Ryan Larson - Thoughts on the Sipapu

 In class we've discussed the Sipapu, the hole in the floor of native American religious structures where people are believed to have come up from the fifth world into the current world. This ties into the idea of the world navel that Campbell mentions in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I thought it'd be interesting to examine why humans seem to have a deep connection between human origins and the ground itself-- something that occurs in many different religions. Jews and Christians believe that Adam was made out of dust, and in Greek mythology Prometheus is believed to have sculpted humans out of clay-- and many native American myths also depict clay as our original material. It's very common to see the idea that humanity originally came out of the dirt. But why is this?

 One explanation is that people have a circular way of thinking. When people die, they are (usually) buried in the ground and then slowly decompose into dirt. Ancient people would have observed this. Perhaps the thinking was that humans decompose because they are returning to their natural state- the dirt. It would follow, then, that the first humans were made out of earth. As the Bible says, "For you are dust, and to dust you will return."

 Another possible explanation is that clay was seen as a metaphor for humanity. In the time before paints and 3d printers, options for creating things were very limited. Clay, however, is quite easy to find (it's sitting in the ground, of course) and easy to use. For people who had no other way of creating things, it would make sense to assume that clay was the standard method of creation, even for the gods. Generally in myth, we tend to assume that the god or gods have technology similar to our own. The Greeks and Romans, for instance, pictured their gods with chariots, swords and all the modern bronze-age technology of the day. (It's interesting that we no longer do this. Nobody imagines God or Allah with a iphone. But that's a topic for another blog post.) Because the people of the time used clay as their means of creation, they assumed that their gods did the same. Perhaps to them, clay was more than just an art form-- it was the essence of creation itself. And because clay came out of the dirt, it made logical sense that there was some sort of connection between humanity and the earth. And therefore, we must have originally come up out from it.

These reasons may be accurate, and they may not. These are just my half-researched ideas, and I'm sure there are plenty more credible sources out there. Do with this what you will, and have a good night.