Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 7

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 p.a.w.nees and Blackfeet see Grinnell, p.a.w.nee 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds of the natives, Strachey quotes the remarks of a certain Indian: "We have five G.o.ds in all; our chief G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.dlike hare made the water and the fish and a great deare." The other four G.o.ds, in envy, killed the hare's deer. This is curiously like the Bushman myth of Cagn, the mantis insect, and his favourite eland. "The G.o.dly 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, gra.s.shopper, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sage, 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 G.o.ds, 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 cla.s.ses, and totems, and cla.s.s divisions.

"Everything in nature is divided between the cla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.ds, but the appropriate native terms mean "creators and masters," "makers," and "finishers," and "immortals". All the cla.s.ses of these, including the cla.s.s 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-G.o.d 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 Ura.n.u.s 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, pa.s.sing 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 fict.i.tious 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 pet.i.tion 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 G.o.ds, 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 s.p.a.ce". 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 s.p.a.ce," so marked as among the Zunis. The highly abstract conception of Ahonawilona was unknown to Europeans when this work first appeared.

CHAPTER XV. MEXICAN DIVINE MYTHS

European eye-witnesses of Mexican ritual--Diaz, his account of temples and G.o.ds__Sahagun, his method--Theories of the G.o.d Huitzilopochtli--Totemistic and other elements in his image and legend--Ill.u.s.trations from Latin religion-- "G.o.d-eating"--The calendar--Other G.o.ds--Their feasts and cruel ritual--Their composite character--Parallels from ancient cla.s.sical peoples--Moral aspects of Aztec G.o.ds.

The religion of the Mexicans was a compound of morality and cruelty so astonishing that its two aspects have been explained as the contributions of two separate races. The wild Aztecs from the north are credited with having brought to a high pitch of organised ritual the ferocious customs of the Red Indians. The tortures which the tribes inflicted on captives taken in war were trans.m.u.ted into the cannibal sacrifices and orgies of bloodshed with which the Aztec temples reeked.

The milder elements, again, the sense of sin which found relief in confession and prayer, are a.s.signed to the influence of Mayas, and especially of Toltecs, a shadowy and perhaps an imaginary people. Our ignorance of Mexican history before the Spanish conquest is too deep to make any such theory of the influence of race on religion in Mexico more than merely plausible. The facts of ritual and of myth are better known, thanks to the observations of such an honest soldier as Bernal Diaz and such a learned missionary as Sahagun. The author of the _Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana_ was a Spanish Franciscan, and one of the earliest missionaries (1529) in Mexico. He himself describes the method by which he collected his information about the native religion.

He summoned together the chief men of one of the provinces, who, in turn, chose twelve old men well seen in knowledge of the Mexican practices and antiquities. Several of them were also scholars in the European sense, and had been taught Latin. The majority of the commission collected and presented "pictures which were the writings formerly in use among them," and the "grammarians" or Latin-learned Aztecs wrote in European characters and in Aztec the explanations of these designs. When Sahagun changed his place of residence, these doc.u.ments were again compared, re-edited and enlarged by the a.s.sistance of the native gentlemen in his new district, and finally the whole was pa.s.sed through yet a third "sieve," as Sahagun says, in the city of Mexico. The completed ma.n.u.script had many ups and downs of fortune, but Sahagun's book remains a source of almost undisputed authenticity.

Probably no dead religion whose life was among a people ignorant of syllabaries or of the alphabet is presented to us in a more trustworthy form than the religion of Mexico. It is necessary, however, to discount the _theories_ of Sahagun and his converts, who though they never heard of Euhemerus, habitually applied the euhemeristic doctrine to their facts. They decided that the G.o.ds of the Aztecs had once been living men and conjurors, worshipped after their decease. It is possible, too, that a strain of Catholic piety has found its way into the long prayers of the heathen penitents, as reported by Sahagun.* Sahagun gives us a full account of the Mexican mythology. What the G.o.ds, as represented by idols and adored in ritual, were like, we learn from a gallant Catholic soldier, Bernal Diaz.** "Above the altars," he writes, "were two shapes like giants, wondrous for height and hugeness. The first on the right was Huichilobos (Huitzilopochtli), their G.o.d of war. He had a big head and trunk, his eyes great and terrible, and so inlaid with precious stones that all his head and body shone with stars thereof. Great snakes of gold and fine stones were girdled about his flanks; in one hand he held a bow, and arrows in the other, and a little idol called his page stood by his side.... Thereby also were braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and the savour of incense were the sacrifice. The walls of this oratory were black and dripping with gouts of blood, and likewise the floor that stank horribly." Such was the aspect of a Mexican shrine before the Spaniards introduced their faith.