Comparing Iroquois Myth And The Golden Chain

Myth and fantastic stories are often made to answer questions that are unknown, like where the world came from or how mankind became as they are today. The Iroquois people of North America answered these questions with “The World of the Turtle’s Back”; likewise, the Yoruba people of Sub-Saharan Africa had an origin in “The Golden Chain”. Cultures greatly impact the myth and story they give birth to, and the two stories highlight differing perspectives about the world: the Iroquois belief in nature being more important than humans against Yoruba belief in humans being more important than nature. First, the Iroquois people believe in nature as a concrete and unchangeable, while the Yoruba see nature as intelligently designed by the Orishas, humanlike gods. One example of this is found in the two myth’s explanations of why men are different, blind and seeing, left or right handed. In the Iroquois myth, there are two types of people,

These were the ways of world, a natural part of man, not good or evil, but a natural part of the universe. In contrast, the Yoruba people tell of how cripples and the blind are not simply a part of nature, but the result of error on the part of a god, a flaw in the human design. The Orisha Obatala got drunk when forming human beings from clay, and this error resulted in the creation of abnormal human beings without eyes or with misshapen limbs, making these flaws an error in design, not a locked in part of the world. In addition to an explanation of a dichotomy in mankind, the difference between an unchangeable nature and shifting design is found in the characters that aid humanity: the animals in the Iroquois myth and the Orisha, gods in the Yoruba myth. Both myths begin with the world we currently live in as a great sea with no land to live on, a place inhospitable for human life. During the Iroquois myth it