The Esselen Creation Myth: An Interpretation - Part 1
When I first read the Esselen creation myth, I was mystified, unsure of the meaning of the story and unsure how to begin to figure it out. Three core elements of the tale kept my attention: flood waters end one age, so beginning a new age, a trinity of characters, Eagle, Hummingbird and Coyote, together survive this flood and human struggle with procreation is dramatized. Taken at face value, the tale is an exploration of humanity's deepest concerns of the creative and destructive forces of nature and man’s struggle with the procreative and self-destructive forces within all humans. Viewing these elements through Matthieu Pageau's framework of cosmic symbolism presented in The Language of Creation (2018), reveals a sophisticated encoding of metaphysical truth about the nature of reality and humanity.
Pageau's work on biblical cosmology shows how traditional narratives operate through what he calls "the language of creation" - a symbolic grammar that reflects the fundamental structure of existence. This grammar includes several key patterns:
The tension between 'space' (ordered stability) and 'time' (transformative chaos)
The necessity of proper mediation between spiritual and material realms
Cosmic hierarchy
Macrocosmic and microcosmic representation
These patterns appear in the Esselen creation myth. Consider its opening: "When this world was finished, the eagle, the hummingbird, and Coyote were standing on the top of Pico Blanco. When the water rose to their feet..." Already we see the tension Pageau identifies between spatial order, the mountain peak and temporal chaos, rising waters. The trinity of characters represents different modes of hierarchic mediation between these realms - the eagle as heavenly authority, the hummingbird as messenger, and coyote as earthly agent. The myth drives toward the essential problem of regeneration: how will life begin again? This question haunts all post-diluvian narratives.
I’ll assume that the reader is familiar with neither the Esselen creation myth or Matthieu Pageau. Some context is then needed. First, historical context.
The Esselen inhabited the Santa Lucia Mountains and Big Sur coast for over 6,000 years, speaking a distinct Hokan language. Their creation myth survived despite the profound cultural disruption that began in 1602 with Sebastian Vizcaino's exploration and intensified in the 1770s with Junipero Serra's mission system.
From the Esselen Tribe's website:
"This was the beginning of a transformation of the Esselen culture, as the people were gathered up and taken in to three missions: Mission Carmel, San Antonio Mission and the Soledad Mission. These missions were strategically placed in a geographical triangle around the Santa Lucia Mountains, the ancient homeland of the Esselen’s. The missionaries were here to save the souls of the heathens, as they called us. In this way they hoped to take the land for the Spanish King, Carlos III. This had severe consequences for the Esselen and other tribes that called these mountains their home."
You can read the full Esselen Creation Myth as recorded in 1907 on the Esselen Tribe website here:
https://www.esselentribe.org/history
Within a few decades, virtually all Esselen people lived at the missions where a cascade of infectious disease decimated the majority of the tribal population.
In 1910, UC Berkeley anthropologist A.L. Kroeber recorded the creation myth from discussions with surviving members of the Esselen Tribe. This recording of their creation story represents a preservation of ancient spiritual wisdom that survived multiple waves of colonization, including both Spanish missionary efforts and subsequent Mexican land grants that left the Esselen people dispossessed of their ancestral lands.
But what does the creation myth mean? How do we approach the story with respectful curiosity? How do we interpret the story?
This is perhaps a hazardous endeavor that risks reading into the text contemporary perspectives foreign to the ancient context of this story and others. In today's world we are embedded in a culture where the materialist, scientific, rational process is a default academic approach to uncover truths, truths that are relative, discursive, contingent and carefully qualified. The materialist, scientific method is utterly different from and often contemptuous of spiritual perspectives.
Pre-historical oral stories are vessels that preserve and transmit wisdom of a spiritual nature. Creation myths make no attempt to elucidate the material properties of water or explain material causality. Creation myths are, we might say, metaphysical by nature, having to do with the meaning of materiality and expressing a spiritual narrative about the fundamental nature of reality and what that means for humanity.
How to understand them? Many different approaches to the texts are possible. Evolutionary, psychological, Freudian/Jungian, anthropological, and critical (cynical) theories and many more are all possible to employ. While perhaps each of these perspectives, particularly those articulated by those of Jung and Neumann, are useful, many are reductive and contemptuous and hostile and dismissive of the uniqueness of particular creation myths while also recognizing universal patterns that provide explanations and connections and meanings.
An obvious problem with the scientific, rationalist approach to understanding the Esselen creation myth, is that creation myths are spiritual cosmologies. Creation myths are encapsulated understandings of the origins of the world and how to relate to the world and each other. Creation myths communicate the core elements of faith and reason that form societies of people, binding them together with a shared purpose and ethical system. This is utterly different from the scientific perspective which seeks to understand mechanics and facts instead of metaphysical meaning.
There is a modern rational tendency to separate reason from imagination and fact from value. Spiritual cosmologies, with all their factual flaws, offer a vision of the universe that unites fact and value, reason and imagination, the spiritual and the scientific.
Creation myths are a testament to the shared human desire to know. They are an example of a developed metaphysics rooted across all cultures and ages. Creation myths represent the human quest to understand our place in the universe. How do we act in the world and why? The Esselen creation myth offers a model of the world and a model of humanity's role within the world. To see this requires us to adopt a spiritual and symbolic perspective. If we are successful, consistent patterns of symbology will be seen. Layers of meaning will align. If we, even temporarily, approach creation myths with a spiritual lens, putting down our telescopes and microscopes, I believe that we are then approaching the text on its own terms.
Matthieu Pageau put forth a range of interpretations of biblical cosmology in Genesis which promises an enriched understanding of all ancient texts and a recapturing of cosmological narrative structures.
For Pageau, a creation myth is not merely a primitive attempt to explain natural phenomena, but rather a sophisticated encoding of metaphysical truth. Unlike modern scientific explanations that focus on mechanical causality, these myths reveal how spiritual meaning manifests in material reality and what it means for the human.
Consider how Genesis of the Bible opens:
"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."
Pageau reflects that this statement is about the fundamental duality that structures all of reality - the joining of spiritual meaning, heaven and material expression, earth. This pattern repeats through many creation myths because it reflects the basic structure of knowledge itself.
Consider the nature of the written word, which Pageau suggests is a microcosm of cosmic human mediation, or proper joining, of heaven and earth, spiritual meaning and earthly matter. Just as God, in Genesis, created the universe, joining spiritual truth with physical reality, humans create written language by joining abstract meaning with concrete marks. Abstract meaning exists in the human mind while physical marks are made on a page and these marks are organized by rules, grammar. The organized marks host and express the meaning. Just as in Genesis, where God breathes meaning into matter through creation, humans breathe meaning into marks when writing.
With this symbolic perspective, every act of writing recapitulates the cosmic creation of human mediation between spirit and matter.
If we see writing as cosmic mediation we may also grasp humanity's broader role in creation. We are meant to be like words - properly joining spiritual meaning with material expression through conscious mediation. Whether through writing, speaking, building, or creating, our purpose is to help heaven and earth properly unite. The written word serves as both example and instruction - showing us through its very form how to fulfill our cosmic role as mediators between spiritual and material reality.
Just as the written word mirrors the union of heaven and earth, narrative structure also reflects the fundamental patterns of cosmic mediation. Stories are bridges between worlds. The elements of a given story are selected and ordered, and with character and conflict, communicate a message, a meaning. Stories mirror the cosmic dance where spirit becomes matter, heaven touching earth through narrative expression.
In crafting stories, with heroes and villains, triumphs and trials, we humans give form to the formless, making tangible the truths that undergird existence. Each tale becomes a microcosm of the universe's own story, where meaning and matter intertwine. Stories are doorways through which the infinite steps into time, allowing us to touch transcendent truths through the clay of words. In this way, every storyteller becomes a cosmic translator, every narrative a testament to humanity's role in bridging the seen and unseen realms of being.
This explains why similar story patterns appear across cultures. They don't just reflect psychological archetypes but encode the fundamental pattern of reality itself - the proper relationship between the metaphysical and physical through conscious human mediation.
I find Pageau’s insights to be illuminating of biblical cosmology and ancient cosmology. The Esselen creation myth provides an occasion to test these perspectives and see what is revealed. In the next series of essays I will offer a reading of the Esselen creation myth using cosmic symbolism as a lens. My hope is to respectfully engage with one ancient cosmological text alongside reflections with another ancient cosmological text.
One might argue that applying Pageau's framework, which focuses on Biblical stories, to Native American mythology imposes Christian patterns on indigenous wisdom. However, this misunderstands the nature of cosmic symbolism. These patterns emerge not from Christianity specifically but from the fundamental structure of human knowledge and experience. When multiple traditions reflect similar patterns - like floods giving way to dry land, or failed meditation leading to chaos - this suggests universal truth rather than cultural misappropriation.
The key is recognizing that while expressions differ, the basic patterns of reality - the relationship between spiritual meaning and material manifestation, the need for proper mediation, the tension between order and chaos - appear across cultures because they reflect the structure of reality itself.
The validity of an interpretation emerges from its ability to illuminate the text's own internal logic rather than imposing external frameworks. When we find similar patterns across cultures, like the flood in the Esselen myth echoing the flood in Genesis and elsewhere, this suggests we've touched something fundamental about human understanding of reality and human history.
The Esselen myth, read through cosmic symbolism, reveals a sophisticated metaphysical understanding of proper and improper mediation between spiritual and material reality. Far from diminishing the unique cultural indigenous expression, this approach reveals a profound wisdom about the human condition and our cosmic role as mediators between heaven and earth.
Sounds like were just beginning a great journey!