Volume II Part 7 (2/2)

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 Cus.h.i.+ng.* Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 wors.h.i.+pped, 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.

Cus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+eld, 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 fetis.h.i.+sts.*

* Cus.h.i.+ng, _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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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, wors.h.i.+pped 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.

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