Novelty of the "New World "--Different stages of culture
represented there--Question of American Monotheism--
Authorities and evidence cited--Myths examined: Eskimo,
Ahts, Thlinkeets, Iroquois, the Great Hare--Dr. Brinton's
theory of the hare--Zuni myths--Transition to Mexican
mythology.
The divine myths of the vast American continent are a topic which a
lifetime entirely devoted to the study could not exhaust. At best it
is only a sketch in outline that can be offered in a work on the
development of mythology in general. The subject is the more interesting
as anything like systematic borrowing of myths from the Old World is all
but impossible, as has already been argued in chapter xi. America, it
is true, may have been partially "discovered" many times; there probably
have been several points and moments of contact between the New and the
Old World. Yet at the time when the Spaniards landed there, and while
the first conquests and discoveries were being pursued, the land and
the people were to Europeans practically as novel as the races and
territories of a strange planet.* But the New World only revealed the
old stock of humanity in many of its familiar stages of culture, and,
consequently, with the old sort of gods, and myths, and creeds.
* Reville, Hibbert Lectures, 1884, p. 8
In the evolution of politics, society, ritual, and in all the outward
and visible parts of religion, the American races ranged between a
culture rather below the ancient Egyptian and a rudeness on a level with
Australian or Bushman institutions. The more civilised peoples, Aztecs
and Peruvians, had many peculiarities in common with the races of
ancient Egypt, China and India; where they fell short was in the lack
of alphabet or syllabary. The Mexican MSS. are but an advanced
picture-writing, more organised than that of the Ojibbeways; the
Peruvian Quipus was scarcely better than the Red Indian wampum records.
Mexicans and Peruvians were settled in what deserved to be called
cities; they had developed a monumental and elaborately decorated
architecture; they were industrious in the arts known to them, though
ignorant of iron. Among the Aztecs, at least, weapons and tools of
bronze, if rare, were not unknown. They were sedulous in agriculture,
disciplined in war, capable of absorbing and amalgamating with conquered
tribes.
In Peru the ruling family, the Incas, enjoyed all the sway of a
hierarchy, and the chief Inca occupied nearly as secure a position,
religious, social and political, as any Rameses or Thothmes. In Mexico,
doubtless, the monarch's power was at least nominally limited, in much
the same way as that of the Persian king. The royal rule devolved on the
elected member of an ancient family, but once he became prince he was
surrounded by imposing ceremony. In both these two civilised peoples
the priesthood enjoyed great power, and in Mexico, though not so
extensively, if at all, in Peru, practised an appalling ritual of
cannibalism and human sacrifice. It is extremely probable, or rather
certain, that both of these civilisations were younger than the culture
of other American peoples long passed away, whose cities stand in
colossal ruin among the forests, whose hieroglyphs seem undecipherable,
and whose copper-mines were worked at an unknown date on the shore of
Lake Superior. Over the origin and date of those "crowned races" it
were vain to linger here. They have sometimes left the shadows of
names--Toltecs and Chichimecs--and relics more marvellous than the
fainter traces of miners and builders in Southern and Central Africa.
The rest is silence. We shall never know why the dwellers in Palenque
deserted their majestic city while "the staircases were new, the steps
whole, the edges sharp, and nowhere did traces of wear and tear give
certain proof of long habitation".* On a much lower level than the
great urban peoples, but tending, as it were, in the same direction,
and presenting the same features of state communism in their social
arrangements, were, and are, the cave and cliff dwellers, the
agricultural village Indians (Pueblo Indians) of New Mexico and Arizona.
In the sides of the canons towns have been burrowed, and men have
dwelt in them like sand-martins in a sand-bank. The traveller views
"perpendicular cliffs everywhere riddled with human habitations, which
resemble the cells of a honeycomb more than anything else". In lowland
villages the dwellings are built of clay and stone.
* Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 328.
"The San Juan valley is strewn with ruins for hundreds of miles; some
buildings, three storeys high, of masonry, are still standing."* The
Moquis, Zunis and Navahos of to-day, whose habits and religious rites
are known from the works of Mr. Cushing, Mr. Matthews, and Captain John
G. Bourke, are apparently descendants of "a sedentary, agricultural and
comparatively cultivated race," whose decadence perhaps began "before
the arrival of the Spaniards."**
Rather lower in the scale of culture than the settled Pueblo Indians
were the hunter tribes of North America generally. They dwelt, indeed,
in collections of wigwams which were partially settled, and the "long
house" of the Iroquois looks like an approach to the communal system of
the Pueblos.*** But while such races as Iroquois, Mandans and Ojibbeways
cultivated the maize plant, they depended for food more than did the
Pueblo peoples on success in the chase. Deer, elk, buffalo, the wild
turkey, the bear, with ducks and other birds, supplied the big kettle
with its contents. Their society was totemistic, as has already been
described; kinship, as a rule, was traced through the female line; the
Sachems or chiefs and counsellors were elected, generally out of
certain totem-kindreds; the war-chiefs were also elected when a military
expedition started on the war-path; and Jossakeeds or medicine-men (the
title varied in different dialects) had no small share of secular power.
*Nadaillac, p. 222.
** Ibid., p. 257. See Bourke's Snake-Dance of the Natives of
Arizona, and the fifth report of the Archaeological
Institute of America, with an account of the development of
Pueblo buildings. It seems scarcely necessary to discuss Mr.
Lewis Morgan's attempt to show that the Aztecs of Cortes's
time were only on the level of the modern Pueblo Indians.
*** Mr. Lewis Morgan's valuable League of the Iroquois and
the Iroquois Book of Rites (Brinton, Philadelphia, 1883) may
be consulted.
In war these tribes displayed that deliberate cruelty which survived
under the Aztec rulers as the enormous cannibal ritual of human
sacrifice. A curious point in Red Indian custom was the familiar
institution of scalping the slain in war. Other races are head-hunters,
but scalping is probably peculiar to the Red Men and the Scythians.*
* Herodotus, iv. 64.
On a level, yet lower than that of the Algonkin and other hunter tribes,
are the American races whom circumstances have driven into desolate
infertile regions; who live, like the Ahts, mainly on fish; like the
Eskimos, in a world of frost and winter; or like the Fuegians, on
crustaceans and seaweed. The minute gradations of culture cannot be
closely examined here, but the process is upwards, from people like the
Fuegians and Diggers, to the builders of the kitchen-middens--probably
quite equals of the Eskimos***--and so through the condition of Ahts.
*** Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, p. 66.
The resemblance between Scythian and Red Indian manners exercised the
learned in the time of Grotius. It has been acutely remarked by J. G.
Mueller, that in America one stage of society, as developed in the Old
World, is absent. There is no pastoral stage. The natives had neither
domesticated kine, goats nor sheep. From this lack of interest in the
well-being of the domesticated lower animals he is inclined to deduce
the peculiarly savage cruelty of American war and American religion.
Sympathy was undeveloped. Possibly the lack of tame animals may have
encouraged the prevalence of human sacrifice. The Brahmana shows how,
in Hindostan, the lower animals became vicarious substitutes for man in
sacrifice, as the fawn of Artemis or the ram of Jehovah took the
place of Iphigenia or of Isaac. Cf. J. G. Mueller, Oeschichte der
Amerikanisehen Urreligionen, pp. 22, 23.
Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and other rude tribes of the North-west Pacific
Coast, to that of Sioux, Blackfeet, Mandans, Iroquois, and then to the
settled state of the Pueblo folk, the southern comforts of the Natchez,
and finally to the organisation of the Mayas, and the summit occupied by
the Aztecs and Incas.
Through the creeds of all these races, whether originally of the same
stock or not, run many strands of religious and mythical beliefs--the
very threads that are woven into the varied faiths of the Old World. The
dread of ghosts; the religious adoration paid to animals; the belief in
kindred and protecting beasts; the worship of inanimate objects, roughly
styled fetishes; a certain reverence for the great heavenly bodies, sun,
moon and Pleiades; a tendency to regard the stars, with all other things
and phenomena, as animated and personal--with a belief in a Supreme
Creator, these are the warp, as it were, of the fabric of American
religion.*
* The arguments against the borrowing of the Creator from
missionaries have already been stated.
In one stage of culture one set of those ideas may be more predominant
than in another stage, but they are present in all. The zoo-morphic or
theriomorphic mythologies and creeds are nowhere more vivacious than in
America. Not content with the tribal zoomorphic guardian and friend,
the totem, each Indian was in the habit of seeking for a special animal
protector of his own. This being, which he called his Manitou,
revealed itself to him in the long fasts of that savage sacrament
which consecrates the entrance on full manhood. Even in the elaborate
religions of the civilised races, Peruvians and Aztecs, the animal
deities survive, and sacred beasts gather in the shrine of Pachacamac,
or a rudimentary remnant of ancestral beak or feather clings to the
statue of Huitzilopochtli. But among the civilised peoples, in which
the division of labour found its place and human ranks were minutely
discriminated, the gods too had their divisions and departments. An
organised polytheism prevailed, and in the temples of Centeotl and
Tlazolteotl, Herodotus or Pausanias would have readily recognised the
Demeter and the Aphrodite of Mexico.
There were departmental gods, and there was even an obvious tendency
towards the worship of one spiritual deity, the Bretwalda of all the
divine kings, a god on his way to becoming single and supreme. The
religions and myths of America thus display, like the myths and
religions of the Old World, the long evolution of human thought in its
seeking after God. The rude first draughts of Deity are there, and
they are by no means effaced in the fantastic priestly designs of
departmental divinities.
The question of a primitive American monotheism has been more debated
than even that of the "Heno-theism" of the Aryans in India. On this
point it must be said that, in a certain sense, probably any race of men
may be called monotheistic, just as, in another sense, Christians who
revere saints may be called polytheistic.*
* Gaidoz, Revue Critique, March, 1887.
It has been constantly set forth in this work that, in moments of truly
religious thought, even the lowest tribes turn their minds towards a
guardian, a higher power, something which watches and helps the race of
men. This mental approach towards the powerful friend is an aspiration,
and sometimes a dogma; it is religious, not mythological; it is
monotheistic, not polytheistic. The Being appealed to by the savage in
moments of need or despair may go by a name which denotes a hawk, or a
spider, or a grasshopper, but we may be pretty sure that little thought
of such creatures is in the mind of the worshipper in his hour of need.*
* There are exceptions, as when the Ojibbeway, being in
danger, appeals to his own private protecting Manitou,
perhaps a wild duck; or when the Zuni cries to "Ye animal
gods, my fathers!" (Bureau of Ethnol., 1880-81, p. 42.) Thus
we can scarcely agree entirely with M. Maurice Vernes when
he says, "All men are monotheistic in the fervour of
adoration or in moments of deep thought". (L'Histoire des
Religions, Paris, 1887, p. 61.) The tendency of adoration
and of speculation is, however, monotheistic.
Again, the most ludicrous or infamous tales may be current about the
adventures and misadventures of the grasshopper or the hawk. He may be,
as mythically conceived, only one out of a crowd of similar magnified
non-natural men or lower animals. But neither his companions nor his
legend are likely to distract the thoughts of the Bushman who cries to
Cagn for food, or of the Murri who tells his boy that Pund-jel watches
him from the heavens, or of the Solomon Islander who appeals to Qat as
he crosses the line of reefs and foam. Thus it may be maintained that
whenever man turns to a guardian not of this world, not present to the
senses, man is for the moment a theist, and often a monotheist. But when
we look from aspiration to doctrine, from the solitary ejaculation to
ritual, from religion to myth, it would probably be vain to suppose that
an uncontaminated belief in one God only, the maker and creator of all
things, has generally prevailed, either in America or elsewhere. Such
a belief, rejecting all minor deities, consciously stated in terms
and declared in ritual, is the result of long ages and efforts of
the highest thought, or, if once and again the intuition of Deity has
flashed on some lonely shepherd or sage like an inspiration, his creed
has usually been at war with the popular opinions of men, and has,
except in Islam, won its disciples from the learned and refined. America
seems no exception to so general a rule.
An opposite opinion is very commonly entertained, because the narratives
of missionaries, and even the novels of Cooper and others, have made
readers familiar with such terms as "the Great Spirit" in the mouths of
Pawnees or Mohicans. On the one hand, taking the view of borrowing, Mrs.
E. A. Smith says: "'The Great Spirit,' so popularly and poetically know
as the God of the Red Man,' and 'the happy hunting-ground,' generally
reported to be the Indian's idea of a future state, are both of them but
their ready conception of the white man's God and heaven".* Dr. Brinton,
too,** avers that "the Great Spirit is a post-Christian conception."
In most cases these terms are entirely of modern origin, coined at the
suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man's God....
* Bureau of Ethnology's Second Report, p. 52.
** Myths of the New World, New York, 1876, p. 58.
The Jesuits' _Relations_ state positively that there was "no one
immaterial God recognised by the Algonkin tribes, and that the title
'The Great Manito' was introduced first by themselves in its personal
sense." The statement of one missionary cannot be taken, of course, to
bind all the others. The Pere Paul le Jeune remarks: "The savages give
the name of Manitou to whatsoever in nature, good or evil, is superior
to man. Therefore when we speak of God, they sometimes call him 'The
Good Manitou,' that is, 'The Good Spirit'."* The same Pere Paul le
Jeune** says that by Manitou his flock meant _un ange ou quelque nature
puissante. Il y'en a de bons et de mauvais_. The evidence of Pere
Hierosme Lallemant*** has already been alluded to, but it may be as well
to repeat that, while he attributes to the Indians a kind of unconscious
religious theism, he entirely denies them any monotheistic dogmas. With
Tertullian, he writes, _Exclamant vocem naturaliter Christianam_. "To
speak truth, these peoples have derived from their fathers no knowledge
of a god, and before we set foot in their country they had nothing but
vain fables about the origin of the world. Nevertheless, savages as they
were, there did abide in their hearts a secret sentiment of divinity,
and of a first principle, author of all things, whom, not knowing, they
yet invoked. In the forest, in the chase, on the water, in peril by sea,
they call him to their aid."
* Relations de la Novelle France, 1637, p. 49.
** Relations, 1633, p. 17.
*** 1648, p. 77.
This guardian, it seems, receives different names in different
circumstances. Myth comes in; the sky is a God; a Manitou dwelling in
the north sends ice and snow; another dwells in the waters, and many in
the winds.* The Pere Allouez** says, "They recognise no sovereign of
heaven or earth". Here the good father and all who advocate a theory
of borrowing are at variance with Master Thomas Heriot, "that learned
_Mathematician_" (1588). In Virginia "there is one chiefe god, that
has beene from all eternitie," who "made other gods of a principal
order".*** Near New Plymouth, Kiehtan was the chief god, and the souls
of the just abode in his mansions.**** We have already cited Alione,
and shown that he and the other gods found by the first explorers, are
certainly not of Christian origin.
* The Confessions of Kah-ge-ga-gah Bowh, a converted Crane
of the Ojibbeways, may be rather a suspicious document. Kah,
to shorten his noble name, became a preacher and platform-
speaker of somewhat windy eloquence, according to Mr.
Longfellow, who had heard him. His report is that in youth
he sought the favour of the Manitous (Mon-e-doos he calls
them), but also revered Ke-sha-mon-e-doo, the benevolent
spirit, "who made the earth with all its variety and smiling
beauty". But his narrative is very unlike the Indian account
of the manufacture of the world by this or that animal,
already given in "Myths of the Origin of Things". The
benevolent spirit, according to Kah's father, a medicine-
man, dwelt in the sun (Copway, Recollections of a Forest
Life, London, s. a. pp. 4, 5). Practical and good-natured
actions of the Great Spirit are recorded on p. 35. He
directs starving travellers by means of dreams.
** Relations, 1667, p. 1.
*** Arber, Captain John Smith, p. 321.
**** Op. cit., p. 768.
A curious account of Red Indian religion may be extracted from a work
styled _A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner
during a Thirty Years' Residence among the Indians_ (New York, 1830).
Tanner was caught when a boy, and lived as an Indian, even in religion.
The Great Spirit constantly appears in his story as a moral and
protecting deity, whose favour and help may be won by "prayers, which
are aided by magical ceremonies and dances. Tanner accepted and acted
on this part of the Indian belief, while generally rejecting the
medicine men, who gave themselves out for messengers or avaters of the
Great Spirit. Tanner had frequent visions of the Great Spirit in the
form of a handsome young man, who gave him information about the future.
"Do I not know," said the appearance, "when you are hungry and in
distress? I look down upon you at all times, and it is not necessary you
should call me with such loud cries". (p. 189).
Almost all idea of a tendency towards monotheism vanishes when we turn
from the religions to the myths of the American peoples. Doubtless it
may be maintained that the religious impulse or sentiment never wholly
dies, but, after being submerged in a flood of fables, reappears in
the philosophic conception of a pure deity entertained by a few of the
cultivated classes of Mexico and Peru. But our business just now is with
the flood of fables. From north to south the more general beliefs are
marked with an early dualism, and everywhere are met the two opposed
figures of a good and a bad extra-natural being in the shape of a man or
beast. The Eskimos, for example, call the better being Torngarsuk. "They
don't all agree about his form or aspect. Some say he has no form at
all; others describe him as a great bear, or as a great man with one
arm, or as small as a finger. He is immortal, but might be killed by the
intervention of the god Crepitus."*
* The circumstances in which this is possible may be sought
for in Crantz, History of Greenland, London, 1767, vol. i.
p. 200
"The other great but malignant spirit is a nameless female," the wife or
mother of Torngarsuk. She dwells under the sea in a habitation guarded
by a Cerberus of her own, a huge dog, which may be surprised, for he
sleeps for one moment at a time. Torngarsuk is not the maker of all
things, but still is so much of a deity that many, "when they hear
of God and his omnipotence, are readily led to the supposition that
probably we mean their Torngarsuk ". All spirits are called Torngak,
and _soak = great_; hence the good spirit of the Eskimos in his limited
power is "the Great Spirit".* In addition to a host of other spirits,
some of whom reveal themselves affably to all, while others are only
accessible to Angakut or medicine-men, the Eskimos have a Pluto, or
Hades, or Charos of their own. He is meagre, dark, sullen, and devours
the bowels of the ghosts. There are spirits of fire, water, mountains,
winds; there are dog-faced demons, and the souls of abortions become
hideous spectres, while the common ghost of civilised life is familiar.
The spirit of a boy's dead mother appeared to him in open day, and
addressed him in touching language: "Be not afraid; I am thy mother,
and love thee!" for here, too, in this frozen and haunted world, love is
more strong than death.**
Eskimo myth is practical, and, where speculative, is concerned with the
fortunes of men, alive or dead, as far as these depend on propitiating
the gods or extra-natural beings. The Eskimo myth of the origin of death
would find its place among the other legends of this sort.***
* Crantz, op. cit., i. 207. note.
** Op. cit., i. 209
*** Cf. Modern Mythology, "The Origin of Death".
As a rule, Eskimo myth, as far as it has been investigated, rather
resembles that of the Zulus. _Maerchen_ or romantic stories are very
common; tales about the making of things and the actions of the
pre-human beings are singularly scarce. Except for some moon and star
myths, and the tale of the origin of death, hardly any myths, properly
so called, are reported. "Only very scanty traces," says Rink, "have
been found of any kind of ideas having been formed as to the origin and
early history of the world and the ruling powers or deities."*
* He adds that this "seems sufficiently to show that such
mythological speculations have been, in respect to other
nations, also the product of a later stage of culture". That
this position is erroneous is plain from the many myths here
collected from peoples lower in culture than the Eskimos.
Cf. Rink, _Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos_.
Turning from the Eskimos to the Ahts of Vancouver's Island, we find them
in possession of rather a copious mythology. Without believing exactly
in a _supreme_, they have the conception of a _superior_ being,
Quawteaht, no mere local nor tribal deity, but known in every village,
like Osiris in Egypt. He is also, like Osiris and Baiame, the chief of
a beautiful, far-off, spiritual country, but he had his adventures
and misadventures while he dwelt on earth. The malevolent aspect of
things--storms, disease and the rest--is either Quawteaht enraged, or
the manifestation of his opponent in the primitive dualism, Tootooch or
Chay-her, the Hades or Pluto of the Ahts. Like Hades, Chay-her is both a
person and a place--the place of the dead discomforted, and the ruler
of that land, a boneless form with a long grey beard. The exploits of
Quawteaht in the beginning of things were something between those of
Zeus and of Prometheus.
"He is the general framer--I do not say creator of all things, though
some special things are excepted."* Quawteaht, in the legend of the
loon (who was once an injured Indian, and still wails his wrongs), is
represented as conscious of the conduct of men, and as prone to avenge
misdeeds.** In person Quawteaht was of short stature, with very strong
hairy arms and legs.*** There is a touch of unconscious Darwinism in
this description of "the first Indian". In Quawteaht mingle the rough
draughts of a god and of an Adam, a creator and a first man. This
mixture is familiar in the Zulu Unkulunkulu. Unlike Prometheus,
Quawteaht did not steal the seed of fire. It was stolen by the
cuttlefish, and in some legends Quawteaht was the original proprietor.
Like most gods, he could assume the form of the beasts, and it was in
the shape of a great whale that he discomfited his opponent Tootooch.***
It does not appear that Tootooch receives any worship or adoration, such
as is offered to the sun and moon.
* Sproat, Savage Life, London, 1868, p. 210.
** Op. cit., p. 182.
***Ibid. i. p. 179.
Leaving the Ahts for the Thlinkeets, we find Yehl, the god or hero of
the introduction of the arts, who, like the Christ of the Finnish epic
or Maui in New Zealand, was born by a miraculous birth. His mother was
a Thlinkeet woman, whose boys had all been slain. As she wandered
disconsolate by the sea-shore, a dolphin or whale, taking pity upon her.
bade her drink a little salt water and swallow a pebble. She did so, and
in due time bore a child, Yehl, the hero of the Thlinkeets. Once, in
his youth, Yehl shot a supernatural crane, skinned it, and whenever
he wished to fly, clothed himself in the bird's skin. Yet he is always
known as a raven. Hence there is much the same confusion between Yehl
and the bird as between Amun in Egypt and the ram in whose skin he was
once pleased to reveal himself to a mortal. In Yehl's youth occurred the
deluge, produced by the curse of an unfriendly uncle of his own; but the
deluge was nothing to Yehl, who flew up to heaven, and anchored himself
to a cloud by his beak till the waters abated. Like most heroes of his
kind, Yehl brought light to men. The heavenly bodies in his time were
kept in boxes by an old chief. Yehl, by an ingenious stratagem, got
possession of the boxes. To fly up to the firmament with the treasure,
to open the boxes, and to stick stars, sun and moon in their proper
places in the sky, was to the active Yehl the work of a moment.
Fire he stole, like Prometheus, carrying a brand in his beak till
he reached the Thlinkeet shore. There the fire dropped on stones and
sticks, from which it is still obtained by striking the flints or
rubbing together the bits of wood. Water, like fire, was a monopoly in
those days, and one Khanukh kept all of it in his own well. Khanukh was
the ancestor of the Wolf family among the Thlinkeets, as Yehl is the
first father of the stock called Ravens. The wolf and raven thus answer
to the mythic creative crow and cockatoo in Australian mythology, and
take sides in the primitive dualism. When Yehl went to steal water
from Khanukh, the pair had a discussion, exactly like that between
Joukahainen and Waina-moinen in the epic of the Finns, as to which of
them had been longer in the world. "Before the world stood in its place,
I was there," says Yehl; and Wainamoinen says, "When earth was made,
I was there; when space was unrolled, I launched the sun on his way".
Similar boasts occur in the poems of Empedocles and of Taliesin.
Khanukh, however, proved to be both older and more skilled in magic
than Yehl. Yet the accomplishment of flying once more stood Yehl in good
stead, and he carried off the water, as Odin, in the form of a bird,
stole Suttung's mead, by flying off with it in his beak. Yehl then went
to his own place.*
In the myths of the other races on the North-west Pacific Coast nothing
is more remarkable than the theriomorphic character of the heroes, who
are also to a certain extent gods and makers of things.
The Koniagas have their ancestral bird and dog, demiurges, makers of
sea, rivers, hills, yet subject to "a great deity called Schljam Schoa,"
of whom they are the messengers and agents.** The Aleuts have their
primeval dog-hero, and also a great old man, who made people, like
Deucalion, and as in the Macusi myth, by throwing stones over his
shoulder.***
* Bancroft, iii. 100-102 [Holmberg, Eth. Skiz., p. 61].
** Ibid., 104, quoting Dall's Alaska, p. 405, and
Lisiansky's Voyage, pp. 197, 198.
*** Brett's Indians qf Guiana, p. 384.
Concerning the primal mythical beings of the great hunter and warrior
tribes of America, Algonkins, Hurons and Iroquois, something has already
been said in the chapter on "Myths of the Origin of Things".
It is the peculiarity of such heroes or gods of myth as the opposing Red
Indian good and evil deities that they take little part in the affairs
of the world when once these have been started.* Ioskeha and Tawiscara,
the good and bad primeval brothers, have had their wars, and are now, in
the opinion of some, the sun and the moon.** The benefits of Ioskeha
to mankind are mainly in the past; as, for example, when, like another
Indra, he slew the great frog that had swallowed the waters, and gave
them free course over earth.***
* Erminie Smith, in _Report of Bureau of Ethnology_, 1880-
81, publishes a full, but not very systematic, account of
Iroquois gods of to-day. Thunder, the wind, and echo are the
chief divine figures. The Titans or Jotuns, the opposed
supernatural powers, are giants of stone. "Among the most
ancient of the deities were their most remote ancestors,
certain animals who later were transformed into human
shapes, the name of the animals being preserved by their
descendants, who have used them to designate their gentes or
clans." The Iroquois have a strange and very touching
version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (op. cit., p.
104). It appears to be native and unborrowed; all the
details are pure Iroquois.
** Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 102.
*** Ibid. i. p. 108.
Ioskeha is still so far serviceable that he "makes the pot boil," though
this may only be a way of recalling the benefits conferred on man by him
when he learned from the turtle how to make fire. Ioskeha, moreover is
thanked for success in the chase, because he let loose the animals from
the cave in which they lived at the beginning. As they fled he spoiled
their speed by wounding them with arrows; only one escaped, the
wind-swift wolf. Some devotees regarded Ioskeha as the teacher of
agriculture and the giver of great harvests of maize. In 1635 Ioskeha
was seen, all meagre and skeleton-like, tearing a man's leg with his
teeth, a prophecy of famine. A more agreeable apparition of loskeha is
reported by the Pere Barthelemy Vimont.* When an Iroquois was fishing,
"a demon appeared to him in the shape of a tall and beautiful young man.
'Be not afraid,' said this spirit; 'I am the master of earth, whom
you Hurons worship under the name of Ioskeha; the French give me the
erroneous name of Jesus, but they know me not.'" Ioskeha then gave some
directions for curing the small-pox. The Indian's story is, of course,
coloured by what he knew of missionary teaching, but the incident should
be compared with the "medicine dream" of John Tanner.
The sky, conceived as a person, held a place rather in the religion
than in the mythology of the Indians. He was approached with prayer and
sacrifice, and "they implored the sky in all their necessities".** "The
sky hears us," they would say in taking an oath, and they appeased the
wrath of the sky with a very peculiar semi-cannibal sacrifice.***
* Relations, 1640, p. 92.
** Op. cit. i. 1636, p. 107.
*** For Pawnees and Blackfeet see Grinnell, Pawnee and
Blackfoot Legends (2 vols.).
What Ioskeha was to the Iroquois, Michabo or Manibozho was to the
Algonkin tribes. There has been a good deal of mystification about
Michabo or Manibozho, or Messou, who was probably, in myth, a hare _sans
phrase_, but who has been converted by philological processes into a
personification of light or dawn. It has already been seen that the wild
North Pacific peoples recognise in their hero and demiurge animals of
various species; dogs, ravens, muskrats and coyotes have been found in
this lofty estimation, and the Utes believe in "Cin-au-av, the ancient
of wolves".* It would require some labour to derive all the ancient
heroes and gods from misconceptions about the names of vast natural
phenomena like light and dawn, and it is probable that Michabo or
Mani-bozho, the Great Hare of the Algonkins, is only a successful
apotheosised totem like the rest. His legend and his dominion are very
widely spread. Dr. Brinton himself (p. 153) allows that the great hare
is a totem. Perhaps our earliest authority about the mythical great hare
in America is William Strachey's _Travaile into Virginia_.**
* Powell, in Bureau of Ethnology, 1879-80, p. 43.
** Circa 1612; reprinted by the Hakjuyt Society.
Among other information as to the gods of the natives, Strachey quotes
the remarks of a certain Indian: "We have five gods in all; our chief
god appears often unto us in the likeness of a mighty great hare; the
other four have no visible shape, but are indeed the four wynds". An
Indian, after hearing from the English the Biblical account of the
creation, explained that "our god, who takes upon him the shape of a
hare,... at length devised and made divers men and women". He also drove
away the cannibal Manitous. "That godlike hare made the water and the
fish and a great deare." The other four gods, in envy, killed the
hare's deer. This is curiously like the Bushman myth of Cagn, the mantis
insect, and his favourite eland. "The godly hare's house" is at the
place of sun-rising; there the souls of good Indians "feed on delicious
fruits with that great hare," who is clearly, so far, the Virginian
Osiris.* Dr. Brinton has written at some length on "this chimerical
beast," whose myth prevails, he says, "from the remotest wilds of the
North-west to the coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundary
of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of Hudson's Bay.... The totem"
(totem-kindred probably is meant) "clan which bore his name was looked
up to with peculiar respect." From this it would appear that the hare
was a totem like another, and had the same origin, whatever that may
have been. According to the Pere Allouez, the Indians "ont en veneration
toute particuliere, une certaine beste chimerique, qu'ils n'ont jamais
veue sinon en songe, ils Tappelient Missibizi," which appears to be a
form of Michabo and Mani-bozho.**
* _History of Travaile_, pp. 98, 99. This hare we have
alluded to in vol. i. p. 184, but it seems worth while again
to examine Dr. Brinton's theory more closely.
** Relations, 1637, p. 13
In 1670 the same Pere Allouez gives some myths about Michabo.
"C'est-a-dire le grand lievre," who made the world, and also invented
fishing-nets. He is the master of life, and can leap eight leagues at
one bound, and is beheld by his servants in dreams. In 1634 Pere Paul le
Jeune gives a longer account of Messou, "a variation of the same name,"
according to Dr. Brinton, as Michabo. This Messou reconstructed the
drowned world out of a piece of clay brought him by an otter, which
succeeded after the failure of a raven sent out by Messou. He afterwards
married a muskrat, by whom he became the father of a flourishing family.
"Le brave reparateur de l'univers est le frere aisne de toutes les
bestes," says the mocking missionary.* Messou has the usual powers of
shape-shifting, which are the common accomplishments of the medicine-man
or conjuror, _se transformant en mille sortes d'animaux.** He is not
so much a creator as a demiurge, inferior to a mysterious being called
Atahocan. But Atahocan is obsolescent, and his name is nearly equivalent
to an old wife's fable, a story of events _au temps jadis_.*** "Le mot
_Nitatoho-can signifie, 'Je dis un vieux conte fait a plaisir'."
* _Relations_, 1634, p. 13.
** Op. cit., 1633, p. 16.
*** Op. cit., 1634, p. 13.
These are examples of the legends of Michabo or Manibozho, the great
hare. He appears in no way to differ from the other animals of magical
renown, who, in so many scores of savage myths, start the world on its
way and instruct men in the arts. His fame may be more widely
spread, but his deeds are those of eagle, crow, wolf, coyote, spider,
grasshopper, and so forth, in remote parts of the world. His legend is
the kind of legend whose origin we ascribe to the credulous fancy of
early peoples, taking no distinction between themselves and the beasts.
If the hare was indeed the totem of a successful and honoured kindred,
his elevation is perfectly natural and intelligible.
Dr. Brinton, in his _Myths of the New World_ (New York, 1876), adopts
a different line of explanation. Michabo, he says, "was originally the
highest divinity recognised by them, powerful and beneficent beyond all
others, maker of the heavens and the world". We gladly welcome him in
that capacity in religion. But it has already been shown that Michabo is
only, in myth, the _reparateur de l'univers_, and that he has a sleeping
partner--a deity retired from business. Moreover, Dr. Brinton's account
of Michabo, "powerful and beneficent beyond all others, maker of
the heavens and the world," clashes with his own statement, that "of
monotheism as displayed in the one personal definite God of the Semitic
races" (to whom Dr. Brinton's description of Michabo applies) "there is
not a single instance on the American continent."* The residences and
birthplaces of Michabo are as many as those of the gods of Greece. It is
true that in some accounts, as in Strachey's, "his bright home is in
the _rising_ sun". It does not follow that the hare had any original
connection with the dawn. But this connection Dr. Brinton seeks to
establish by philological arguments. According to this writer, the names
(Manibozho, Nanibozhu, Missibizi, Michabo, Messou) "all seem compounded,
according to well-ascertained laws of Algonkin euphony, from the words
corresponding to _great_ and _hare or rabbit_, or the first two perhaps
from _spirit_ and _hare_".** But this seeming must not be trusted. We
must attentively examine the Algonkin root _wab_, when it will appear
"that in fact there are two roots having this sound. One is the initial
syllable of the word translated hare or rabbit, but the other means
_white_, and from it is derived the words for the east, the dawn,
the light, the day, and the morning. Beyond a doubt (sic) this is the
compound in the names Michabo and Manibozho, which therefore mean the
great light, the spirit of light, of the dawn, or the east."
* Relations, pp. 63, 176.
** Op. cit., p. 178.
Then the war of Manibozho became the struggle of light and darkness.
Finally, Michabo is recognised by Dr. Brinton as "the not unworthy
personification of the purest conceptions they possessed concerning the
Father of All,"* though, according to Dr. Brinton in an earlier passage,
they can hardly be said to have possessed such conceptions.** We are not
responsible for these inconsistencies. The degeneracy to the belief in
a "mighty great hare," a "chimerical beast," was the result of a
misunderstanding of the root _wab_ in their own language by the
Algonkins, a misunderstanding that not only affected the dialects in
which the root _wab_ occurred in the hare's name, but those in which it
did not!
On the whole, the mythology of the great hunting and warrior tribes of
North America is peopled by the figures of ideal culture-heroes, partly
regarded as first men, partly as demiurges and creators. They waver in
outward aspect between the beautiful youths of the "medicine-dreams" and
the bestial guise of totems and protecting animals. They have a tendency
to become identified with the sun, like Osiris in Egypt, or with the
moon. They are adepts in all the arts of the medicine-man, and they
are especially addicted to animal metamorphosis. In the long winter
evenings, round the camp-fire, the Indians tell such grotesque tales of
their pranks and adventures as the Greeks told of their gods, and the
Middle Ages of the saints.***
* Relations, p. 183.
** Op. cit., p. 53.
*** A full collection of these, as they survive in oral
tradition, with an obvious European intermixture, will be
found in Mr. Leland's _Algonquin Legends_, London, 1884, and
in Schoolcraft's _Hiawatha Legends_, London, 1856. See
especially the Manibozho legend.
The stage in civilisation above that of the hunter tribes is represented
in the present day by the settled Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and
Arizona. Concerning the faith of the Zunis we fortunately possess an
elaborate account by Mr. Frank Cushing.* Mr. Cushing was for long a
dweller in the clay _pueblos_ of the Zunis, and is an initiated member
of their sacred societies. He found that they dealt at least as freely
in metaphysics as the Maoris, and that, like the Australians, "they
suppose sun, moon and stars, the sky, earth and sea, in all their
phenomena and elements, and all inanimate objects, as well as plants,
animals and men, to belong to one great system of all conscious and
interrelated life, in which the degrees of relationship seem to be
determined largely, if not wholly, by the degrees of resemblance". This,
of course, is stated in terms of modern self-conscious speculation.
When much the same opinions are found among the Kamilaroi and Kurnai of
Australia, they are stated thus: "Some of the totems divide not mankind
only, but the whole universe into what may almost be called gentile
divisions".**
* Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1880-81.
** Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 167.(p. 170). Mrs. Langloh
Parker, in a letter to me, remarks that Baiame alone is
outside of this conception, and is common to all classes,
and totems, and class divisions.
"Everything in nature is divided between the classes. The wind belongs
to one and the rain to another. The sun is Wutaroo and the moon is
Yungaroo.... The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as
the great tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs, and all
things, animate or inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of
the body corporate, whereof he himself is part. They are almost parts of
himself".
Manifestly this is the very condition of mind out of which mythology,
with all existing things acting as _dramatis personae_, must inevitably
arise.
The Zuni philosophy, then, endows all the elements and phenomena of
nature with personality, and that personality is blended with
the personality of the beast "whose operations most resemble its
manifestation". Thus lightning is figured as a serpent, and the serpent
holds a kind of mean position between lightning and man. Strangely
enough, flint arrow-heads, as in Europe, are regarded as the gift of
thunder, though the Zunis have not yet lost the art of making, nor
entirely abandoned, perhaps, the habit of using them. Once more, the
supernatural beings of Zuni religion are almost invariably in the shape
of animals, or in monstrous semi-theriomorphic form. There is no general
name for the gods, but the appropriate native terms mean "creators and
masters," "makers," and "finishers," and "immortals". All the classes of
these, including the class that specially protects the animals necessary
to men, "are believed to be related by blood ". But among these
essences, the animals are nearest to man, most accessible, and therefore
most worshipped, sometimes as mediators. But the Zuni has mediators even
between him and his animal mediators, and these are fetishes, usually
of stone, which accidentally resemble this or that beast-god in shape.
Sometimes, as in the Egyptian sphinx, the natural resemblance of a stone
to a living form has been accentuated and increased by art. The stones
with a natural resemblance to animals are most valued when they are old
and long in use, and the orthodox or priestly theory is that they are
petrifactions of this or that beast. Flint arrow-heads and feathers are
bound about them with string.
All these beliefs and practices inspire the Zuni epic, which is
repeated, at stated intervals, by the initiated to the neophytes. Mr.
Cushing heard a good deal of this archaic poem in his sacred capacity.
The epic contains a Zuni cosmogony. Men, as in so many other myths,
originally lived in the dark places of earth in four caverns. Like the
children of Uranus and Gaea, they murmured at the darkness. The "holder
of the paths of life," the sun, now made two beings out of his own
substance; they fell to the earth, armed with rainbow and lightning, a
shield and a magical flint knife. The new-comers cut the earth with a
flint-knife, as Qat cut the palpable dark with a blade of red obsidian
in Melanesia. Men were then lifted through the hole on the shield, and
began their existence in the sunlight, passing gradually through the
four caverns. Men emerged on a globe still very wet; for, as in the
Iroquois and other myths, there had been a time when "water was the
world ". The two benefactors dried the earth and changed the monstrous
beasts into stones. It is clear that this myth accounts at once for
the fossil creatures found in the rocks and for the merely accidental
resemblance to animals of stones now employed as fetishes.* In the
stones is believed to survive the "medicine" or magic, the spiritual
force of the animals of old.
* Report, etc, p. 15.
The Zunis have a culture-hero as usual, Po'shai-an-k'ia, who founded the
mysteries, as Demeter did in Greece, and established the sacred orders.
He appeared in human form, taught men agriculture, ritual, and then
departed. He is still attentive to prayer. He divided the world into
regions, and gave the animals their homes and functions, much as Heitsi
Eibib did in Namaqualand. These animals carry out the designs of the
culture-hero, and punish initiated Zunis who are careless of their
religious duties and ritual. The myths of the sacred beasts are long
and dismal, chiefly aetiological, or attempts to account by a fictitious
narrative for the distribution and habits of the various creatures. Zuni
prayers are mainly for success in the chase; they are directed to the
divine beasts, and are reinforced by magical ceremonies. Yet a prayer
for sport may end with such a truly religious petition as this: "Grant
me thy light; give me and my children a good trail across life ". Again
we read: "This day, my fathers, ye animal gods, although this country
be filled with enemies, render me precious.... Oh, give ye shelter of
my heart from them!" Yet in religious hymns the Zunis celebrate
Ahonawilona, "the Maker and Container of All, the All Father," the
uncreated, the unbegotten, who "thought himself out into space". Here
is monotheism among fetishists.*
* Cushing, _Report, Ethnol. Bureau_, 1891-92, p. 379.
The faith of the Zunis, with its metaphysics, its devoutness and its
magic ritual, may seem a kind of introduction to the magic, the ritual
and the piety of the ancient Aztecs. The latter may have grown, in a
long course of forgotten ages, out of elements like those of the Zuni
practice, combined with the atrocious cruelty of the warrior tribes of
the north. Perhaps in no race is the extreme contrast between low myth,
and the highest speculation, that of "the Eternal thinking himself
out into space," so marked as among the Zunis. The highly abstract
conception of Ahonawilona was unknown to Europeans when this work first
appeared.