THE ORIGINS OF OGLALA DAKOTA RELIGION
Keywords:
Oglala Dakota, ReligionAbstract
Joseph Campbell speaks of the "Twilight of the Great Hunt," referring to the culture of the North American Plains. According to him, Franco-Cantabrian Aurignacian culture is echoed in the buffalo jump, sacred pipe, sun dance, and medicine wheel.' He finds archaic Animal Master motifs in the Blackfoot myth of the girl who marries the buffalo bull and is taught the life-restoring buffalo dance. He also finds hints of the Eurasian Paleolithic in the Oglala Lakota myth of White Buffalo Maiden and the Gift of the Sacred Pipe2 The late Mircea Eliade found paleolithic mythic significance in the widespread mythic motif of the animal who is sent to the bottom of a lake or the sea to bring up the soil from which the world is made.s With variations, this myth recurs throughout North Eurasia and North America.
References
Joseph Campbell, The Way of Animal Po wets, An Atlas of Mythology, Vol. I. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983., pp. 193ff.
Campbell, The Masks of God, Primitive Mythology, Vol. I, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1979 (1959)., pp. 282-5.
Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis The Vanishing God, trans. Willard R. Trask, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 1972 (1972)., pp, 76ff.
Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, New York and Oxford: Facts on File Publication, 1985., pp. 6f.
George Frison, Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, New York: Academic Press, 1978., pp. 243f.
Black Elk Speaks, Joseph G. Neihhardt, New York: Pocket Books, 1919 (1932)., pp, 1-5.
The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown, London and New York: Penguin Books. 1977 (1953).
Margot Liberty, "The Sun Dance" in Anthropology of the Great Plains, Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1980., pp. 164f.
Fred W. Voget, The Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance, Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1984., pp. 79ft.
Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974 (1964)., Bollingen Series LXXVI, pp, 6f.
