Creation Story

In the beginning the earth was a plain of ice and snow. All was dark. There was no life, no death. The sun, the moon, and the stars slept beneath the ice. All the eternal ancestors slept there, too, until at last they woke themselves out of their own eternity and broke through to the surface.

When the eternal ancestors arose, in the Dreamtime, they wandered the earth, sometimes in animal form -- as bears, wolves, and ravens -- sometimes in human shape, sometimes part animal and human, sometimes as part human and plant.

Two such beings, self-created out of nothing, were the Ungambi. Wandering the world, they found half-made human beings. They were made of animals and plants, but were shapeless bundles, lying higgledy-piggledy, near where the ice was warmed, so water holes and salt lakes could be created. The people were all doubled over into balls, vague and unfinished, without limbs or features.

With their great stone knives, the Ungambi carved heads, bodies, legs, and arms out of the bundles. They made the faces, and the hands and feet. At last the human beings were finished.

Thus every man and woman was transformed from nature and owes allegiance to the spirit of the animal or the plant that made the bundle they were created from -- such as the ash tree, the grass seed, the bear, the large and small bird, or the rat.

Then the ancestors freed the moon and stars from their tombs, to shine over the ice and snow. But the humans were cold, so they rose the sun from its bed in the southeast, melting the ice below frostfell.

This work done, the ancestors went back to sleep. Some of them returned to the ice, others became rocks and trees. The trails the ancestors walked in the Dreamtime are holy trails. Everywhere the ancestors went, they left sacred traces of their presence -- a rock, a waterhole, a tree, a glacier.

For the Dreamtime does not merely lie in the distant past, the Dreamtime is the eternal Now. Between heartbeat and heartbeat, the Dreamtime can come again.

The gods and godlings we know now, have come to power over the ages, as they conferred with the Manitou, the spirits of the Earth and her creatures, and learned the powers to be drawn from the Manitou and the Dreamtime.