This engaging companion to Anthony Aveni's Star Stories: Constellations and People (2019) “celebrates the audacity of the human imagination” (p. xi) through creation stories from 22 cultures spanning over 2,500 years of human history. What links these stories, as Aveni demonstrates, is an emphasis on the natural world and a desire to make sense of its rhythms and how the world and the beings that inhabit it came to be. Rejecting the notion that the stories told are myths in the sense of fabrications, Aveni instead counters that what makes these stories different from those recounted by contemporary Western astronomers is that they include living participants whose actions play a key role in the progression of the narrative. Derived from careful observations of the natural world, creation myths explore the role of people as “mediators in a powerful universal discourse” (p. 11).
Rather than taking a more traditional perspective, Aveni focuses on the experience of the storyteller in relation to the landscape, which he characterizes as a dynamic interaction of land, sky, and people. These ideas resonate with those expressed in Leslie Marmon Silko's essay “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories” (Antaeus 57, 1986; reprinted in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, Simon and Schuster, 1996). Silko (1996:37) cites the importance of landscape-based narratives in “[delineating] the complexities of the relationship that human beings must maintain with the surrounding natural world if they hope to survive.” Landscape and, in particular, the type of landscape in which each story takes place—mountains, waterways, caves, islands, or extreme environments—guides the organization of the book.
Much of the volume focuses on the Americas, with stories ranging from the far northern extremes (inhabited by the Inuit) to Tierra del Fuego. Other narratives from North American Indigenous peoples include those told by the Diné/Navajo (Mountains), the Tlingit (Waterways), and the Cherokee and Haudenosaunee, grouped with the Hawaiian and other islanders because they envision their homeland as “Turtle Island.” Latin America is represented by Aztec, Andean, and Amazonian narratives related to mountains, and others pertaining to caves told by the K'iche’ Maya and Inca. These stories are paired with narratives from cultures worldwide inhabiting mountainous terrain (Greece, China), river deltas (Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, and Inner Niger), karstic landscapes (southwest Australia), islands (Polynesia, Japan, Dobu), and extreme environments (the Norse culture inhabiting Scandinavia and the North Atlantic).
This organizational structure allows Aveni to preface each section with an overview of how certain landscapes impacted the lives of the people living there, and how that was manifested in their origin stories. The Navajo homeland, Dinétah, for example, is bounded by four directional mountains and delineated by the path of the sun and stars across the sky. The creation story focuses on finding balance within this landscape, which oscillates between order and chaos. Contributing to the latter is the Coyote trickster—one of several trickster figures in Native American creation narratives Aveni explores. He notes that they sometimes function as creator (e.g., the god Maui, who created the Hawaiian Islands) and sometimes transformer (e.g., the Tlingit Raven), but that they invariably use deception and humor to highlight the conflicting sides of human nature.
Other tricksters include the Hero Twins in the Maya creation story, who defeat the underworld lords through trickery. Twins commonly appear in origin myths; Sapling and Flint in the Haudenosaunee story serve as yet another example. Rather than being seen in terms of “good” and “evil,” as they are sometimes characterized, they instead—like Coyote—epitomize the human impulses toward order/creation and disorder/destruction that must continually be balanced.
Creation Stories closes with a fifth-century BC Greek creation myth, which Aveni describes as a “parent of today's scientific stories of creation” (p. 23; italics added). Placing it alongside other origin narratives provides a reminder that all such stories are rooted in cultural traditions and serve an important function for their listeners: “Through the stories,” Silko (1996:30) writes, “we hear who we are.” Aveni's narrative challenges us to beware of simple dichotomies by demonstrating that “myth” and “science” together “contribute to our ever-changing understanding of the phenomena that shape our experiences in the world” (p. 11).
This attractively illustrated volume, with its informative endnotes, offers an insightful glimpse of how multiple peoples, at different times and places, answered the profound questions surrounding human existence and that of the universe. Its richness stems from its exploration of this universal theme in all of its complexity, penned by a prolific scholar whose writings continue to ask probing questions and tackle issues of relevance to society today.
