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Quote Originally Posted by Ninjadeadbeard View Post
Not too fluent in the Lone Man story (except through a cursory wiki dive), but I think I can help. If you want a Devil-figure (the Disney Method of working with mythology), then the Lone Man could be the shadow cast by the First Creator. He is, in essence, the First Destroyer and he brought death into the world. Of course, in the myth itself when the Creator asks his shadow why it created death, the Lone Man would say, "You were careless, and brought too much life to the world. Life multiplies too fast, and if I did not create an end to it, Life would become miserable when it used up all the land."

Or the Lone Man could be the brother of the First Creator, but I'd still have him create stuff like death in the above example. I think the original myth (read here) had something to do with death coming into the world via a frog, but I just gave that job to Lone Man. I kinda like the idea of making some of the Natives a little Zarathustran in that they see a Good and Evil force at work in the world, but that neither is perfect. The First Creator created many good things, but also the bad, and he may be a bit careless in his wanton creation. The Lone Man is implacable as death itself, but he tempers his Brother's frivolities with cold, hard rationalism.


I like it. To match it up with the story in TheMeMan's post, we could say that Lone Man's rational side helped to create the social group in Native cultures. To maintain the balance, First Creator created all the deadly and dangerous things as well as the good things, and the society created by Lone Man protects the Natives from those things. This muddies the waters a little bit in terms of the life-death dichotomy, but maybe that's the way it should be. Life is generally good but can be specifically bad, and Death is dreadful but forces a very helpful rationale on the world. Well looky there! That might be a dandy theme upon which to build a lot of Native cultural minutiae. It enforces the kind of "respect everything and examine everything with wisdom" thing that you see pop up in Native American velvet paintings.