Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 6

There were departmental G.o.ds, and there was even an obvious tendency towards the worship of one spiritual deity, the Bretwalda of all the divine kings, a G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 gra.s.shopper, 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 G.o.ds, 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 gra.s.shopper 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n to ritual, from religion to myth, it would probably be vain to suppose that an uncontaminated belief in one G.o.d 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 p.a.w.nees 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d....

* 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 G.o.d recognised by the Algonkin tribes, and that the t.i.tle '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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mstances. Myth comes in; the sky is a G.o.d; 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 G.o.d, that has beene from all eternitie," who "made other G.o.ds of a princ.i.p.al order".*** Near New Plymouth, Kiehtan was the chief G.o.d, and the souls of the just abode in his mansions.**** We have already cited Alione, and shown that he and the other G.o.ds 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 doc.u.ment. Kah, to shorten his n.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d Crepitus."*

* The circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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. _Marchen_ 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 p.r.o.ne 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds, he could a.s.sume 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 G.o.d 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-sh.o.r.e, 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 c.o.c.katoo 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds of to-day. Thunder, the wind, and echo are the chief divine figures. The t.i.tans 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.