The Myths of the New World. Brinton Daniel Garrison

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      No better success attended the attempt of Nezahuatl, lord of Tezcuco, which took place about the same time. He had long prayed to the gods of his forefathers for a son to inherit his kingdom, and the altars had smoked vainly with the blood of slaughtered victims. At length, in indignation and despair, the prince exclaimed, “Verily, these gods that I am adoring, what are they but idols of stone without speech or feeling? They could not have made the beauty of the heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars which adorn it, and which light the earth, with its countless streams, its fountains and waters, its trees and plants, and its various inhabitants. There must be some god, invisible and unknown, who is the universal creator. He alone can console me in my affliction and take away my sorrow.” Strengthened in this conviction by a timely fulfilment of his heart’s desire, he erected a temple nine stories high to represent the nine heavens, which he dedicated “to the Unknown God, the Cause of Causes.” This temple, he ordained, should never be polluted by blood, nor should any graven image ever be set up within its precincts.52

      In neither case, be it observed, was any attempt made to substitute another and purer religion for the popular one. The Inca continued to receive the homage of his subjects as a brother of the sun, and the regular services to that luminary were never interrupted. Nor did the prince of Tezcuco afterwards neglect the honors due his national gods, nor even refrain himself from plunging the knife into the breasts of captives on the altar of the god of war.53 They were but expressions of that monotheism which is ever present, “not in contrast to polytheism, but in living intuition in the religious sentiments.” If this subtle but true distinction be rightly understood, it will excite no surprise to find such epithets as “endless,” “omnipotent,” “invisible,” “adorable,” such appellations as “the Maker and Moulder of All,” “the Mother and Father of Life,” “the One God complete in perfection and unity,” “the Creator of all that is,” “the Soul of the World,” in use and of undoubted indigenous origin not only among the civilized Aztecs, but even among the Haitians, the Araucanians, the Lenni Lenape, and others.54 It will not seem contradictory to hear of them in a purely polytheistic worship; we shall be far from regarding them as familiar to the popular mind, and we shall never be led so far astray as to adduce them in evidence of a monotheism in either technical sense of that word. In point of fact they were not applied to any particular god even in the most enlightened nations, but were terms of laudation and magniloquence used by the priests and devotees of every several god to do him honor. They prove something in regard to a consciousness of divinity hedging us about, but nothing at all in favor of a recognition of one God; they exemplify how profound is the conviction of a highest and first principle, but they do not offer the least reason to surmise that this was a living reality in doctrine or practice.

      The confusion of these distinct ideas has led to much misconception of the native creeds. But another and more fatal error was that which distorted them into a dualistic form, ranging on one hand the good spirit with his legions of angels, on the other the evil one with his swarms of fiends, representing the world as the scene of their unending conflict, man as the unlucky football who gets all the blows. This notion, which has its historical origin among the Parsees of ancient Iran, is unknown to savage nations. “The idea of the Devil,” justly observes Jacob Grimm, “is foreign to all primitive religions.” Yet Professor Mueller, in his voluminous work on those of America, after approvingly quoting this saying, complacently proceeds to classify the deities as good or bad spirits!55

      This view, which has obtained without question in every work on the native religions of America, has arisen partly from habits of thought difficult to break, partly from mistranslations of native words, partly from the foolish axiom of the early missionaries, “The gods of the gentiles are devils.” Yet their own writings furnish conclusive proof that no such distinction existed out of their own fancies. The same word (otkon) which Father Bruyas employs to translate into Iroquois the term “devil,” in the passage “the Devil took upon himself the figure of a serpent,” he is obliged to use for “spirit” in the phrase, “at the resurrection we shall be spirits,”56 which is a rather amusing illustration how impossible it was by any native word to convey the idea of the spirit of evil. When, in 1570, Father Rogel commenced his labors among the tribes near the Savannah River, he told them that the deity they adored was a demon who loved all evil things, and they must hate him; whereupon his auditors replied, that so far from this being the case, whom he called a wicked being was the power that sent them all good things, and indignantly left the missionary to preach to the winds.57

      A passage often quoted in support of this mistaken view is one in Winslow’s “Good News from New England,” written in 1622. The author says that the Indians worship a good power called Kiehtan, and another “who, as farre as wee can conceive, is the Devill,” named Hobbamock, or Hobbamoqui. The former of these names is merely the word “great,” in their dialect of Algonkin, with a final n, and is probably an abbreviation of Kittanitowit, the great manito, a vague term mentioned by Roger Williams and other early writers, not the appellation of any personified deity.58 The latter, so far from corresponding to the power of evil, was, according to Winslow’s own statement, the kindly god who cured diseases, aided them in the chase, and appeared to them in dreams as their protector. Therefore, with great justice, Dr. Jarvis has explained it to mean “the oke or tutelary deity which each Indian worships,” as the word itself signifies.59

      So in many instances it turns out that what has been reported to be the evil divinity of a nation, to whom they pray to the neglect of a better one, is in reality the highest power they recognize. Thus Juripari, worshipped by certain tribes of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, and said to be their wicked spirit, is in fact the only name in their language for spiritual existence in general; and Aka-kanet, sometimes mentioned as the father of evil in the mythology of the Araucanians, is the benign power appealed to by their priests, who is throned in the Pleiades, who sends fruits and flowers to the earth, and is addressed as “grandfather.”60 The Çupay of the Peruvians never was, as Prescott would have us believe, “the shadowy embodiment of evil,” but simply and solely their god of the dead, the Pluto of their pantheon, corresponding to the Mictla of the Mexicans.

      The evidence on the point is indeed conclusive. The Jesuit missionaries very rarely distinguish between good and evil deities when speaking of the religion of the northern tribes; and the Moravian Brethren among the Algonkins and Iroquois place on record their unanimous testimony that “the idea of a devil, a prince of darkness, they first received in later times through the Europeans.”61 So the Cherokees, remarks an intelligent observer, “know nothing of the Evil One and his domains, except what they have learned from white men.”62 The term Great Spirit conveys, for instance, to the Chipeway just as much the idea of a bad as of a good spirit; he is unaware of any distinction until it is explained to him.63 “I have never been able to discover from the Dakotas themselves,” remarks the Rev. G. H. Pond, who had lived among them as a missionary for eighteen years,64 “the least degree of evidence that they divide the gods into classes of good and evil, and am persuaded that those persons who represent them as doing so, do it inconsiderately, and because it is so natural to subscribe to a long cherished popular opinion.”

      Very soon after coming in contact with the whites, the Indians caught the notion of a bad and good spirit, pitted one against the other in eternal warfare, and engrafted it on their ancient traditions. Writers anxious to discover Jewish or Christian analogies, forcibly construed myths to suit their pet theories, and for indolent observers it was convenient to catalogue their gods in antithetical classes. In Mexican and Peruvian mythology this is so plainly false that historians no longer insist upon it, but as a popular error it

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