Primal Myths

by Barbara C. Sproul

  Therefore we now perceive that the white men are men of understanding, but the black people are ignorant; moreover, also the black men go and serve them; the black people also warm themselves at the fire.

  —Adolf N. Krug. “Bulu Tales from Kamerun, West Africa.” Journal of American Folklore, 25, 1912–1913, pp. 111–112. (New York: G. E. Stechert, for the American Folklore Society.)

  NGOMBE

  The Quarrelsomeness of Man and How the Earth was Peopled

  Living in the dense forests of Zaire, the Ngombe worship Akongo, “the Unexplainable,” “the One who causes all things to be.” In this first Ngombe myth fragment, the sacred harmony of the beginning is destroyed by man’s quarrelsomeness. The “creation” as such thus represents a devolution.

  Similarly, the second myth depicts a heavenly origin for all, but in this case a woman is at fault. Cast out of paradise, she descends to earth with her children and encourages them in incest. Another woman, her daughter, then falls prey to the witchcraft of Ebenga, the evil power of the earth world, and the ambiguous nature of life is established. Much like the Garden of Eden myth in the Old Testament, this Ngombe story of the fall fails to account for the origin of evil. If Akongo is both good and powerful, where did Ebenga come from?

  I Akongo was not always as he is now. In the beginning the creator lived among men; but men were quarrelsome. One day they had a big quarrel and Akongo left them to themselves. He went and hid in the forest and nobody has seen him since. People today can’t tell what he is like.

  II In the beginning there were no men on earth. The people lived in the sky with Akongo and they were happy. But there was a woman named Mbokomu who bothered everybody.

  One day Akongo put the woman in a basket with her son and her daughter, some cassava, maize, and sugarcane and lowered the basket down to the earth.

  The family planted a garden on earth and the garden flourished through their care.

  One day the mother said to her son: “When we die there will be no one left to tend the garden.”

  “That can’t be helped,” the son replied.

  “You must have children,” the mother said.

  “How?” asked the son. “We are the only people here. Where shall I find a wife?”

  “Your sister is a woman,” his mother replied. “Take her and have children by her.” But the son recoiled from his mother’s suggestion. The mother insisted, however. “That, or die childless, with nobody to continue our work. You can only get children by your sister so go and take her.”

  In the end the son gave in and went to his sister. The sister yielded to him quite willingly and became pregnant.

  One day the sister met a creature who looked like a man except that he was completely covered by hair. She was afraid but the creature spoke so kindly to her that after a while they became friends. One day the sister took her husband’s razor and went out to look for the hairy man. When she found him she made him lie down and shaved him. Now he looked like a man. His name was Ebenga, meaning the beginner.

  Ebenga betwitched the woman, so that when her child was born it brought witchcraft into the world. The child grew up under the spell of Ebenga. He practiced witchcraft and brought evil and sorrow to men.

  In the course of time the brother and sister had other children. So the earth was peopled. But evil and witchcraft continued to the present.

  The sky is supported by two creatures, Libanja and Songo. Libanja holds up the sky in the east by an enormous pole, and Songo in the west. When they grow tired the sky will fall down and men will turn into lizards.

  —Susan Feldman (ed.). African Myths and Tales. New York: Dell Publishing, 1963, pp. 37 39.—Adapted from material in E. W. Smith. African Ideas of God. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1950.

  NANDI

  When God Came to Earth

  Like other Nilotic cultures, the Nandi have a stratified mythology that reflects the merger of Hamitic and Paleo-Negritic peoples. The Nandi found Dorobo hunters when they entered Kenya; they thought the Dorobo so primordial that in some myths they portrayed them as the progenitors of the human race. (One of these myths tells how the first Dorobo gave birth to children through his knees.)

  This tale also asserts Dorobo primacy. Along with the elephant and thunder, the Dorobo already inhabited the earth when God (the sun, Asista) came to prepare the order of things. And as in many other African myths, the “progress” of the first men is disparaged here. When people set themselves against the other creatures, the original harmony of nature is destroyed and evil enters the world.

  WHEN GOD came to the earth to prepare the present order of things, he found three beings there, the thunder, an elephant, and a Dorobo, all living together.

  One day the thunder remarked: “What sort of a creature is this man? If he wishes to turn over from one side to the other when he is asleep, he is able to do so. If I wish to turn over, I have first of all to get up.”

  The elephant said: “It is the same with me; before I can turn over from one side to the other, I have to stand up.”

  The thunder declared that he was afraid of the man and said he would run away and go to the heavens. At this the elephant laughed and inquired why he was running away, for the man after all was only a small creature. “But he is bad,” the thunder replied, “he can turn over when asleep”; and with that he fled and went to the heavens, where he has remained ever since.

  The man seeing the thunder go away was pleased, and said: “The person I was afraid of has fled. I do not mind the elephant.” He then went to the woods and made some poison into which he dipped an arrow, and having cut a bow, he returned to the kraal, and shot the elephant.

  The elephant wept and lifted his trunk to the heavens, crying out to the thunder to take him up.

  The thunder refused, however, and said: “I shall not take you, for when I warned you that the man was bad, you laughed and said he was small.”

  The elephant cried out again and begged to be taken to heaven, as he was on the point of death.

  But the thunder only replied: “Die by yourself.”

  And the elephant died, and the man became great in all the countries.

  —A. C. Hollis. The Nandi, Their Language and Folklore. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 111–114.

  DOGON

  The First Words

  An agricultural people of Mali and Upper Volta, the Dogon were thought even by their neighbors to be so primitive as to have virtually no sophisticated religious beliefs. It was with considerable surprise, then, that Marcel Griaule, a French ethnologist who had worked among the Dogon for years, finally heard their amazingly complex and profound cosmology from the wise man Ogotemmeli who had been delegated to reveal it.

  While only a short part of the whole myth is recounted here, it serves to demonstrate the rich system of correspondences between the natural order, the social realm, and personal life. Structural similarities abound to the extent that the individual, while still only a part of the whole on one plane, is representative of it on another. In his actions, he thus affects the same cosmic order which he displays, making his life sacred on several levels at once.

  The Dogon envisage creation in several stages, each culminating in a sacred “word” or revelation. The first is nature, a simple but eloquent language expressed in the sounds of grasses covering the nakedness of the earth. The second, an attempt to redeem mankind, concerns the social order and is symbolized by weaving. This word caused men to leave their caves and live with each other in community. The third revelation includes two things: (1) the sacred granary, paradigmatic not only of earthly granaries but also of the world order of creation on the cosmic plane and the digestive system of individuals on the personal level; and (2) the drum, a primary method of communication and symbolic of verbal language and culture.

  These sacred words are the products of various stages of sacred development: the creation of the earth by the god Amma; his frustrated attempt to mate with her and her subseq
uent defilement by incestuous rape; the perfect birth of the Nummo twins, divine creatures of water and light who purify earth and order the creation of the eight ancestors; the expulsion of the ancestors from heaven and the ordering of the natural and social realms of earth. Throughout, the principle of polar opposition is maintained and cherished. Only by clarifying such oppositions does interrelation and further creation result.

  Of particular interest in this regard is the notion of double-sexed souls. All children are both male and female until one sexual orientation is encouraged by the physical removal of the other through circumcision or excision rites. The recessive sex remains as a shadow image, a perception not unlike Jung’s of the anima and animus. Only after such rites is the young man or woman sexually and psychologically ready for a fruitful union.

  OGOTEMMELI, seating himself on his threshold, scraped his stiff leather snuff-box, and put a pinch of yellow powder on his tongue. “Tobacco,” he said, “makes for right thinking.”

  So saying, he set to work to analyse the world system, for it was essential to begin with the dawn of all things. He rejected as a detail of no interest, the popular account of how the fourteen solar systems were formed from flat circular slabs of earth one on top of the other. He was only prepared to speak of the serviceable solar system; he agreed to consider the stars, though they only played a secondary part.

  “It is quite true,” he said, “that in course of time women took down the stars to give them to their children. The children put spindles through them and made them spin like fiery tops to show themselves how the world turned. But that was only a game.”

  The stars came from pellets of earth flung out into space by the God Amma, the one God. He had created the sun and the moon by a more complicated process, which was not the first known to man but is the first attested invention of God: the art of pottery. The sun is, in a sense, a pot raised once for all to white heat and surrounded by a spiral of red copper with eight turns. The moon is the same shape, but its copper is white. It was heated only one quarter at a time. Ogotemmeli said he would explain later the movements of these bodies. For the moment he was concerned only to indicate the main lines of the design, and from that to pass to its actors.

  He was anxious, however, to give an idea of the size of the sun.

  “Some,” he said, “think it is as large as this encampment, which would mean thirty cubits. But it is really bigger. Its surface area is bigger than the whole of Sanga Canton.”

  And after some hesitation he added:

  “It is perhaps even bigger than that.”

  He refused to linger over the dimensions of the moon, nor did he ever say anything about them. The moon’s function was not important, and he would speak of it later. He said however that, while Africans were creatures of light emanating from the fullness of the sun, Europeans were creatures of the moonlight: hence their immature appearance.

  He spat out his tobacco as he spoke. Ogotemmeli had nothing against Europeans. He was not even sorry for them. He left them to their destiny in the lands of the north.

  The God Amma, it appeared, took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him, as he had done with the stars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is the top, and from there stretched out to the south, which is the bottom, of the world, although the whole movement was horizontal. The earth lies flat, but the north is at the top. It extends east and west with separate members like a foetus in the womb. It is a body, that is to say, a thing with members branching out from a central mass. This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe.

  Ogotemmeli ceased speaking. His hands crossed above his head, he sought to distinguish the different sounds coming from the courtyards and roofs. He had reached the point of the origin of troubles and of the primordial blunder of God.

  “If they overheard me, I should be fined an ox!”

  At God’s approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. He cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things for ever; from this defective union there was born, instead of the intended twins, a single being, the Thos aureus or jackal, symbol of the difficulties of God. Ogotemmeli’s voice sank lower and lower. It was no longer a question of women’s ears listening to what he was saying; other, nonmaterial, ear-drums might vibrate to his important discourse. The European and his African assistant, Sergeant Koguem, were leaning towards the old man as if hatching plots of the most alarming nature.

  But, when he came to the beneficent acts of God, Ogotemmeli’s voice again assumed its normal tone.

  God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps of any kind, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the former disorder. Water, which is the divine seed, was thus able to enter the womb of the earth and the normal reproductive cycle resulted in the birth of twins. Two beings were thus formed. God created them like water. They were green in colour, half human beings and half serpents. From the head to the loins they were human: below that they were serpents. Their red eyes were wide open like human eyes, and their tongues were forked like the tongues of reptiles. Their arms were flexible and without joints. Their bodies were green and sleek all over, shining like the surface of water, and covered with short green hairs, a presage of vegetation and germination.

  These spirits, called Nummo, were thus two homogeneous products of God, of divine essence like himself, conceived without untoward incidents and developed normally in the womb of the earth. Their destiny took them to Heaven, where they received the instructions of their father. Not that God had to teach them speech, that indispensable necessity of all beings, as it is of the world-system; the Pair were born perfect and complete; they had eight members, and their number was eight, which is the symbol of speech.

  They were also of the essence of God, since they were made of his seed, which is at once the ground, the form, and the substance of the life-force of the world, from which derives the motion and the persistence of created being. This force is water, and the Pair are present in all water: they are water, the water of the seas, of coasts, of torrents, of storms, and of the spoonfuls we drink.

  Ogotemmeli used the terms “Water” and “Nummo” indiscriminately.

  “Without Nummo,” he said, “it was not even possible to create the earth, for the earth was moulded clay and it is from water (that is, from Nummo) that its life is derived.”

  “What life is there in the earth?” asked the European.

  “The life-force of the earth is water. God moulded the earth with water. Blood too he made out of water. Even in a stone there is this force, for there is moisture in everything.

  “But if Nummo is water, it also produces copper. When the sky is overcast, the sun’s rays may be seen materializing on the misty horizon. These rays, excreted by the spirits, are of copper and are light. They are water too, because they uphold the earth’s moisture as it rises. The Pair excrete light, because they are also light.”

  While he was speaking, Ogotemmeli had been searching for something in the dust. He finally collected a number of small stones. With a rapid movement he flung them into the courtyard over the heads of his two interlocutors, who had no time to bend down. The stones fell just where the Hogon’s cock had been crowing a few seconds before.

  “That cock is a squalling nuisance. He makes all conversation impossible.”

  The bird began to crow again on the other side of the wall, so Ogotemmeli sent Koguem to throw a bit of wood at him. When Koguem came back, he asked whether the cock was now outside the limits of the Tabda
quarter.

  “He is in the Hogon’s field,” said Koguem. “I have set four children to watch him.”

  “Good!” said Ogotemmeli with a little laugh. “Let him make the most of what remains to him of life! They tell me he is to be eaten at the next Feast of Twins.”

  He returned to the subject of the Nummo spirits, or (as he more usually put it, in the singular) of Nummo, for this pair of twins, he explained, represented the perfect, the ideal unit.

  The Nummo, looking down from Heaven, saw their mother, the earth, naked and speechless, as a consequence no doubt of the original incident in her relations with the God Amma. It was necessary to put an end to this state of disorder. The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions. They took ten bunches of these fibres, corresponding to the number of their ten fingers, and made two strands of them, one for the front and one for behind. To this day masked men still wear these appendages hanging down to their feet in thick tendrils.

  But the purpose of this garment was not merely modesty. It manifested on earth the first act in the ordering of the universe and the revelation of the helicoid sign in the form of an undulating broken line.

  For the fibres fell in coils, symbol of tornadoes, of the windings of torrents, of eddies and whirlwinds, of the undulating movement of reptiles. They recall also the eight-fold spirals of the sun, which sucks up moisture. They were themselves a channel of moisture, impregnated as they were with the freshness of the celestial plants. They were full of the essence of Nummo: they were Nummo in motion, as shown in the undulating line, which can be prolonged to infinity.

  When Nummo speaks, what comes from his mouth is a warm vapour which conveys, and itself constitutes, speech. This vapour, like all water, has sound, dies away in a helicoid line. The coiled fringes of the skirt were therefore the chosen vehicle for the words which the Spirit desired to reveal to the earth. He endued his hands with magic power by raising them to his lips while he plaited the skirt, so that the moisture of his words was imparted to the damp plaits, and the spiritual revelation was embodied in the technical instruction.