{"id":8207,"date":"2016-08-20T15:46:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-20T21:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8207"},"modified":"2016-08-27T10:07:10","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T16:07:10","slug":"north-americas-four-footed-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8207","title":{"rendered":"North America’s Four-Footed God"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"\"When I was new to Paganism, I thought about pantheons. Should I be signing with Team Celtic, Team Roman, Team Germanic, or whom?<\/p>\n

Now I don’t really care. Sometimes you don’t come to the pantheon, the pantheon comes to you \u2014 and it may be a motley crew at that.<\/p>\n

My own pantheon includes Hermes, Tlaloc (I live at the fringe of his territory<\/a>), the Moon, and a forest god who has manifested as a young blue spruce tree dusted with golden aspen leaves.<\/p>\n

But maybe I should make room on the shelf for Old Man Coyote, whose howl, says Dan Flores, author of\u00a0 Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History<\/a><\/em>\"\", could be “the original national anthem of North America<\/a>.” His publisher says<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Coyote near my house this summer.<\/p><\/div>\n

Coyote America<\/i> 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 \u201cwolf\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coyote likes camps, villages, towns, and cities. He lived with the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan<\/a> \u2014 the word coyotl <\/em>itself is Aztec (Nahuatl), pronounced COY-yoht<\/em>, so we Westerners who say it as two syllables actually favor an older pronunciation than the Hispanicized co-yo-te.<\/em>((As a boy in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, I was taught that only Easterners and tourists said kiy-yo-te.<\/em>))<\/p>\n

As a deity, he was Huehuecoyotl<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/a><\/p>\n

AFTERTHOUGHT: <\/strong>Wrong canid in the title, but a movie nevertheless inbued with the spirit of Old Man Coyote is The Grey Fox<\/em><\/a> (1982), starring Richard Farnsworth.\u00a0 I treasure my VHS copy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was new to Paganism, I thought about pantheons. Should I be signing with Team Celtic, Team Roman, Team Germanic, or whom? Now I don’t really care. Sometimes you don’t come to the pantheon, the pantheon comes to you \u2014 and it may be a motley crew at that. My own pantheon includes Hermes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,290,208,48],"class_list":["post-8207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-coyotes","tag-indian-tribes","tag-nature-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-28n","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6511,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6511","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":0},"title":"Egyptian Reconstructionists Won’t Like This","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 5, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"(Trigger Warning: Texas, iced tea, demons) From D Magazine in Dallas: \"The Exorcists Next Door,\" a profile piece on two Protestant exorcists. Dozens of what appear to be demons manifest and depart during this day\u2019s session. Larry coaxes out their names and functions, a veritable pantheon of entities known and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2184,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2184","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":1},"title":"The 14th Thing to Love about Pagans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 17, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Writing at Pantheon, \"the Pagan blog at Patheos.com,\" Star Foster lists \"13 Things I LOVE about Pagans,\" for example, \"Smaller is Better\" and \"Many Gods, Few Masters.\" I agree with all of them. But I could add one more: \"Borrowing\" with both hands. Mad eclecticism. It is\u00a0 illustrated by her\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3525,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3525","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":2},"title":"Mojo & Materiality: Lucky Mojo Curio Co.","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"When the AAR met in Montreal in 2009, we not only had our first session on idolatry\/materiality from a Pagan perspective, but also the Magical Mercantile Tour of Pagan and occult-related shops and meeting places. This year's tour revisited the concept under a slightly different name, a tribute to our\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/DeskSetMojo-279x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4032","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":3},"title":"Adding New Gods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"P. Sufenas Virius Lupus wonders about how new gods are added to polytheist pantheons. Something that will often happen, particularly with reconstructionist-based practitioners, is that further research into a particular deity and their connections leads to \"new-to-me\" or various other re-discovered deities that are then taken into one's personal pantheon.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4601,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4601","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":4},"title":"Three Related Blog Posts","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"From Deborah Castellano, who also blogs at Charmed, I'm Sure: \"The Art of Career Occultism.\"' Let me ask you, how do you see a career occultist? \u00a0Do you see her as someone who gets up and does sun\u00a0salutations, writing in her dream diary over herbal tea and an organic scone,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":98,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=98","url_meta":{"origin":8207,"position":5},"title":"Inventing Jane Harrison","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 15, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"I have received Mary Beard's The Invention of Jane Harrison--there goes the evening. (And all hail the interlibrary loan staff for producing it so quickly.) Ronald Hutton writes of Harrison in his book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft: \"Savagery and barbarism both frightened and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8207"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8222,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions\/8222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}