Contents

Redhorn in the Context of Orion
The Cognates of the Îtcorúcika Myth
The Hand, the Eye, and the Hole in the Sky
The Grasping Eye and the Ear-Heads
The Prosopic Ears and Reincarnation
The Sacred Turnip of the Sky
Fauna and M42
Red Man and Red Woman
The Battle against the Waterspirits
The Hatchet
The Headless Man
The Two-Headed Man
The Fire Sticks of Orion
The Hand and the Fire Drill
Deep History and the Fire Below the Drill
Arrows
Old Woman's Grandson, the Gestating Star
The Buffalo Stars
3-Deer
The Mexican Origin of 3-Deer

Appendix

The Stellagraphy of Orion

Redhorn in the Context of Orion. Most scholars probably hold the widespread view that Redhorn, also known as "Wears Faces on His Ears" (Îtcorúcika) is Morning Star. However, the story "Îtcorúcika and His Brothers" states something very much at odds with this thesis:

(66) And these three were stars. The one star that is shining most greatly of the trio, it is he. The greatly shining white one, and the blue one, and the red one; (67) and Îtcorúcika was the yellowish one. And the other ones, his older brothers, are also stars. They are the trio that are bunched together. [1]

That the stars are "bunched together" (sdonâki) shows that none of the trio is a wandering planet like Morning Star. The star of Redhorn is a fixed star. For this and other reasons that can be adduced, Redhorn is not Venus in any of its aspects. An examination of stellar triads turns up a fairly small inventory, the most prominent among which is the Belt Stars of Orion (see "bunched together"). [2] The stellar code of "Îtcorúcika and His Brothers" can be understood in terms of these Orion stars (see Commentary). This shows that the assumption that the stellar trio is in Orion is consistent with the story understood allegorically, which goes a very long way towards confirming the hypothesis, since the story is rich in details. What should succeed in confirming the stellar identity of Redhorn is to compare the Hotcâk material on Redhorn with other non-Hotcâk Orion mythologies. If the Hotcâk material on Redhorn fits in with foreign allegories about Orion, this should be sufficient confirmation of its identity. What follows brings together Orion mythology from other American Indian sources and places the Redhorn mythology into the same context.

Notes to "Redhorn in the Context of Orion"

[1] Paul Radin, "Intcohorúcika," Winnebago Notebooks (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Library) #14, pp. 66-67.

[2] The three stars of the Cingulum are apparently what the Zuni also call "Keeping Close Together" (Ipilasha). Edward Winslow Gifford, Culture Element Distributions, XII: Apache-Pueblo. University of California Anthropological Records, 4: 1. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940) 53–154 [155, no. 2266].

The Cognates of the Îtcorúcika Myth. The essential core of the Hotcâk story, "Îtcorúcika and His Brothers", can be mapped onto certain astronomical stories of other Siouan tribes. There are extensive parallels between "Îtcorúcika and His Brothers" and the Orion myths of the Hidatsa and Crow, who are very closely related to each other, but remote in space, time, and language from the Hotcâgara. These cogntes make no mention of Orion, but some of their variants state that the hand of the bad spirit Long Arms was transformed into certain stars of Orion. We can set a Crow variant collected by Lowie [1], in good narrative order with its corresponding Hotcâk myth, as we see below.

The first thing to notice about this set of correlations is that the Hotcâk story can be divided into isomorphic episodes. This fact, more than any other, has made it difficult to readily see how the Hotcâk myth belonged with its Crow counterpart. Another characteristic obscuring the connection is the realignment of characters. The paradigm myth has a number of characters: the Bad Spirit, his subjects (including the adoptees), and the Brothers. Owing to its internal isomorphism, the Bad Spirit (the Crow Long Arms) is played by three characters in the Hotcâk version: Hena the disloyal brother, the Chief of the Bad Waterspirits, and the witch who is the sister of the Bad Waterspirits. The role of the Brothers is played by the Twins in the Crow reflex, but in the Hotcâk the protagonists are the three brothers, although often Îtcorúcika plays their role alone. A third feature that estranges the Hotcâk waikâ from its proper Siouan context is its inversion. Instead of an obscure hole in the heavens, we have a hidden hole to the underworld. The Above World has been traded for the Below World. Yet the degree of divergence may not be as striking as it first appears. Other Cosmic Domains are most usually thought of on the model of the terrestrial world, so that both supra-celestial worlds have their own sky and their own ground. The ground is indeed the top side of the sky familiar to the terrestrial domain beneath it. Even underworlds are conceived as having their own sky and their own ground. This would mean that the hole in the terrestrial surface world would be a hole in the sky of the subterranean world beneath it. Therefore, a hole in the ground can, and likely is, also a hole in another world's sky. All the Siouan traditions and those that have borrowed from them, view this hole as bound up with the progress of the soul to and from the Above World. The trip back is reincarnation. Yet the Hotcâgara, its fair to say, are obsessed with this process, and their mythology of Îtcorúcika-Redhorn is often devoted to this spirit's resurrection after a period of death or quasi-death. Esoterically, this resurrection is astronomically that of a star that has set with the sun into the underworld only to rise again in the fullness of time to its pristine glory to its lofty station in the Above World. This then becomes the model by which we may understand death and resurrection in human terms. This alternant, inverted, model may also have some antiquity.

There are a few points of divergence not shown on the table of correlations. The Crow contains a brief episode in which all the birds of the sky are interviewed by Old Man Coyote to see if they can shed light on what happened to Curtain Boy. However, they all prove ignorant of his whereabouts. In the Hotcâk version, there is no search for Îtcorúcika, so no such interview can take place. The Hotcâk contains episodes about how the brothers found wives, and how Îtcorúcika avenged himself upon his errant brothers. Since the Crow Twins do not marry and have no errant brothers, this episode does not occur in their story.

Setting these understandable divergences aside, the degree to which the two myths can be correlated is substantial. In the first episode, Hena, the leader of the disloyal brothers, is the counterpart to Long Arms, the chief of the Sky People, as indeed both are to the chief of the Waterspirits. They differ, of course, by each being from a different cosmic realm. Similarly, in the Crow, the subjects of Long Arms are birds, whereas in the Hotcâk they are respectively canines (foxes and coyotes) and Waterspirits. All agree, however, that these subordinates are engaged in a nefarious project. The Waterspirits are even explicitly said to be Bad (cicik) Waterspirits. In each version there is a conspiracy afoot. The sky people plot to capture and kill Curtain Boy, just as Hena and his brothers plot to have Îtcorúcika captured and murdered. The Waterspirits operate through their agent, a beautiful witch, as they plot a grisly fate for their captive. The motivation behind this plot is rather different in each case. The Sky People are angry with Curtain Boy and his brother for having killed so many evil spirits living on earth. These terrestrial spirits, it turns out, have been adopted by the Sky People. In a striking correspondence, we learn that the disloyal brothers had all been adopted into the family of Îtcorúcika and his two loyal brothers. The difference is that the adoptees and the Sky People are distinct, but in the Hotcâk story, the disloyal brothers are the counterparts of both the Sky People and the terrestrial bad spirits simultaneously. The Hotcâk brothers are divided into sky brothers, who are stars, and the adopted brothers who are terrestrial. Furthermore, the opposition between the birds and the humanoid terrestrial spirits in the Crow story is reflected in the Hotcâk opposition between the humanoid stellar spirits who are the loyal brothers, and the terrestrial spirits who are animals (canines of the fox and coyote genera). Episode 2 of the Hotcâk story is equally remote both from the Crow and the Episode 1 of the Hotcâk story. She is humanoid, whereas the status of the Waterspirits might be presumed to be in their non-human form. It is not clear that she is adopted, as they call her "our woman" (hinûk-hitcapwira), translated "sister", by which is meant in the Crow-Omaha type kinship system of the Hotcâgara, that she is a young female of the speaker's clan. She chooses to adopt a terrestrial existence in contradistinction to the other Waterspirits, who maintain a subterranean abode. Although it seems that she is not likely adopted, she is almost evil incarnate and is happy to participate and even engineer (quite literally as it turns out) the plot to undo Îtcorúcika. There seems to be no common motive for the conspiracy in any of the episodes except anger and resentment in two of them. Hena and his brothers resent the fact that Îtcorúcika was given precedence, specifically that he was given the best (cî, "fattest") woman and this made them jealous. The anger of the Sky Spirits in the Crow version derives simply from the fact that the Twins had slaughtered and eaten their adopted terrestrial kin. The brothers who correspond to both the Sky People and the adoptees, are predictably both the offended party and the victims. What is particularly interesting is the motivation of the Waterspirits, which seems to be nothing more than to make a meal out of Îtcorúcika. This is the ultimate objective of the Sky People as well. They expect that Curtain Boy will make a fat and greasy meal since he ate their adopted relatives. The Bad Waterspirits are actually defined as such by their man eating proclivities, and are said not have been created by Earthmaker, implying that they were created by the demonic Herecgúnina. Although from opposite cosmic domains, the Sky People and the Bad Waterspirits share this striking correspondence. Another shared theme is that of persuasion. The Sky People persuade Long Arms to capture Curtain Boy, and in a Hidatsa version, Long Arms actually resists the suggestion making it necessary for the Sky People to be both persistent and argumentative. This is exactly what we see in the case of Hena and his brothers, although it is the leader who must convert his entourage. However, it takes very little effort for the brothers to induce the Waterspirit witch to join their cause. The theme of the hunting trip occurs in both the Crow and Hotcâk, although in somewhat differing contexts. The hunting trip sends the brothers to the Outside, the wilderness beyond the pale of culture, a place symbolic of the Otherworld, in which the strange events of the supernatural become possible. It is in this situation that the heroes of the stories come to be the objects of a plot to undo them. It is there that they come into contact with the supernatural being who will cause them to fall (literally or figuratively) into captivity. In the Crow story the Twins lie down outside where they are exposed to danger as they sleep. Îtcorúcika does the opposite: he enters into a lodge, but inside this lodge is a woman who represents the counterpart to Long Arms and is his special danger. He too lies down, just as a star does when it sets. He is then invited to lie on the other side of the lodge where he falls through the concealed hole into the underworld. Similarly, it is down a hole that Îtcorúcika chases the witch when he returns topside to avenge himself. In the Hotcâk the emphasis is on the heliacal setting of stars for a period into the underworld, after which they once again appear. For the Crow and Hidatsa, the emphasis is upon the ascendancy of the stars as they dwell in the night sky of the Above World. The hole itself, whether in the Above or the Below World is not readily visible. It is not something that ordinary people can see as they look at the heavens, even if they might know roughly where it is. This same obscurity is rendered by the hole into which Îtcorúcika fall by being actually disguised. In one case the hole to the underworld is a covered trap, and in the other case, it is hidden at the base of a tent pole. When the protagonist disappears through the hole, no one on earth has any idea what happened to him. In the world into which he has been abducted, he is bound and held captive. This theme seems to be played out in an unusual way as Îtcorúcika chases the witch through the underworld, where both of them pass through the center of various plants, until the witch becomes bound to one as a botanical tubercle.

After this, follows another persuasion episode, but unlike that of theme 9, this one ends in failure. Spring Boy, twice asks Long Arms to surrender his brother unharmed, and twice he is rebuffed. Occurring at roughly the same spot in the narrative in the Hotcâk is an odd episode in which two creatures of the Water World step forward and petition for clemency on behalf of the condemned Îtcorúcika. These are Otter and Loon, both of whom are said to be Waterspirits originally. They bear no ordinary relationship to their chief, as they are his hicûcge or nephews (sister's sons). As such they bear the Warbundle for him and have a joking relationship of the highest intimacy. There is no more devoted relationship between relatives than that of uncle and nephew. But living up to his wicked (cicik) nature, the chief denies them their request, despite the evocation of their bonds of kinship. Otter and Loon are the special subjects of the chief, just as the birds are the special subjects of Long Arms in Crow-Hidatsa. Of course Loon just is a bird himself, hinting at the possibility that the preform lying behind their corresponding themes was characterized by the subjects being birds. On the other hand, Spring Boy in the Crow-Hidatsa, like his counterpart among the Hotcâk Twins, Little Ghost, is thrown into the waters immediately after his nativity, and becomes a wild creature of the Water World himself. This suggests that in the preform the defender of the captive Brother was also a creature of the Water World, and again it appears as if he could well have been the Twin who was thrown away into the waters. In a wider context, this Twin is most usually associated with the beaver -- and we do see the Crow Twins acquire a beaver tail weapon -- but among the Crow he is also associated with the otter, as it is said that he has "sharp teeth like an otter." [2] So the choice of the otter is also consonant with a preform in which the role is played by the aquatic Twin. In between the Bad Spirit's two refusals, in the Crow-Hidatsa versions, is a display of force that has an obscure meaning. Spring Boy draws his bow and shoots a medicine stone that Long Arms keeps near him. When the arrow hits the stone, it bleeds. Does it represent the sun? Or is it a kind of Omphalos marking a Center? Perhaps, too, it is the same as the stone dropped on the head of the woman fleeing from the Above World back through the hole in the sky.

In the next episode, the other brother breaks the bonds holding the captive. In the Hotcâk, since Îtcorúcika is a lone brother in this situation he breaks his own bonds, prompting the question of why he did not do so earlier, or even why he submitted to being bound in the first place if he possessed such supernatural strength. It again suggests a preform in which there were two brothers involved in the episode. One of the brothers the shoots either the Bad Spirit or his subjects. It is typical of Hotcâk stories that the whole race is attacked and nearly annihilated. However, that the Hotcâk has also a parallel episode in which there is just one opponent, the witch, suggests that it is the Bad Spirit who was slain in the preform. The result, as all the reflexes agree, is that the Bad Spirit's subjects all flee. Both agree that the Bad Spirit's body was burnt. It is not clear that this burning has the same esoteric significance in both reflexes. The burning of the Waterspirits in the Hotcâk is the rise of Îtcorúcika with the sun, which now becomes his torch to light the surface of the waters ("burn the Waterspirits"). Prima facie the burning of Long Arms might be the standard procedure in disposing of an evil spirit so that he does not return. Nevertheless, since it is an astronomy myth, the identity of the flames with the sun could not be simply dismissed. At this point the narratives of the two reflexes have a striking correspondence. The Brothers allow at least certain of the subjects of the Bad Spirit to live on earth. In the Crow these re birds; in the Hotcâk, they are Loon and Otter. The paradigmatic subjects of the Chief of the Bad Waterspirits. What's interesting is that they are given the same reward: to live on earth. In the Crow case, this is a descent; in the Hotcâk case, it is an ascent. This, of course, reflects the inverse relation of the Otherworld (Cosmic domain) that occurs in each tradition. Finally, both myths agree that the Brothers are or became stars, but they diverge substantially on what stars they are. Being a Divine Twins myth, the Crow version goes with the stars that have been preassigned to those tow spirits. The Hotcâk makes them the Belt Stars of Orion. At first this may seem like an irreconcilable divergence, but as we shall see in detail below, the Crow was well as the Hidatsa variants to our present story make out the hand of Long Arms, which was severed by the Twins, to be none other than Orion. So despite great separations in time and culture, there remains a clear stellar convergence in the astronomical codes of the two myths.

This myth with its two inverted reflexes, finds an interesting mediation in a story from a people who are themselves intermediate in kinship and language to the Crow-Hidatsa and the Hotcâgara. These people are the Oglala band of the Teton Lakota. The following myth bears significant similarities to both the Crow-Hidatsa and Hotcâk stories. [3]

Iron Hawk and his wife transformed themselves into buffalo, and in this form his wife gave birth to a bull calf called "Red Calf". One day Iron Hawk went to swim in a creek and there encountered a woman on the opposite bank. She persuaded him to ferry her across, while she held onto his back. [4] When he reached midway, she suddenly sprouted enormous wings, and taking flight, carried him through the hole in the sky. [5] His wife showed up to join him in swimming, but could find him nowhere. Red Calf had his mother show him where they were to have met. Red Calf put on a gray cap that his father had given him, and was immediately transformed into a hawk. As he flew over the middle of the creek, he encountered a whirlwind, and following its path, he flew through the hole in the sky. There he passed through one village of birds after another. Finally, he came to a village at the fork of two creeks. There he as put up for the night by a woman who told him that a man in the shape of a buffalo was to be killed and eaten on the morrow. The next day the boy went with the old woman to watch the spectacle. When Red Calf appeared, his father recognized him. Iron Hawk was held in place by a Rock Woman (Ûktceghila) who was attached to his hip. Red Calf fired an arrow at her, and the Rock Woman shattered into a myriad of pieces. Iron Hawk ran off as a buffalo, and Red Calf flew with him as a hawk. As they fled they came across a little man thought to be a Rock Man. This man Red Calf also shot dead. When they reached the bird village where they had started, the birds had devised a plan to rescue the pair: they made a great nest and lowered them in it through the hole in the sky to safety. Now in their absence, Yellow Iktomi had abused Red Calf's grandmother by pushing her. When the old woman told them what he had done, Red Calf beat Iktomi with a dirty teepee skin until he turned from yellow to black. [6]

Here again is another story of an involuntary ascent through a hole in the sky and an escape back through it after an ordeal in which the abductee is bound and put on the menu for dinner. Like the Crow-Hidatsa paradigm, there are two strongly related males who are the protagonists of the story, although in the Oglala it is not twins, but father and son.

Iron Hawk and Red Calf seem to be almost interchangeable. As a father and son combination, they are the counterparts of the Crow and Hidatsa Twins. Iron Hawk can transform himself at will into a buffalo, and Red Calf was actually born as a bison. By use of a magical gray cap, each is able to change into a hawk. Spring Boy in the Crow version also has the power of metamorphosis, being able to transform himself into an arrow and like the Hotcâk Redhorn, to shoot himself quickly to another point in space. Superficially, there seems to be little connection between the buffalo alloforms of the Oglala heroes and the transformations of Spring Boy. However, if we turn our attention to the Crow's closest kindred tribe, the Hidatsa, we find an interesting link. In their version, Long Arms captures Spring Boy and crucifies him on a forked tree. After Spring Boy escapes and avenges himself upon Long Arms, he institutes the Sun Dance among the Hidatsa, a rite which they call "Hide Beating". This ceremony is done in remembrance of Spring Boy's adventures among the spirits of the Above World. In founding this rite, Spring Boy declared, "Since I have named the buffalo hide as my own body, the buffalo shall range where people are." [7] So for the Hidatsa, the buffalo becomes an alloform for Spring Boy, putting him into better alignment with Iron Hawk and Red Calf.

In all the reflexes, the boy is in the company of a woman when he discovers the hole in the sky. Iron Hawk discovers it the hard way, as does Curtain Boy, who is pulled up by Long Arms. In both cases, the captive ascends by being pulled up. His rescuer launches himself through the hole by his own supernatural power, although the basic form of his ascent is the same, in some sense, as that of the captive. In the Crow story, Curtain Boy is taken aloft in the grip of a hand; Spring Boy shoots himself through the hole as an arrow. However, the shooting of an arrow is also done by hand, so Spring Boy can be said to ascend through the sky by means of a hand. Just as Iron Hawk ascended in conjunction with a whirlwind, so too does his rescuer Red Calf. The whirlwind is an exemplar (especially in this contest) of the V-shaped spinning cone of spiritual communication from one world to another. This cone of communication is what contemporary Oglala call a kapemni. [8] After the captive is taken up, his whereabouts are unknown.

The two stories from this point follow each other very closely. The rescuer goes through four different villages, populated exclusively by birds. In the last he is given hospitality by an old woman. She learns that the captive was going to be eaten on the morrow. He then accompanies the old woman to the spectacle where the captive recognizes him. The captive is bound by the physical body of his captor. In the Oglala the captor and the stone have been merged into one being, a Rock Person or Ûktceghila. In the Crow, Long Arms has a special relationship to the stone, which in some tellings is said to be "his medicine" (source of power). [9] Spring Boy merely shoots the stone, which bleeds; then he shoots Long Arms himself, killing him. In the Oglala the stone and the captor, being one and the same, are shot at once and killed. The two kinsmen flee, but their means of escape are superficially different. In the Oglala the birds lower them in a nest to the earth; in Crow, the Twins descend by riding two arrows each. In other versions, birds are identified as souls. [10] A nest is a house for neonate birds, most specifically eggs, which make birds "twice born", like souls who live in heaven and are born again on earth. The arrow is identified with the soul as well, as will be discussed in more detail below. So the seeming divergence between the accounts at the end may only be superficial.

What is particularly interesting is that Long Arm is replaced in the Oglala by the female Ûktceghila, which Beckwith's translator rendered as "Rock Person", adding parenthetically, "Petrified Bones". [11] This rendering looks like a translator's or narrator's gloss for Beckwith's benefit, inasmuch as the term is well known. The suffix -la is a diminutive, leaving the stem Ûktceghi to answer almost exactly to the Dakota name, Ûktéxi. Riggs, who did his research between 1852 and 1882, tells us that Ûktéxi means, "the Dakota god of the waters; a fabled monster of the deep; the whale: an extinct animal, the bones of which are said to be sometimes found by the Indians, probably the mastodon (see ûxtcéghila)." Under ûxtcéghila he says, "probably the mastodon, or other large animal, whose petrified remains are found in Dakota Territory." [12] In a tabulation of Lakota deities, Unkcegila [= Ûktceghila] (or Unhcegila [= Ûxtceghila]) is said to be a "Land monster[,] Female Unktehi"; and the Unktehi [= Ûktexi] is described as, "One Who Kills[,] Water Monster". [13] That the Ûktceghila are female Ûktexi reveals the connection between petrified bones and water monsters. The holy men of the Dakota told Walker, "the females [of the Ûktexi] live on the dry land, and their bones are often found in the badlands." [14] Both Ûktceghila and Ûktexi are quite close to Hotcâk Waktcexi, Uaktcexi, "Waterspirit". In the mythic account of "The Feast" given by Little Wound, the well known horns and tails of the Hotcâk Waktcexi are seen as attributes of the Ûkceghila as well:

Then others were invited. The Unktehi who are the Wakan [Holy Ones] of the waters. The Unkcegila who are the Wakan of the lands. ... Then Woxpe asks Okaga to do some favor for each one of the guests, and he promises to do so. Okaga asked Ikcegila [Unktceghila] what he most desired, and he said to have power over everything. Okaga asked what part he would have this power in, and he answered that he wanted this power in his horns and his tail. So he received this power. But his horns were very soft and his tail was brittle. (Iktomi made them so.) (His women lived on the earth, and his home was in the waters.) [15]

And in Walker's Literary Cycle, a good description is given of an Ûktexi, making it indubitable that such a creature is the Lakota counterpart to the Hotcâk Waterspirit:

The second day they traveled thus and in the water, a great beast came toward them. Its body was like the body of a huge otter. Its head like that of a huge wolf, its tail like that of a huge beaver and it had horns which it could make long or short as it willed. As it came, it groaned and growled and gnashed its teeth and slashed the waters with its tail, making great waves. They knew this to be an Unktehi one of the monsters. When near it said to them, "Ho, sons of Tate, I will drag you under the waters and instead of serving the Gods, you shall serve me." [16]

Given the correspondences between Lakota Ûktceghila and Hotcâk Uaktcexira, the basic plot of the Oglala story now can be seen to tilt towards the Hotcâk version whose inverted topology thus finds a surprising reflection in the standard Above World model. We can see a good correspondence between the main events of the Oglala story and the central episode of the Hotcâk Îtcorúcika myth.

The occurrence of the buffalo in this story marks a strong divergence from its Hotcâk parallel. However, on this point, it does recall the odd antipathy of the Twins to buffalo foetuses, which derives from the identity of one of the Twins with Sirius, as is conclusively shown by Lankford. [17] Aborted foetuses are anathema to him because Sirius, called "Morning Star" for its well known competition with "the" Morning Star (of Venus), rises with the sun about the time buffaloes calve, thus presiding over this blessing of life for buffaloes and their predators alike. However, none of this exists in the Hotcâk tradition. Red Calf in this story is the Oglala counterpart of Îtcorúcika. The name "Îtcorúcika" is just one of many born by the figure better known as "Redhorn". The "horn" in his name refers metaphorically to his braid or scalplock, which is said to be of a striking red hue. Judging by his name, we might be justified in concluding that the hair on Red Calf is of much the same color. Beyond mere color is the odd fact that Red Calf is in form, at any rate, a buffalo. Redhorn has less of an affinity to the buffalo, although as the hunting deity Herok'aga ("Without Horns"), he is paired with the deer. As will be argued below, Orion is connected to the deer and in the Oglala tradition, to the buffalo in part. This merely reflects a change in the primary source of meat. The strange interchangeability of father and son is another distant echo of the cross generational identities for which Redhorn is particularly and perhaps uniquely known (see above). The alternance between hawk and buffalo is unknown in the Hotcâk traditions concerning Redhorn, although it has been argued by James Brown that some Mississippian peoples had identified their counterpart to Redhorn with a hawk. This notion arises because the Mississippian deity is, at least on one occasion, portrayed with prosopic earrings (despite the fact that birds have no external ears). [18] The sense of both the closeness (in structure) and divergence (in time ?) of the Oglala and Hotcâk stories is particularly well illustrated in the concluding transformation episodes. The animals in question would seem to have no relationship: one is a spider (iktomi) the other is a fox with coyote associates. Although the zoological status of the species is totally at variance, their mythological roles are not too far apart. Iktomi is the exact counterpart to the Hotcâk Wakdjâkaga, "Trickster"; but most akin to Trickster is Coyote, whose species often plays the fool or the swindler, with the fox less prominant in this role. The color transformations are reversed: Hena blackens his face with charcoal, then is turned into a fox, an animal of reddish or orange hue; Iktomi is turned from yellow to black. Note, however, that Hena is black from charcoal, essentially the same carbonaceous matter that will turn the interior of a teepee black near the smoke hole. It is not mere exterior dirt that can turn things black, but only the soot of the inside surface of the skin. So both Hena and his counterpart Iktomi are blackened by the same substance, and the fire turns out to be the ultimate source of both colorations. Teepee skins are made of buffalo hide, the very stuff of Red Calf and his father, as the firebrand is esoterically of Îtcorúcika -- but to show how these are proper counterparts requires an additional treatise to be given later (see below).

Notes to "The Cognates of the Îtcorúcika Myth".

[1] Plenty Hawk, "1. Lodge Boy and Thrown Away," in Robert H. Lowie, "Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 25, part 1 (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1918) 74-85.

[2] Gray Bull, "2. Lodge Boy and Thrown-Away," in Lowie, "Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 25, part 1 (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1918) 85-94 [90].

[3] The following Tsimshian story, surprisingly, also fits well within this group, having a father rescuing his son, the arrow motif, the hole in the sky, star people, and other themes. "There was a town. One evening a man went out of the house, and his son accompanied him. They sat down on the beach. After they had been sitting there for some time, the boy looked up to the sky and said to a star, "Poor fellow! You little twinkler, indeed, you must feel cold." Thus spoke the boy to the Star. The Star heard it, and one evening when the boy went out, the Star came down and took him up to the sky. When day broke, the people found that the boy was lost. They (p. 87) looked for him everywhere. They asked all the tribes, but they could not find him. Then the people stopped, but his father and his mother longed for him. They were crying all the time. They did so many days. One day the man was walking about crying. When he stopped crying, he looked up a mountain, and, behold, smoke came out of it. He went up, and when he came near, he saw a woman. She asked the man, "Do you know who took your child?" "No," said the man. "The Star took your child. He tied him onto the edge of his smoke-hole. The child is crying all the time. He is almost dead, because the sparks the fire are burning his body." Thus she spoke. Then she said, (p. 88) "Go on. Make many arrows, that you may have a great many quickly." The man went down and came to his town. There he made four bundles of arrows. He saw a very long mountain, which he climbed. He stood on top of it, took his bow, and took an arrow and shot at the sky. The arrow hit the edge of the hole of the sky, and stuck there. He shot another arrow, which hit the nock of the first one. He shot again, and continued to do so for many days. Then the arrows came down, and reached to him. The man was carrying tobacco, red paint, and sling-stones. Then he went up, climbing the arrows. He reached the sky, and met a person who said, "Your (p. 89) child is about to die. He is crying all the time because his body is being burned. Carve a piece of wood so that it will look just like your child." He gave to this person tobacco, red paint, and sling-stones in return for his advice. Then the person was very glad. The man made a figure of spruce, one of hemlock, one of balsam fir, and one of red cedar, and one of yellow cedar, all as large as his boy. Then be made a great fire. He built a pyre of slender trees, which he placed crosswise, and placed fire underneath. He hung his wooden images to a tree over the fire. He poked the fire, so that the sparks burned the body of the wooden figure. Then the latter cried aloud, but after a short time it stopped. Then he took it off, and took another one. It did the same. The figure stopped crying after a short time. He (p. 90) took it down. Then he tied the red cedar to the tree and poked the fire. There were very many sparks. The figure cried for a long time, and then stopped. He took it down and hung up the yellow cedar. It did not stop. Then he took the image of yellow cedar. He went on, and came to a place where he heard a man splitting firewood with his wedge and hammer. His name was G*ix*sats??'ntx*. When he came near, he asked him, "Where is the house?" At the same time he gave him tobacco. Then G*ix*sats??'ntx* began to swell when he tasted the tobacco. (The people of olden times called it "being troubled.") He also gave him red paint and sling-stones. (p. 91) Then G*ix*sats??'ntx* told him where the child was. He said, "Wait in the woods until they are all asleep, then go up to the roof of the house." The man went, and when he came nearer, he heard the voice of his boy, who was crying; but as soon as the boy stopped, the chief ordered his men to poke the fire until many sparks flew up. When all the people were asleep, the man went to the roof of the house where the child was. The child recognized his father and cried; but his father rebuked him, saying, "Don't cry, don't cry! They might hear you in the house." The boy stopped and the man took him off. In his place he tied the wooden image to the smoke hole. Then he went down. Early in the morning the chief ordered his people to poke the fire. Then the wooden image cried while the man (p. 92) and his son were making their escape. But the wooden image did not cry long. Then it stopped. The chief became suspicious, and sent a man to the roof. He went up, and, behold, there was a stick. The boy was lost, and the wooden image was on the roof. The chief said, "Pursue them!" The people did so. The man heard them approaching. When they were close behind him, he threw tobacco, red paint, and sling-stones in their way. The paint was red; the sling-stones were blue. The chief's people found these and picked them up. Some persons took the sling-stones, and others took the red paint and put it on their faces. 1 While they were doing so, the man and his son continued to (p. 93) run. Again the man heard the pursuers approaching. Now he came to G*ix*sats??'ntx*, who said, "Run quickly, my dear. They will not catch you." The Star had taken the boy, and therefore the Star's tribe were pursuing them. The main gave G*ix*sats??'ntx* tobacco, and then G*ix*sats??'ntx* swelled very much, so that he obstructed the trail, and therefore the Star tribe could not reach the man. Now he came near the hole of the sky. He came to it, and went down the chain of arrows. As soon as he reached the ground, he pulled the arrows down, and they all dropped to the ground. He had saved his boy. Then he went down the mountain and ran home. He got the boy back, and therefore he and his wife were glad." Moses, "The Stars", in Franz Boas, Tsimshian Texts. Nass River Dialect. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin 27 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1902) 86-93.

[4] The story spends some time in describing how she shifted around until she was resting on the small of his back. In Teton folklore, it is said, "Whirlwinds are caused by a chrysalis, called the wa-mni-yo-mni, which the Tetons say is found in the small of the back of some buffaloes." J. Owen Dorsey, "Teton Folk-Lore Notes", The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 2, #5 (1889): 133-139 [137].

[5] To this compare the Shoshone tale in which a winged Ogre seizes Coyote's nephew and flies away with him through a hole in the sky. Buffalo Bill, "Coyote and His Nephew," in Robert H. Lowie, Shoshonean Tales, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 37, ##143/144 (Jan.-June, 1924): 1-242, Story 6, pp. 109-113 [112]. The idea that there is an above world accessible through a hole in the sky is an idea found in the great Siberian homeland of the American Indians. This is what the Chukchee think on the subject:

Each world has a hole in the zenith of the sky, right under the base of the polar star; and the shamans slip through this hole while going from one world to another. The heroes of several tales fly up through this hole, riding an eagle or a thunderbird. Through this hole the people of the upper world may look down upon the lower one.

Waldemar Bogoras, "The Folklore of Northeastern Asia, as Compared with That of Northwestern America," American Anthropologist, New Series, 4, #4 (Oct. - Dec., 1902): 577-683 [590].

[6] Martha Warren Beckwith, "Mythology of the Oglala Dakota", The Journal of American Folklore, 43 (1930), #170 (Oct.-Dec.): 386-389.

[8] Bear's Arm, "3. The Sacred Arrow", in Martha Warren Beckwith, Mandan and Hidatsa Mythology, Publications of the Folk-Lore Foundation (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College) #10 (1930): 22-52 [42].

[9] Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology (Rosebud Sioux Reservation: Siñte Gleska University, 1992) 31.

[0] Grandmother's Knife, "3. Lodge Boy and Thrown Away," in Lowie, "Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 25, part 1 (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1918) 94-98 [98].

[10]

[11]

[12] Stephen R. Riggs, A Dakota-English Dictionary (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992 [1890]) s.v., 485.

[13] James R. Walker, Lakota Myth, ed. by Elaine A. Jahner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 32. Further references are cited for this in James R. Walker, Lakota Beliefs and Rituals, ed. by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980) 108, 122 (Unkcegila), and 72, 108, 112, 118, 122, 123 (Unktehi); James Owen Dorsey, A Study of Siouan Cults, 11th Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1894) 195-197 (Unktehi).

[14] Walker, Lakota Beliefs and Rituals, 108.

[15] Walker, Lakota Myth, 158-159.

[16] Walker, Lakota Myth, 337.

[17] George E. Lankford, Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007) ...

[18] James Brown, "On the Identity of the Birdman within Mississippian Period Art and Iconography", in Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, edd. F. Kent Reilly III and James F. Garber (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) 56-106.

The Hand, the Eye, and the Hole in the Sky. A number of Siouan tribes and their neighbors see the central stars of Orion as making up a hand. [1] The Oglala Lakota concept of this asterism is seen in the inset to the left. The Hand (Nape) is made up of the Belt Stars of Orion (wrist), the Sword Stars (thumb), with the addition of Rigel (index finger), and Cursa (little finger), a star from the neighboring constellation of Eridanus. Goodman says that a story about a chief's lost arm is the origin myth of the Hand Constellation. [2] The Oglala story goes like this. The Thunders rip off the (left) arm of one of the chiefs among the Star People, and the chief, who is understandably anxious to get it back, offers his daughter in marriage to any warrior who can retrieve it. Fallen Star recaptures the arm from the Thunders and their ally, the trickster Iktomi, as it lies on a mantel above a boiling kettle of water. By use of various magical artifacts, Fallen Star escapes his pursuers and arrives at his grandmother's teepee. She grabs an ax and swings it wildly in the air, breaking up the storm clouds. Fallen Star presents the arm and wins the chief's daughter in marriage. They soon have a son who is destined to carry on his father's adventures. [3] This chief is said to rule over all the Star People. He could be Polaris, Morning Star, Evening Star, or even Sirius; but the position of the Thunderbird constellation at least suggests that the arm in question is the Milky Way. The Lakota Thunderbird asterism, which is essentially Draco plus two stars in Canis Minor (Little Dipper), is offset from the Milky Way to the same extent as the hand (Orion) constellation. This means that they are 180° in opposition (azimuth 270° vs. azimuth 90°). That the Thunderbirds should appropriate the Milky Way as their own seems fitting, since it has that same misty quality that characterizes clouds. In this context the Thunderbirds can play the same oppositional role played elsewhere by the Great Serpent and its variants (see 1 and 2). Whether the Hand sets or rises, the Thunderbirds constellation does the exact opposite, save that as a circumpolar asterism, it only approaches the horizon without actually setting. It is the same tug-of-war at opposite quadrants that we have seen played out between Orion and Scorpius. During mid-May nearly the whole southern half of the Milky Way, including the chief's Hand, heliacally sets. At this time the Thunderbird rises high at the opposite side of the sky. With the Thunderbird's dominance, the chief's arm disappears from the sky for a brief period. Thus, the Thunderbirds have "stolen" the arm. Fallen Star wins the tug-of-war for the chief right at the place and time that the arm is suspended above the kettle and fire (for this image and symbolism among the Hotcâgara, see "Bluehorn Rescues His Sister"). The scene is one in which the Hand asterism is rising with the sun, suspended over both the Ocean Sea (the kettle) and the red of the dawn (the fire). This is, astronomically speaking, the point at which Orion is suspended above the boiling kettle and fire, and the time at which Fallen Star begins taking it back to the chief (at the opposite end of the celestial sphere). In the course of the journey, the Hand rises and the Thunderbird (Draco) falls very near the northern horizon.

It is among the Hidatsa that we begin to see some interesting connections to the Hotcâk counterpart of Orion. [4] In the Hidatsa story the chief of the stars is a spirit called "Long Arm". His name also suggests the Milky Way. The Divine Twins, Lodge Boy and Spring Boy, had killed a number of evil spirits that lived on the surface of the earth. The sky people became alarmed for their own safety and petitioned Long Arm to capture Spring Boy, the more aggressive of the two boys, and bring him to the sky to be executed. Long Arm reluctantly complied. They took Spring Boy and crucified him on a forked tree. Lodge Boy noticed a streak of light where the hole in the sky was where Long Arm had snatched up Spring Boy. He flew through, changed himself into a little boy, and got himself adopted by an old grandmother. Lodge Boy soon found his brother. Disguising himself as a spider while everyone was asleep or inattentive, he climbed up and cut his brother free.

They went out as spiders and the holy man knew all about it but could do nothing because the two together were too powerful for him. Long Arm went and placed his hand over the hole by which they passed through so as to catch them. Spring Boy made a motion with the hatchet as if to cut it off at the wrist and said, "This second time your hand has committed a crime, and it shall be a sign to the people on earth." So it is today that we see the hand in the heavens. The white people call it Orion. The belt is where they cut across the wrist, the thumb and fingers also show; they are hanging down like a hand. "The hand star" it is called. [5]

The Hidatsa model is a Hand asterism created when Long Arm attempted to manually block the hole in heaven. His hand was thrust over the hole to prevent the Twins from going back to earth through it. We learn that the souls of the righteous go through that same hole when they ascend to heaven, and those souls in the world above who wish to return to earth, also use the same hole to descend. Since this hole is found in the center of Long Arm's hand, it must actually go right through his hand. Just as Long Arm initially lost his hand trying unsuccessfully to stop the Twins from using the hole, so even now his hand is a vain attempt at obstruction.

The Crow, who are very closely related to the Hidatsa, have a version of the Long Arm myth nearly identical to that of their Hidatsa cousins. [6]

In the Arapaho story, Moon and Sun, who are brothers, go out hunting for wives. In a serious lapse in judgement, Sun settles upon a toad for a mate, but Moon finds favor in a human woman. Moon takes the form of a porcupine and induces the woman to climb after him on an ever-growing tree. Finally, Moon changes into human form and the woman, who is impressed by his splendid garb, willingly follows him. They enter into the world above by emerging through a trap door in the sky. There they live for some time, and she gives birth to a baby boy know as "Little Star" (or "Lone Star"). [6.1] One day her husband tells her to go after potatoes, but never to pull up any withered plant found nearby. Out of curiosity, she pulls up the withered plant and finds a hole in the heavens from where she can see her old village on the earth below. She descends with her child through the hole using a rawhide lariat. However, her rope comes up short and she dangles suspended in midair. Moon sees her, and decides to bring her back to him in death (as apparently some of the dead go to the moon). Moon takes a flat, circular, heating stone, and drops it on her head, taking care to avoid hitting his son. The stone kills the mother, but the child survives the fall. On earth Little Star is adopted by Old Woman Night. In time she makes arrows and a special bow, called the "Coyote Bow". Old Woman Night would always put a little food behind her lean-back, and told Little Star that it was being saved for lunch. When Old Woman Night went to check her traps, Little Star looked behind the lean-back where he found a monster eating all the food. The monster, whose body extended all the way from the river, had blazing eyes and two horns. Little Star promptly shot him dead, then knocked off his horns. When Old Woman Night found out, she was appalled, since the monster was her husband. Later on, Old Woman Night made Little Star a lance out of his Coyote Bow. Little Star resolved to make a journey to see Sun. However, when he arrived, Sun said, "It is best for you to return, since your lance, which is poisonous, is lawless." So he went back to Old Woman Night, where he hung his lance above the door of her teepee. He became the Morning Star, also called "the Cross". "That small group of stars early at night, with a row of stars along the side represent the hand of Little Star with his lance." [7]

The Arikara have a number of versions of the story of the hole in the sky and the star husband. While everyone else was traveling in a religious procession into a sacred lodge, two women decided to break the rules and lay on top of a drying scaffold. One of them said, "I really admire that star above. I wish I could marry him." "Don't say that," said the other, "it is sacred." After they had gone to bed, a long arm reached down and pulled both women up into the sky. He was one of the larger stars in the sky, and he took the first to marry her. In time she bore her star husband a child. Then the other woman also bore a child. Then the star said to his wife, "Don't dig any turnips, for you will discover where you came from." Then he hid her digging sticks. However, when an opportunity presented itself, she stole a digging stick and cut a hole in the ground. The stick itself disappeared into the hole, and when she looked for it, she saw a hole in the sky. There she saw the earth below. Her companion said, "Don't do that, it is not safe." Later, she consulted Old Woman Spider, who advised her to make a rope out of buffalo sinew. She took the sinew and lowered herself and her child down through the hole, but she dangled high above the ground. [7.1] Then her husband said to three stones, "You shall help me." He heated them in the fire. They dropped a stone down upon the head of the woman and killed her, but they spared the star's son. In time the other woman descended in like fashion, and she too was killed in the same way, but her son was spared. The first boy, Drinks Brain Soup, was captured and lived with an old woman. Drinks Brains brought his mother back to life by shooting arrows into the air over her scaffold. He himself was the white arrow. In time they captured the other boy, Long Teeth. He lived in a spring and ate shells, which he called 'parched corn'. Eventually they caught him and placed him in a sweat bath, after which he vomited up the shells and other things of the water. He tried to run away, but they had put an buffalo bladder behind his neck, and he could not say under the water. Even though they were warned that it was dangerous, they went out and killed a man who had hot coals tied to his ankles, and another being who had a gigantic mouth. He is said to have killed their mother. When the boys and their mother were laying down, the long arm of a being named "Long Arm" (Wihtcés) extended down from the sky. Long Teeth saw it, and first he chopped off the hand, then the arm. After this, Drinks Brains cut off another arm at the urging of his brother. Soon there was a pile of arms there. Long Arm vowed, "It won't be long before I make slaves out of you!" Later in the night the arm came down again, and when it touched Long Teeth, it put him to sleep. The arm snatched him up into the sky, into the very village whence his mother had gone. Long Teeth was hung spread eagle on a tree where they built a fire. Drinks Brains shot himself into the sky with four arrows, a yellow one, a black one, a red one, and a white one. He himself became an arrow. He crawled up to Long Teeth in the form of an ant and spoke into his ear: "My brother, I have arrived." Then, when everyone was asleep, they escaped. They came to where Old Woman Spider lived in the sky world. They asked for her help. She lowered them easily to the earth below. Then she said to Long Teeth, "This brother of yours is holy, he who transforms himself into an arrow. This one is an arrow, and you will be like me, a spider." That is why today arrows are fierce and can kill people, and it is why when a black spider bites someone they can die. [8]

Lankford uses the Hidatsa model to make sense of the rather extensive iconography from the Mississippian southeast. [9] There are graphics in various media showing a downward pointed hand with an ocular-like slit in the middle of it. The inset at left from Moundville shows such a hand inscribed on a piece of pottery. [10] Lankford argues convincingly that these images are of the Hand asterism with its hole or slot for the passage of souls to (and perhaps from) Spiritland in the upper world. This is reinforced considerably by the numerous examples of the belief in the Milky Way as the path of souls. [11] [...] The hole in Orion is very near this path (which crosses Gemini). It seems reasonable to conclude that the concept of the Hand constellation and the hole in the sky which it covers, was once more widely distributed than the few cultures that now remain acquainted with it. The apparent eye that often appears inside the hand's slit might be understood in one of at least two ways. It may be a genuine eye, which in the present astral context should possess its common valence as a star symbol. This is rather paradoxical, since the center of the square formed by M42-Alnitak-Mintaka-Algiebba is vacant to the naked eye, leaving no candidate for a star in the center of the Hand. This very stellar void is what suggests the center of the square as a celestial hole in the first place. However, there is a widespread belief that the souls of the dead transform themselves into stars. This concept of the dead is, for instance, very important among the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples. The Lankford thesis asserts that it is through the slit in the Hand asterism that the departed enter onto the path of souls (the Milky Way), and given the Hidatsa model, also return this way to earth for reincarnation. To make it clear that the slit is a portal and passageway for souls, a symbol of the soul might be expected in its center. Therefore, the eye may indicate the soul of the deceased in the form of a star. Another widespread connection between the eye and the soul is expressed in the belief that a person's soul can be seen in the pupil of his eye. [...] Another possibility suggests itself. The "eye" figure in the center of the slit may not be ocular at all. It may instead be a "target" design of concentric circles. Lankford has also analyzed this in terms of [see Hawk and Hand volume ...]. [12] I arrived at the same conclusion independently (see Gottschall, a New Interpretation), seeing the design as another version of the swirling lines of a "cosmic column" of communication between the upper and lower worlds. Clearly, nothing can so well exemplify such a pathway as the portal through which souls travel from one world to the other. Nevertheless, to express these two concepts -- the cosmic column and the progress of the stellar soul -- as exclusive alternatives may be unsubtle. The intention may have been to render them in a unified concept, the soul's journey through the portal as the exemplar of the process of inter-world transduction, here captured as a target-eye icon.

The coupling of the open hand and eye is even found in the folklore of the Old World. [13] However, when we look into the function of the eye it is not too difficult to see the connection it has to the celestial Hand of the plains. The Hand belonged to a bad spirit who attempted to use it to bar the escape of the Twins from the Above World. The Hand is the organ of agency, the executive organ, which more than any other body part enacts the will of the agent. Thus we see in plains pictography of more recent vintage, that the presentation of the Hand (as shown below) symbolized agency itself, expressed descriptively as "I did it". The hand as an instrument of grasping is used to express capture as we see in the two examples below, the third of which shows a Lakota warrior who has captued a Crow man and woman.

It is this function that Long Arm's actions exemplify. His hand is the organ of agency by which he attempts to grasp and hold the fleeing Twins. For this he loses his arm and the power symbolized by his hand, which can no longer block the hole in the sky that now runs right through the center of his palm. Souls that come from the Sky World have to pass through this hole, so it should follow that they got there originally by passing through it the other way (as it is the one and only portal to the celestial realm of souls). So why does the Mississippian version (on the Lankford model) have an eye subsisting in this hole? The eye and hand have an important shared function: they both apprehend the objects of their attention. But the celestial Hand gathers the souls of the departed through its central hole, making it strikingly similar to an eye. An eye metaphorically grasps the light through its central hole, the pupil. It is this light, in the form of an image, that the person "grasps" in perception. Why is the capture of an image of any pertinence to the transmigration of souls? We find among the Hotcâgara for instance, that the soul, the nâghirak, is seen essentially as an insubstantial image itself. This image can be conceived negatively as a shadow (cf. the ancient Greek concept of the departed as "shades"); or as a positive image such as can be seen in a reflection on the face of still waters. Naturally as the surviving counterpart of a person, the life soul should be in that person's image. Furthermore, keeping to the Hotcâk exemplar, especially within the Medicine Rite, the essence of a person's being is called hâp, which means "light", a term which Radin translates properly as "Light-and-Life", inasmuch as it is used to refer to someone's life while retaining its primary meaning as "light". So the insubstantiality of the soul is understood as an image of light, the essence of life departed. So when it passes through a celestial hole, it is much like an image of light that is apprehended by the eye. It is the eye that captures the image of living light the way a hand captures a solid object. However, the perforated Hand captures an insubstantial counterpart to the body, and does so necessarily on the model of the eye, the organ that captures images of light. Far from refuting Lankford's model of the Hand being a representation of the celestial portal for the transmigration of souls, the presence of the eye in its center is a symbolic affirmation of this model.

Notes to "The Hand, the Eye, and the Hole in the Sky"

[1] In addition, we also have a good reflex from the Arapaho, who are an Algonquian tribe, and the Arikara who are Caddoan. An intriguing possibility from far away California suggests itself. "To the Maricopa there is an unnamed star group (the Pleiades?) that represents a hand print." See Thaddeus M. Cowan, "Effigy Mounds and Stellar Representation: A Comparison of Old World and New World Alignment Schemes," in Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, ed. Anthony F. Aveni (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975) 217-235 [221]. The story goes that when Kokomát broke the sky, Thoshipá caught it, preventing it from crashing down. In the north he left his finger prints, and these are seen in a group of stars today. Since Orion is not in the north, it cannot be the star group to which the Maricopa story refers. However, although the stars are different, we do have some of the same ideas: the sky has an opening and a hand is placed over it to close it. Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian : Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States, and Alaska, 20 vv. (Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1926) 2:86. Hagar notses, "The Osage recognize an Arm constellation, but it has not been identified. The Cherokee also have an Arm, which they see in the "V" shaped Hyades. This is the broken ar of a man who fled to the skies because he cold no longer be of any use on earth. Standsbury Hagar, Cherokee Star-lore (...) 355-366 [365-366]. The Timagami Ojibway (Anishanaabe), have a story in which a woman who is the spiritual protector of the Mitewin sits over the hole in the sky. Frank G. Speck, Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Canada: Anthropological Series, ix, 47; reprinted in Stith Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1929) 126-127. This would seem to make the hole in the sky a portal of reincarnation.

[2] Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology (Rosebud Sioux Reservation: Siñte Gleska University, 1992) 26-27. He mentions a 1986 version by Ollie Napesin which no doubt connects the Hand asterism to the story told in DeMallie (see next entry).

[3] The Sixth Grandfather, Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) 404-409.

[4] Bear's Arm, "3. The Sacred Arrow", in Martha Warren Beckwith, Mandan and Hidatsa Mythology, Publications of the Folk-Lore Foundation (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College) #10 (1930): 22-52. Cf. another version in which the brothers are Atùtish and Mahash, who are themselves raised by the brothers Long Tail and Spotted Body. Mahash rescues his brother by turning into an ant. Washington Matthews, A Folk-tale of the Hidatsa Indians, 136-143 [136-139] = The Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians, The United States Geological and Gographical Survey, Miscellaneous Publicatons, No. 7 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1877) 63-70.

[5] Bear's Arm [Beckwith], "3. The Sacred Arrow", 41-42.

[6]

[6.1] In a variant of this story, the child's name is Haçouusâ, which means "Little Star" or "Star Child". Runs in the Water, "136. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1903]) 332-338 [335]. In another variant, the child is called "Moon Child" (Hiiciisisâ). Caspar Edson, "137. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 339. Hiiciis means both "Sun" and "Moon". "138. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 340-341 [341 nt 1]. Consequently, in one story he is said to be the son of the Sun and called Hiiciisteiâ. This same story also calls him Housâ, "Porcupine's Son", and even Biaxuyan, "Found in Grass". "138. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 340-341.

[7] George A. Dorsey, The Arapaho Sun Dance: The Ceremony of the Offerings Lodge. Field Museum Anthropological Series (Chicago: the Museum: 1903) 5:212-228; George Lankford, The "Path of Souls": Some Death Imagery in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex," in Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, edd. F. Kent Reilly III and James F. Garber (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) 174-212 [198]. There is another version of this story in six variants: Fire Wood, "134. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1903]) 321-329; Long Hair, "135. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 330-331; Runs in the Water, "136. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 332-338; Caspar Edson, "137. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 339; the source of this variant is an old woman of the tribe, "138. The Porcupine and the Woman who Climbed to the Sky," in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 340-341. Yet another variant is contained in a footnote: Philip Rapid in Dorsey and Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho, 339-340, nt. 3.

[7.1] Cf. similar ideas among the Siberian Chukchees.

In some of these tales the supreme being in the upper world, the Dawn, Creator, Polar-star Spirit, or whoever he may be, lets down by means of a strong rope the human visitor and his wife, after supplying them with provisions. Sometimes his rope is only a spider's thread, but is capable of sustaining twenty reindeer- loads without snapping.

Waldemar Bogoras, "The Folklore of Northeastern Asia, as Compared with That of Northwestern America," American Anthropologist, New Series, 4, #4 (Oct. - Dec., 1902): 577-683 [ 591].

[8] Lillian Brave (One Kernel of Corn Woman), "63. Long Teeth and Drinks Brain Soup," in Douglas R. Parks, Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians. Volumne 2, Stories of Other Narrators: Interlinear Linguistic Texts. Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians, 4 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) 2:693-715. Other versions of this myth: Ella P. Waters (Yellow Bird Woman), "85. The Star Husband and Old Woman's Grandson," in Parks, Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians, 2:889-922. White Bear, "15. The Girl who Married a Star," in George A. Dorsey, Traditions of the Arikara (Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1904) 56-60. George E. Lankford, Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007) ...

[9] Lankford, The "Path of Souls", [...].

[10] Clarence Bloomfield Moore, Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River, Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 13 (1905): 125-244 [175]; Lankford, The "Path of Souls", 175, fig. 8.1.

[11] Robert L. Hall, An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997)162b; Lankford, The "Path of Souls", 179-191. See an illustration of this belief among the Micmac at Gottschall: A New Interpretation.

[12] Lankford, in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (New Haven: Yale University Press and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004) ...

[13] This is what is said on the matter of the symbolism of the open hand in Robert Means Lawrence, The Magic Of The Horse-shoe, with Other Folk-Lore Notes (... , 1898) "IV. The Symbol Of The Open Hand". "It is worthy of note that the symbol of an open hand with extended fingers was a favorite talisman in former ages, and was to be seen, for example, at the entrances of dwellings in ancient Carthage. It is also found on Lybian and Phoenician tombs, as well as on Celtic monuments in French Brittany. Dr. H. C. Trumbull quotes evidence from various writers showing that this symbol is in common use at the present time in several Eastern lands. In the region of ancient Babylonia the figure of a red outstretched hand is still displayed on houses and animals; and in Jerusalem the same token is frequently placed above the door or on the lintel on account of its reputed virtues in averting evil glances. The Spanish Jews of Jerusalem draw the figure of a hand in red upon the doors of their houses; and they also place upon their children's heads silver handshaped charms, which they believe to be specially obnoxious to unfriendly individuals desirous of bringing evil either upon the children themselves, or upon other members of the household. In different parts of Palestine the open-hand symbol appears alike on the houses of Christians, Jews, and Moslems, usually painted in blue on or above the door. Claude Reignier Conder, R. E., in "Heth and Moab," remarks on the antiquity of this pagan emblem, which appears on Roman standards and on the sceptre of Siva in India. He is of the opinion that the figure of the red hand, whether sculptured on Irish crosses, displayed in Indian temples, or on Mexican buildings, is always an example of the same original idea, -- that of a protective symbol. A white hand-print is commonly seen upon the doors and shutters of Jewish and Moslem houses in Beyrout and other Syrian towns; and even the Christian residents of these towns sometimes mark windows and flour-boxes with this emblem, after dipping the hand in whitewash, in order to "avert chilling February winds from old people and to bring luck to the bin." In Germany a rude amulet having the form of an open hand is fashioned out of the stems of coarse plants, and is deemed an ample safeguard against divers misfortunes and sorceries. It is called "the hand of Saint John," or "the hand of Fortune." The Jewish matrons of Algeria fasten little golden hands to their chidren's caps, or to their glass-bead necklaces, and they themselves carry about similar luck tokens. In northwestern Scotland whoever enters a house where butter is being made is expected to lay his hand upon the churn, thereby signifying that he has no evil designs against the butter-maker, and dissipating any possible effects of an evil eye. As a charm against malevolent influences, the Arabs of Algeria make use of rude drawings representing an open hand, placed either above the entrances of their habitations or within doors, -- a symbolical translation of the well-known Arabic imprecation, " Five fingers in thine eye!" Oftentimes the same meaning is conveyed by five lines, one shorter than the others to indicate the thumb." It is interesting to note that in the Old World connections are drawn between the open hand and the eye.

The Grasping Eye and the Ear-Heads. The Chiwere-Winnebago branch of Siouan culture seems entirely devoid of the mythology of the Hand-Portal. They have an alternant image and mythology which is actually found coexisting obscurely within the Hidatsa Hand-Portal concept. The Hidatsa story of the Twins (see above) ends on a rather unexpected note:

The boys went back to the place where they had left the arrows sticking in the ground, pulled out the arrows and went home to their mother. She told them that the people in the sky were like birds, they could fly about as they pleased. Since the opening was made in the heavens they may come down to earth. If a person lives well on earth his spirit takes flight to the skies and is able to come back again and be reborn, but if he does evil he will wander about on earth and never leave it for the skies. A baby born with a slit in the ear at the place where earrings are hung is such a reborn child from the people in the skies. [1]

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Hidatsa story is the charming account of the rebirth of the sky people on earth, where we are told that babies born with earring slits give away their celestial origins. And where do these renovated souls enter into our lower world? The story makes it clear that it is through the hole in the sky in the center of the Hand, a hand lopped off when Long Arm tried to cover the perforation in the heavenly vault. The conclusion of the story says that those souls coming from the Sky World to be reborn on earth have a sign that identifies their provenance. This sign is a pair of slits or holes designed to accommodate earrings, although the earrings themselves are absent. [1.1] The earring holes recall the hole in the Hand through which these returning people had to have passed in order to depart from their spirit hole in the Sky World. The correlation is typical of myths, which repeat themselves in a series of themes and variations. So what do these holes signify esoterically, and what do they have to do with the perforated Hand of Orion?

We get an important hint in a gloss at the end of what appears to be an unrelated myth. This is an Ioway story about a man noted more than all others for earrings, indeed his name is "Human Head Earrings" (Wâkx!istowi). Of him it is said,

Human-head-earrings was only a man like the rest of us, but he said that when he died his little heads should live always. So now when we die the little person invisible to us that dwells in us (the soul) goes to the other world. [2]

So the head worn on the ear is, or is at least symbolic of, the soul. As we have seen in the Mississippian version, the Hand is augmented by an isomorphic and complementary image -- the eye inside that hole. This identifies the hole as a portal into which the insubstantial, light-image that is the life soul is captured by the world beyond, just as an eye captures an image of light through its pupil. The earring model of the soul sees it as an appendage of the ear. So if this is indeed a model of its Mississippian counterpart, we have the following analogy:

Head(-Earring) : Ear :: Soul : Eye

It is easy to draw the correspondences between head and soul, not only in North America, but even throughout the Old World. [Head = soul]

What of the correspondence between ear and eye? This relationship is also based upon an analogy:

Eye : Ear :: Light : Sound

Among the Hotcâgara, sound is a well known symbol of light. Therefore, the organ of sound apprehension is analogous to the organ of light apprehension. The eye, as we have concluded, corresponds to the hole in heaven -- the portal of souls -- because it too takes within its hole the insubstantial images of light just as the sky-portal takes in the insubstantial images of light that are the afterlife of the departed. So the ear on the Ioway model is like an alternative image to the eye, but with a head-soul parked right on it. We see something of this symbolic interplay in far off India where direct influence can be summarily excluded. In the epic Mahâbhârata (), the good spirits (the Danava) have become incarnated to pursue on a human plane a cosmic struggle with the evil spirits (the Asura). In this fight, the god Sûrya (the Sun), as one of the Asura, has become incarnate in the form of the champion Karna. Karna betrays his divine origin in his birth. He comes into this world wearing a breast plate of gold, and upon his ears hang golden earrings. His very name means "Ear". So the light of the world is born as "Ear", adorned from the beginning in gold, including the orb-shaped earrings. Yet Sûrya himself is most strongly identified with the eye:

The affinity of the eye and the sun is indicated in a passage where the eye of the dead man is conceived as going to Sûrya ([Rig Veda] 10.16.3; cp. 90.3, 158.3, 4). In the A[tharva] V[eda] he is called the "lord of eyes" (AV. 5.24.9) and is said to be the one eye of created being and to see beyond the sky, the earth, and the waters (AV. 13.1.45). He is far-seeing ([Rig Veda] 7.35.8; 10.37.1), all-seeing ([Rig Veda] 1.502), is the spy (spash) of the whole world ([Rig Veda] 4.13.3), beholds all beings and the good and bad deeds of mortals ([Rig Veda] 1.50.7; 6.51.2; 7.60.2; 7.61.1; 7.63.4). [3]

The eye of the gods can be reborn on earth as Ear because light is strongly analogous to sound. So in the Ioway story, we have Wâkx!istowi with ears that have human head-souls as earrings. The ear symbolizes more indirectly the eye that we found to symbolize the hole in the sky in the middle of the stellar Hand. This is the place where the light-soul is grasped as by perception. In the hand/eye model the soul is itself not symbolized, but is understood to be an image. In the ear and prosopic earring image, the earring is the explicit symbol of the soul. The soul as a head is affixed to the flesh, which as an earlobe is essentially fat, a substance analogous to marrow. [Onians.] In death these heads live on, but it would not be in this world. The ear, being analogous to the eye, should stand for the portal into and out of which the souls proceed. However, although the Ioway heads are explicitly connected to souls and fit in with the Mississippian version of the Hand Orion, there is nothing that connects them to the stars, let alone Orion.

It is when we turn to the Hotcâk version of the myth that the prosopic earring model makes contact with Orion. The Hotcâgara also have the spirit Wears Faces on His Ears (Îtcorúcika), and his adventures bear close resemblance to his Ioway counterpart. They appear to be the "same" personage as he exists in related peoples. Although in the Hotcâk we do not get any sense of the earring heads being souls, we do find that he is explicitly identified with stars, and in particular given the allegorical story of "Îtcorúcika and His Brothers", we are led to conclude that he is the star Alnilam of Orion. Redhorn comes into the world like the Hidatsa sky child, reborn from the sky world. The Hidatsa sky child has already had his ears supernaturally prepared for earrings; Redhorn, on the other hand, will have his ears supernaturally prepared in his future when he rubs them with his own saliva and faces magically sprout on his earlobes. It is interesting that it's saliva that produces the faces on his earlobes. In another story from the Redhorn Cycle, a number of Redhorn's friends attempt to remove an arrow from a wounded man. Only Redhorn succeeds (he is a spirit of the arrow). Then he heals the puncture wound itself by the application of his holy saliva. So it is the same substance by which a puncture wound is healed that is used to produce the faces on his earlobes. It is as if his earlobes had punctures, as in the Hidatsa model, that are now cured and replaced by living faces. So the hole or blank spot is "cured" by having faces emerge on it. Here we are reminded of the Ioway model, where the faces are souls. In the Ioway symbolism, these are living earrings that are put on, though we may infer the existence of the usual holes that will have been drilled in his ears. The emergence of the soul out of a hole can only recall the Hidatsa model -- argued as general in some respects by Lankford [4] -- of the hole in the sky whence souls come and go in the cycle of death and rebirth.

And what is the significance of these heads to the shared figure of the Ioway and Hotcâgara? They are said to do three things in particular: to laugh, wink, and stick out their tongues. We can understand these as Hotcâk symbols. In astronomy codes, sound is used to symbolize light. Usually it is crying, the "opposite" of laughter, that is used to symbolize a figure's light. Laughter serves the purpose better here because of its on-again, off-again, staccato pattern of sound. What would this pattern be in terms of light? Clearly, it would be blinking, or in stellar terms, twinkling, which is what most stars do. Stars are also homologized to eyes, partly because of the bright whites of the eyes, but also because the eyes blink. This is represented in the winking of the eyes in the miniature faces. In many American cultures, the stars are not only eyes, but are the souls of the departed. [5] As we might expect from the Hidatsa model, this may be, or once have been, the inspiration for making the faces express both their status as stars through the actions of their eyes, and their status as souls (as explicitly stated by the Ioway). This brings us to the final symbol of the triad: the protrusion of the tongues. The tongue is roughly cylindrical, and is of a reddish hue. This is an image isomorphic with the red "horn" of hair from which Redhorn derives one of his names. Redhorn's red hair seems to be the red clouds of the horizon in which he is immersed when his star (Alnilam of Orion) helically rises or sets. As a "horn" or queue, it may also have a stellar value as the Sword Stars, whose central star is M42, a reddish "hairy" nebula (see above). It is isomorphic to a cloud, so it is no accident that the name nebula, "cloud", so readily suggests itself for such an object. The cloud form of his hair is particularly appropriate to render into the image of the tongue. Clouds are wet, and those near the horizon, associated as they are with the Ocean Sea (De Djâ´), recall not only the saliva on tongues, but their reddish hue. This "tongue" of clouds comes to stick out only when the sun begins to rise, and is pulled back in once the sun is fully up. The tongue, although not the author of speech like the voice, controls its form and content. As sound represents light, so the "tongue" of clouds on the horizon that make up the "hair" of Redhorn are not the source and author of their own luminance, but control its form and shape after their own actions. We see, therefore, that each attribute of the ear-faces can be brought into correlation with Îtcorúcika's stellar attributes. So the little faces or heads are an image of the stellar Redhorn. One of the meanings of naghirak in Hotcâk is "man’s reflection in the water" [6]. This was once its primary meaning, but in time came to mean "soul" or "ghost" before all else. This matches the Ioway model perfectly, but with the addition that the faces are both stellar and spiritual at the same time.

Notes to the "Grasping Eye and the Ear Heads"

[1] Bear's Arm [Beckwith], "3. The Sacred Arrow", 42.

[1.1] A Maidu myth connects the Star Husband theme and the piercing of the ears in a way that reminds us of the Hidatsa. Two girls who were of an age to dance the puberty dance, were dancing it. And having stopped dancing just at dawn, they both slept. Toward morning the two girls, who were sleeping, arising, went off to dig roots. When they returned at night, the people all danced the round-dance. Having finished the round-dance, they danced forward and back. And just as the light came over the hills, while it grew brighter, after having run off after the one who carried the rattle, they (the two girls) went to sleep. They dreamed. "If you have a bad dream, you must dive into the stream after having pierced your ear-lobe. Then you must blow away all evil from yourselves. Thus ye will arise feeling entirely well," she said. So their mothers told the two girls. They dreamed of Star-Men, but did not blow the evil away from themselves; they did not pierce their ears, did not bathe. When the dance was over, they went again to make camp with their mothers at the spring to dig roots. And having arrived there, they camped. And (p. 184, p. 185) going to sleep at that place, lying on their backs and looking upward, they talked. "Do you want to go there?" said one. "If I got there, I should like to see that red, very bright star." Then the other said, "I also, I should like to go to that one that looks blue. I wish I might see what he looks like!" Then they went to sleep. As they slept, in the morning they woke up there, where the Star-Men were. The old woman hunted for them back here. She hunted to find where they had gone. She kept looking for tracks, but could not see them, could not trace them; so she went back, weeping, to the house. When she returned, the people got back from a hunting-expedition. They kept coming back; and when they had returned, they searched. They kept looking for tracks, and, not finding them, they went back. And so, having returned, they remained there. Meanwhile the two girls staid up there in the sky, and were married. They talked together. "Our mothers, our fathers, our brothers, have felt very badly at not being able to trace us," said the younger girl. "You wanted very much to come to this country; and I, believing you, came thus far. It is making my father feet badly, my mother feel badly, my brothers feel badly. It was your idea," she said. "Our mothers gave us very good advice. But you, not believing her, when you had bad dreams, did not pierce your ear. It is for that reason that we are living far away here. I am going back. If you want to remain, you may stay. All my relatives are thinking about me. I feel very badly. I ought not to speak that way, but I have said it. I feel very badly, thinking about it," said she, the younger girl. (p. 186, p. 187) (The other) said to her sister, "Let us both go back in some way! Let us go and gather some kind of food! We shall learn something in time." So they remained. To each a child was born; and they, making a hut at a little distance, staid there. After they had remained there for some time, they said, "These children ask for sinew." So the husbands gave them sinew. Again, "They ask for sinew," they said, and the men gave it to them. Meanwhile the two girls made rope. Every day, "They call for sinew," they said. And they gave them sinew. So the two girls kept making rope, until night they made rope. Letting it down towards the earth, they measured it. "How far down does the rope extend?" they said. But it did not quite reach the ground. So they still said, "They ask for sinew. These children are eating a great deal, but only sinew," they said. And the two men believed. And so the two women kept making rope until it was sufficient, till it reached all the way down, till it reached down to the earth. Then having made the children remain, they came back down. Having fastened the rope, and just as they were halfway down to the end, the children began to cry, kept crying and crying. "What can be the matter with those two children! Suppose you go and see," said one of the men. Then one went over to the house; and going across, when he reached it, there was no one there but the two children only, crying. When he had looked about, he saw the rope hanging down hither. So he cut it; and the women, who had almost reached the ground, fell and were killed. And one of their brothers, who was still hunting for them, saw them. And the rope was there also. Taking that, he went off to the house; and, arriving there, he told all the brothers, "Our two sisters are dead," he said. (p. 188, p. 189) Then they went, and, having arrived there, lifting up the bodies, they brought them back. And having carried them there, they laid them in the water. In the morning the two girls awoke, and, waking, they came out of the water, came back to the house, and after a while they spoke. "She spoke that way. When she loved him much, I talked with her, talking like her, I followed her," said the younger girl. "She said it would be good to go to the place where the man was whom she had dreamed of while dancing. . . . She said that truly; and I, thinking it was said in fun, said the same. When we had said this, the men we loved did, indeed, do so to us. When we returned, they, learning about it up there, cut the rope, and in that way we died," said the youngest one, speaking to her mother and relatives. "One was a very red man, who ate only hearts. One was a bluish man, who only ate fat. There are many people of that sort, each always eating but one kind of food. Some eat only liver, some only meat. There are men of that kind," said the younger girl. But the other girl said nothing. And thereafter they remained there in the olden time. That is all, they say. "10. The Girls Who Married the Stars," in Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Franz Boas, vol. 4 (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1912) 182-189.

[2] "6. Wâkx!istowi, the Man with the Human Head Earrings," in Alanson Skinner, "Traditions of the Iowa Indians," The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 38, #150 (Oct.-Dec., 1925): 427-506 [457-458].

[3] A. A. MacDonell, Vedic Mythology (Delhi: Motilal Barnassidas: 1974 [1898]) 30.

[4] George E. Lankford, Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007) ...

[5] Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999) 251-253. The Pleiades star cluster is said in Peru to be the eyes of Viracacha, the god of thunder and creation. Anthony Aveni, Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures (New York: J. Wiley, 1997) 153. A raconteur of a Shoshone story says that after the Cottontail brothers made the Moon out of the Sun's gall bladder, "They made stars out of some other part of the body -- maybe the eyes." Annie Bealer, "Cottontail Shoots the Sun," in Anne M. Smith, Shoshone Tales (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993 [1939]) 100.

[6] Albert Samuel Gatschet, "Hotcank hit'e," in Linguistic and Ethnological Material on the Winnebago, Manuscript 1989-a (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives, 1889, 1890-1891) q.v.

The Prosopic Ears and Reincarnation. Since we are told that even though the Ioway Human Head Earrings was mortal, that his earring heads would live on as his souls, it follows that they are lost at death, leaving the body behind without earrings. The Hidatsa reference to earring holes and the Ioway gloss actually have some interesting things in common, as can be seen from the table below.

Here again we have the theme of the journey of the soul tied to this corpus of myth. However, there is some apparent inconsistency in the idea that the little heads are "the" soul. This would make better sense for the son of Human Head Earrings, who has but one of these heads in the center of his chest. However, there is a widespread belief in dual souls. [Dual soul doctrine] The other possibility is that they represent the duality of ghost and flesh, which may explain why in other Siouan myths, the two prosopic earrings disappear and the story is set in the mythology of the Twins. The Hidatsa and Ioway episodes deal with the opposite poles of life, which are both characterized by an absence of the earrings for which their ears had been supernaturally prepared. In the Hidatsa, causation is not discussed explicitly, but the appearance of earring holes in the earlobes nevertheless implies that the child has come from the Above world. For the Ioway the temporal sequence is from death to the sky. What is being described is two halves of a cycle.

[illustration]

The Hidatsa are clearly expressing the idea of reincarnation, since the sky people to whom they refer are the righteous dead who have gone to the Above world to lead their afterlife. They are then reborn but carry the mark of the earring with them into this world. The Ioway concentrate on the prototypic individual who put these living soul-heads on his earlobes, which then became the locus of his soul(s). When he died, they lived on. As his soul(s) they represent his identity, and therefore his self as it exists in the world above. In some symbolic way, he comes into existence as Wakx!istowi when he takes these earpieces to himself. Yet it is when we turn to the Hotcâgara that we find the whole cyclical scheme richly portrayed.

Like the Ioway, the Hotcâk exploration of the cycle of death and rebirth focuses upon an individual who has the very similar name, Wâgícdjahorùcika, "Wears Man Faces on His Ears", or Îtcorúcika, "Wears Faces on His Ears". He is also known as "Redhorn" (Hecutcka). Îtcorúcika is Redhorn's sacred name, the name the spirits use for him. He established the grounds for this name on earth by applying his own saliva to his ears, causing living faces to appear there. The name Îtco-horúcika is a compound expression. Îtco (and icdja) means "face". It is an old word, as can be seen from its cognates: Biloxi, ité, "forehead, face"; Dakota, ite, "face"; it’e, "forehead"; Osage, îcdse, "face". Now it often means "face to face" as in 'îdjera, and as in the compound î´djokipáhi, which means, "butt to butt, end to end; face to face, opposing". The more common word for face is hicdja, icdja. So Îtco-horúcika is also known in one story as Wâgícdjahorùcika, "Wears Man Faces on His Ears". [1] The second part of the compound in Îtco-horúcika's name is horucík (-ka being the definite article used to indicate a personal name). Both Radin-Marino and Miner agree that this word means, "to wear in the ears (as earrings)". This sense is illustrated in the story about Hog, where it says, Kirigi, Xguxgúcega gh'egh'éra hanâtc´ horucíkce ("When he got back, Hog was wearing all the earbobs in his ears"). [2] The stem meaning "to wear" (where the part of the body is unspecified) is -kax-, -kix-; however, most terms pertaining to wearing things are body specific: hadjé, "to wear as a skirt"; hakere, "to wear on a scalp lock"; hodjâ´, hotcâ´, hokidjâ´, "to wear on the foot"; hok’âk, "to wear on the head"; honâkicig, "to wear leggings"; î´, honâzî´, "to wear over the shoulder". So the word horucík means specifically "to wear on the ears". Considering that the faces are alive and animated, it is a bit strange to say that they are "worn" at all. In the Hotcâk story, despite the spirit's name, the faces seem rather to grow on the earlobes. Yet the closely related Ioway have this same character who reifies the notion that the faces are actually worn:

There were once ten brothers, six of whom were good hunters, three poor hunters, while the last was the hero of this tale. The eldest boys all killed big game, and the other three killed only turkeys, raccoons, and skunks respectively. One day it was announced that there was to be a great race around the world, and the tenth boy told the three poor hunters to get boughs and make a sweat lodge. The boys did this, while the six who were good hunters jeered and laughed at them and made their own lodge. However, after they had sweated, and the youngest brother had pulled at their hair till it was very long, then he too sweated and became handsome. He put on his best clothes, placed his human head earbobs in his ears, and came out. When the elder brothers saw how fine the younger ones looked, they became very jealous. [3]

In this tale, the little faces have an independent existence as earbobs. The youngest brother actually places them in his ears. We later learn that they had the power to become animate, just like the more intimately incarnated faces of the Hotcâk Îtcorúcika. This has led Hall and others, this time I think correctly, to connect these earpieces with actual artifacts dating from the Early Mississippian culture. [4] He calls these artifacts "long nosed god maskettes", a rather odd designation. It must be observed that a great many of them have short noses. The idea that they represent gods is a supposition for which there is no evidence at all. "Maskette" was an unfortunate choice of words, since it is already employed to denote a kind of headdress worn among the Indians of the American Southwest. If it is to mean "little masks", it deviates from the primary sense, inasmuch as the article is not designed to hide anything. All we can say is that they are prosopic ornaments. So there once were such little comic faces that men actually wore on the ears and in some cases elsewhere. [5] That their mythological counterparts are not necessarily ear pieces is clear enough from what is said of Redhorn's sons:

At this time, Red Horn's first wife was pregnant and, finally, the old woman's granddaughter gave birth to a male child who was the very likeness of his father, Red Horn, having long red hair and having human heads hanging from his ears. Not long after this, the giantess also gave birth to a male child whose hair was likewise just like his father's. Instead of having human heads hanging from his ears, he had them attached to his nipples. [6]

Redhorn had two sons who were just beginning to walk, when this [Redhorn's death] happened. One of them was just like his father and the other one had the man faces on his shoulders. [7]

So these faces were also found on the breasts and on the shoulders. However, they remain paradigmatically ear ornaments. The word horucík probably comes from ru-cik, "to hang or suspend by hand". This would most often apply to earrings and earbobs, and so the word became specialized. The Mississippian prosopic earpieces were apparently much sought after and are widely distributed over the midwest. Archaeologists have uncovered as many as 30 of these artifacts, made of bone, shell, and copper. [8] They were certainly considered items of some value. At least in later times strings of shells or even attractive loose shells (especially white ones) were valued above most other things. They could function to some degree as a medium of exchange, as wampum. The Hotcâk word for wampum is worucik, from wa-ho-ru-cik, "something which is hung or suspended by hand". This is our familiar word horucík with the object prefix wa- ("something") attached to it. There is one instance in Hotcâk literature where the noun form of the word is found, that is, horucikra, where -ra is something of a definite article meaning, "the one such that (it is)". It is of great interest that the translation given to it is wampum. [9] So some earpieces are wampum. The Hotcâk culture may have traces of a time when îtco-horucik-ra, "the faces hung by hand from the ears", were a prized form of wampum. So it seems likely from the philological argument coupled with the archaeological artifacts, that the mythic prosopic earpieces were inspired by actual earrings such as those dating from the Mississippian period. Despite its great historical interest, it tells us nothing about the esoteric meaning of the living ear-faces of myth.

At the end of the first story in one version of the Redhorn Cycle, the hero himself clarifies the import of his several names. He finds this necessary because his older brother Kunu's wife has thrown deer lungs at him on account of one of his names.

Now the little brother stood up and said, "Those in the heavens who created me did not call me by this name, He-who-is-hit-with-deer-lungs. They called me He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings." With that he spat upon his hands and began fingering his ears. And as he did this, little faces suddenly appeared on his ears, laughing, winking and sticking out their tongues. Then he spoke again, "Those on earth, when they speak of me, call me Red Horn." With this he spat upon his hands, and drew them over his hair whi