The Earth On The Turtle's Back Analysis

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“Myths can be described as sacred tales that help man understand the world and his place in it. Myths often try to respond to various eternal questions, such as the origin of the existence of evil, and also, through the archetypes that they provide, seem to give guidance to every generation,” as an Access teacher states, on enotes.com. During one’s education, grammar school through college, we fortunately get the opportunity to be exposed to countless myths and also numerous mythological creatures that we have never heard of before. Personally it was quite the challenge to relate some of these mythological tales into my own life. We don’t usually realize or understand, at that exact time of hearing or reading the creation myth, their drive …show more content…

An example of symbolic writing in a myth is within the tale of The Earth on the Turtles Back, the woman who descends through the immense hole is carrying a hand full of seeds, which is used to plant the Earth’s very first form of vegetation. In the creation myth it has been said that a Muskrats paw scratches the turtles shell, leaving its paw print among the shell, symbolizing a field of crops as farmers would do in today’s world. “They brought Muskrat over and placed her paw against his back. To this day there are marks at the back of Turtle's shell that were made by Muskrat's paw” (The Earth on the Turtles Back Myth). One other key symbol we have discovered throughout our exploration of creation myths is the symbolic meaning of the “tree”. In the account of the African Bushmen life comes from within the tree, out of the roots of the tree, throughout the branches of the tree, and dug out from the base, underneath, the tree. “At the base of the tree he dug a hole that reached all the way down into the world where the people and animals lived... he led the first man up the hole and soon the first woman came up out of it. Soon all the people were gathered at the foot of the tree, awed by the world they had just entered… the animals then climbed out of the hole some of the found a way to climb up through the tree's roots and also come out of the branches” (African Bushmen Myth). This tree, I believe, is a symbolic meaning of “the tree of life”; life and mankind would not have been able to exist today, or even of been able to surface without this

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