
The Apache and Navajo are of the Athapaskan group, the Navajo being relative newcomers to the South West beating the Spanish by only a hundred years.
Social structure, together with the institutions and rituals involved likewise produced distinct types.
Priests on the one hand who carried out rituals and the medicine man or shaman who was more or less independent of the priest and claimed powers of healing, of producing rain and guaranteeing the success of individual and collective enterprise.
The major part of some 300 surviving tribes has been confined to reservations the past century
Those people who were not farmers have seen great changes in their way of life.
Social behavior has been modified by increasing influence of white civilization.

traditional Indian mythology originally grew up in a framework that has now been discarded.
There have been few additions to ancestral ideas. The relative importance of the creator has been emphasized, sometimes as a result of the influence of Christian preaching.
Occasionally local Indian prophets predicting the return of the dead and the re-establishment of the past have instituted ceremonial dances in preparations for this return (Ghost Dance). Finally, the peyote cult has spread from Mexico.
In its most classical form, North American mythology reveals common basic traits that lie beyond the seeming disparities of regional variations.
The principle common denominator is the very active role assigned a body of protective or evil spirits: by comparison, the creator of the universe remains in the background, especially as far as human fate is concerned.
The majority of protective spirits are mythical animals, but also include the sun (worshiped by the huntsmen of the plains and farmers), stars (the Pawnee of Nebraska), thunder or “Thunderbirds," gods of maize, spirits of mountains, rivers or such minerals as flint and arrowheads.

In contrast to these protectors there are also great monsters such as the Kwakiutl cannibals from the N.W pacific coast, or the Algonquin horned water-serpent.
Tiny creatures that are waggish rather than wicked haunt woods and pools.
The spirits of the dead are to be feared for they come to steal men’s souls and to inflict death unless the medicine man intervenes.
In actual fact, all supernatural beings possess ambivalent powers, since protectors kill men's enemies and evil spirits accord their patronage to certain privileged people (members of certain bodies or medicine men).
Protective spirits and the creator of the cosmos usually reside in celestial worlds or on mountain tops.
Monsters inhabit underground worlds and the depths of the sea.
The land of the dead is sometimes thought to be in the sky at the end of the Milky Way, though sometimes (rarely) underground.
Thus Indians regard the universe as a series of worlds one above the other with the world of men at the center.

Another fundamental Feature of Indian thought is the link between the different worlds or Cosmic sectors and the six points of space
A sacred color is associated with each sector or direction
The Zuni tribe of New Mexico and several other pueblo societies think of the north as yellow, west as blue south as red and east as white. The zenith as multicolored and the nadir as black.
Each sector each real or mythical mountain on the human horizon is associated with various animal vegetable and mineral species.
Farmers also associated them with the 6 varieties of maize, each of which is given symbolically one of the 6 colors of space.
Animals, plants and minerals, the source of material prosperity, are thought to be under the domination of protective spirits, who grant them to humans when the appropriate rites are performed.
In most traditions che universe is described as having passed thru an initial phase in which the populations consisted of animals and occasionally of seemingly anthropomorphic creatures who behaved like humans, but at the same time played the part of “transformers."
The major hero varies according to the individual regions and their geographical and cultural divisions.
In Alaska and the Northern part of N.W pacific coast, it is a raven (there are similarities with Siberian myth here): farther south it is a blue jay, a coyote on the Columbia plateau and plains, a rabbit in the great basin and in the S.E, a hare in certain eastern communities.
Anthropologically speaking, American Indians belong to the Asiatic race. Definite cultural affinities have been noted between Siberian traditions and N. W. Indian traditions; both, for example, recount the adventure-cycle of the Raven setting the world to order.

The first step of these mythical animals or heroes was to bring order to the cosmos.
They gained possession of fire, wind, rain and snow by dint of petty thefts cunningly carried out in a variety of supernatural places, the main one being the House of the Sun.
These animals also formed the features of the land.
The animals who brought civilization to the world were divided into peoples
Ultimately, they decided to institute death, so as to avoid over-population and famine.
Myths show them to be wise and intelligent, engaged in a systematic struggle against monsters, but at the same time cruel, egotistical, licentious, covetous and greedy.
Sometimes these animals were stupid and ended up in more trouble because of their traps set for others.
Finally, this first mythical universe was destroyed, either by fire or flood, at the instigation of monsters.
In one Alaskan myth, for example, the Frog-woman or Volcano-woman (who gave humans copper) destroyed the world by fire.
A culture hero is responsible for the Flood, although his intention may have been to destroy monsters,
An Algonquin Manibozho decided to produce a flood to extinguish a fire lit by his adversaries.
Manibozho himself took refuge on a mountainside with a few animals.
When the waters began to recede, he ordered the muskrat to dive down for some mud so that he could form the earth and men.
He taught humans the techniques necessary for survival: he established social institutions, he prescribed ceremonial rituals.
Coyote and other culture heroes did the same.
In this the legend Coyote is described as having invented horses, although the only domestic animal the Indians had before the arrival of the Spaniards was the dog.

Pueblos and Navajos

These believe that humans were created in the fourth earth-womb.
They were without light and warmth, and some had tails and black skin.
Then mythical characters, with the aid of animals, gave them their present appearance and brought them up to the surface of the earth.
The maize-gods, particularly maize mother, were connected with this ascent.
the emergence was followed by long travels, each tribe being taken to its ordained habitat by supernatural beings.
According to the Keresan Pueblos of N. M. the bowels of the earth contained four worlds, one on top of the other:

The lowest was white, then red, blue and yellow.

Lyatiku, Mother of Humans' and maize mother, created a fir tree, which acted as a ladder to the red world.
Then she asked the Woodpecker to peck a hole thru the thick layer of rock that barred the way to the world above that.
Humankind stayed for 4 years in the blue world; the same procedure was used for the next two stages:
A tree formed a ladder and the Woodpecker made a hole
Finally the bagger and Old Man Whirlwind helped bring about the emergence,
The place where men emerged though was to sacred for habitation.
Lyatiku ordered them to emigrate south.
Before she returned to the white world below she gave humankind an ear of maize: "this is my heart” she said. “It will be your food, and the sap from it will be like milk from my breast.”

Any tribe that associates its own beginnings with the emergence always claims to have held the place of honor in that arrival upon earth.
It ascended first, it emerged at a central point.
Myths of this type invariably add that other men remained prisoner in the bowels of the earth
Maize Mother and the mythical dead went to join them there. (these dead jointly represent the qualities of the ancestors and of the protective spirits who are embodied in ceremonial masks--the pueblo kachinas–and they return at intervals to visit the living and assure them of good maize harvests.

In one fairly widespread story the Sun, and Moon are of opposite sex; they desired each other but upon coupling learned that they were brother (sun) and sister (moon).
The sister was filled with shame and fled, the sun after her, into the sky where they became the day star and night star.

Among the Indians of North America systems of relationship, the organization of alliances and reciprocal agreements of the social, family and religious sub-groups all spring from the blood-tes between each of these separate units and some mythical hero.
The image of the hero, who is the ancestor of his line, is sculpted on ceremonial masks, and in British Columbia it is also found on totem-poles erected in front of the chieftains' dwellings.
For the Indians, mythology has another implication apart from its etiological function--it is a living reality; it is the guarantee of stability, security and the tribe's future prosperity and to this end the major episodes in mythology are periodically stayed as ritual drama,
Costumed and masked actors bring the mythical past to life in songs and dances for the benefit of those who live in the present.
The Pueblo have Kachina dances that are performed each season from one solstice to another, and do rather more than simply recall the fact that the Maize Mother bestowed food-giving ears of maize upon their ancestors.
Indeed, those members of the confraternities who wear the kachina masks and have ears of maize in their belts are the incarnation of the ancestors and the gods: thanks to their actual presence the maize will continue to grow.
The power attributed to mythical beings has a direct bearing on the shaman’s magic.
When an Indian Shaman Acquires or exercises his powers the mythical protectors are a positive reality to him/her
They first appear to him to bestow upon him/her (usually him) the privileged gift in a dream or vision bordering on a trance.
There is a story of a Yuma Medicine man from Arizona who was very sick and dying.
various animals had a hand in his cure and when he was all cured the animals said to him, “Man, even so will you cure your fellows.” They gave him all the magic remedies he needed.
Thus myths may be regarded as etiological and typical, an image of the society that produces them, active insofar as ritual and the practices of shaman's give them a physical reality.
However they must also be seen for their possible connection with actual tribal history
For Example: the Arikara and Pawnee originally farmed in Louisiana and are known to have moved up the Missouri valley north towards the plains.
Once in the plains, they became hunters
This is reflected in their myths of emergence, which tell of their migrations on earth towards the west and north.

Other myths depict heroes who save their people from famine and so, thanks to protective spirits, are married on the mountainside to both the Maize Mother and the Buffalo woman.
The sun dance, the most important ritual for the plains Indians, is in fact intended to ensure successful hunting
Mythology and ritual may also reflect a fusion between 2 tribes based on historical reality.
For Example: the name of Zuni clowns. It is the custom among the Zuni Indians for actors with grotesque masks to parody priests when the most sacred rites are being celebrated (this is in contrast to the Kachinas).
These priests, say the Zuri, are Koyenshi, ancestral children who were drowned shortly after the emergence, and who are also known by the name of Ahlashiwe, in other words “Old Stones.”
Now the term Ahiashiwe also applies to a kind of fetish-stone from the west. So the Koyemshis would seem to represent the survival of foreign gods belonging to the Salado race, which originally came from the west and fused with the Zuni tribes.

To study the structure of myths is to study the thought-structure behind them.
North American mythology follows symmetrically constructed patterns in which protectors, are contrasted with monsters, heaven with earth, the living with the dead, male with female, “nature (hunting, wild crops and raw food) with “culture” (maize-farming, cooked food and prepared food stuffs).
The fundamental antithesis is between life and death; it can be transposed by interpreting the first term as agriculture (source of life) and the second as war (source of death).
A “mediatory notion" between agriculture and war can be found in the idea of a scalp, since a scalp is “the harvest of war” that is why, in myths, scalps produce dew.

Another example of mediation between life and death appears the enigmatic personality of the two culture-heroes, Coyote and Raven
They both feed on carrion and come halfway between animals that prey on others (for the feed on flesh) and herbivorous animals (for they do not kill what they eat).
Now there is an association between animals of prey and herbivorous (or plant eating) animals on the one hand, and hunting and agriculture on the other, and, by extension, war and agriculture.
In comparing life and death and war and agriculture one can see that Coyote and Raven are ultimately mediators between life and death and their simultaneously destructive and beneficence character and function are reflections of the duality they exist to surmount.
The search for a formula of mediation between life and death is immediately comprehensible in those myths in which a human being rises again from death.
For instance, a man gives up his own life in order to submit to ordeals in the land of the dead, and when he triumphs over them his much-Lamented wife is allowed to return to the world above and he himself is given the personal right to reincarnation.
In a variant of this myth, warriors sacrifice their lives, not to save a wife, but for the sake of tribal prosperity.
According to another variant a young man who has no parents’ risks life to bring back the daughter of a chieftain who has died of love for him.
In this case the ordeal over which he triumphs are no longer set in the world of the dead, but in the house in which his beloved died.
Finally, it is impossible to understand a North American myth and all the variants involved, without taking into account the geographical and cultural contexts and re-establishing the structural pattern according to which it was built.
This is true, however, of any myth so it does not constitute a special case but conforms to the general pattern.

The Munduruku Religion

They were one of the fiercest tribes in the Central Amazon basin. Originally, they considered warfare (along with hunting) the primary occupation of the men. They would kill all the women as well as men and cut off their heads, take them home and preserve them by pulling out the brain and boiling it for a short while.

These heads were important for religious ritual and showing male prowess and were kept in the men's house.

Children were kept and raised as Munduruku.

The heads were important as it had a beneficent effect upon the spirits of game animals as it 'pleased' the spirits of the game animals and thus promoted fertility

There is a spirit mother of all game animals, and one is not to kill to many animals or accidents (snake bites, etc.) can happen.

They no longer have their great ceremonies to appease the spirits – the only rituals remaining are those that center upon the ancestral spirits and the men's house.

Munduruku religions revolve largely around the problems of evil, illness and death.

There are many harmful spirits inhabiting the brush and forests.

If you wander outside the village at night you can be attacked by Yurupari, a forest and water spirit that makes a thin whistling sound and attacks people.

You get fever and abdominal pain, or can die. these spirits are believed to be more prevalent now than ever before

There are two classes of spirits made by man. both of which are the work of malevolent shamans.

One is where the shaman transforms himself into a jaguar and can travel to distant villages and consume the internal substance of his enemy.

Simple sorcery, making harmful objects that enter the victim and cause illness are more common

There is no such thing as an accident, or something caused by natural means.

Evil shamans are believed to make objects, fill them with supernatural power and waft them off into the air where they move at random, sometimes lodging on the ground until stepped on, and /or entering anybody who passes

They can't be avoided since they are invisible to all but the shaman

Most shamans are good however and practice their art for the good of people. His primary function today is to cure illness, that is, due the ravages of his evil colleagues.

His power is inherited from his father, though needs to be trained.

He receives no pay and carries on all the normal work of any adult male.

He will blow tobacco smoke, believed to be powerful and life giving over sick people and sucks out intrusive objects with his mouth.

One of the risks of shamanistic practice is accusation of witchcraft or sorcery, the penalty for both is death.

The logic is simple, if there were no sorcerers, there would be no illness and therefore less death.

The seemingly tranquil life of the Munduruku is filled with fears of the unseen and unknown.

There is little violence and aggression, but they are present in repressed and residual form.

The sorcerer is a projection of these latent tendencies that simmer below the surface of Munduruku social relations.

The decline of Munduruku religious ritual, of communal worship, bespeaks a decline of the entire integration of the society.

The Munduruku see these clearly and know their traditional ways are ending and they will not long hold out against the encroachment of Brazilian society.

They believe there is an underworld beneath their territory inhabited by beings called Kokeriwat. This is a place where everything is backwards:

People fish with snakes, they have sexual intercourse standing up, the sun rises in the west.

In early days they were essentially friendly but since the time that warfare has ended the Kokeriwat, the Munduruku have been harassed by growing numbers of Yurupai and have moved their underworld to the forests eastward where they no longer communicate with the Munduruku.

Even the good spirits have been displaced by the bad, just as the good times of bravery and abundance have been replaced by tedium, relieved only by ineffable fears.