[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The sun, furthermore, is the moon's wife, and their childrenare the stars; the moon can sometimes turn into a pig.The mythology has not been systematized, and so a number ofversions can be accepted of one event.For example, Biliku, either368 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYin a male or in a female form, made the world and then made aman named Tomo, the first of the human race, who was black,like the present Andamanese, but much taller and bearded.Bilikutaught Tomo how to live and what to eat.And then Tomo had awife, Lady Crab.According to one view, Biliku created LadyCrab after teaching Tomo how to live.According to another,Tomo saw her swimming near his home and called to her; shecame ashore and became his wife.According to still another ac-count, Lady Crab, already pregnant, came ashore and gave birthto several children who became progenitors of the present race.A different series gives us Lady Dove as Tomo's wife; another, themoon who, it will be recalled, is also the husband of the sun.Tomo himself is sometimes the sun.But the reader may recall, too,that in the Andamanese myth already given of Kingfisher's theft offire,* Biliku caused Kingfisher, the fire-bringer, to lose his wings,so that it was he who became the first man.Sir Monitor Lizard also is the first man; and his wife is LadyCivet Cat.In the days before his marriage, and when he had justcompleted his initiation ceremonies, he went into the jungle tohunt pig, climbed up a Dipterocarpus tree, and got caught upthere in some way by his genitals.Lady Civet Cat, seeing himin that sorry plight, released him and the two then marriedand became the progenitors of the Andamanese.17Now the dying and resurrected god of the archaic high civiliza-tions of the Near East, Tammuz-Adonis, for whom the womenwept in the Temple of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8:14) and whoseEgyptian counterpart was Osiris, was actually out hunting a wildboar when he was gored in the loin and rendered impotent; hedescended in death then to the lower world, and was resurrectedonly when the goddess, Ishtar-Aphrodite, whose animal is not in-deed the civet cat but the lion, descended to the underworld andreleased him.How are we to explain this correspondence? Theanswer is to be found in the kitchen middens.Lidio Cipriani in1952 excavated a series of huge Andamanese kitchen middens,which must have been accumulating for a period of some five orsix thousand years.And he found: (1) to a depth of about six* Supra, p.278.,THRESHOLDS OF THE PALEOLI THI C 369inches from the top, European imports, chips of broken bottles,rifle-bullets, pieces of iron, etc.; (2) going deeper for many feet,crab legs that had been used as smoking pipes, the bones of pigs,pottery shards, and well-preserved clam shells; (3) within aboutthree feet from the bottom, no crab-leg pipes, no pig bones, nopottery, and clamshells heavily calcinated, showing that they hadbeen exposed directly to the fire.Conclusion: "The Andamanese,"writes Cipriani, "on their arrival, did not know pottery.Previousto its introduction, food was roasted in the fire or in hot ashes;later, it was boiled in pots.The first Andamanese potteryis of good make, with clay well worked and well burned in thefire.The more we approach the upper strata, the more it undergoesa degeneration.Bones of Sus andamanensis [the Andaman-ese pig] begin to appear later than pottery.They become morefrequent, the more we approach the top levels.The inevitableconclusion would seem to be that the ancient Andamanese knewneither pottery nor the hunting of pigs.It is likely that both pot-tery and a domesticated Sus were introduced by one and the samepeople." 18 Thus, once again, diffusion even here, and regression:regressed neolithic, along with the great neolithic myth of Venusand Adonis, Ishtar and Tammuz, now transformed by the principleof land-nâma * into Lady Civet Cat and Sir Monitor Lizard.The animals most prominent in the tales of the Andamanesehave no social value whatsoever.They are the little neighbors inthe forest, and during the mythological age, when Biliku lived onthe earth, they were of the company of the ancestors.But theywere separated from man by the discovery of fire which is trueenough, since man is protected from the animals at night by hisfires, which they fear.Some of their markings, in fact, were causedby painful contact with the first fire.Pleasant little animal tales of this kind are known to all thehunting and food-gathering peoples of the world, and are, in fact,spontaneously invented even by children.I should think it safe toassume, therefore, that the category is of immense antiquity.Theplots, however, enacted by the various local stock-companies offamiliar beasts and birds, greatly vary; and so, if we are to take* Cf.supra, pp.199-200.370 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYseriously the warning in the case just cited of the rescue of SirMonitor Lizard by Lady Civet Cat, we shall have to rememberthat though the genre of the animal tale is certainly of paleolithicage, the cultural influences represented in the plots may be derivedfrom centers of civilization of a very much higher order than any-thing visible in the local scene would have led one to expect.Among the Andamanese a number of the animals used forfood are represented as having originally been men.A canoe up-set and its occupants became turtles; Lady Civet Cat turned someof the ancestors into pigs; some of the pigs jumped into the seaand became dugongs.The animals killed and eaten, clearly, havea different psychological import for the islanders from those thatare simply man's neighbors in the woods.One thinks of Róheim'sobservation, quoted earlier, that "whatever is killed becomesthe father." The Andamanese rites of initiation are concernedlargely with protecting the initiate against the powers of these foodanimals [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]