Now I don’t really care. Sometimes you don’t come to the pantheon, the pantheon comes to you — and it may be a motley crew at that.
My own pantheon includes Hermes, Tlaloc (I live at the fringe of his territory), the Moon, and a forest god who has manifested as a young blue spruce tree dusted with golden aspen leaves.
But maybe I should make room on the shelf for Old Man Coyote, whose howl, says Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
Coyote near my house this summer.
Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism.
Coyote likes camps, villages, towns, and cities. He lived with the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan — the word coyotl itself is Aztec (Nahuatl), pronounced COY-yoht, so we Westerners who say it as two syllables actually favor an older pronunciation than the Hispanicized co-yo-te.((As a boy in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, I was taught that only Easterners and tourists said kiy-yo-te.))
As a deity, he was Huehuecoyotl, or “Venerable Old Coyote, “who sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar often called ‘Old Man Coyote’ that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward, in what is now the western United States,” Flores writes.
Europeans had old experiences, stories, myths, and preconceptions about gray wolves, bears, and foxes and long employed folk stories about them to investigate human nature. But coyotes are different. The coyote is an American original whose evolutionary history has taken place on this continent, not in the Old World. We see it not from the traditional vantages but from a sideways one, and from that perspective everything looks different.
But you don’t honor him/her/them by feeding them, at least not directly. Maybe you honor Coyote by telling Coyote stories. They are easy to find.
AFTERTHOUGHT: Wrong canid in the title, but a movie nevertheless inbued with the spirit of Old Man Coyote is The Grey Fox (1982), starring Richard Farnsworth. I treasure my VHS copy.
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One morning, riding my mountain bike across the what looked to be empty grassy hills around Mt. Diablo in the San Francisco Bay Area, I stopped on the trail,looked all around me, and saw only grassland, a few coastal live oaks, and patches of chapparal. On impulse, I clapped me hands threes times. When I turned around, standing calm and canny on the trail behind me, three or four feet away, was a coyote.
After a few minutes, the coyote trotted off, pursuing coyote affairs. And I rode on.
That’s about as close to a magical encounter with coyote as I’ve ever experienced.
[Pronunciation: These days, I probably tend toward three syllables. When I was a kid, I probably favored two (Bay Area dialect). Also spoke of ro-day-Os, not ro-dee-os.]
There is an annual even in Taos, New Mexico, where I once lived, which is called either The Sheriff’s Rodeo (ROH-dee-oh) or El Rodeo de Taos (Roh-DEY-oh). So to me it’s a matter of which language you are speaking. In Spanish, I would use the three-syllable pronunciation, but I think it is an affectation to use it in English — merely “virtue-signalling” — “look how sensitive I am.” And, after all, it started as two syllables in Nahuatl!
I once suggested the term meta-pantheon to describe the sorts of assemblages and pastiches of deities, powers, guardians, ancestors, and other than human figures that end up in the practices of today’s Pagan/pagan practitioners. These meta-pantheons are often rooted in personal experiences, local qualities of land and energy, and relationships developed in the course of magical activities.
A few significant influences on my own, for example, include the San Andreas fault system (Earth energies), tides in a large estuary complex (Water energies), curiousity about Northern European mythology, Craft Trads in The SF Bay Area, and distance healing.
Have you read Le Guin’s coyote stories? Wonderful. Lately, the trickster Goddesses/Gods just won’t leave me alone.