raven wolf

ok it’ missing one eye do to my wonderful cat but i’m very proud of the paint job
my inspiration is from an old inuit story about the raven. In the first tale, we discover how the sun, moon, and stars came to be. The main character is Raven who, like Coyote in other parts of the Western United States, is a “trickster” figure. [For a more thorough discussion see my essay on the trickster.] Raven is just going about his typical day-to-day life; but without light he keeps blundering into things. Typical of a trickster, his mind turns to bettering his situation. Note the sentence, “it slowed him down a good deal in his pursuit of food and other fleshly pleasures, and in his constant effort to interfere and to change things.”

Where is the light in this strange world of absolute darkness? It is kept deep inside an infinity of concentric boxes, in a plank house up the river, where an old man lives with the daughter he has never seen. In contrast to systematic origin myths, it is irrelevant how any of this got there. The emotional and social content is the important part — the man who owns the light and possesses it in a carefully guarded cache of boxes, the daughter who has never been seen.

Raven, who is an immortal being, deals with all of this in a way that is typical of the trickster. Watching the daughter come down to the river to get water, his sexual appetite is stirred. [Like Coyote, Raven’s sexual appetite is always inflated.] He transforms himself into a single hemlock needle, floats down river into the daughter’s dipping basket, gives her thirst so that she drinks him down, and enters the house inside of her. Having symbolically impregnated her, Raven emerges as a human child who begins to grow up, as all spoiled boy children do, with his grandfather. Little by little, he gets the grandfather to give him the boxes until he finally gets the grandfather to toss him the light itself! In an instant, he is transformed back into Raven who flies out of the house through the smoke hole in the roof.

The world as we know it is born in this moment as Raven first flies above it with the light in his beak. But there is another great character who, in the first burst of light, is finally able to see its prey. It is Eagle who heads full speed at Raven, causing him to swerve and drop half of his cargo. Falling to the ground, this part of the light smashes into pieces, forming the moon and the stars! And as Eagle chases after Raven, the remainder of the light, the sun, is dropped beyond the rim of the world so that it can begin its daily passage across the sky. The concept of “the rim of the world” is common all the way along the Northwest and undoubtedly derives from the horizon that dominates their ocean-front homes.

In the end, while the old man has lost his sole possession of the light, he has gained the ability to see his daughter who is very beautiful. In this matrilineal society, the daughter’s marriage and child bearing will carry on his lineage.

By toshiami, shot with NIKON D40X at 2008-07-11

By toshiami, shot with NIKON D40X at 2008-07-11

By toshiami, shot with NIKON D40X at 2008-07-11

By toshiami, shot with NIKON D40X at 2008-07-11

By toshiami, shot with NIKON D40X at 2008-07-11

thank you!! 😀 😀

thankies everyone!! 😀 😀