Part 2
The primitive men of America saw before them forests, plains, deserts, mountains, lakes, and rivers of various sizes, from the smallest to the greatest; they lived in climates varying from the coldest and most inclement to the hottest and most difficult of endurance. They saw around them on all sides a world far more hostile than friendly,--a world of savage beasts, wild creatures, poisonous reptiles, deadly insects. Each creature, every plant had its own fixed and settled character, its own aim and object. Whence came beasts good for food or clothing; whence others dangerous to life, beasts to be slain or avoided? Whence came trees and plants of various kinds and uses? Whence came sweetness in the maple or bitterness and poison in another tree? What is the origin of corn, and why do poisons grow to kill as corn does to nourish? Whence came the rattlesnake, and whence the salmon? Because of these questions myths appeared, and those myths gave answers which received full faith and credence,--answers on which was built a theory of how this world arose, and what the true and proper scheme of life was.
The myth-maker looked at the universe around him, and saw throughout every part of it individualities having qualities, desires, and passions in varying degrees. He observed these individualities, and gave a detailed account and history of how this world arose. He gave this history by projecting existence into a past which was remote and passionless. Out of that harmonious past he evolved the present world and its order by describing in the past world the play of all those passions, desires, and appetites which he saw at work in life around him. Such was the method employed in producing the American creation myths. The task required much time, long observation, careful thought, and no small constructive power. These creation myths with the next, which I have mentioned already and called action myths, are the great result of mental toil and effort in the old time on this continent. In these two sets of myths the Indian has told what he thinks of the universe.
When Europeans came to this hemisphere, the American myth system was unbroken and perfect. There was no second order of thought here. The continent was untouched by foreign conquest or ideas. The inhabitants had lived in mental isolation, in absolute freedom from every outside influence. Human history has no second example of a single system of thought developed over such a vast area. Inhabited America extended at least nine thousand miles from north to south, more than one third of the earth's circumference and considerably more than the earth's diameter. This territory where broadest was at least three thousand miles from east to west, both in North and South America. Over this immense portion of the earth's surface with its endless variety of soil, climate, scenery, and conditions of existence, a single system of primitive philosophy was developed with a fulness and a wealth of illustration which could find no parallel in any other place. The result of all this is that we have in America a monument of thought which is absolutely unequalled, altogether unique in human experience. The special value of this thought lies, moreover, in the fact that it is primitive, that it is the thought of ages long anterior to those which we find recorded on the eastern hemisphere, either in sacred books, histories, or literature, whether preserved on baked brick, burnt cylinders, or papyrus.
The American system, which gives us a circumstantial account of the beginning of all things, is as far reaching as the nebular hypothesis, or as that theory which gives a common origin to man and all sentient existences.
Primitive man in America stood at every step face to face with divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape from the presence of those powers which had constituted the first world, and which composed all that there was in the present one. Man's chief means of sustenance in most parts were on land or in the water. Game and fish of all sorts were under direct divine supervision. Invisible powers might send forth game or withdraw it very quickly. With fish the case was similar. Connected with fishing and hunting was an elaborate ceremonial, a variety of observances and prohibitions. Every man had a great many things to observe as an individual, a great many also as a member of his tribe or society.
The most important question of all in Indian life was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages. No man could communicate with these unless the man to whom they chose to manifest themselves. There were certain things which a man had to do to obtain communication with divinity and receive a promise of assistance; but it was only the elect, the right person, the fit one, who obtained the desired favor. For instance, twenty men might go to the mountain place, and observe every rule carefully, but only one man be favored with a vision, only one become a seer. Twenty others might go to the mountain place, and not one be accounted worthy to behold a spirit; a third twenty might go, and two or three of them be chosen. No man could tell beforehand what success or failure might await him. The general method at present is the following, the same as in the old time:--
Soon after puberty, and in every case before marriage or acquaintance with woman, the youth or young man who hopes to become a doctor goes to a sacred mountain pond or spring, where he drinks water and bathes. After he has bathed and dressed, he speaks to the spirits, he prays them to come to him, to give him knowledge, to grant their assistance. The young man takes no food, no nourishment of any sort, fasts, as he is able, seven days and nights, sometimes longer. All this time he is allowed no drink except water. He sleeps as little as possible. If spirits come to him, he has visions, he receives power and favor. A number of spirits may visit a man one after another, and promise him aid and co-operation. The eagle spirit may come, the spirit of the elk or the salmon,--any spirit that likes the man. The spirit says in substance, "Whenever you call my name I will come, I will give my power to assist you." After one spirit has gone, another may appear, and another. A man is not free to refuse the offers of spirits, he must receive all those who come to him. As there are peculiar observances connected with each spirit, the doctor who is assisted by many is hampered much in his method of living. There are spirits which do not like buckskin; the man to whom they come must never wear buckskin. If a man eats food repugnant to his spirit, the spirit will kill him. As each spirit has its favorite food, and there are other kinds which to it are distasteful, we can understand easily that the doctor who has ten spirits or twenty (and there are some who have thirty) to aid him is limited in his manner of living. Greatness has its price at all times, power must be paid for in every place. Those for whom the spirits have no regard, and they are the majority, return home without visions or hope of assistance; the spirits are able to look through all persons directly, and straightway they see what a man is. They find most people unsuited to their purposes, unfit to be assisted.
This preparation to become seers or sorcerers among Indians is of very deep interest. I have given a considerable number of details on the subject in notes to "Kol Tibichi." The spirit of any plant, any star, or other personage in creation may become a man's attendant. In our popular phraseology, this is called his "medicine."
In a Modoc myth the morning star is the attendant of the sun. According to this myth the sun is destroyed every day physically, is consumed into a heap of ashes; but as the sun has an immortal golden disk in his body, a disk which contains his whole existence, he can never perish. This disk remains always in the heap of ashes. There is a condition, however, incident to the sun's resurrection: he must be called. Every morning some one must rouse him, as a hireling is roused to his daily labor. The morning star has that duty, and will never be freed from it. While the sun exists, the morning star must call him. At the summons of the star the golden disk springs from the pile of ashes, the sun is renewed completely, and goes forth to run his race till consumed again in the evening. Here we have the Phoenix rising from its ashes daily instead of once in five centuries.
The system outlined in the myths contained in this volume is that of the Wintus and Yanas, two stocks of Indians whom I shall describe somewhat later.
The Wintu system is remarkable for the peculiar development of the chief divinity, Olelbis, called also Nomhliëstawa.
The word "Olelbis" is formed of three etymological elements: ol, up; el, in; bis, dwelling or sitting,--dwelling on high. Nomhliëstawa is formed also of three elements: nom, west; hliës, to hurl; and tawa, left-handed. Both names are epithets, and the Wintus have forgotten who or what their chief divinity is; at least I have not been able to find a man among them who could give information on this subject. Olelbis lives in the highest part of the sky; with him are the best of the first people. From his beautiful house, Olelpanti Hlut, he sees everything on earth, and seems more real and familiar than any divinity connected with other tribes. He is certainly more effective in management, more active than any divinity of other Indian stocks, so far as I know.
Olelbis disposes of the first people, except in a few cases, and he retains with himself whomsoever he likes. He sends to the earth and transforms those whom he thinks more useful below than above, and gives the example of a single ruling divinity which, without being all-powerful or all-wise, is able, through the knowledge and services of others, to bear rule over the world in all places and everywhere.
The two old women, the grandmothers, are interesting persons, counsellors of the chief divinity, rainmakers, wise with a knowledge of people of whom Olelbis is ignorant, at least professedly. These old women have been turned into a stone which has a spongy appearance and looks like the inside or porous portion of bones which are without marrow.
The great majority of Wintu metamorphoses are effected by Olelbis. The only exceptions are those of Sas, Hawt, and Tichelis, transformed by Tulchuherris, and certain changes such as those of color produced at the great musical contest given by Waida Dikit. When each played on a flute at that contest till he had done his best, till he had lost breath, then he changed color. Though the Wintu system differs much in detail from others, it agrees perfectly with all bodies of mythology on the great point, the main principle, metamorphosis. Through metamorphosis, all things have become what they are; through revelation it was learned that the metamorphoses took place, and in what way they took place. We must not consider the final act as the whole; the change had been in process for a long period, and the final words from opponents in conflict, the commands of Olelbis, the decisions of personages who changed themselves at the approach of Indians, or at signs of their coming, are but the very last act, the final incident, the official ending, so to speak, of an immensely long career in each case.
Of course there is no true information in the American ethnic religion as to the real changes which affected the world around us; but there is in it, as in all systems like it, true information regarding the history of the human mind. Every ethnic religion gives us documentary evidence. It gives us positive facts which, in their own sphere, are as true as are facts of geology in the history of the earth's crust and surface. They do not tell us what took place in the world without, in the physical universe, they had no means of doing so; but they do tell us what took place at certain periods in the world of mind, in the interior of man.
The term "ethnic religion" needs some explanation, perhaps, before we go further. An ethnic or primitive religion is one which belongs to people of one blood and language, people who increased and developed together with the beliefs of every sort which belong to them. Such a religion includes every species of knowledge, every kind of custom, institution, and art. Every aboriginal nation or human brood has its gods. All people of one blood and origin are under the immediate care and supervision of their gods, and preserve continual communication and converse with them. According to their own beliefs, such people received from their gods all that they have, all that they practise, all that they know. Such people, while their blood is unmixed and their society unconquered, adhere to their gods with the utmost fidelity.
The bonds which connect a nation with its gods, bonds of faith, and those which connect the individuals of that nation with one another, bonds of blood, are the strongest known to primitive man, and are the only social bonds in prehistoric ages. This early stage was the one in which even the most advanced group of Indians in America found themselves when the continent was discovered.
On the Eastern hemisphere, where there were so many races quite distinct and different from one another, the conquest of one race by another, or the conquest of a number of races by one, was frequent and had a great influence on thought and on religion. The influence of one religion or system of thought on another was sometimes considerable, as the intellectual influence of Egypt on Greece, and sometimes great, as that of Greece on Rome.
The influence of the physical conquest of many by one was immense politically and socially, as in the case of Rome, which subdued Greece and, together with Greece, all that Alexander had conquered in Asia and Egypt. With the ruin of Carthage, Rome destroyed the ancient thought of Phoenicia, which was closely akin to the earliest Hebrew, and one of the most important among Semitic nations. With the conquest and assimilation of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul, the whole ancient fabric of Keltic thought on the continent gave way, and its chief elements were lost soon after.
The last of the ethnic religions of Europe, and one of the most valuable, that of the Lithuanians, continued in perfect condition till the fifteenth century, when it was ended through bloodshed and violence. This last of the systems of primitive Aryan thought in Europe passed away leaving slight traces. We know the names of some of its divinities; we know that it resembled the Slav, but was more developed, that it had sacred serpents and priestesses who guarded the holy, unquenchable fire; but, to the great regret of men of science, we have only small fragments of the system, brief and meagre accounts of it.
If we look closely into the religious history of the Eastern hemisphere, we shall find the position to be approximately as follows,--
In the oldest of the inscriptional versions of the "Book of the Dead" on the walls of pyramids, we find the religion of Egypt advanced far beyond the first stages of development. Though animals, birds, reptiles, and insects occupy a prominent position in Egyptian religion, it is not evident why they occupy that position. There is no inscription or book to inform us. The earliest stage of Egyptian religion is lost to us. Egyptian priests, when reproached for the national worship rendered various animals, birds, reptiles, and insects, creatures that were vile, useful, clean, or unclean, as the case might be, were unable to give a cause for the worship. They were unable for the reason that the mythologic account was unknown to them, or had been lost or was unconsidered; whatever the reason, neither papyrus nor inscription explains it.
The chief gods of priestly Egypt answered exactly to the Indian divinities of the second class of myths in America, those which I have called action myths. Among these the sun and the earth were very prominent. Of the earliest gods of Egypt, those which answered to the "first people," or divinities in American creation myths, we find no account thus far. If we had that account, it would explain why there are animals, reptiles, and insects in Egyptian religion.
In Greece those portions of the earliest mythology which were not lost were obscured. The ancient creation myths were either misunderstood, or were unknown to the educated at the period from which the first literary monuments have come down to us. Hesiod arranged and shaped Greek mythology to suit himself and his audience, so that it is quite impossible to learn from that author what the primitive myths of Greece were. If brought before him, he would doubtless have looked on them much as a certain French Algonkin and Iroquois scholar of Canada looked on the myths of America. The man had an extensive knowledge of Algonkin and Iroquois words, but an utter contempt for Indian thought, and no real knowledge of it whatever. When I mentioned Indian mythology, he exclaimed: "Mais, Monsieur, c'est quelque chose d'absurde."
No doubt the earliest creation myths were well known throughout rural Greece among the illiterate, but there was no philosopher of that day who knew their value. There was no man to consider them.
Roman mythology, as well as Greek, suffered from literary treatment, and it is only by collecting detached fragments and facts of primitive thought throughout the whole field of classic literature that we are able to get at something beyond the official religion of polished society in Greece and Rome.
From the wreck of ancient Keltic and Teutonic thought much has been saved on the two islands of Ireland and Iceland. With this, together with the American system and the mythologic inheritance of the Slav world in Eastern Europe, we shall be able perhaps to obtain materials with which to explain the earliest epoch of Aryan thought, the epoch which corresponds in development with the world of American creation myths. In that case we shall gain a connected view of Aryan speculation and its methods from those early beginnings when there was no passion or quality apart from a person, when symbols, metaphors, and personifications were in the distant future. The whole problem is to connect the thought of this continent with that of the rest of mankind, but especially and above all with the Aryan and Semitic divisions of it.
It is to be regretted that Semitic beliefs of the primitive period have not come down to us more numerously; for example, those of the Phoenicians, the earliest Hebrews, and other kindred nations. Fortunately the Arabs, the most poetic of the race, the knightly members of it, have given us in their history one fact of great value. Just before the establishment of the new religion by Mohammed there were in Mecca more than three hundred Arabic divinities, animal, vegetable, and mineral. We can hardly doubt that the pre-Mohammedan Arabic system of religion was the one which on a time belonged to the whole Semitic race, different among some divisions of it in details, of course, but substantially the same everywhere. This statement of the Arabic condition contains a fact of immense significance. It points to a system exactly like the American. The pre-Mohammedan Arabic was the most splendid and important survival of primitive religion in any historic race on the Eastern Hemisphere.
It is proper here to explain the position of spirits in the Indian systems. All the first people are conceived as having bodies as well as spirits. When we speak of a spirit appearing to a sorcerer or "doctor," it is understood that that spirit has left its body temporarily and will return to it. There are no spirits without bodies save an exceptional few who at the time of the metamorphosis of the first people lost the bodies which had belonged to them in their primal condition and received no new bodies at their fall. This loss of bodies was inflicted as a punishment. These desolate disembodied spirits wander about now in mountains and lonely weird places. Uncanny in character, they are seen rarely, and then only by sorcerers.
A good deal has been given to the world of late on mythology by able writers who with good materials would attain good results; but as the materials at their disposal are faulty, much of their work with all its cleverness is mainly a persistent pouring of the empty into the void.
We have seen attempts made to show that real gods have been developed by savage men from their own dead savage chiefs. Such a thing has never been done since the human race began, and it could never have been imagined by any man who knew the ideas of primitive races from actual experience or from competent testimony. The most striking thing in all savage belief is the low estimate put on man when unaided by divine, uncreated power. In Indian belief every object in the universe is divine except man. Divinities have an immense range of power, there is an incalculable difference between the greatest and the smallest of them,--some have inconceivable strength and knowledge, while others are measurably weak and of limited intelligence,--but all belong to one category, all are divine, all are extra-human.
Vegetable gods, so called, have been scoffed at by writers on mythology. The scoff is baseless, for the first people were turned, or turned themselves, into trees and various plants as frequently as into beasts and other creatures. Maize or Indian corn is a transformed god who gave himself to be eaten to save man from hunger and death. When Spanish priests saw little cakes of meal eaten ceremonially by Indians, and when the latter informed them that they were eating their god, the good priests thought this a diabolical mockery of the Holy Sacrament, and a blasphemous trick of Satan to ruin poor ignorant Indians.
I have a myth in which the main character is a violent and cruel old personage who is merciless and faith-breaking, who does no end of damage till he is cornered at last by a good hero and turned into the wild parsnip. Before transformation this old parsnip could travel swiftly, but now he must stay in one place, and of course kills people only when they eat him.
The treasure saved to science by the primitive race of America is unique in value and high significance. The first result from it is to carry us back through untold centuries to that epoch when man made the earliest collective and consistent explanation of this universe and its origin.
Occupying this vantage-ground, we can now throw a flood of light on all those mythologies and ethnic religions or systems of thought from which are lost in part, great or small, the materials needed to prove the foundation and beginnings of each of them. In this condition are all ancient recorded religions, whether of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, or India.
Through amazing ability of primitive man on this continent to retain, or perhaps through his inability to change or go forward, he has preserved a system of thought already old at the time of the first cuneiform letters and of the earliest statements on stone or papyrus. And the discovery of this system of ours coincides almost with the moment when America after a century and a quarter of free political activity, and of intellectual labor unexampled in fruitfulness, takes her due place as a World Power, and enters into intimate and searching relations, not with Europe alone, or one section of mankind, but with the whole human race wherever fixed or resident.
JEREMIAH CURTIN.
Washington, D. C., U. S. A., October 11, 1898.
CREATION MYTHS OF PRIMITIVE AMERICA
[Decoration]
OLELBIS
PERSONAGES