Awonawilona

Before anything, there was darkness. That is how Frank Hamilton Cushing began the story he printed in the Bureau of American Ethnology’s thirteenth annual report: black darkness everywhere, void desolation everywhere, and in the middle of it a single being he called Áwonawílona, “the Maker and Container of All, the All-father Father.” Nothing else had being. Then the being conceived within himself and thought outward into space, and mists rose out of the thinking, steams that Cushing called “potent of growth.”

It is one of the most quoted openings in Native American mythology. It may also be one of the least Zuni.

The story, as Cushing tells it, runs fast once the mists appear. By his own innate knowledge the All-container made himself into the Sun, the father of the Zuni people, and with the Sun came light. The light thickened the mist-clouds until they fell, and the falling gave water, and the water gave the sea that holds the world. The Sun Father then drew flesh from the surface of his own body, the seed-stuff of two worlds, and cast it on the waters. In the heat of his light the sea turned green. Scum rose on it, wide and heavy, and became Áwitelin Tsíta, the Four-fold Containing Mother-earth, and Ápoyan Tä’chu, the All-covering Father-sky. From the two of them lying together on the waters came every living thing, conceived in the fourfold womb of the world.

Cushing knew Zuni better than almost any outsider of his century. He lived in the pueblo from the autumn of 1879, sent there to master the language, and was adopted into the community. He also wrote like a man composing an epic, and he said so. In a note on his method he admitted using words such as “god” and “priest” very freely, and promised a second paper of glossaries that would give “my authority for framing and translating the myths as I have.” That key was meant to follow. By the time Matilda Coxe Stevenson’s great survey went to press in 1904, the Bureau’s own introduction to it observed that the results of Cushing’s researches had never appeared in full.

Stevenson’s survey, published in the Bureau’s twenty-third annual report, keeps the creator and changes the tale. She ranks A’wonawil’ona first among the Zuni higher powers: the supreme life-giving bisexual power, called He-She, the initiator of life and life itself, pervading all space. In her version A’wonawil’ona exists above with the Sun Father and the Moon Mother, while below are Shi’wanni and his wife Shi’wano’kia, who work not with hands but with hearts and minds. Everything is fog, rising like steam. From the breath of its heart A’wonawil’ona makes the clouds and the great waters. Then Shi’wanni spits into his left palm, slaps the spittle with the fingers of his right until it foams like yucca suds, and blows the coloured bubbles upward to become the fixed stars. Shi’wano’kia does the same, the foam runs over her hand and spreads everywhere, and it becomes the Earth Mother.

Stevenson is precise about the colour of this being and vague about its shape, which is the honest order. A’wonawil’ona, she writes, is the blue vault of the firmament. The breath clouds of the gods carry the yellow of the north, the blue-green of the west, the red of the south and the silver of the east. White and black smoke clouds become part of the being, because it is the air itself, and when the air takes the form of a bird the bird is the being too. She went further and likened the Zuni conception to the Greek idea of Athena, which tells more about the classroom she came from than about Zuni.

Where her account comes alive is in the small, physical acts of worship. A masked impersonator, she writes, blows from his heart the breath of A’wonawil’ona onto a cluster of plumes or onto his own hand and carries it to the mouth of another person, who draws it in. The breath passes from mouth to mouth like something solid. The most sacred symbol of life, an ear of corn clothed in feathers called the mi’li, holds the spirit of A’wonawil’ona “put into and upon this created form.” On one ceremonial stick a small ring, the symbol of the world and of long life, is painted blue for it. “The breath of A’wonawil’ona is everywhere,” she concludes. “It is life itself.”

Then Ruth Bunzel went to Zuni and asked the obvious question. Her study of Zuni ceremonialism, issued in the Bureau’s report for 1929 and 1930, translates the word as “the ones who hold our roads,” and the road in Zuni prayer is a human life, its length and its safe completion. The term, she found, covered a whole class of beings: the sun, the earth, the corn, the prey animals, the gods of war. It was applied to anyone addressed in prayer. She found no trace of a bisexual creator who ruled the universe. Ask a Zuni whether the a:’wona:wi’lona were man or woman, she reported, and the answer came back “Both, of course,” since the word named a crowd and not a person. Her explanation for the confusion was blunt. Missionaries had seized on the term as the nearest native equivalent for God, and Zuni speakers had duly learned to translate it as God.

The prayers she recorded bear her out. A prayer spoken at nightfall over the autumn food offering to the ancestors calls on “those who hold our roads, the night priests” to send their little wind-blown clouds and their fine rain caressing the earth, and to grant long life and old age. And the formal creation talk she took down begins with no All-father at all. In this world there was no one. The sun came up and went in, and no one offered him sacred meal or prayer sticks, and it was very lonely. So the Sun sent his two children into the fourth womb of the earth to bring the people out into his light.

Ruth Benedict, whose two-volume Zuni Mythology appeared from Columbia University Press in 1935, drew the line under the matter. Both Cushing and Stevenson, she wrote, had given the term an interpretation coloured by monotheistic deism, and Stevenson had even compared the deity to Athena. Those-who-hold-the-Roads was not the creator of the world and not a single figure of the Zuni pantheon but a collective form of address. Benedict added a second correction aimed at Cushing alone. His creation story turns on the Sun Father and the Earth Mother lying together, a myth she knew among the Yuman peoples but which, as far as she could discover, no Zuni priest or layman then recognised.

So the record holds two creatures under one name. One is a vast, breathing, sexless intelligence that thinks light into the dark, makes itself into the Sun, and fills every feather and every ear of corn with life. It belongs to two Washington publications of 1896 and 1904, and to every popular book that has copied them since. The other is plainer, and it is the one in the mouths of the people who use the word: a phrase of respect for the powers who decide how far each person’s road will run.

What either version can do follows from the same root. As the first account has it, the being’s power is breath, the warm current that makes cloud, water, light and flesh, and that a priest can lift from a feather and give to a child. As the second has it, the power belongs to many hands at once, and each holder can lengthen a road with rain and corn or let it run short. The limit is just as clear in both. Nothing in Zuni practice commands these powers. They can only be fed with prayer sticks and sacred meal and asked, as that prayer puts it, to add to their hearts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Awonawilona in Zuni mythology?

Awonawilona is described in Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1896 account and Matilda Coxe Stevenson’s 1904 account as the supreme creator of Zuni tradition, a life-giving power that existed alone before the world. Later fieldwork by Ruth Bunzel and Ruth Benedict found that the Zuni word a:’wona:wi’lona means “the ones who hold our roads” and is a collective term for the beings addressed in prayer, not the name of one god.

What does the name Awonawilona mean?

Ruth Bunzel translated a:’wona:wi’lona as “the ones who hold our roads.” In Zuni prayer a person’s road is their life and its length, so the phrase names the powers, such as the sun, the earth and the corn, that are believed to govern how long and how safely a person lives.

Did Awonawilona create the world?

In Cushing’s version Awonawilona thought mists out of the darkness, became the Sun, and set off the creation of Earth Mother and Sky Father, and in Stevenson’s version the being’s breath made the clouds and the great waters. The Zuni creation talk recorded by Bunzel begins instead with the Sun alone, and Benedict concluded that the term does not refer to a creator of the world at all.

Is Awonawilona male or female?

Stevenson called Awonawilona a bisexual power referred to as He-She, while Cushing wrote of the being as “he” and the All-father. Bunzel reported that Zuni speakers answered the question “Both, of course,” because the word covers a whole class of supernatural beings rather than one individual.

Why do Zuni people translate Awonawilona as God?

According to Ruth Bunzel, missionaries chose the Zuni term as the nearest native equivalent for God, and Zuni speakers accordingly came to translate it that way into English. Ruth Benedict made the same point, adding that Cushing and Stevenson had both read the term through the lens of monotheism.

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