Coyote
Coyote is the trickster and second great figure of Maidu cosmology, paired throughout the creation cycle with Earth-Initiate. He is at once the creator's companion and his opponent: he calls out to the creator over the first waters and advises him, yet he mars the perfect world, and where Earth-Initiate would have human beings live forever, Coyote argues that they must die and stay dead. In this way he brings death into the world, and by a bitter justice his own son is the first to die, bitten by a rattlesnake; though Coyote then repents, the law he has set cannot be undone. Dixon, Kroeber and Shipley all record him as the bringer of mortality and the spoiler of the creator's order, a being connected with both truth and falsehood, humour and grief.
Domains
- trickery
- death and mortality
- disorder
Powers
- to bring death and mortality into the world by overruling the creator
- to spoil and disorder the perfect world made by the creator
- to take the form of a man or of the coyote at will
Relations
- companion: Earth-Initiate (Kodoyanpe, the Earth-Maker)Coyote accompanies Earth-Initiate at the creation, calling out to him over the waters and giving him counsel about how the world should be made.Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV (E. J. Brill, 1912) (secondary); William Shipley (ed. and trans.), The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc'ibyjim (Heyday Books, 1991) (secondary)
- rival: Earth-Initiate (Kodoyanpe, the Earth-Maker)The trickster sets himself against the creator, opposing his plan for human immortality and afterwards working to spoil the finished world.William Shipley (ed. and trans.), The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc'ibyjim (Heyday Books, 1991) (secondary); A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 78 (1925) (secondary)
Sources
- Coyote is the Maidu trickster and culture-hero who, as companion and adversary of the creator, brings death into the world by insisting that human beings must die.: Roland B. Dixon, 'Maidu Myths', Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. XVII, part II (1902) (secondary); William Shipley (ed. and trans.), The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc'ibyjim (Heyday Books, 1991) (secondary)