When I was working as the marketing arm for Dr. Brenda E.F. Beck’s animated series, The Legend of Ponnivala, I was struck by an interesting idea that hadn’t occurred to me before in the legends I had studied: that origin stories very often have their roots in the ancestral shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society.
In the Ponnivala story (which is an English adaptation of the local Tamil legend, Annanmar Kathai, or “The Brothers’ Story”), there is a region of forest that the goddess Parvati wishes to see become fertile and productive, and so she creates nine men who will be the farmers of this land. Now, from the perspective of a people who have farmed the region for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this makes sense; taking virgin land and taming it to feed the people is a reasonable expenditure of effort.
Except, this is the South Indian jungle we’re talking about. Can there be any doubt that this dense forest was already “fertile and productive” before being cleared and tilled?
What’s more, this place was already populated with hunters. The hunters are the main rivals of the farmers. The hunters have an issue, of course, because their territory and fertile hunting grounds are being flattened and planted over. Ostensibly, this can be explained away as having something to do with the eating of meat, but there’s no admonition against it in the tale; rather, there is an episode in which the farmers slaughter thousands of tigers and cobras, and partition the meat of a giant boar. So, meat isn’t the issue.
The only other thing I could surmise from a cursory reading is that the goddess herself wanted to do away with the hunters. But, since she could create life, there’s no particularly good reason she couldn’t simply have eliminated the hunters herself; or, at the very least, ordered them to become farmers.
Both of these groups still exist in the region, so it’s a touchy subject to get into without assuming too much. But, in my opinion, the object lesson here is that some time, a long time ago, some people moved away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into an agricultural lifestyle.
In so many legends, there’s a god who demands this change. He or she has decided that the fruits of the land are not enough, and that true piety lies in the backbreaking toil involved in turning that virgin land into fertile farmland.
Is it so? Well, the farmers of Ponnivala are literally created by the goddess for the purpose of making already-fertile and successful hunting grounds into farmland.
Adam and Eve, perhaps the most famous of the original hunter-gatherer families, were cast out of Eden for their sin. Their punishment? To raise food by the sweat of their brows and the strength of their backs.
Finnish legend, as told in Kalevala, does something similar, but without a real divine ordinance. The demigod Väinämöinen, son of the sea wind and the goddess of nature, first came to shore on a barren island, where he sat alone for many years. With the aid of Sampsa Pellervoinen – a “son of the fields,” the origins of which are obscure – the first sowing was the planting of the many trees familiar to the Baltic area. One giant oak grew up from this planting, and obscured the sun, so Väinämöinen asked his mother to send him the strength to remove it. She sent him a strange little man clad in copper boots and hat, who grew to immense size and felled the oak with a single blow. Väinämöinen himself then razed an entire forest to the ground, save one birch tree. An eagle asked why he had done this, and Väinämöinen replied it was so the eagle could have someplace to rest on its journeys.
Pleased, the eagle lit a spark that ignited a great flame, which the north wind fanned to burn all of the fallen trees to ash. This ash made the land fertile for sowing, and Väinämöinen asked Ukko, the supreme god and ruler of the skies to bring rain to wet the soil, and Mannu, goddess of the earth, to favour it with her blessings. Thus, the barley grew, and the cuckoo sang to celebrate the prosperity of the fields.
It’s of no small importance to note that the Finnic culture, language, and myths are not related to those of the Near East, nor to those of the Dravidian peoples. They’re not even related to any Indo-Germanic language stems, and are considered by some to be considerably older and more indigenous to their region than others. In fact, while there may be some similarity by virtue of proximity – thousands of years neighbouring both Slavs and North Germanic populations can hardly be said to have had no impact at all – the creation stories are very different in content and intent.
But where farming begins (and Kalevala leaves it off at this point), life in the forest ends. Some form of cataclysm; be it original sin, the generations-long war between the local hunters and crafters and the ordained farmers, or the first planting of all the wild lands and the subsequent felling and immolation of the entire forest; divides these ancient peoples from their wildness and situates them as permanent residents of a land they’ve tamed. There’s no good reason to believe that agriculture is a better lifestyle than hunting and gathering. It’s certainly harder, far more labour intensive, and creates the very foundation for financial and religious hierarchies, property ownership, and debt. It allows space to develop a slave or serf economy, contributes to ecological and environmental issues, and gives the priest class an entirely new level of power and control; for, without their intercession, the gods might not be happy and the fields might not be productive. It’s also far less reliable than wildcraft – droughts can cause an entire population dependent on crop yields to starve. They seldom completely eliminate fish and game from a region (I say “seldom” because of course there are regional droughts in arid places; but, again, political dependencies are often the cause of famine, as traditional hunters are prevented from moving with their game animals to wetter or warmer places as the seasons change).
The question we’re left with – which may never be answered, as it lies too far in the distant past – is whether the pride in farming is the result of a people’s genuine passion for their place, or the result of the most successful propaganda campaign in the history of our species. Is it the combined and unifying effort of a people to carve out a space in the world that’s truly their own, or a colonizing of that effort by leveraging mythology to create power structures?
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Something on the order of 10,000 years of human history bound by this activity, this shaping of the earth to feed humans. It’s regarded as the singular activity that freed our ancestors; among certain classes, anyway; to create laws, government, poetry, music, writing, philosophy, and science…the stuff of civilization, grown on the labour of backs and the sweat of brows. Food is culture, and the things people grow in the places where it grows readily are, if not natural, likewise indigenous to the areas in which they’ve grown. At the same time that the process has separated humanity from its wildness, it has rooted them in the life of their lands. And that, over these millennia since, has as much to say about the character, belief, and sacred stewardship over life as the reading of seasons, the lore of the forest, and the blessings of the gods themselves.
As peoples with legendary origins, it’s often our first memory. And in that, very often, lie the roots of our identity.
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