376 ZUNI CREATION MYTHS. ieth.ann.13 



former has for its chief motive the absolute and faithful reproduction 

 of creative episodes — one may almost say, iudeed, the revivification of 

 the ancient. 



That this is attempted and is regarded as possible by primitive man 

 is not to be wondered at when we consider his peculiar modes of con- 

 ception. I have said of the Zufiis that theirs is a science of appear- 

 ances and a philosophy of analogies. The primitive man, no less than 

 the child, is the most com^jrehensive of observers, because his looking 

 at and into things is not self-conscious, but instinctive and undirected, 

 therefore comprehensive and searching. Unacquainted as he is with 

 rational explanations of the things he sees, he is given, as has been the 

 race throughout all time, to symbolic interpretation and mystic exj)res- 

 sion thereof, as even today are those who deal with the domain of the 

 purely si)eculative. It follows that his organizations are symbolic; 

 that his actions within these organizations are also symbolic. Con- 

 sequently, as a child at play on the floor finds sticks all-sutficient for 

 the personages of bis play-drama, chairs for his houses, and lines of 

 the floor for the rivers that none but his eyes can see, so does the 

 primitive man regard the mute, but to him personified, appliances of 

 his dance and the actions thereof, other than they seem to us. 



I can perhaps make my meaning more clear by analyzing such a con- 

 ception common to the Zuni nund. The Zuni has observed that the 

 corn plant is jointed ; that its leaves sj)ring from these joints not regu- 

 larly, but spirally; that stripped of the leaves the stalk is found to be 

 indented, not regularly at opposite sides, but also spirally; that the 

 matured plant is characterized, as no other plant is, by two sets of 

 seeds, the ears of corn springing out from it two-thirds down and the 

 tassels of seeds, sometimes earlets, at the top; also that these tassels 

 resemble the seed-spikes of the sj)ring-grass or pigeon-grass; that the 

 leaves themselves while hke broad blades of grass are fluted like plumes, 

 and that amongst the ears of corn ever and anon are found bunches of 

 soot; and, finally, that the colors of the corn are as the colors of the 

 woi'ld — seven in number. Later on it may be seen to what extent he 

 has legendized these characteristics, thus accounting for them, and to 

 what extent, also, he has dramatized this, his natural philosophy of 

 the corn and its origin. Nothing in this world or universe having 

 occurred by accident — so it seems to the Zuni mind, — but everything 

 having been started by a personal agency or su2)ernal, he immediately 

 begins to see in these characteristics of the corn plant the traces of the 

 actions of the peoples in his myths of the olden time. Lo! men lived 

 on grass seeds at first, but, as rel.ated in the course of the legends 

 which follow, there came a time when, by the potencies of the gods and 

 the magic of his own i>riests or shamans, man modified the food of first 

 7nen into the food of men's children. It needed only a youth and a 

 maiden, continent and pure, to grasp at opposite sides and successively 

 the blades of grass planted with plumes of supplication, and walking 



