Episode 21: Scavenger Stories
Amanda’s Notes
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/coyote-america-dan-flores-history-science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_(mythology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote
https://pestpointers.com/amazing-coyote-facts-and-things-you-didnt-know/
https://www.historynet.com/coyote-american-original/
Alright, for the final episode in our animal folklore series we are talking about coyotes and jackals, and I will get into how the two relate. And it turns out it’s not just because we needed to make sure Corinne had access to myths for this episode.
So a bit of biology and history before we get into the folklore portion of my segment. The canid family of animals evolved in North America about 5 and a half million years ago. While many canid species such as wolves, jackals, and wild dogs left via land bridges, coyotes never left the North American continent. Physically, modern coyotes are closest to golden jackals amongst the different canid species. There’s only a 4% genetic difference and evolutionarily they only split apart 800,000 years ago, which is the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. So yeah, our episode topic totes makes sense and wasn’t laziness at all.
So growing up, believe it or not, I read whatever available book on mythology and folklore I could find. Shocking, right? And in that sort of zealous research that only a 9 year old can do, I learned that in Native American folklore (you know, the generic Native folklore that definitely is the same across the continent) coyote is a trickster character a la Reynard in France or Anansi in West Africa. I imagine that’s a similar belief that you have, yeah? Because that’s what’s available in surface level stories.
But surface level colonizer retellings of stories are never really accurate, are they? Looking further, Coyote as a mythological figure only shows up in mythology in the region that is modern day California, which makes sense when you understand that coyotes did not migrate East of even the Great Plains until the late 19th Century. And in those original myths Coyote doesn’t really fit the trickster role. He never does anything to teach humanity a lesson. Instead, Coyote exists as a benevolent teacher or mentor for humanity, with the most important task he carries out being the introduction of fire.
Now, because I’m me I wanted to figure out when and why the myths switched from benevolent mentor to lecherous, spineless trickster. And the answer, naturally, is fucking white people. See, in the fall of 1804 Lewis and Clark made it to present day South Dakota where they encountered a coyote for the first time. At first they thought it was a fox, but after they shot one and looked at it up close they decided it must be some sort of wolf. They named it a prairie wolf and that’s what coyotes were called for most of the 19th Century. Fun fact! Learning that bit of history while doing research for this episode made certain passages of Little House on the Prairie make sooooo much more sense in retrospect. That introduced coyotes into United States consciousness, but the beginning of their reputation as a pest came from an even less likely source than Lewis and Clark. Care to guess?
It was our buddy, originator of the Great American Novel himself, Mark Twain. In the 1870s Twain wrote the book Roughing It in which he gives a four page rant about coyotes, saying in part “the meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede”. By the 1920s the publication Scientific American started referring to coyotes as “the original Bolsheviks”.
Around this time, coyotes began getting hunted with as much creative cruelty as possible, termed “the archpredator of our time”. Fun fact, coyotes mostly eat berries and small rodents. Archpredator they are not, but other anti-predator campaigns had about eradicated wolves in North America so I guess when fascism is on the rise killing innocent animals is what you have to do to keep your mind off of it. Well, pre-Netflix. I’m avoiding the rise of fascism worldwide by watching Stranger Things, no animals harmed in the making of this decline of Democracy.
It was in the 20s as well that contemporary folklorists started twisting Native coyote myths. This is when the reinterpretation of these myths as Reynard style tricksters began when the folklorist was feeling generous, actual coward sexual predator Coyote was the less kind reinterpretation.
And that reputation stayed in place until around the late 1960s. It took Disney making a series of pro-coyote short films and Warner Bros. introducing Wile E. Coyote to help the animal start making its comeback as another part of nature, not a pest to eradicate.
And now for just some quick facts about coyotes. Coyotes, while originally confined to the Western half of the continent, have now been found as far east as New York and have even been found on the other side of the Panama Canal. Coyotes to the east of the Mississippi are on average 10-15 pounds larger than their Western counterparts, which according to genetic testing is due to generations of inbreeding with wolves. And there’s a very real chance that coyotes were almost domesticated at some point, to the same level we believe cheetahs were domesticated. And that’s my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_animal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis
https://www.realmofhistory.com/2022/06/27/anubis-history-mythology-jackal-god/
https://www.worldhistory.org/Anubis/
https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/jackal-gods-ancient-egypt/index.php
Stefanović, D. (2013). THE “CHRISTIANISATION” OF HERMANUBIS. Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, 62(4), 506–514. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24434042
So before I could really dig into jackal mythology, which had secretly been my plan all along (insert evil laugh here), I did have to double check that coyotes’ range doesn’t extend outside of North America. Thankfully, it does not! So I did not have to change my plans, nebulous though they were. I did, however, learn that at one point in time coyotes were referred to as “American jackals”, since they fill roughly the same ecological niche and in the grand scheme of things are pretty closely related. So that’s cool! I learned new biology things! My mom and mother in law will be proud!
So, let’s do a wee bit of background on jackals before we go further. Jackals are wild canids, closely related to wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs. There are three main species, the black-backed jackal and the side-striped jackal, both of which are fairly closely related and mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal, which ranges through western Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and into Europe. And here I find I have to drag myself. I recently read a YA romance novel set in a fictional version of France, where the characters referenced a “golden jackal” typically found east of the region they were located. I, being me, assumed that this was a made up thing??? It was being largely presented as a sort of mythological creature, in my defense. I sent several indignant texts to Amanda upon learning that no, golden jackals are real animals, the author was accurate about their range, and I’m still mad at myself about the whole situation.
ANYWAY. In a lot of western literature, jackals will crop up as trickster figures. Y’all know I love a good trickster, but instead I’m going to focus a little more on their role in Egyptian mythology. Buckle up because we are going to go for a bit of a ride here. My research took a swerve I was NOT expecting.
As any kid who had an Ancient Egypt phase can tell you, jackals are frequently associated with the god Anubis, who is a god of mummification and the dead. He played a hugely important role in helping souls reach the afterlife. Anubis is frequently represented as a man with the head of a jackal–or, probably a jackal. Maybe. Because here’s the thing: the way Anubis is represented doesn’t look a ton like the jackals that could conceivably be found in and around Egypt. Remember before how I mentioned before that two species of jackal are from sub-Saharan Africa? The jackal that chills out in the region near Egypt, the golden jackal, actually looks more like North American coyotes than how Anubis is typically represented. Even more notably, Greek writers often referred to Anubis as being dog-headed. Despite this, we’re going to roll with my baby understanding of Egyptology and continue to refer to Anubis as looking like a jackal.
There actually aren’t a ton of extant myths about Anubis. Depending on the time period, he might be a son of Ra, or of Osiris, sometimes his mother is Bastet (which I find hilarious, since she’s a cat-headed goddess) or sometimes Isis. But since he played such an integral role in guiding souls along to the afterlife, from overseeing the mummification process to the weighing of the heart to determine if the soul was slated for punishment or not, there is a TON of art that features him. Like, just loads.
Okay, so here’s where my research started getting kinda. Not what I expected.
Anubis was also like, WEIRDLY popular with Greeks and Romans after they successively conquered Egypt. The Greeks and Romans took one look at this funky lil jackal-headed deity and were like, “You made this? I made this.” What’s sort of weird about their adoption of Anubis is that for Greek and Roman cultures, deities who had both human and animal features were kind of passe. Those kinds of deities were for barbarians, not their Modern and Enlightened worship. But, much like their adoption of Isis, cults sprang up to worship him, where his role as a psychopomp often got him conflated with either Hades or Hermes (or sometimes Cerberus, because he’s a dog, geddit??). Anubis was so commonly conflated with Hermes that a weird, merged version of the deity (usually with like, Hermes’ winged sandals and a dog by his side) was developed, with possibly the WORST portmanteau ever: Hermanubis. Let’s just have a moment of silence for that. Because it’s just horrible. I hate it.
As I’m perusing this information, being silently aghast at the name “Hermanubis”, I saw another phrase that just baffled me. To quote the Egyptologist Salima Ikram: [Anubis] became associated with Charon in the Graeco-Roman period and St. Christopher in the early Christian period…
And I was like, “wait, St Christopher? The guy we talked about in the hitchhiking ghosts episode? The same St Christopher my mom keeps a holy medal of in her purse?” And the answer is yes. I’ve linked to one of the articles I read on JSTOR about it, but in rough summary, the idea is that a) St Christopher is sometimes mentioned as having a dog face???? Why is this something I never learned in 16 years of Catholic School??? And b) there was often imagery of Anubis with the moon, which was associated with Osiris and rebirth, which somehow got combined with the story of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child across that river, and Christ is ALSO associated with rebirth so conflate these two stories and profit? I guess??? I don’t even know. I don’t know that we’ve got enough time to unravel my state of surprise. This is just. Not where I saw my research going. But that’s where I ended up! I hope you are as confused and entertained as I am!
