Call Them by Their True Names

Hannah Arendt has become alarmingly relevant, and her books have been selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism

The Cahuilla were one of the myriad smallish tribes that inhabited the vast area now known as California.

They lived in the western Mojave Desert, and, in the story Lewis sent me, the world begins with darkness and “beautiful, far-away sounds—sounds such as might come from distant singers.” It continues, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—not so unlike the Book of Genesis, until the maternal darkness endeavors to give birth and miscarries twice, then bears twin broth

they fashion the world and all the things in it, the twins argue about whether there should be sickness and death. The brother who wins is worried about overpopulation. The loser abandons the earth in a huff, in his hurry leaving behind some of his creations, including coyotes, palm trees, and flies. The remaining brother becomes such a problem—lusting after his daughter, the moon; giving rattlesnakes poisonous fangs; arming people with weapons they would use against each other—that his creatures have to figure out how to kill him. No one is unequivocally good, starting with the gods.

Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Ohlone people say that Coyote was the first being, and the world was created by him, and by Eagle and by Hummingbird, who laughs at Coyote’s attempts to figure out just where to impregnate his wife. (He’s not always this naïve. In the Winnebago stories from the Great Lakes, Coyote sends his detachable penis on long, sneaky missions in pursuit of penetration, like some drone from the dreamtime.) As the Californian poet Gary Snyder once put it, “Old Doctor Coyote…is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil.” Instead, he’s full of contagious exuberance and great creative force. In another Californian creation myth, the gods argue about procreation: one thinks a man and woman should put a stick between them at night, and it will be a baby when they wake up. The other says that there should be a lot of nocturnal embracing and laughing in the baby-making process.