Seven Story Tower by Curtiss Hoffman

Author:Curtiss Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Murngin specifically state that Yurlunggur is the chief of the serpent spirits because he resides at the greatest depth in the pool, and ascends to the greatest height in the sky.

Rainbows in Other Mythological Contexts

Elsewhere in myth, rainbows have a similar significance. In the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh legend, the protagonist must pass the rainbow-girded scorpion-man guardians of the mountains to reach the paradisal isle of Dilmun where the Flood hero resides.28 In Norse myth, the rainbow bridge Bifrost leads from the lower realms to Asgard, where the Aesir (gods) rule and where the dead heroes shed each other’s blood each day and are revived by sacred mead served by demi-goddesses each night.29 Among the Jicarilla Apache, the Sun and the Moon are said to have disappeared through a hole in the sky due to the exaggerated practices of their shamans, and the gods directed the people and animals, whom they differentiated from one another, to construct ladders of rainbow light to reach into the upper, current world. They then differentiated the people into clans, as Satene did in Story Four.30 The Tlingit people of southern Alaska, who, like the Apache, speak an Athabascan language, tell a related story:Two young boys, close friends, were walking in a meadow one night under the full moon. One of them insulted the moon, though the other warned him not to. Suddenly, a strange rainbow descended out of the sky around the first boy, and when his friend looked for him, he had vanished. The moon had taken him. Not knowing what else to do, the second boy took out his bow and arrow and shot at a star. The arrow did not return, so he shot more and more arrows until the dawn, when his arrows formed a ladder leading to the upper world which he climbed. There he obtained the help of a grandmother spirit, who gave him four magical objects. She then sent him on his way to the lodge of the moon. When he reached the moon’s lodge he heard his friend screaming out in pain. He saw his head emerging from the smoke hole. He rescued him, and the angry moon, a gigantic rolling head, pursued them. One by one the boy cast his magical objects in its path to slow it down. Finally, he cast the last object, a small whetstone, and it turned into a cliff so steep that the moon could not climb it, but kept rolling helplessly up and down, again and again. The pair were blessed by the grandmother spirit and returned in safety down the arrow ladder to their village. There, they had been taken for dead, and people were both surprised and overjoyed at their return.31

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.