At the Font of the Marvelous: Exploring Oral Narrative and Mythic Imagery of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors

4 Old Good Twin: Sky Holder During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

53 4 Old Good Twin Sky Holder During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries french jesuits in the seventeenth century gave his name, variously spelled, as Teharonhiaouagon, “he who holds up the sky,” or Sky Holder.1 Sometimes said to be one of two brothers, he was described by the missionaries as the great god of the Iroquois, their mightiest spirit, and the principal being “they acknowledge as a Divinity, and obey as the great Master of their lives.” Midwinter, an important religious ceremony held in February, was dedicated to learning Sky Holder’s will as interpreted from dreams (Thwaites 1896–1901, 42:197, 53:253, 55:61, 54:65). Mohawk chief John Norton wrote that this deity was the “Great Patron” of the Iroquois, and to him “they offered up their supplications, when they set out on an expedition; and in times of their greatest barbarism, it was to him, they offered the devoted victims taken in war” (Klinck and Talman 1970, 97). In 1827, Tuscarora writer David Cusick remembered Sky Holder as the deity who led the Iroquois in their tribal wanderings, protected his people from monsters, and instructed them in the arts of war (Beauchamp 1892, 11–18). This older Sky Holder has little in common with the beneficent demiurge described around 1900 in various accounts of the creation. That being, 1. “He who holds up the sky” was offered by French missionary Claude Dablon in 1656. In about 1815, James Dean rendered the Iroquois name for Sky Holder as “the holder or supporter of the heavens” (Lounsbury and Gick 2000, 162). 54 | At the Font of the Marvelous under a variety of names including Sky Holder,2 brought plants, animals, and features of the landscape into being for the benefit of humans, then fashioned the first people out of clay. At every step of the way, his wicked twin brother countered each good deed with a negative or destructive act. Although the kindly sibling prevailed, both brothers still compete to influence human behavior now and in the afterlife (see Fenton 1998, 34–50; Hewitt 1974, 470–791). Nor does the older Sky Holder sound precisely the same as the high god described by Lewis Henry Morgan about the year 1850. That deity, usually known as the Great Spirit, benevolently administers this world in competition with his evil twin brother and governs the next—a heavenly abode for mortals abiding by his ethical precepts (Morgan 1962, 154–56). All the sources named above almost certainly refer to the same deity or to different aspects of the same being. Yet, the widely differing characterizations pose a dilemma. Do they indicate that we do not understand Sky Holder’s whole nature (a function of inadequate information), or do they reflect how ideas about Sky Holder may have evolved through the ages (Wonderley 2001)? Hale (1885, 13), Beauchamp (1897, 169), and Parker (1913, 11) thought major changes had occurred in the Iroquois pantheon during the historical epoch. Hewitt (1910) and, after him, Fenton (1962; 1998, 110), took a more timeless view of the matter, implying that the character of the most important deity was little altered with the passage of time. Tooker (1970, 3) and Wallace (1972, 252–53; 1978, 447) believed Handsome Lake’s reforms in the early nineteenth century involved only minor revision of the good twin and his wicked brother. To express such opinions implies that one controls the terms of a comparison . Yet, the most rudimentary exercise of historical research on this topic has never been performed. The evidence bearing on the earlier nature 2. Sky Holder is called Sapling (Odendonniha) in creation accounts from the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario, given by John and Joshua Buck (in 1889 and 1897) and by Seth Newhouse (in 1896–97; Hewitt 1974, 188, 301–2). In John Arthur Gibson’s magisterial narrative of beginnings (1900, also Six Nations Reserve), Sapling is the first human created by Sky Holder (Hewitt 1974, 531). Later, during the early days of the human race as Gibson describes it, the Creator returns to the earth four times “in the guise of the fatherless boy named Sapling” (Fenton 1998, 46). Old Good Twin | 55 of Sky Holder—before Handsome Lake and prior to the great outpouring of written documentation after 1875—is marshaled in this chapter.3 Hoping to arrive at a better understanding of the Iroquois’s great god...