Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/76

62 "finishers," and "immortals." All the classes of these, including the class that specially protects the animals necessary to men, "are believed to be related by blood." But among these essences, the animals are nearest to man, most accessible, and therefore most worshipped, sometimes as mediators. But the Zuni has mediators even between him and his animal mediators, and these are fetishes, usually of stone, which accidentally resemble this or that beast-god in shape. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian sphinx, the natural resemblance of a stone to a living form has been accentuated and increased by art. The stones with a natural resemblance to animals are most valued when they are old and long in use, and the orthodox or priestly theory is that they are petrifactions of this or that beast. Flint arrowheads and feathers are bound about them with string.

All these beliefs and practices inspire the Zuni epic, which is repeated, at stated intervals, by the initiated to the neophytes. Mr. Gushing heard a good deal of this archaic poem in his sacred capacity. The epic contains a Zuni cosmogony. Men, as in so many other myths, originally lived in the dark places of earth in four caverns. Like the children of Uranus and Gæa, they murmured at the darkness. The "holder of the paths of life," the sun, now made two beings out of his own substance; they fell to the earth, armed with rainbow and lightning, a shield, and a magical flint knife. The new-comers cut the earth with a flint knife, as Qat cut the palpable dark with a blade of red obsidian in Melanesia. Men were then lifted through the hole on the shield, and began