Legends

Legends are stories believed by the narrator to be true. Most stories, therefore, are based on actual experience or observations that have been cast into narrative form in accord with traditional models and established points of view. Legends need no datelines or the names of persons or places to authenticate them. They are over as events, but they live and survive in our memories due to their human interest. They are symbols of something of universal and perennial interest, ideal representations of human nature and the truth of life everywhere. Legends are the stories formed around the truth like crystal formed around a grain of sand. False addition or deductions from real facts may build them up by twisting the facts in the process of translating from primitive languages. As such, legends are unverified nonhistorical popular stories handed down by tradition from antiquity. Originally, they were limited to the lives of saints and gods or to collections of stories from particular religious and mythological backgrounds. There is a legend regarding the creation of the world in Middle America coming from ancient Aztec and Mayan people. Throughout the New World, there is a belief in multiple creations of which the present world is but one. In Middle American belief, there are normally four of these creations or, as [Page 1458]they are called, world ages. Movement through these ages is usually progressive, and the present age may acquire a special status as the fifth age, which is the sum of all other ages. The basis of this legend of five in four is expressed in the carving known as the Aztec Sun Stone, where the sign that names the present age movement is constituted by the signs that name the four previous ages: Water,Jaguar, Rain, and Wind. These signs are enclosed in the unending sign of the Twenty signs, running anticlockwise and enclosed by two year-snakes. The 16th-century Nahua manuscript known as the legend of the Suns tells us more about these world ages and their cataclysmic endings. During the first age (Water), humans were invented and molded from ash, and then everything was overtaken by water and people were transformed into fish. During the Jaguar age, the sun was eclipsed, and in darkness jaguars ate the people. Then came the Rain age, which ended in a rain of volcanic fire and ash. Then the Wind age, with its hurricane, came and men turned into apes. And the present age also is doomed to earthquake and famine. The same sequence of cataclysmic events—flood, eclipse, eruption, and hurricane—occurs in other legends as well. According to Indian legends, the universe is said to have come into being out of chaos when Indra, the kind of the gods and the god of rains, or Vishnu, a solar deity, separated heaven from the earth. Then the sun rose, and from that spot, the naval of the earth, a great pillar was erected to prop apart heaven and the earth. This pillar is the axis of the world. There were now three worlds: Heaven, Earth, and the intervening Air or Ether. Although there are some obscure hints of an underworld as well, little is said about it in Rigveda, the basis of this legend.

Source: Courtesy, Wikipedia.

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