Volume II Part 5 (2/2)

CHAPTER XIV. AMERICAN DIVINE MYTHS

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 G.o.ds, 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e 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. Cus.h.i.+ng, 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; kins.h.i.+p, 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 t.i.tle 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 Inst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstances 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.

Muller, 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 subst.i.tutes 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. Muller, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds 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.

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