Cross-cultural Views of Greed
The U.S. appears to be in a massive shift of wealth from poor and middle-income people to those who are already quite wealthy. This wealth disparity is epitomized by Elon Musk's 100 billion dollars annual income, which turns out to be roughly 3 billion more than what all elementary school teachers in the U.S. earn combined. I've also noticed recent articles about how important greed is to our socio-economic system. Thinking about wealth and greed reminded me that Hopi and Zuni cultures warn of the dangers of greed: it destroys worlds, as I discuss in the excerpt below from my article "Corn Culture."
For untold centuries, Pueblo Indians have been acutely aware of the destructive potential of greed, so they have designed cultures that curtail the human tendency toward unmitigated selfishness. Let’s look at a Hopi myth and then a Zuni one, both excellent examples of cultural products that extol humility and gratitude and warn against the dangers of greed. These ancient myths are as relevant to our twenty-first-century, hi-tech, genetically sophisticated lives today as they have always been to the Pueblo people. Both myths feature corn, an extremely important plant….
Both the Hopi and Zuni believe that the world has been cyclically created, destroyed, and re-created. Each destruction was the result of human greed. According to the Hopi, we now live in the Fourth World, (and some say we’re coming to the end of it). Hopi mythology tells of a time after the end of the Third World Age when most people had died; however, some people, including some Hopi, had been spared, kept safely inside the body of Mother Earth until the Earth’s surface was again habitable. When the Earth was ready, these humans emerged. They met a being named Masaw who was tilling the soil. Masaw offered the groups of people different kinds of corn by which they might make their livelihood in this new Fourth World. While others grabbed for the biggest ears of corn, the Hopi deliberately chose the smallest ear of blue corn.
The wise old Hopi ancestors’ selection of the little ear of blue corn symbolizes their intent to live a life that would be hard – their harvest would be small for their efforts – but enduring. These ancient Hopis had observed that there are dangers inherent in an easy lifestyle. People become complacent, take their abundance for granted, and then they lose their spiritual connection with the Source of their abundance. The end result is that, over time, such people do not endure. Their greed leads them to hoard goods and ruin their environments and to war with each other. Choosing a difficult lifeway, a way that requires much hard work for relatively small harvest, guards against greed by keeping people humble and grateful for what they have. To survive, such people must stay spiritually in tune with the Earth and keenly aware of the plants and animals around them; consequently, they endure beyond the lifetimes of the people who live easier lives.
A Zuni Corn Maidens myth recorded by anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1935) suggests a resonant moral. This is a story of the long-ago times, when the radiantly beautiful Corn Maidens, Mother Goddesses of corn, lived among the Zuni people. These seven Corn Maidens were more beautiful than any mere human woman could ever be, and they kept the Zuni’s corn storerooms full. In return, the Zuni people performed ceremonies and were grateful for the Corn Maidens’ gifts. But one night, the Bow priest whose duty it was to protect the Corn Maidens while they slept snuck up behind Yellow Corn and tried to rape her. He dared to lay hands on Yellow Corn.
Yellow Corn rebuked the Bow priest for attempting to “lie with his Mother,” and then she hurried to tell her sisters what had happened. All the Corn Maidens agreed that they must leave the people, lest they be made “less valuable” by such foolish behavior. When the Corn Maidens left, all the corn in the storerooms followed them. The people got by OK for a while by hunting deer and eating cactus, but after six increasingly difficult years – drought, a killing frost, depletion of game, one hardship after another -- they were dying of starvation. Desperate, the Zuni priests asked Eagle and other birds to help them find the Corn Maidens, but the beautiful sisters remained secluded.
Finally the Zuni priests called on Newekwe Youth, a young initiate from a neighboring village who had special skills. Newekwe Youth flew up to the Milky Way, from where he could see the Corn Maidens hiding in the ocean far to the southeast of Zuni. He reported this sighting to the Zuni priests who had summoned him, but Newekwe youth warned them that he could not retrieve the Corn Maidens alone. He would need the priests’ help. They must neither talk, nor eat, nor drink, nor pee; they couldn’t even move. They could only sit in the kiva with their arms folded across their chests and pray and meditate while he planted the prayer sticks along the path to where the Corn Maidens were hiding. And he couldn’t just take the prayer sticks all at once: he planted the first a short distance away from the village, returned and prayed with the priests a while. Then he took the second, planted it further away, returned and prayed even longer with the priests. And so on, until Newekwe youth had planted a path of seven prayer sticks reaching all the way to the ocean where the Corn Maidens were staying.
Suffice to say, this was an arduous process that taxed the priests’ abilities to endure deprivation and stay focused, but they did it because otherwise the whole village would die. The Corn Maidens, who know such things, were aware of the priests’ sacrifice, so when Newekwe Youth found them and asked them the requisite four times to return, they agreed – but only on the condition that the Zuni people would “be happy all the time” and perform their ceremonies as they had since Time Immemorial.
When the Corn Maidens returned to the village, the people performed the welcoming ceremony. That night, their storerooms were filled, but because the Bow Priest had laid hands on Yellow Corn, the Corn Maidens would now live among them in spirit only rather than in flesh, and from that time on Zuni corn was never perfectly kernelled.
Like the Hopi myth of the creation and destruction of worlds, this story points to the devastating consequences of greed. The Bow Priest wasn’t satisfied with what he had – he wanted more, all for himself. His unmitigated selfishness caused the whole village to suffer extreme hardship. The Corn Maidens’ condition that the Zuni people “be happy all the time” points to the antidote for such greed. The meaning of “happiness” here is not smiley-face giddiness; rather, it refers to the contentment that rests on gratitude for what one has been given – the direct opposite of greed. If the Bow priest had been happy with the bounty that was his, he would not have tried to reach out and grab still more for his own pleasure.
What is the moral of these stories for us today?