The historian Hutchinson said, "the Indians were supposed to be worshipers
of the devil, and their powows to be wizards." Such supposition by the
mind of Christendom intensified fears and ruthless acts on American soil
more than elsewhere, whenever suspicion of witchcraft was engendered.
America was then understood to be peculiarly the domain of the Evil One,
and all its pagan inhabitants were regarded as his devoted adherents.
Thence his followers here were deemed to be more numerous and formidable
than elsewhere, and therefore his invasion was more to be dreaded on this
than on the other side of the Atlantic.
We must impute a considerable portion of witchcraft horrors to such narrow
and cramping religious views and feelings among our fathers, as made all
men everywhere seem to them not only outcasts from God, but also
associates with Satan, who did not possess their special creed, and
worship by their processes. They practically forgot that all men, of all
nations and tribes, are the offspring of the Unknown God, whom Paul
declared to the Athenians; and also that his paternal beneficence extends
to his children everywhere, and draws them toward him by methods suited to
their circumstances, capacities, and needs, and consequently that all
religious creeds and all modes and forms of worship may be helpful to
those who possess and use them.
History, literature, and public belief, pertaining to the religious
practices of North American Indians, so far as we remember, have very
uniformly ascribed to them something closely resembling communings and
consultations with invisible intelligences. Such religious services are,
and ever have been, rendered in all those primitive tribes the world over
concerning whom we have attained to anything like accurate knowledge. (See
Primitive Culture, by Edward B. Tylor.) Ethnology proves that belief in
the presence of spirits--and, generally, belief in the access of ancestral
spirits--exists among man everywhere in the nations lowest of all in
culture, and survives in them as they rise in development. Dr. Bentley
declared that "the agency of invisible beings, if not a part of every
religion, is not contrary to any one." Hutchinson, as quoted above, says,
"The Indians were supposed to be worshipers of _The Devil_, and their
powows to be wizards."
No question is raised that such a supposition pertaining to Indian worship
was prevalent in the New England mind down to the close of the seventeenth
century. Nor can we doubt that untruthfully the Puritans charged the
aborigines with worshiping the one great Devil of Puritan Diabolism,
because of our conviction that the red men were in fact communing with
their ancestral and numerous other friendly spirits. The white man's
erroneous conception that his devil was the red man's god, had no small
influence upon public action in witchcraft times. The idea that their
devil had for backers all the aborigines of the continent, made him a more
formidable foe than he otherwise would have been, and intensified the
ruthlessness of the whites in their persecutions of those of their own
complexion and households who were believed to have made a compact to
serve the Evil One. Perhaps a modern instance may exhibit with much
clearness the real nature of Indian worship in former ages.
We quote from the Washington Chronicle, early in the year 1873, what is
there ascribed to General O. O. Howard, who is often called the _Christian
Soldier_. He, as commissioner from the American government, had, unarmed
and with but two attendants, penetrated the fastnesses of the mountains,
made his way to the home of the Appache Indians and to the presence of
their fierce chief, Cochise. After council with the Appaches, "they had,"
as General Howard writes, "an Appache prayer-meeting, ... one Indian after
another would pray or speak.... Cochise's talks were apparently the most
authoritative;... I could hear him name Stagalito, meaning Red Beard. I
knew from this that our whole case was being considered in their way _in
the Divine Presence_ either of the God of the earth, or of His spirits;
and surely these were solemn moments, ... fortunately the spirits were on
our side." These words indicate very clearly the nature of that devil whom
modern Indian powows worship: they make him on one occasion neither more
nor less than the ascended chief Stagalito, associated with other spirits
of the same nature. Can there be a doubt that Hutchinson misrepresented
the fact, if he meant to call the Indian communings with spirits a
worshiping of that monstrous being whom the word "_Devil_," uttered
through clerical lips, or recorded by intelligent pens, in early colonial
times, was intended and understood to describe? We think not. There was
neither truth nor justice in the supposition that the red men were
devil-worshipers at the times when they were consulting departed spirits;
nor in the presumption that their mediums--their powows--were wizards.
False epithets do not convert any sincere worship, performed even by the
rudest of the rude, into a bad act. Those Indians of two centuries ago, as
judged by us now, had truer conceptions and better knowledge of spirit
intercourse with mortals, and of the fit methods of obtaining useful
incentives and help from spirit realms, than had their Christian
neighbors, who misunderstood and blindly maligned the devotions offered to
the Great Spirit by his children in the forests. The Indians, to the best
of their ability, worshiped Him who is the common Father of all men of
every hue and condition. They sought access to the Great Spirit, our God
as well as theirs, through communings with their ancestral and other
spirits. But the supposition that they worshiped such a being as the devil
of Christendom, is obviously incorrect.
Cotton Mather said that "the Indians generally acknowledged and worshiped
_many_ GODS; therefore greatly esteemed and reveres their _priests_,
powows or wizards, who were esteemed as having immediate converse with the
gods." Rev. Mr. Higginson, of Salem, said the Indians in that vicinity "do
worship two gods--a good and an evil." Mather and Higginson are better
authority on this point than Hutchinson. Those denizens of the impressive
forests were nature-taught spiritualists communing with their ancestral
spirits, and through them were lured and helped on to worship the Great
Spirit of Nature--the Omnipresent God.