was. When time began everything was a swirling nothingness of water, mud and mist. There was no time; there was no form. Then came the beginning of order; the mist and the mud began to take shape--to harden, to strengthen and to grow.
There are clear areas of agreement between this myth and the story of creation as told in other religions, and there is also some correspondence between the myth and what we know of the process of creation through scientific investigation today. Mokat is given seniority because he spoke first, but both chiefs created the world as it is now constituted:
They at once set to work to build the earth, to separate the waters from the land, and they made all the world a vast plain cut by rivers and bounded by the ocean. No longer were there swirls of matter and fog, but there was land and water as we know them.
Once these two beings have created the world, they find that they are both lonely and at odds with each other. They then decide to create beings to people the earth. The two argue over what the beings will look like, and Mokat wins because he is senior, while Tamayowit takes the "monsters" he wants to create and goes beneath the earth into the underworld. It is he who pushes up the mountains from that underworld. He moves and creates earthquakes, and there is a tension between himself and Mokat for supremacy, with Mokat protecting the earth and its people while Tamayowit wants one day to destroy it.
Elements of this oral myth can certainly be related to the geographic and climatic nature of California. James J. Rawls and Walton Bean describe the state thus:
California is a notoriously extraordinary place. Three elements in its geography have played especially crucial parts in its history: its extreme isolation, its extraordinary climate, and the great diversity among its various subregions.
These geographic elements are described as historically significant, and just as ...