Great Myths and Legends: Hero Twins of the Americas: Myths of Origin, Duality, and Vengeance

right well welcome everyone and thank you for making it out in the rain I know it's kind of a gross day but glad you're here um so today we're gonna be talking about myths from both mezzo and North America I'm gonna be focusing on North America and Simon on Mesoamerica but to get us started we're actually going to start with Romanian historian and philosopher Mirka le a de who spent his career trying to figure out some of the most fundamental aspects of the human belief systems and in his work he emphasizes things like the importance of the center and like the importance of duality things like good and evil now and later the sacred and the profane light and dark past and present I could go on and on and on and he focuses on these things and in doing so he recognizes that twins regularly show up in the iconography of places all over the world as symbols of this sort of Universal dichotomy so for example we've got up now um objects from the pen museum collections I basically went in did a quick search of pen Newseum collections for twins and found objects from all over the place up at the top we have 1000 year old fragments of gauze poncho showing twin figures from Pacha comic Peru down at the bottom here a 2,000 year old Nubian statue from Egypt showing male twins next one of this one series of a popular print created in the first half of the 20th century showing Chinese Buddhist deities ho ho and ere Shen twin gods of harmony figurines from our in Iraq showing the twin gods perhaps as much as 6,000 years old and a 19th century painting from Calcutta India showing Rama and brought by route identical twin male characters so this widespread notion of twins in collections such as ours and other museums all over the world shows that this type of character plays a really essential role in the symbolic systems of the entire world but today we're going to focus in on the iteration of this twin story that exists in the Americas all over the Americas in both mezzo and North America and I should point out now that it exists in South America as well but we're stretching it to fit all of into an hour already so we're going to see what we can do um so before we tell you this story I wanted to start just by very simply introducing the types of evidence that we're going to be drawing on today and basically the types of evidence that are available to archaeologists to access these sorts of fundamental stories and belief systems the first and perhaps the most straightforward way of course is to access these things through the written records of the ancient people themselves for example here we've got images of The Dresden codex this is the oldest known book written in the Americas it consists of 39 sheets a flattened fig bark covered in a lime paste and then inscribed with highly accurate say astronomical tables almanacs ritual schedules it's about eight inches tall nearly twelve feet long when you stretch it out and cover it on both sides with about 350 glyphs and associated images this codex provides an absolutely enormous amount of information about the belief systems of the people who created it however the hero twins are not featured too prominently though they are referenced in this one glyph that I pulled up here thus much of our knowledge about this myth in the Maya world has to come from other sources so where do we get this information many of these sources that we draw on date later in time when Europeans make contact with the indigenous people of the Americas and begin to record many of their stories one of the most famous of these is on the ethnographic manuscript is the Popol Vuh a corpus of mythological and historical narratives from post the post classic Maya in Guatemala's western highlands the Popol Vuh was recorded by the Dominican priest Francisco Jimenez and you're going to hear a lot more about it today it's famous for the telling of the Maya creation myth as well as it's classically epic tales of the hero twins which we're going to focus on so in the Maya world we can turn to these sorts of documents to help us clarify and expand upon the written record of pre-columbian people however in the US and in Canada where we don't have any of those pre-columbian written records we have to use ethno historic documents created by the early French Spanish and English explorers to help us provide any written record of the belief systems of these early people as Simon we'll discuss a great deal ethno historic records such as these are heavily biased by the people who are writing them down so imposing sort of a Western point of view on to indigenous stories so we still need to move past these ethno historic documents as well and in order to augment these limited and very biased records many archeologists turn to ethnography ethnography meaning the stories and belief systems that were that are being told in indigenous communities today many of which are related to the stories and belief systems that were characterizing the prehistoric populations in these places as well by speaking to the descendant communities today as migrant graphic research aimed at documenting these cultural traditions has taken place in a digit America from the very early period here's an image from 1916 up until today now we're going to go just one step further in both places where written records and places that lack them entirely are concerned the material record is absolutely essential to really understanding these myths stories and histories as they were told by past peoples so here we're going to come to the main focus of our talk to archaeology and iconography so the material record of course is accessed through archaeology through the excavation of sites through looking at assemblages of features and of artifacts and then importantly for our talk today um based on the iconographic images that are inscribed upon many of those objects the study of iconography so literally meaning picture writing in archaeology focuses on the identification description and interpretation of the content of images rather than just their style so not necessarily interested in how the images are depicted but what is the content that is actually being depicted much of the iconographic corpus that we're going to be talking about today is figural meaning that it shows both human and non-human figures engaged in various activities surrounded by indications of the world that they live in and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about how the hero twins prominent art figure prominently in the iconography of both mezzo and North America so just to provide you with one really quick example of what an archaeologist does when they're trying to use iconography to understand what is being depicted on a particular object let me show you one very brief example this the design of a Mississippian shell gorget found in the American South on it there are a number of in size designs and looking at it at first it may be hard to imagine that it's depicting something other than just a design but rather some sort of scene in a story but in fact it does so to begin to understand this story we have to start by pulling this gorget apart into its various meaningful pieces so here we go at the bottom with the various pieces that are independently meaningful on this gorget now doing this is not necessarily straightforward you may have looked at this and figured out some sort of different way of dividing these up than what um what we that work in the American South do but the reason is you have to know a particular vocabulary you have to understand the words that people are using or the images that people are using to put these stories together and that vocabulary can only be built up through repeated exposure much like learning any language would be so here we've got a series of symbols down at the bottom we have a very simple cross thought to represent the center around that we have a sort of stylized Sun thought to represent the Sun in the above world then we've got this sort of swirly Ford four-cornered motif thought to represent the four corners of this earth on which humans and animals walk around and then we've got four creatures four birds that that are living somewhere within this scene so based on this study of iconography you can take things apart into their different pieces and then add dimensions of the story back together that we're not there before so in essence taking a two-dimensional object and making it three-dimensional by adding space recognizing what exists in this world what exists in the above world or even adding a fourth dimension by adding time and you'll hear some of those um those messages today um so you'll see Simon and I do this process many times today but the vocabulary that Simon is working with is much more complex than mine he has a much better understanding of it because of the amount of work that's been done on the iconography of Mesoamerica so with that I'm going to hand it over to him and I'm going to ask for your patience when you get to my section in understanding that I'm still slowly but surely learning this language okay thank you thank you okay so to discover the hero twins to delve into this particular kind of task we need to start in a particular place this is the site of issue chain it's its representative here of the highlands of Guatemala so this is volcanic islands it's not a lot of people's image of Central America and it's not very hot it's very often rainy and cold but it's the place where there was a great flowering of Maya culture towards the end what we call the Postclassic period and the 500 years or so before the Spanish arrived now the highlands are our home today to probably the most traditional people in the entire Americas my people have preserved more of their traditions more of their ideas more of their ritual practices than just about anywhere else this is a ceremony I was at in 2006 there is an altar and the various spirits and gods are call to and offerings made it's very different it's not a replica it's not an exact translation of what would have happened in the pre-columbian past it's an ongoing tradition or which is evolving all the time and they're really in the distance you can see the site of or the town of TG cast an angle teacher caster Lango is the center where the hero twins is made real for us without what happened there in the 18th century we would have extreme difficulty in putting any of this stuff together now we are thankful to francisco jimenez he was a parish priest who came to teach acatenango in 1701 and sometime between 1701 and 1704 he made a copy of an a Maya document now this document was not wasn't made of hieroglyphs it wasn't of drawn pictures it was already in the Roman alphabet and it had been made by indigenous people indigenous clerics in we actually know very precisely somewhere between 1554 and 1558 so these were first-generation people these are people who had grown up in an indigenous Maya world but were now enculturated were now had learned the Roman script we're actually working for the church and what they did was set down their own history of the world very much in reaction and somewhat in resistance to what was being taught in the church itself it's really a remarkable document it was scrawled away it was looked after it was careful but jimenez who spoke excellent keychain Maya which is the language of this particular part of God Amalia Highlands and managed to see it and they trusted him enough that he was able to produce a copy he made his own translation so it's written in Roman alphabet but in keachi language and he produced a Spanish version that particular version is now lost it used to be in the university in san carlos in not that far away but it's disappeared fortunately he made his own second copy and that has survived it's now in Chicago now the Popol Vuh add all these multiple editions suggest has become something of a sort of central religious motif not just for the ancient Maya but for indigenous people in the Americas and it's often called the Maya Bible a great epic and myth and those things that's some extent true but we have to understand a number of different things about it one is it was written not from a pure perspective but one that was already inculcated by Christian ideas and it had very particular purposes very particular political purposes the first hardest half is very mythological but the second half is really about the lineages about the kings about the Lords about the nobility of the key chain man and it tries to establish their authority so the text itself is as I say written in keychain Maya and then with a Spanish translation it is quite you know relatively long document and we're only going to be concentrating on the parts that relate to the hero twins and this is not a traditional breakdown of it this is just my breakdown for the sake of this this lecture and it falls very into three parts there's the backstory and this is where we find out about the parents are of the hero twins they have very similar names and they live on the surface of the earth they're already deities and they're called down into the underworld they play ball they're skilled ball game players and they're forced to face the underworld Lords not just in playing the game but also the series of trials a series of tests and very very quickly they fall down they actually fail the tests they have to go to the house of darkness with two cigars and they're told that they have to keep them alight all night the cigars are already lit so you can see there's not really very much time surprise surprise by the time the morning comes the cigars are burned out they failed the test and they're sacrificed one brother at this point somehow disappears from the story all together and the father of hero twins is cut into pieces and buried in the middle of a ball court now this is as you can imagine it's not really the end of the story so what happens is that a tree is grown up or and some versions or some tailings of the story a head his severed head is put into the tree now this tree this fruit magically come to life it had been a dead in barren tree and the fruit are both fruit and they look like his face and in fact these are homonyms in my languages a young beautiful daughter of one of the death gods happens to go by the tree and the fruit talks to her he seduces her he ultimately spits into his hand which is a metaphor for semen and she is impregnated and becomes pregnant she has to escape the death lords are going to be very very angry when they discover that she is pregnant and indeed they are they order her sacrifice but through various kind of magical means and through animals that help her out she escapes and she follows their instructions to climb up back to the surface of the earth on the surface of the earth she lives with her grandmother she has to persuade her to were a cranky old woman and she's not at all interested in this woman she's never met who claims that she's carrying her grandchildren but eventually she does persuade her and the boys grow up with their twins they have a twin brother set as well those are people that they have to kind of battle against instead of childhood years they become ball players they are maize growers they do various magical things but the first really big test is when they take on seven macaw seven macaw is a giant bird a bird who claims to be the Sun and the moon he is a false son he's very arrogant he's he's always boasting about his riches and all the jewels that he owns and in fact his body is made up of jewels and to some extent so they really resent this arrogance and they decide to take him down and they use a blowgun shot to hit him in the face disable him and then when he tries to recover they use false medicine to destroy his power so that's one of the great evil forces that they've eradicated they next moved to his two sons this is si Buckner who is basically a huge metaphor for the surface of the earth he's part crocodile he's part fish they trick him and they manage to turn him into stone cabrakan is another brother another son of the great macaw and then poison him so this is really about eradicating the earth from big monsters because ultimately there will be human beings which don't exist I can try if they can turn me up a little bit that might help as well yes actually it's a voice mic so it's not to do with how close I am so having succeeded against these two great sets of monsters in the real world on the surface world they find themselves called down into the underworld by the same death gods that have sacrificed their father and they face the same challenges they have to go to the house of darkness and keep those cigars alight but they play a trick they managed to get fireflies to sit on the end of their cigars and make them appear as if they've been a light or light they go to the house of Jaguars where they're expected to be eaten but instead they bring bones with them and make the Jaguars completely happy eating bones a bit like dogs everything by each day they're playing the death Lords at the ball game what we're seeing here and pretty much every day is a tie certainly the the hero twins are not so good that they can beat these excellent supernatural players and then the very last night of this series they have to sleep over in the house of bats the house of mouse is full of vampires and they're particularly nasty vampires because they don't just drink your blood they cut off your head very very dangerous are they magically are there they're there great talent as a blow gunners this is the weapon that they've used to strike the great bird and they climb inside their blowgun to wait out the night what happens unfortunately is in the morning they look out one brother looks out to try and see if the dawn has arrived when they'll be safe it hasn't quite arrived at bat comes down and cuts off his head naturally this being a magical story what happens is the head becomes the ball and the ball is used in the ball game until they find more trickery and magic to get it back so by now we're down here through the trials in the games and we're on to sacrifice and resurrection they realize they can't defeat the Lords of death a ball game so they faked their own death they willingly submit to their own sacrifice the Lords of death are delighted they've really been spending days and days and days trying to get rid of these irritating guys and what they do is they grind their bones into powder into meal and they throw it into a river now in a little bit like a kind of sped up version of human evolution the meal turns into fish and the fish turn into animals that climb out of the river and they're reconstituted in order to get their own back in order to wreak revenge on the death Lords they have to impersonate somebody else they have to wear masks and they pretend they're entertainers what they do is they walk around the underworld and find a dog and then kill it and then they put the head back on the dog and it comes back to life it's a great trick they become famous for this and ultimately the death gods are imploring them they're begging them to come and do their tricks so they come and they burn down the palace of the underworld and then build it all up again they even take one brother takes the other and kills him cuts him into pieces and then puts him back together again at this point because the death goes up beside themselves with enthusiasm they distance is a fantastic thing and they volunteer to the cut to pieces and put back together again and as you might guess they decide that maybe they won't do that and instead revealing who they really are they kill the Lords of death and not restore them at this point they can go back to the ball court and they can resurrect their father and they bring him back to life and then in the story that's in the Popol Vuh one brother turns into the Sun and the other turns into the moon and they rise up into the sky okay so this is the story that the Popol Vuh provides us with it's a skeleton it contains core elements but if something was written down in 1554 after many many changes that happened in my society so the trick what we're doing today as archaeologists iconographer x' pig refers trying to sort out what this story meant and how it worked in the deep past so we find something like this this is a image from a classic Maya vessel which was probably from about 6 to 700 AD and you can see the head in the tree the same kind of head which gives forth the sputum which this bit which inseminates the the underworld beauty and that sort of sets off kind of chain of reactions of looking at different images and making sense of them and because I'm telling the story kind of chronologically we will kind of nip around a little bit but I want to start here by showing the my amazed God here he is he's beautiful and he is the inner he's the analogous figure to the Father in the Popol Vuh he'd never describes him as the maize God but it's it's very clear that maize is what this whole story is about he is in the water and he is been closed by these underworld women so this is his his spouse and her sisters and then with it we get these two extra figures close up on them one of them is sort of very human the other is sort of partly animal he has this this Jaguar Pelt around his mouth and through various means we can reconstruct how the Classic Maya version of these people was put together the two brothers in the Popol Vuh he's called una poo but in the classic period he's called Hoonah howl and they both mean one Lord how paths being the word for Lord is also than add a sign so he's embedded into the calendar if we go to his brother so when I was basically the prototype Lord he's the prototype King his brother is spelunky in the Popol Vuh but in the classic period his name was something like yeah balloon he's also part of the calendar because he is the head variant for the number nine and whereas we go back we can see that the Diagnostics for hula how is this spot in particular there's a few other things but the spot is a big one and for Josh balloon or spelunky it's this wild animal clothing and animal skin so one brother seems to be the the Lord of the cities the other is the Lord of the forest he's the Lord with the closest association with animals and we have a number of characters that we begin to recognize from the popul Vuh we have the big bird the bird who has carries all these jewels and big displays on many many vessels and going right back into the pre-classic era which would is before 200 AD so let's say from 400 to 200 400 BC to 200 AD and we have the blow gunning scene this is a early classic vessel it's a double cylinder we see the same bird which we call generally the principal bird deity and both brothers we have who know how with the blowgun and we have Josh balloon who is sort of tempting him with a piece of fruit he's sort of come luring him I think and then that the shot goes out a little bit of a close-up so we can see who know how's face interesting with and this is a bus dealer too so here we see the bird who's kind of pointing down and we see the two brothers and here we see a fruit tree in fact if I read just from the Popol Vuh it says at length seven macaw the bird perched on the Nance tree which is kind of round fruit to feed was shot hoola Pooh directed a pellet straight from his blowgun into his jaw seven macaw cried out sailing over the top of the tree and landing on the ground so this is pretty much you know there's a stop frame animation going on here and it's interesting to think that this is from around 300 BC this next scene which is ostensibly the same thing although we actually see the blowgun again is from around 700 AD so already in the deep mire past we have a thousand years of religious tradition because of the hieroglyphs we can actually read this we know this is M Xiong this is the descent from the sky indeed here we see the bird coming out of the sky falling out of the tree who know how with his spots and then back at Ed's arpa again in this deep time in the pre-classic we find not only this part with some the part that a crucial part of the Popol Vuh when they actually attack the bird is that their first attempt fails and the bird grabs hold of Hoonah poo and cuts his arm off and so when the archaeologists first saw the standing figure here with this spare arm up with the bird and this stump issuing out blood it was very clear that here again is the origin of this particular story we see it again in the late classic so around again around 700 AD here is on who know how and here is the bird and we have a nice little text here it says that chuck who Cobb was chopped his hand and you can see here it looks a little bit like damage but it isn't this actually is a stump here it's the severed hand of Hoonah poo now all these versions we've seen are with the principal bird deity but there's another version of this deity which is a macaw which is much more consistent with what the poeple who says because he calls the bird is called seven macaw but you see the same magical wings which basically identify this desert and as a McCall we see continuity so this is through this is now into the color Postclassic period this is the Madrid codex and it was probably painted somewhere around 14 or 1500 and again the macaw with the arm in its mouth here - this is excavated stucco facade at the site of copan here it's really very much under excavation but here in the museum a replica has put the pieces back together again so this is it looks rather different we have the course the macaw head but we have these miniature macaw heads at the ends of these feathers and then we have the subgiant head in the center and you can see just about hanging out of that mouth is the arm and in fact the arm is so completed even got the dot to tell you that we're talking about who know how now the bird is I cannot graphically is rather strange this is not a male thing this is something that comes from central Mexico and specifically the iconography of tear to work on now for a long time we've really seen no tangible connections between the mythology of the Maya and the mythology of central Mexico and the more recent findings to do with this story are bringing them the two of them together so take two a car apart from the famous vastness its architecture has many many compounds full of beautiful murals the number excavated is a tiny percentage there is generations of work to be done at a to work on all of which I think will reveal amazing information and amazing iconography they've already discovered Maya hieroglyphs painted on the walls at a to account where you have some sort of in clay you have some sort of group of people using it from the central Maya lowlands and some of these murals at Tittel con show a bird and it's a macaw and it has the same Accor heads along its wings just out of the picture here is a blow gunner and up here you see the tree and it's a bird coming out of the tree well that seems a little bit suggestive but nothing like I suggested us this very very new find so this has been very recently published by my colleagues in Denmark and it's burned from the same complex where there's other paintings came from and you can just see well again there cuz the macaw heads everywhere but this thing up here is the telling thing it's the bloody arm this is the first time that we've seen Teta we can express the same myth and show its can Mesoamerican identity with the Maya to wrap up this sort of pan Nez Americanism of course Etowah con is collapsed at around 550 ad so this is classic period but into the post classic we find the same kind of thing this is the Borgia codex which is ostensibly an Aztec document that says this is from very very close to the time the Spanish conquest and a tiny detail in it shows you the macaw with the arm so even though again there's not one single reference in this really quite long volume to that myth this gives the game away that they knew about it um into the underworld we enter the next part which is where we have now descended and we're going to play ball with the Lords of death Kings this is a king from the site of Naranjo can dress as Hoonah how so of course the spots are the giveaway again the ball game yoke so this is part of the equipment this is where you take the blow from these very large balls this is not football this is not something you use your feet in fact your feet are a foul you're only allowed to use your hips your elbows and your chest and the heavy yoke is basically to protect protect your most vulnerable organs so here's a king in this sort of death death iconography or crossbones he is enacting the role of Hoonah how in the death ball game but in fact most of the time rather ironically Kings decide to play the other side they triumph they play the Lords of death rather than the good guys so here from Coppin you've had these captions that tell us this is the death lord here but it's also it says uber wash up Allahu nubuck our wheel he is one of the great kings of copán and he is dressed as the lord of death and over here we have who know how playing him a ball they're playing a very very heavy ball because this is solid stone the mythological ball presumably and this even more beautiful example comes from a tiny tiny site called Esperanza but it's it's very likely had been dragged from another site called chin cultic right across in the western highlands of Guatemala actually into Mexico and here you see this is the death god again these shell iconography as part of his doing and it tells us that is the king and just in the ball there you see better in the drawing is the head of Horner how so this is the part of the story where the head has been chopped off by the killer bats and is now being played with later on his brother will find his conniving means of having a rabbit distract them by pretending to be a ball and they stick his head back on all this kind of mythic stuff so we're leading up to the kind of grand finale which is the defeat are of the Lords of death this is a vessel which is very famous one which is now in Princeton we do see a roll out although these are photographs that Justin Kerr took by using a camera which wraps images unwraps images and what we see I think the drawing is slightly clearer one of the great lords of the underworld we don't know his real name we call him God el he sits with this very fancy cape and with an owl his headdress for the feathers he has lots of very nice young ladies to share time with and he's out he's really not aware of things you can see that this lady is trying to knit this one on the ankle just to make her aware that something bad is happening outside what's happening is a sacrifice scene two characters with axes are taking this death God you know because these darkness signs are with this sort of tail this of a serpent tail comes out and they're beheading in this appears to be one of the executions and for a long time there was a controversy really about what was the the meaning of this scene and I think I think Justin was right in arguing that this these are the twins and they are masked because they are the this is the period where they're the entertainers and they're now taking their revenge in fact I can say that we have proof positive of that this is another vessel which more recently came to light a drawing again makes it a little bit clearer and it's it is a fussy scene so let's break it up here we see the same character who's being sacrificed there's that serpent II tail fin that comes out he has death iconography but his chest has been split open because someone has extracted his heart through his abdomen so that's one death Lord out of the way the other one the main king of the underworld got el the one who wears the fancy cape and the hat and the jewels he's being stripped naked and the brothers who are now perfectly identifiable as the two brothers are disrobing and casting his stuff aside so this is their overturning of that underworld rule so what happens next another complex scene which simplifies slightly you see both brothers and they have little pots that they're inverting and out is coming snakes and these snakes are representative of water and what they're doing is they're watering the earth down here for what end well because they are bringing their father back to life and through the surface of the earth represented here as a turtle break through the maize God and this of course is great metaphor the metaphor for the cycling of the seasons of the new chute coming out of the ground he's covered in jewels and green feathers which are all the leaves all the foliage of the maize plant and you see the pot here very openly being used to water him one last episode we don't understand we have you know it's for the sake of talk one puts together a coherent story but in fact there are lots and lots of loose ends at some point the main God and who know how come to the court of the sky ruler and make some sort of presentation to him the sky ruler is a complicated character because he is also the great bird he is the bird who they've eradicated in another another creation or another land so we're still working on trying to pull this back into common sense and hopefully over time reading the glyphs and understand the iconography will do that and this is the Meijer section I will pass it over to Megan for the next section so I'm now going to sort of move us northward into what is now the United States and Canada and try and weigh the evidence for this myth in those locations and Simon just said for the sake of a talk we try and put together coherent narrative well I'm going to say I'm going to do my very best job to do that but we are much further behind in understanding the details of the iconography of the hero twins in North America but for sake of argument I'm going to start off with probably the clearest cut evidence for the North American hero twin myth and this comes from the membres region marked here on the map just there in southwestern New Mexico as you can see this is just across the border from Mexico so we're not terribly far from the regions that we were just discussing from about 800 AD to about 1150 ad people in this region we're creating these beautiful black on white bowls many of which are depicted up here and most common they're depicting animals and geometric designs but around AD 1000 figural art becomes a majorly huge portion of the iconography on membres bowls by interpreting this iconography scholars have started to put together sort of a series of bowls that seem to depict the hero twins story in a way that very closely follows the hero twins story that Simon just told us about um now I should point out here that as in the North American archaeologist I tend to get very frustrated and annoyed when we try and claim Mesoamerican connections as the meaning behind all of the major cultural changes in North America but here we've got some evidence for it that goes beyond just our assumptions about what native North American people may have been able to do and that is that about at the same time around 81,000 we see the appearance of macaw feathers and in particular these beautiful objects made out of brightly colored feathers that would not have been available in this particular region so here we've got independent evidence beyond just the presence of the hero twins that there is Mesoamerican contacts happening around 81,000 between those people living in the moon base region and those people living further south in Mexico so let's very briefly take a look at the hero twins as it's told through these Mimbres bowls after the birth of the twins and much of this is going to sound familiar to you they're brought to the surface of the earth and the grandmother here is shown with the twins perched on a burden basket probably representing the fact that it is now her burden to raise these twins in membres art the twins are usually depicted dualistic aliy one is larger the other smaller one is right-handed the other left-handed one is slightly more masculine the other slightly more feminine here the larger right-handed twin carries a sunflower perhaps as he was designated to become the Sun and then the left-handed twin carries a moon flower perhaps because he was designated to become the moon as in the mine story the twins go on to many trials during which they must prove their strength in their ingenuity here the larger right-handed twin is fighting against the seven macaw or the great macaw and this is supposed to depict I believe me I recognize this looks nothing like him a call however the thing that convinced everyone that this is probably what was being shown here is the fact that one of the twins arms is shown inside the macaws mouth without its hand likely recognizing the fact that the hand was ripped off by this particular trial in this next portrait um the twins are shown together reunited once more and in particular we think that what this one is showing is the reunite reuniting of this twin with his arm so they're pictured side-by-side without their interior arms to emphasize the fact that the right-handed twin has his left arm back in this picture so they've managed to get his arm back at this point in the story after retrieving the arm the twins must go on to fight the sons of the great macaw and here we've got them fighting a particularly monstrous creature that matches that description of a mix between a fish and an alligator um this fits very well there are series of other bowls that show them fighting other monsters that may also fit in with the story but for the sake of brevity I'm not going to show you all of them here um in the underworld after they leave the surface of the earth they go to the underworld they're set forth for a number of other trials those that were also undergone by their brother and/or by their father in their uncle in previous times and one of those was the task of smoking in this particular tale it appears that what they were able to do in order to keep their cigar lit through the entire night was to attach macaw feathers right here those bright red feathers that I just showed to the end making it look as though it was still lit in the same way that they used fireflies to do that in the story that Simon told us so in one final scene the left-handed twin deck decapitates his brother but this beheading is as you learned a sleight-of-hand performance and in this particular instance we see that the lifeline between these two brothers is still there thus allowing the brother to be brought back to life here the Decapitator twin wears a mask depicting probably a horned serpent of some sort and this is an extremely rare element on membres painted bowls but one that has parallel motifs more common in Mesoamerican iconography and thus the presence of sort of this moat 'if the hero twins myth more generally and of course those macaw feathers we have reason to believe that there was actual connection between Mesoamerica and the membres region at this time so this still begs the question why is it that people in the members region were so willing to accept this myth so willing to set aside the myths of their own culture and accept a Mesoamerican myth when it is brought into their region and one of the best explanations for this currently is that the membres people would not have been particularly unfamiliar with the ideas that were being told in the hero myths story and particularly with the themes of monster slaying the themes of vengeance for a killed relative the themes of duality in them in the twins themselves um and thus they were quickly able to accept these things and sort of bring them into their already established belief system and one of the reasons that we really believe this um isn't that the twins figure very prominently in the mythology of the de neige or the Navajo people who are located around the Four Corners region not that far north of where the membres people were so the hero twins figure the most prominently in the de neige origin story and this is where people first enter the world on which they live today and they find it covered in water and completely overrun by monsters the first woman to give birth in this world gives birth to twins who turn out to be incredibly powerful and are charged with going out on adventures to rid the world of these various monsters as you can see from these pictures the twins are still very huge portions of the modern iconographic motifs used by Danai artists today in things like storybooks things like baskets also in ceramic motifs um in this particularly modern riff on the hero twin story um the boys who are said to follow the trail of the rainbow throughout their adventures it's always a piece of the rainbow that shows back up and tells them where to go next and how to defeat their current monster here they are waiting impatiently for the rainbow to swing by and pick them up again so as you can see this is currently something that is very very prominent in Denee mythology but for the rest of this talk I want to focus on the fact that the hero twins myth is incredibly widespread in North America and in no way isolated to the south West where we do believe we had contact with Mesoamerican populations stories of adventuring twins abound and ethno historic record of native groups from throughout the Great Plains people like the Hidatsa the Ricker Arapaho the Midwest groups like the Ho Chunk in the IOA the South the Caddo and the Cherokee and the northeast deer coin groups the specifics of this myth vary dramatically from tribe to tribe which makes my job here really difficult but overall many of these themes do tie these myths together and indicate both similarities with the Mesoamerican story and some important differences the North American iteration and you're just going to have to hold off on the pictures for a second while I tell you the story because we didn't have a whole lot of iconography to depict this portion of the story but the North American iteration concerns a pair of magical twins who were born from their pregnant mother when she was killed by a monster while their father is away often if the father is portrayed as human he's off hunting if he's portrayed as divine then he has returned to the divine realm upon their birth the twins are separated in some versions one twin was never known um period by his relatives because one was born normally where the other was born magically from the afterbirth that was tossed away after the birth of his brother in other versions the twins were separated as their mother's killer left one behind to be found by the relatives and took the other and discarded him either out in the woods or in a local on spring or Creek but regardless of all of these details one boy grew up civilized and the other grew up wild something that should sound familiar to you from the Mayan myth um these are often portrayed as being the the wild twin is often portrayed is being raised by water creatures because he was thrown in the spring and these boys have many different names and depending on which group you're talking about they translate to any number of things but the most common themes are something like village boy and wild boy or Lodge boy and thrown away so I'll be using those terms interchangeably throughout this to describe these twins so eventually the twins are reunited when thrown away decides that he wants to come find his brother while their father is away however he always chooses to disappear immediately before the father comes however eventually what a Lodge boy or village boy decides that he's going to tell his brother or tell his father that his brother has been coming to visit him um when he does in some tellings of the story the father develops a plan to determine if wild boy is in fact his son in other stories he's just determined to figure out whether the boys are worthy of the special powers that their unusual birth bestowed upon them and then in final tellings the father knows that wild boy is his son and he and village boy concoct some sort of plan to capture him and domesticate him to bring him back to his family after the boys are reunited and become part of the same family once again they're given special tools and weapons of great power these are often represented as bows and arrows though occasionally shields and Spears are also used and despite being reunited they always keep their dualistic nature so one is sometimes portrayed as good and the other evil one is more wild one is more civilized one is larger one is smaller but together they go on any variety of adventures to rid the world of monsters and to avenge the original death of their mother showing again clear connections to both the DNA stories and the Mayan myth I don't have time to go into all of these various adventures um but I would do want to point out that various feats are chart that they're charged with our scene is very similar to those that are depicted in the Mayan myth so for example there are charged with battling giant animals they are charged with smoking a pipe without inhaling the smoke they're charged with defeating godlike creatures in a game of chunky the North American version of the ballgame they're charged with killing themselves in reanimating themselves through special magic on and on and on in the end the boys win their final battle which allows them to bring their mother back and they rejoin their father to become a complete family once again in only instances where the mother is not in the only instances where the mother has not brought back to life she's brought back instead as a corn plant so again very clear connections to the Mayan myth the hero twins seem to learn loom very large an ethnographic record of North American myths um and that's where all of this information that I've just provided you with comes from but the real question becomes can we trace how long these myths have been standing in these communities and to do that we have to turn back to the archeology self and in recent years archeologists have kind of settled this question finding evidence that the hero twins story dates well before the period of contact with any external groups be they in Mesoamerica or in the southwest in the eastern United States and I'd like to spend the rest of my time showing you just a few of these examples in this first example um we have a limestone tablet called the thrustin tablet found in Sumner County Tennessee I'm going to overlay a drawing of this here just to make it a little bit easier to see so what we have going on here are a series of scenes and as I was talking about at the beginning with the iconographic record we have to sort of pull those scenes apart to understand what is happening what we think is being shown in this tablet is the very early instances of the hero twins meeting one another once again and then being granted their special powers and those weapons so here in the first scene we've got the two twins and Simon pointed out a lot of things that allow you to identify the twins we have those here as well one is often depicted with lines on his face the other with some sort of star sun symbol one with this central circle on his belly and then the wild twin is portrayed is wearing an animal skin where the domesticated twin of the civilized twin is just depicted wearing more normal clothing so here we believe that the twins are greeting one another the extra arms there in the middle are probably a sign of emotion where they're going up to sort of meet in a high-five life gesture later in this story we see the two twins independently going through their tests their tests of strength to see if they're worthy of the weapons that they that they will be given and here we've got one twin potentially battling with some sort of creature over here he's holding a shield while the other twin in the background is holding a spear appearing to have already been given his implements um worthy of his power in the other scene on here we see the opposite twin undergoing his test here it's the test of smoking perhaps indicated by him sitting inside this enclosure with a pipe while his brother is outside already having his bows and arrows and all of his weapons so what we have here um is a series of images carved onto one stone that seems to tell a small portion of the hero myth as it is preserved in the ethnographic record of eastern North America so in order to get the other pieces and to start to piece together this myth we have to turn to other sites and I'm going to show you just two very quick examples from rock art sites in eastern North America um this first scene is from the Gottshall rock shelter in Iowa County Wisconsin and this is very close to where I went to college and was kind of my introduction to the idea of the hero twins in North American iconography at all I should say that this this guy over here is actually the primary character that we have managed to figure out the story of so if I were to give this talk only on North America we'd be talking about this guy over here this this character of red porn rather than about the twins who we think are depicted over here because we're just slowly but surely putting together their story but there are things you can see here that tie these guys together you've got the central circular symbol you've got the fact that they're dressed independently you've got these sun or star symbols and you've got lines on the face um in this particular telling we believe that red horn here is meant to actually represent the twins father I want you to take note of the lines running down his um his body here and then we've got other references on this same panel to aspects of the story that we aren't quite able to tie together but likely represent things like the pipe smoking challenge that they undergo further south in Warren County Missouri we have picture cave and this is an enormous um sort of panorama of rock art but I want to point out just two aspects um here we've got this same striped figure off by himself probably representing red horn in this particular case someday I'll come back and give you a whole talk about this guy he's wearing this small human head as an earring um he who has who wears human heads as earrings as a character that we understand very well in eastern North American iconography but he was viewed as having given birth to twins are having fathered twin sons and those twin sons we think are depicted over here in picture cave you can see they're carrying their bows and arrows and they're wearing their elaborate headdresses but perhaps one of the most interesting and the most compelling stories to me comes from the site of Cahokia particularly one mound at Cahokia Mounds 72 so you may be slightly familiar with the site kokia is an enormous site from the Mississippian period in st. Clair County Illinois and generally when we talk about Cahokia we focus on things like the grand plaza monks mound up here in the corner um but today we're going to focus on this little odd mown down here diminutive in size oddly a kilter to the main axis of the site and sort of set outside the main plaza outside the palisade wall here's a modern picture of this Mound it's nothing that's going to blow your mind when you walk up to it but it turns out to have been one of the most interesting things we found at Cahokia yet and that's because inside of mound 72 we have found at least 272 human burials place in this mound likely over the course of only a few years and six major episodes so when this was initially found everyone chose to believe that this was the burial of the original Cahokia and chief this happens very early in the site's history um and there's one central individual who's depicted down here and I'll zoom in on this picture a little bit for you who was viewed as the chief and all of these people put in in sort of ritual sacrifice type ceremonies like those that are reminiscent of what we hear about from Mesoamerica and from other parts of the world indicating basically the power of this man that when he died they needed to do this so before we decide on whether or not we agree on that interpretation I want to go through the burials that are here so we're gonna focus in on this area first and the individual where the most interested in is this guy right here who's laying on a cape of 20,000 marine shell beads um basically laid out probably sewn onto a skin in the shape of a falcon that skin has now decomposed but the beads are still there and show a very clear shape surrounding him on are all sorts of burial goods mica that must have come from the Appalachian Mountains chunky stones and sticks perhaps tying him to the challenge of playing the chunky game hundreds and hundreds of arrow points here's an image of sort of a replica of his body from the the Cokie mount Museum and then an actual excavation image of these points these points were likely arranged in Quivers we've got points of different colors probably representing the duel of this individual but what really sells this is when they excavated him away and they removed these shell beads they found another individual buried face down underneath him so as if he was wearing the cloak on his back so here we've got a very clear call to the twins myth we've got a very clear burial of not one individual but two individuals who are buried with all of these materials that are sort of evoking other aspects of this myth to continue with the saga of Mount 72 I just want to point out a few of the other things so after these individuals were laid to rest all sorts of pits were dug in this location and I should point out that these pits were dug to be exactly the right size for the people who ended up going into them in one pit there were 53 females showing evidence of being strangled and then arranged neatly in two rows separated by mats all sorts of work has been done on these particular individuals and we believe that they were probably immigrants from elsewhere people that did not live at Cahokia but were brought in for the purposes of this ceremony um in another area we have for example this burial up here which is of four young males who are lacking both their hands in their heads their arms are interlocked and they've been interpreted as potentially representing the four cardinal directions down here we've got 39 men and women violently killed we have evidence that some were buried alive as their fingers are actually curved into the dirt underneath them in which they were buried um we have these individuals here all men who died at various stages not all for the purposes of this particular ceremony but were carried to this location to be laid to rest on cedar on planks basically on on stretchers and laid very neatly in this particular pit um chances are based on the dietary a work that's been done on these skeletons they were elites they were shown as eating much more meat and much smaller amounts of corn where the opposite can be said for the individuals that were more violently killed um so what we have is this impression of the fact that people are coming to Cahokia specifically for the purposes of dying as a part of the ritual of the burial of these two individuals with the shell cloak um what we this fits more or less with what we originally thought that this was a burial of an elite individual at Cahokia however recently we've started to reinterpret this as perhaps a telling of the hero twins myth basically letting go of our Western idea that the only reason you would ever sacrifice yourself was for the purposes of a leader and instead holding on to the idea that communal ritual and the sorts of reenactments of these important stories would have been essential to the continuing of the world of these people and so rather than depicting the scene as a lord sort of taking a lesser individual killing her and placing her into a pit sort of in isolation from everything else going on we can now paint a picture of this as a public ritual in which people would have been watching the enactment of the myths that basically settle their lives basically tell them how their world began explain the duality of good and evil of night and day and focus on the two twin characters of the hero twins so um as Meg mentioned at the beginning we could have gone for the south we could have taken our academic boots and trod through the Dameon the darién gap down into South America because some of the myths down there seemed astonishingly similar to what we have there's certainly one where twins are battling at Giant harpy eagle and getting its feathers as a symbol of rulership for the Lords of the jungle areas so what we can attest is that the idea of twins the idea of battling monsters and the ways in which this trans versus the surface of the earth the underworld and the sky is very common indeed and this brings thoughts about where this story might have originated where this story may have come from in what way has it evolved in different places at different times we we don't really have enough idea about early early contacts between these areas and it seems much more probable that is the groups of people who are traveling down from the Bering Strait along the coastlines from North America into South America who are bringing with them and developing this story which then you know survives a bit like you know little rock pools all over the region now as iconographer the pig refers archeologists we try and be as cautious as we can about these kinds of bits of information because it's very easy to delude yourself sometimes and there's something we've got a fancy name of a directional fallacy where we look at things that survive today and then simply use that as a template we look back on time and sort of try and pick things that match and that's a kind of useful starting point that means it's hard to know of what else we would start with but as we become more sophisticated as we learn more as we can piece together symbolic systems writing systems and see how they change over time we can actually look for those myths in the past trying to reconstruct them in their own time when there's something in the maya myth that doesn't fit something in the Popol Vuh that will seem to be a bit of a problem you know how can we find something which fits better in fact now we see no this is change this is these are things developing over time that the Popol Vuh itself is the product of a cultural evolution it was made with very very specific aims in mind and in that sense it's a complex literary work layered and layered with its own history of development so in looking through into the past we have a different kind of agenda which is to make the past live and speak for itself final communes to make um so just to throw up as we're talking a few of the many images that we've shown you today of the hero twins depicted across North America and across Mesoamerica um we hope that what we've been able to do is show you that despite all of the differences in these stories all of the variations that exist between the story told in the Maya world the story told by the de neige today and the stories told on the archaeological objects found from the Mississippian period in eastern North America that there are some themes there are regular motifs both themes in terms of what the story is about and also motifs in terms of how the twins are depicted the types of characteristics that they have and really when you put this evidence together um we thought it would be best to end with a quote from Paul Roedean who who said in 1949 so well before we were working on this talk because of this wide distribution and because of the importance and significance attached to it everywhere I feel that it is not an exaggeration to designate it meaning the hero twins myth as the basic myth of Aboriginal America so he recognized this now Simon and I recognized this or he recognized this then and Simon and I recognized this now and we hope that you'll come away was sort of a curiosity about what we'll find in the archaeological record as we start to understand these iconographic vocabularies even better and are able to put together maybe the details of these stories as they were told prehistorically rather than as they're told today with our modern Western influences so with that I think um we would be happy to take any additional questions that you have

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 30,553

Rating: 4.8295965 out of 5

Keywords: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Penn Museum, Philadelphia Museum, Science, History, Archaeology, Hero, Twins, Maya, Dr. Megan Kassabaum, Dr. Simon Martin, magic, America, Myths, Legends, Anthropology

Id: mG-Hi57V2_o

Length: 65min 41sec (3941 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Myths concerning the “hero twins” are widespread from Canada to South America. In the archetypal Maya myth, a pair of twin brothers battle with a range of monsters and death deities as they seek to make the world safe for humankind. Instead of defeating their enemies in trials of strength, they outwit them in games of skill, ingenuity, and magic, offering role models of how best to survive death and ultimately attain rebirth into the sky. A variety of myths throughout North America draw on these same themes but differ dramatically in the details, thereby demonstrating the incredible antiquity of the basic story and the relationships between the diverse cultures of the New World.

Dr. Megan Kassabaum, Weingarten Assistant Curator, American Section and Dr. Simon Martin, Associate Curator / Keeper, American Section