THE ORIGIN OF MAN.
Usually man is the EARTH-BORN, both in language and
myths.--Illustrations from the legends of the Caribs, Apalachians,
Iroquois, Quichuas, Aztecs, and others.--The underworld.--Man the
product of one of the primal creative powers, the Spirit, or the
Water, in the myths of the Athapascas, Eskimos, Moxos, and
others.--Never literally derived from an inferior species.
No man can escape the importunate question, whence am I? The first
replies framed to meet it possess an interest to the thoughtful mind,
beyond that of mere fables. They illustrate the position in creation
claimed by our race, and the early workings of self-consciousness. Often
the oldest terms for man are synopses of these replies, and merit a more
than passing contemplation.
The seed is hidden in the earth. Warmed by the sun, watered by the rain,
presently it bursts its dark prison-house, unfolds its delicate leaves,
blossoms, and matures its fruit. Its work done, the earth draws it to
itself again, resolves the various structures into their original mould,
and the unending round recommences.
This is the marvellous process that struck the primitive mind. Out of
the Earth rises life, to it it returns. She it is who guards all germs,
nourishes all beings. The Aztecs painted her as a woman with countless
breasts, the Peruvians called her Mama Allpa, _mother_ Earth. _Homo_,
_Adam_, _chamaigen[=e]s_, what do all these words mean but the
earth-born, the son of the soil, repeated in the poetic language of
Attica in _anthropos_, he who springs up as a flower?
The word that corresponds to the Latin _homo_ in American languages has
such singular uniformity in so many of them, that we might be tempted to
regard it as a fragment of some ancient and common tongue, their parent
stem. In the Eskimo it is _inuk_, _innuk_, plural _innuit_; in Athapasca
it is _dinni_, _tenne_; in Algonkin, _inini_, _lenni_, _inwi_; in
Iroquois, _onwi_, _eniha_; in the Otomi of Mexico _n-aniehe_; in the
Maya, _inic_, _winic_, _winak_; all in North America, and the number
might be extended. Of these only the last mentioned can plausibly be
traced to a radical (unless the Iroquois _onwi_ is from _onnha_ life,
_onnhe_ to live). This Father Ximenes derives from _win_, meaning to
grow, to gain, to increase,[223-1] in which the analogy to vegetable
life is not far off, an analogy strengthened by the myth of that stock,
which relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of
maize.[223-2]
In many other instances religious legend carries out this idea. The
mythical ancestor of the Caribs created his offspring by sowing the soil
with stones or with the fruit of the Mauritius palm, which sprouted
forth into men and women,[224-1] while the Yurucares, much of whose
mythology was perhaps borrowed from the Peruvians, clothed this crude
tenet in a somewhat more poetic form, fabling that at the beginning the
first of men were pegged, Ariel-like, in the knotty entrails of an
enormous hole, until the god Tiri--a second Prospero--released them by
cleaving it in twain.[224-2]
As in oriental legends the origin of man from the earth was veiled under
the story that he was the progeny of some mountain fecundated by the
embrace of Mithras or Jupiter, so the Indians often pointed to some
height or some cavern, as the spot whence the first of men issued, adult
and armed, from the womb of the All-mother Earth. The oldest name of the
Alleghany Mountains is Paemotinck or Pemolnick, an Algonkin word, the
meaning of which is said to be "the origin of the Indians."[224-3]
The Witchitas, who dwelt on the Red River among the mountains named
after them, have a tradition that their progenitors issued from the
rocks about their homes,[225-1] and many other tribes the Tahkalis,
Navajos, Coyoteras, and the Haitians, for instance, set up this claim to
be autochthones. Most writers have interpreted this simply to mean that
they knew nothing at all about their origin, or that they coined these
fables merely to strengthen the title to the territory they inhabited
when they saw the whites eagerly snatching it away on every pretext. No
doubt there is some truth in this, but if they be carefully sifted,
there is sometimes a deep historical significance in these myths, which
has hitherto escaped the observation of students. An instance presents
itself in our own country.
All those tribes, the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chicasaws, and
Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into
one common confederacy under the headship of the last mentioned,
unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence
in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence
they pretended to have emerged. Fortunately we have a description,
though a brief one, of this interesting monument from the pen of an
intelligent traveller. It is described as "an elevation of earth about
half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high. From its northeast
corner a wall of equal height extends for near half a mile to the high
land." This was the Nunne Chaha or Nunne Hamgeh, the High Hill, or the
Bending Hill, famous in Choctaw stories, and which Captain Gregg found
they have not yet forgotten in their western home. The legend was that
in its centre was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath. Here he
made the first men from the clay around him, and as at that time the
waters covered the earth, he raised the wall to dry them on. When the
soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he banished the
waters to their channels and beds, and gave the dry land to his
creatures.[226-1] When in 1826 Albert Gallatin obtained from some
Natchez chiefs a vocabulary of their language, they gave to him as their
word for _hill_ precisely the same word that a century and a quarter
before the French had found among them as their highest term for
God;[226-2] reversing the example of the ancient Greeks who came in time
to speak of Olympus, at first the proper name of a peak in Thessaly, as
synonymous with heaven and Jove.
A parallel to this southern legend occurs among the Six Nations of the
north. They with one consent, if we may credit the account of Cusic,
looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego River in the State of
New York, as the locality where their forefathers first saw the light of
day, and that they had some such legend the name Oneida, people of the
Stone, would seem to testify.
The cave of Pacari Tampu, the Lodgings of the Dawn, was five leagues
distant from Cuzco, surrounded by a sacred grove and inclosed with
temples of great antiquity. From its hallowed recesses the mythical
civilizers of Peru, the first of men, emerged, and in it during the time
of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of the
waves.[227-1] Viracocha himself is said to have dwelt there, though it
hardly needed this evidence to render it certain that this consecrated
cavern is but a localization of the general myth of the dawn rising from
the deep. It refers us for its prototype to the Aymara allegory of the
morning light flinging its beams like snow-white foam athwart the waves
of Lake Titicaca.
An ancient legend of the Aztecs derived their nation from a place called
Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caverns, located north of Mexico. Antiquaries
have indulged in all sorts of speculations as to what this means.
Sahagun explains it as a valley so named; Clavigero supposes it to have
been a city; Hamilton Smith, and after him Schoolcraft, construed
caverns to be a figure of speech for the _boats_ in which the early
Americans paddled across from Asia(!); the Abbe Brasseur confounds it
with Aztlan, and very many have discovered in it a distinct reference
to the fabulous "seven cities of Cibola" and the Casas Grandes, ruins of
large buildings of unburnt brick in the valley of the River Gila. From
this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a
division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans.
When Torquemada adds that _seven_ hero gods ruled in Chicomoztoc and
were the progenitors of all its inhabitants, when one of them turns out
to be Xelhua, the giant who with six others escaped the flood by
ascending the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise and
afterwards built the pyramid of Cholula, and when we remember that in
one of the flood-myths _seven_ persons were said to have escaped the
waters, the whole narrative acquires a fabulous aspect that shuts it out
from history, and brands it as one of those fictions of the origin of
man from the earth so common to the race. Fictions yet truths; for
caverns and hollow trees were in fact the houses and temples of our
first parents, and from them they went forth to conquer and adorn the
world; and from the inorganic constituents of the soil acted on by
Light, touched by Divine Force, vivified by the Spirit, did in reality
the first of men proceed.
This cavern, which thus dimly lingered in the memories of nations,
occasionally expanded to a nether world, imagined to underlie this of
ours, and still inhabited by beings of our kind, who have never been
lucky enough to discover its exit. The Mandans and Minnetarees on the
Missouri River supposed this exit was near a certain hill in their
territory, and as it had been, as it were, the womb of the earth, the
same power was attributed to it that in ancient times endowed certain
shrines with such charms; and thither the barren wives of their nation
made frequent pilgrimages when they would become mothers.[229-1] The
Mandans added the somewhat puerile fable that the means of ascent had
been a grapevine, by which many ascended and descended, until one day an
immoderately fat old lady, anxious to get a look at the upper earth,
broke it with her weight, and prevented any further communication.
Such tales of an under-world are very frequent among the Indians, and
are a very natural outgrowth of the literal belief that the race is
earth-born.
Man is indeed like the grass that springs up and soon withers away; but
he is also more than this. The quintessence of dust, he is a son of the
gods as well as a son of the soil. He is the direct product of the great
creative power; therefore all the Athapascan tribes west of the Rocky
Mountains--the Kenai, the Kolushes, and the Atnai--claim descent from a
raven--from that same mighty cloud-bird, who in the beginning of things
seized the elements and brought the world from the abyss of the
primitive ocean. Those of the same stock situate more eastwardly, the
Dogribs, the Chepewyans, the Hare Indians, and also the west coast
Eskimos, and the natives of the Aleutian Isles, all believe that they
have sprung from a dog.[229-2] The latter animal, we have already seen,
both in the old and new world was the fixed symbol of the water goddess.
Therefore in these myths, which are found over so many thousand square
leagues, we cannot be in error in perceiving a reflex of their
cosmogonical traditions already discussed, in which from the winds and
the waters, represented here under their emblems of the bird and the
dog, all animate life proceeded.
Without this symbolic coloring, a tribe to the south of them, a band of
the Minnetarees, had the crude tradition that their first progenitor
emerged from the waters, bearing in his hand an ear of maize,[230-1]
very much as Viracocha and his companions rose from the sacred waves of
Lake Titicaca, or as the Moxos imagined that they were descended from
the lakes and rivers on whose banks their villages were situated.
These myths, and many others, hint of general conceptions of life and
the world, wide-spread theories of ancient date, such as we are not
accustomed to expect among savage nations, such as may very excusably
excite a doubt as to their native origin, but a doubt infallibly
dispelled by a careful comparison of the best authorities. Is it that
hitherto, in the pride of intellectual culture, we have never done
justice to the thinking faculty of those whom we call barbarians? Or
shall we accept the only other alternative, that these are the
unappreciated heirlooms bequeathed a rude race by a period of higher
civilization, long since extinguished by constant wars and ceaseless
fear? We are not yet ready to answer these questions. With almost
unanimous consent the latter has been accepted as the true solution, but
rather from the preconceived theory of a state of primitive
civilization from which man fell, than from ascertained facts.
It would, perhaps, be pushing symbolism too far to explain as an emblem
of the primitive waters the coyote, which, according to the Root-Diggers
of California, brought their ancestors into the world; or the wolf,
which the Lenni Lenape pretended released mankind from the dark bowels
of the earth by scratching away the soil. They should rather be
interpreted by the curious custom of the Toukaways, a wild people in
Texas, of predatory and unruly disposition. They celebrate their origin
by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in
the earth. The others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, snuff
around him, howl in lupine style, and finally dig him up with their
nails. The leading wolf then solemnly places a bow and arrow in his
hands, and to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living, paternally
advises him "to do as the wolves do--rob, kill, and murder, rove from
place to place, and never cultivate the soil."[231-1] Most wise and
fatherly counsel! But what is there new under the sun? Three thousand
years ago the Hirpini, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe, were wont to
collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites in memory
of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain
their living as wolves by violence and plunder. Therefore they dressed
in wolf-skins, ran with barks and howls over burning coals, and gnawed
wolfishly whatever they could seize.[231-2]
Though hasty writers have often said that the Indian tribes claim
literal descent from different wild beasts, probably in all other
instances, as in these, this will prove, on examination, to be an error
resting on a misapprehension arising from the habit of the natives of
adopting as their totem or clan-mark the figure and name of some animal,
or else, in an ignorance of the animate symbols employed with such
marked preference by the red race to express abstract ideas. In some
cases, doubtless, the natives themselves came, in time, to confound the
symbol with the idea, by that familiar process of personification and
consequent debasement exemplified in the history of every religion; but
I do not believe that a single example could be found where an Indian
tribe had a tradition whose real purport was that man came by natural
process of descent from an ancestor, a brute.
The reflecting mind will not be offended at the contradictions in these
different myths, for a myth is, in one sense, a theory of natural
phenomena expressed in the form of a narrative. Often several
explanations seem equally satisfactory for the same fact, and the mind
hesitates to choose, and rather accepts them all than rejects any. Then,
again, an expression current as a metaphor by-and-by crystallizes into a
dogma, and becomes the nucleus of a new mythological growth. These are
familiar processes to one versed in such studies, and involve no logical
contradiction, because they are never required to be reconciled.
FOOTNOTES:
[223-1] _Vocabulario Quiche_, s. v., ed. Brasseur, Paris, 1862.
[223-2] The Eskimo _innuk_, man, means also a possessor or owner; the
yelk[TN-10] of an egg; and the pus of an abscess (Egede, _Nachrichten von
Groenland_, p. 106). From it is derived _innuwok_, to live, life. Probably
_innuk_ also means the _semen masculinum_, and in its identification with
pus, may not there be the solution of that strange riddle which in so
many myths of the West Indies and Central America makes the first of men
to be "the purulent one?" (See ante, p. 135.)
[224-1] Mueller, _Amer. Urrelig._, pp. 109, 229.
[224-2] D'Orbigny, _Frag. d'une Voy. dans l'Amer. Merid._, p. 512. It is
still a mooted point whence Shakspeare drew the plot of The Tempest. The
coincidence mentioned in the text between some parts of it and South
American mythology does not stand alone. Caliban, the savage and brutish
native of the island, is undoubtedly the word Carib, often spelt
Caribani, and Calibani in older writers; and his "dam's god Setebos" was
the supreme divinity of the Patagonians when first visited by Magellan.
(Pigafetta, _Viaggio intorno al Globo_, Germ. Trans.: Gotha, 1801, p.
247.)
[224-3] Both Lederer and John Bartram assign it this meaning. Gallatin
gives in the Powhatan dialect the word for mountain as _pomottinke_,
doubtless another form of the same.
[225-1] Marcy, _Exploration of the Red River_, p. 69.
[226-1] Compare Romans, _Hist. of Florida_, pp. 58, 71; Adair, _Hist. of
the North Am. Indians_, p. 195; and Gregg, _Commerce of the Prairies_,
ii. p. 235. The description of the mound is by Major Heart, in the
_Trans. of the Am. Philos. Soc._, iii. p. 216. (1st series.)
[226-2] The French writers give for Great Spirit _coyocopchill_; Gallatin
for hill, _kweya koopsel_. The blending of these two ideas, at first
sight so remote, is easily enough explained when we remember that on "the
hill of heaven" in all religions is placed the throne of the mightiest of
existences. The Natchez word can be analyzed as follows: _sel_, _sil_, or
_chill_, great; _cop_, a termination very frequent in their language,
apparently signifying existence; _kweya_, _coyo_, for _kue ya_, from the
Maya _kue_, god; the great living God. The Tarahumara language of Sonora
offers an almost parallel instance. In it _regui_, is _above_[TN-11], up,
over, _reguiki_, heaven, _reguiguiki_, a hill or mountain (Buschmann,
_Spuren der Aztek. Sprache im noerd. Mexico_, p. 244). In the Quiche
dialects _tepeu_ is lord, ruler, and is often applied to the Supreme
Being. With some probability Brasseur derives it from the Aztec _tepetl_,
mountain (_Hist. du Mexique_, i. p. 106).
[227-1] Balboa, _Hist. du Perou_, p. 4.
[229-1] Long's _Expedition to the Rocky Mountains_, i. p. 274; Catlin's
_Letters_, i. p. 178.
[229-2] Richardson, _Arctic Expedition_, pp. 239, 247; Klemm,
_Culturgeschichte der Menschheit_, ii. p. 316.
[230-1] Long, _Exped. to the Rocky Mountains_, i. p. 326.
[231-1] Schoolcraft, _Ind. Tribes_, v. p. 683.
[231-2] Schwarz, _Ursprung der Mythologie_, p. 121.