Volume II Part 7 (1/2)

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 fis.h.i.+ng, ”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 wors.h.i.+p 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+fting, 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.