Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

Italics in the footnotes citations were inconsistently applied by the typesetter.

Footnote [II-11]: "Reads" should possibly be "Reade."

Footnote [VI-43]: "por bien de abirle los ojos, y darle luz, y abridle ... " should possibly be "por bien de abrirle los ojos, y darle luz, y abrirle ..."

Footnote [IX-7] is missing a starting quote.

Footnote [X-65]: "rook" should possibly be "rock."

Footnote [XI-5] is missing a starting quote.

Footnote [XII-75]: The ending page should possibly be 302.

Footnote [II'-29]: "queer" should possibly be "quer."

Footnote [II'-60] is missing a starting quote.

Footnote [III'-2]: "îsles" should possibly be "îles."

Footnote [III'-7]: "Kaigáni" or "Kaigani" may be spelled incorrectly.

Footnote [IV'-16]: "Entferten" should possibly be "Entfernten."

Footnote [V'-7]: "Schlusstein" should possibly be "Schlussstein."

[Page 569]: "Irritilia" should possibly be "Irritila."

[Page 634]: The periods after "from us", and "masahchie" are possibly typos.

[Page 703]: "kiokame" is a possible typo for "hiokame."

Erman, Archiv is variously numbered with Roman and Arabic numbers.

THE WORKS
OF

HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT.

VOLUME III.

THE NATIVE RACES.
Vol. III. MYTHS AND LANGUAGES.

SAN FRANCISCO:
A. L. BANCROFT & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.
1883.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the Year 1882, by
HUBERT H. BANCROFT,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

All Rights Reserved.

CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME.

MYTHOLOGY.

LANGUAGES.

THE NATIVE RACES
OF THE
PACIFIC STATES.

MYTHOLOGY, LANGUAGES.

CHAPTER I.
SPEECH AND SPECULATION.

Difference between Man and Brutes—Mind Language and Soul-Language—Origin of Language: A Gift of the Creator, a Human Invention, or an Evolution—Nature and Value of Myth—Origin of Myth: The Divine Idea, A Fiction of Sorcery, The Creation of a Designing Priesthood—Origin of Worship, of Prayer, of Sacrifice—Fetichism and the Origin of Animal-Worship—Religion and Mythology.

Hitherto we have beheld Man only in his material organism; as a wild though intellectual animal. We have watched the intercourse of uncultured mind with its environment. We have seen how, to clothe himself, the savage robs the beast; how, like animals, primitive man constructs his habitation, provides food, rears a family, exercises authority, holds property, wages war, indulges in amusements, gratifies social instincts; and that in all this, the savage is but one remove from the brute. Ascending the scale, we have examined the first stages of human progress and analyzed an incipient civilization. We will now pass the frontier which separates mankind from animal-kind, and enter the domain of the immaterial and supernatural; phenomena which philosophy purely positive cannot explain.

The primary indication of an absolute superiority in man over other animals is the faculty of speech; not those mute or vocal symbols, expressive of passion and emotion, displayed alike in brutes and men; but the power to separate ideas, to generate in the mind and embody in words, sequences of thought. True, upon the threshold of this inquiry, as in whatever relates to primitive man, we find the brute creation hotly pursuing, and disputing for a share in this progressional power. In common with man, animals possess all the organs of sensation. They see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. They have even the organs of speech; but they have not speech. The source of this wonderful faculty lies further back, obscured by the mists which ever settle round the immaterial. Whether brutes have souls, according to the Aristotelean theory of soul, or whether brute-soul is immortal, or of quality and destiny unlike and inferior to that of man-soul, we see in them unmistakable evidence of mental faculties. The higher order of animals possess the lower order of intellectual perceptions. Thus pride is manifested by the caparisoned horse, shame by the beaten dog, will by the stubborn mule. Brutes have memory; they manifest love and hate, joy and sorrow, gratitude and revenge. They are courageous or cowardly, subtle or simple, not merely up to the measure of what we commonly term instinct, but with evident exercise of judgment; and, to a certain point, we might even claim for them foresight, as in laying in a store of food for winter. But with all this there seems to be a lack of true or connected thought, and of the faculty of abstraction, whereby conceptions are analyzed and impressions defined.

THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION.

They have also a language, such as it is; indeed, all the varieties of language common to man. What gesture-language can be more expressive than that employed by the horse with its ears and by the dog with its tail, wherein are manifestations of every shade of joy, sorrow, courage, fear, shame, and anger? In their brutish physiognomy, also, one may read the language of the emotions, which, if not so delicately pictured as in the face of man, is none the less distinctive. Nor are they without their vocal language. Every fowl and every quadruped possesses the power of communicating intelligence by means of the voice. They have their noise of gladness, their signal cry of danger, their notes of anger and of woe. Thus we see in brutes not only intelligence but the power of communicating intelligence. But intelligence is not thought, neither is expression speech. The language of brutes, like themselves, is soulless.

The next indication of man's superiority over brutes, is the faculty of worship. The wild beast, to escape the storm, flies howling to its den; the savage, awe-stricken, turns and prays. The lowest man perceives a hand behind the lightning, hears a voice abroad upon the storm, for which the highest brute has neither eye nor ear. This essential of humanity we see primordially displayed in mythic phenomena; in the first struggle of spiritual manhood to find expression. Language is symbol significant of thought, mythology is symbol significant of soul. The one is the first distinctive sound that separates the ideal from the material, the other the first respiration of the soul which distinguishes the immortal from the animal. Language is thought incarnate; mythology, soul incarnate. The one is the instrument of thought, as the other is the essence of thought. Neither is thought; both are closely akin to thought; separated from either, in some form, perfect intellectual manhood cannot develop. I do not mean to say with some, that thought without speech cannot exist; unless by speech is meant any form of expression symbolical, emotional, or vocal, or unless by thought is meant something more than mere self-consciousness without sequence and without abstraction. There can be no doubt that speech is the living breath of thought, and that the exercise of speech reacts upon the mental and emotional faculties. In brutes is found neither speech nor myth; in the deaf and dumb, thought and belief are shadowy and undefined; in infants, thought is but as a fleeting cloud passing over the brain. Yet for all this, deaf mutes and children who have no adequate form of expression cannot be placed in the category of brutes. The invention of the finger-alphabet opened a way to the understanding of the deaf and dumb; but long before this is learned, in every instance, these unfortunates invent a gesture-language of their own, in which they think as well as speak. And could we but see the strangely contorted imagery which takes possession of a gesture-thinker's brain, we should better appreciate the value of words. So, into the mouth of children words are put, round which thoughts coalesce; but evidences of ideas are discovered some time before they can be fully expressed by signs or sounds. Kant held the opinion that the mind of a deaf mute is incapable of development, but the wonderful success of our modern institutions has dissipated forever that idea.

The soul of man is a half-conscious inspiration from which perception and expression are inseparable. Nature speaks to it in that subtle sympathy by which the immaterial within holds converse with the immaterial without, in the soft whisperings of the breeze, in the fearful bellowings of the tempest. Between the soul and body there is the closest sympathy, an interaction in every relation. Therefore these voices of nature speaking to nature's offspring, are answered back in various ways according to the various organisms addressed. The animal, the intellectual, the spiritual, whatsoever the entity consists of, responds, and responding expands and unfolds. Once give an animal the power to speak and mental development ensues; for speech cannot continue without ideas, and ideas cannot spring up without intellectual evolution. A dim, half-conscious, brutish thought there may be; but the faculty of abstraction, sequences of thought, without words either spoken or unspoken, cannot exist.

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

It is not at all probable that a system of gesture-language was ever employed by any primitive people, prior or in preference to vocal language. To communicate by signs requires no little skill and implies a degree of artifice and forethought far beyond that required in vocal or emotional language. Long before a child arrives at the point of intelligence necessary for conveying thought by signs, it is well advanced in a vocal language of its own.

In mythology, language assumes personality and independence. Often the significance of the word becomes the essential idea. Zeus, from meaning simply sky, becomes god of the sky; Eos, originally the dawn, is made the goddess of the opening day. Not the idea but the expression of the idea becomes the deity. And so, by these creations of fancy, the imagination expands; in the embodiment of the idea, the mind enlarges with its own creation. Then yet bolder metaphors are thrown off like soap-bubbles, which no sooner take form in words than they are also deified. Thus soul and thought and speech act and react on one another, all the evolutions of conception seeking vent in sound or speculation; and thus language, the expression of mind, and mythology, the expression of soul, become the exponents of divine humanity.

But what then is Language, what is Myth, and whence are they? Broadly, the term language may be applied to whatever social beings employ to communicate passion or sentiment, or to influence one another; whatever is made a vehicle of intelligence, ideographic or phonetic, is language. In this category may be placed, as we have seen, gestures, both instinctive and artificial; emotional expression, displayed in form or feature; vocal sounds, such as the cries of birds, the howling of beasts. Indeed, language is everywhere, in everything. While listening to the rippling brook, the roaring sea, the murmuring forest, as well as to the still small voice within, we are but reading from the vocabulary of nature.

Thus construed, the principle assumes a variety of shapes, and may be followed through successive stages of development. In fact, neither form nor feature can be set in motion, or even left in a state of repose, without conveying intelligence to the observer. The countenance of man, whether it will or not, perpetually speaks, and speaks in most exquisite shades of significance, and with expression far more delicate than that employed by tongue or pen. The face is the reflex of the soul; a transparency which glows with light, divine or devilish, thrown upon it from within. It is a portrait of individual intelligence, a photograph of the inner being, a measure of innate intelligence. And in all pertaining to the actions and passions of mankind, what can be more expressive than the language of the emotions? There are the soft, silent wooings of love, the frantic fury of hate, the dancing delirium of joy, the hungry cravings of desire, the settled melancholy of dead hopes. But more definitely, language is articulate human speech or symbolic expression of ideas.

How man first learned to speak, and whence the power of speech was originally derived, are questions concerning which tradition is uncommunicative. Even mythology, which attempts the solution of supernatural mysteries, the explanation of all phenomena not otherwise accounted for, has little to say as to the genesis of this most potential of all human powers.

Many theories have been advanced concerning the origin of language. Some of them are exploded; others in various stages of modification remain, no two philologists thinking exactly alike. The main hypotheses are three; the subordinate ones are legion. Obviously, speech must be either a direct, completed gift of the Creator, with one or more independent beginnings; or a human invention; or an evolution from a natural germ.

Schleicher conceives primordial language to be a simple organism of vocal gestures; Gould Brown believes language to be partly natural and partly artificial; Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart give to man the creation and development of speech by his own artificial invention. According to Herodotus, the Phrygians and the Egyptians disputed over the question of the antiquity of their languages. Psammetichus thereupon confided two babes to the care of goats, apart from every human sound. At the end of two years they were heard to pronounce the word bekos, the Phrygian for bread. The Phrygians therefore claimed for their language the seniority.

SCIENCE OF PHILOLOGY.

In ancient times it was thought that there was some one primeval tongue, a central language from which all the languages of the earth radiated. The Sythic, Ethiopic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and other languages advanced claims for this seniority. Plato believed language to be an invention of the gods, and by them given to man. Orthodox religionists did not hesitate to affirm that Hebrew, the language of Paradise, was not only given in a perfected state to man, but was miraculously preserved in a state of purity for the chosen Israel. After the dispersion from Babel, such nations as relapsed into barbarism became barbaric in speech. And in the roots of every dialect of both the old world and the new, the Fathers were able to discern Hebrew analogies sufficient to confirm them in their dogma. Indeed other belief was heresy.

There were others who held that, when gesture-language and the language of the emotions were found insufficient for the growing necessities of man, by common consent, it was agreed that certain objects should be represented by certain sounds, and that so, when a word had been invented for every object, language was made.

Another doctrine, called by Mr. Wedgwood, its enthusiastic advocate, 'onomatopœia,' and by Professor Max Müller the 'bow-wow' theory, explains the origin of language in the effort of man to imitate the cries of nature. Thus, for dog the primitive languageless man would say bow-wow; to the rivulet, the wind, the birds and beasts, names were applied which as far as possible were but reproductions of the sounds made by these elements or animals.

Thus philology up to a comparatively late period was a speculation rather than a science. Philosophers sought to know whence language came rather than what language is. But when the great discovery concerning the Arian and Semitic families was made, comparative philologists went to work after the manner of practical investigators in other branches of study, by collecting, classifying and comparing vocabularies, and therefrom striking out a path backward to original trunks. Catalogues of languages were published, one in 1800 by Hervas, a Spanish Jesuit, containing three hundred dialects, followed by Adelung and Vater's Mithridates, from 1806-17. But not until Sanscrit was made a subject of European study did it become apparent that affinities of tongues are subject to the laws that govern affinities of blood. Then it was that a similarity was discovered, not only between the Sanscrit and the Greek and Latin tongues, but between these languages and the Teutonic, Celtic, Iranic, and Indic, all of which became united in the great Arian family. At the same time, the ancient language of the Jews, the Arabic, and the Aramaic—which constitute the Semitic family—were found to be totally different from the Arian in their radical structure. From these investigations, philologists were no less convinced that the Indo-European languages were all of the same stock, than that the Semitic idioms did not belong to it. The doctrine of the Fathers therefore would not stand; for it was found that all languages were not derivations from the Hebrew, nor from any other known central tongue.

Then too, the subordination of tongues to the laws of evolution became apparent. It was discovered that language was in a state of constant change; that, with all its variations, human speech could be grouped into families, and degrees of relationship ascertained; and that, by the comparison of vocabularies, a classification at once morphological and genealogical could be made. Varieties of tongues, as numberless as the phases of humanity, could be traced back towards their beginnings and resolved into earlier forms. It was discovered that in the first order of linguistic development, words are monosyllabic. In this rudimentary stage, to which the Chinese, Tibetan, and perhaps the Japanese belong, roots, or sounds expressive only of the material or substantial parts of things, are used. In the second stage, called the polysynthetic, aggregative, or agglutinate, a modifying termination, significant of the relations of ideas or things to each other, is affixed or glued to the root. To the agglutinate languages belong the American and Turanian families. In the third, called the inflectional stage, which comprises only the Arian and Semitic families, the two elements are more perfectly developed, and it is only in this stage that language can attain the highest degree of richness and refinement.

VARIATIONS OF LANGUAGE.

While these stages or conditions are recognized by all, it is claimed on one side that although settled languages retain their grammatical character, every agglutinate language must once have been monosyllabic, or radical, and every inflectional language once agglutinate; and on the other side it is averred that the assertion is incapable of proof, for no historical evidence exists of any one type ever having passed from one of these stages to another. Now if speech is a perfected gift of the Creator, how happens it that we find language in every stage of development or relapse, from the cluckings of Thlinkeets to the classic lines of Homer and of Shakspeare? In his physiological structure, so far as is known, Man is neither more nor less perfect now than in the days of Adam. How then if language is an organism, is it, unlike other organisms, subject to extreme and sudden change? In animated nature there are two principles; one fixed and finished as an organism, subject to perpetual birth and decay, but incapable of advancing or retrograding; the other, elemental life, the germ or centre of a future development. The one grows, the other unfolds. We have no evidence that instincts and organic functions were more or less perfect in the beginning than now. If therefore language is an instinct or an organism, a perfect gift of the Creator, how can it exist otherwise than in a concrete and perfect state like other instincts and organisms?

The absurdity that human speech is the invention of primitive man—that upon some grassy knoll a company of half-clad barbarians met, and without words invented words, without significant sounds produced sounds significant of every object, therein by mutual consent originating a language—may be set aside. Of all conjectures concerning the origin of language, the hypothesis that words are an artificial invention is the least tenable. And what is most surprising to us, at the present day, is that such men as Locke and Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart could for a moment have entertained the idea. Obviously, without language there could be no culture, and without culture, words never could have been invented. Words are the symbols of objects and ideas. Certain words may be arbitrarily selected, and, by the tacit agreement or general concurrence of society, may be made to signify certain things. And in this sense words may originate conventionally. But though words may have been conventionally selected, they were never selected by conventions. We then have the discoveries of modern philologists, not only to positively deny the infallibility of the common-origin theory, but to bring forward a number of other claimants for the greatest antiquity, as well entitled to a hearing as the Hebrew.

UNIVERSALITY OF SPEECH.

Diversity in the origin of speech does not of necessity imply diversity in the origin of race. Thus with a unity of race, circumstances may be conceived in which independent tongues may have arisen in different localities; whereas with a diversity of race, but one language hypothetically may have been given to all. A common origin is probable, a diversity of origin is possible; neither can be proved or disproved. The radical differences in the structure of the three great types, the monosyllabic, the agglutinate, and the inflectional; and the inherent heterogeneities of the several families of the same type, as of the Chinese and Siamese, of the American and Turanian, or even of the Arian and Semitic, would seem to present insurmountable obstacles to the theory of a common origin; while on the other hand the wonderful mutations of types and trunks, the known transformations of language, and the identifications by some philologists, of the same stock in each of the three progressional stages, render the theory of a unity of origin in language equally probable. Therefore the question of unity or diversity of tongues, as we speak of unity or diversity of race, can be of but little moment to us. Language shows the connection between nations widely separated, leads us back beyond tradition into the obscure past, follows the sinuosities of migrations, indicates epochs in human development, points towards the origin of peoples, serves as a guide in following the radiation of races from common centres. Yet a similarity in the sound, or even in the construction of two words, does not necessarily imply relationship. Two totally distinct languages may have borrowed the same word from a third language; which fact would never establish relationship between the borrowers. When like forms are found in different languages, in order to establish a relationship, historical evidence must be applied as a test, and the words followed up to their roots.

Stripped of technicalities, the question before us is reduced to a few simple propositions. All men speak; there never yet was found a nation without articulate language. Aside from individual and abnormal exceptions, no primitive tribe has ever been discovered, where part of the people spoke, and part were speechless. Language is as much a part of man, as any physical constituent; yet unlike physical organs, as the eye, the ear, the hand, language is not born with the individual. It is not in the blood. The Caucasian infant stolen by Apaches, cannot converse with its own mother when restored to her a few years after.

Therefore speech is not an independent, perfected gift of the Creator, but an incidental acquirement. Furthermore language is an attribute of society. It belongs to the people and not to the individual. The child before mentioned, if dropped by the Apaches among the bears and by them nurtured and reared, is doomed to mutism or bear-language. Man was made a social being; speech was made as a means of communicating intelligence between social beings; one individual alone never could originate, or even preserve a language.

But how then happens it, if man did not make it, and God did not give it him, that human speech is universal? With the organism of man the Creator implants the organs of speech. With the elemental and progressional life of man the Creator implants the germ of speech. In common with the element of progress and civilization, innate from the beginning, speech has developed by slow degrees through thousands of cycles and by various stages, marching steadily forward with the forward march of the intellect. Comparative philology, in common with all other sciences, accords to man a remote antiquity. Bunsen estimates that at least twenty thousand years are required for a language to pass from one rudimentary stage to another.

The mind receives impressions and the soul intuitions, and to throw them off in some form is an absolute necessity. Painful impressions tend to produce bodily contortions and dolorous sounds; pleasant impressions to illumine the features and to make musical the voice. And not only is this compressed emotion destined to find expression, but to impress itself upon others. Emotion is essentially sympathetic. Why certain objects are represented by certain sounds we can never know. Some think that between every word and the object or idea which it represents, there was in the first instance an intimate relationship. By degrees certain natural articulations became associated with certain ideas; then new names were suggested by some fancied analogy to objects already named. Everything else being equal, similar conditions and causations produce similar impressions and are expressed by similar sounds. Hence a certain uniformity between all human tongues; and a tendency in man to imitate the sounds in nature, the cries of animals, the melodies of winds and waters, accounts for the origin of many words.

From giving expression in some outward form to our inward emotion there is no escape. Let us now apply to the expression of feeling and emotion the same law of evolution which governs all social and intellectual phenomena, and from a language of exclamations, we have first the monosyllabic noun and verb, then auxilliaries—adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and pronouns—and finally inflections of parts of speech by which the finer shades of meaning may be expressed.

The spontaneous outbursts of feeling, or the metaphorical expressions of emotion, arising instinctively and acting almost simultaneously with the conception or impression made upon the mind, develop with time into settled forms of speech. Man speaks as birds fly or fishes swim. The Creator supplies the organs and implants the instinct. Speech, though intuitive, is more than intuition; for, as we have seen, speech is a social rather than an individual attribute. Darwin perceives in language not only a spontaneous generation, but a natural selection of grammatical forms; the best words, the clearest and shortest expressions, continually displacing the weaker. So words are made to fit occasions, and dropped as soon as better ones can be found.

Languages are not inherited, yet language is an inheritance. Language is not artificially invented, yet languages are but conventional agreements. Languages are not a concrete perfected gift of the Creator, yet the germ of language is ineradicably implanted in man, and was there implanted by none but man's Creator. This then is Language: it is an acquisition, but an acquisition from necessity; it is a gift, but, when given, an undeveloped germ; it is an artifice, in so far as it is developed by the application of individual agencies.

MYTHOLOGY.

Here, for a while, we will leave Language and turn to Mythology, the mythos 'fable' and logos 'speech' of the Grecians.

Under analysis mythology is open to broad yet significant interpretations. As made up of legendary accounts of places and personages, it is history; as relating to the genesis of the gods, the nature and adventures of divinities, it is religion; placed in the category of science, it is the science of fable; of philosophy, the philosophy of intuitive beliefs. A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction not open to rationalistic criticism; a system of tradition, genealogical and political, confounding the subjective with the objective; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts cemented with wild fancies—it looms ever between the immeasurable and the measurable past.

Thick black clouds, portentous of evil, hang threateningly over the savage during his entire life. Genii murmur in the flowing river, in the rustling branches are felt the breathings of the gods, goblins dance in vapory twilight, and demons howl in the darkness.

In the myths of wild, untutored man, is displayed that inherent desire to account for the origin of things, which, even at the present time, commands the profoundest attention of philosophy; and, as we look back upon the absurd conceptions of our savage ancestry with feelings akin to pity and disgust, so may the speculations of our own times appear to those who shall come after us. Those weird tales which to us are puerility or poetry, according as we please to regard them, were to their believers history, science, and religion. Yet this effort, which continues from the beginning to the end, is not valueless; in it is embodied the soul of human progress. Without mythology, the only door at once to the ideal and inner life of primitive peoples and to their heroic and historic past would be forever closed to us. Nothing so reflects their heart-secrets, exposes to our view their springs of action, shadows forth the sources of their hopes and fears, exhibits the models after which they moulded their lives.

Within crude poetic imagery are enrolled their religious beliefs, are laid the foundations of their systems of worship, are portrayed their thoughts concerning causations and the destinies of mankind. Under symbolic veils is shrouded their ancient national spirit, all that can be known of their early history and popular ideas. Thus are explained the fundamental laws of nature; thus we are told how earth sprang from chaos, how men and beasts and plants were made, how heaven was peopled, and earth, and what were the relative powers and successive dynasties of the gods. Heroes are made gods; gods are materialized and brought down to men.

ALL MYTHS FOUNDED ON FACT.

Of the value of mythology it is unnecessary here to speak. Never was there a time in the history of philosophy when the character, customs, and beliefs of aboriginal man, and everything appertaining to him, were held in such high esteem by scholars as at present. As the ultimate of human knowledge is approached, the inquirer is thrown back upon the past; and more and more the fact becomes apparent, that what is, is but a reproduction of what has been; that in the earlier stages of human development may be found the counterpart of every phase of modern social life. Higher and more heterogeneous as are our present systems of politics and philosophy, every principle, when tracked to its beginning, proves to have been evolved, not originated.

As there never yet was found a people without a language, so every nation has its mythology, some popular and attractive form for preserving historical tradition and presenting ethical maxims; and as by the range of their vocabularies we may follow men through all the stages of their progress in government, domestic affairs and mechanical arts, so, by beliefs expressed, we may determine at any given epoch in the history of a race their ideal and intellectual condition. Without the substance there can be no shadow, without the object there can be no name for it; therefore when we find a language without a word to denote property or chastity, we may be sure that the wealth and women of the tribe are held in common; and when in a system of mythology certain important metaphysical or æsthetic ideas and attributes are wanting, it is evident that the intellect of its composers has not yet reached beyond a certain low point of conception.

Moreover, as in things evil may be found a spirit of good, so in fable we find an element of truth. It is now a recognized principle of philosophy, that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having in the beginning some foundation in fact. More especially is the truth of this principle apparent when we consider that in all the multitudinous beliefs of all ages, held by peoples savage and civilized, there exist a concurrence of ideas and a coincidence of opinion. Human conceptions of supernatural affairs spring from like intuitions. As human nature is essentially the same throughout the world and throughout time, so the religious instincts which form a part of that universal humanity generate and develop in like manner under like conditions. The desire to penetrate hidden surroundings and the method of attempting it are to a certain extent common to all. All wonder at the mysterious; all attempt the solution of mysteries; all primarily possess equal facilities for arriving at correct conclusions. The genesis of belief is uniform, and the results under like conditions analogous.

We may conclude that the purposes for which these fictitious narratives were so carefully preserved and handed down to posterity were two-fold—to keep alive certain facts and to inculcate certain doctrines.

VALUE OF MYTHOLOGY.

Something there must have been in every legend, in every tradition, in every belief, which has ever been entertained by the majority of a people, to recommend it to the minds of men in the first instance. Error absolute cannot exist; false doctrine without an amalgam of verity speedily crumbles, and the more monstrous the falsity the more rapid its decomposition. Myths were the oracles of our savage ancestors; their creed, the rule of their life, prized by them as men now prize their faith; and, by whatever savage philosophy these strange conceits were eliminated, their effect upon the popular mind was vital. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Protagoras, and Epicurus well knew and boldly proclaimed that the gods of the Grecians were disreputable characters, not the kind of deities to make or govern worlds; yet so deep rooted in the hearts of the people were the maxims of the past, that for these expressions one heretic was cast into prison, another expelled from Athens, and another forced to drink the hemlock. And the less a fable presents the appearance of probability, the more grotesque and extravagant it is, the less the likelihood of its having originated in pure invention; for no extravagantly absurd invention without a particle of truth could by any possibility have been palmed off upon a people, and by them accepted, revered, recited, preserved as veritable incident or solution of mystery, and handed down to those most dear to them, to be in like manner held as sacred.

Therefore we may be sure that there never was a myth without a meaning; that mythology is not a bundle of ridiculous fancies invented for vulgar amusement; that there is not one of these stories, no matter how silly or absurd, which was not founded in fact, which did not once hold a significance. "And though I have well weighed and considered all this," concluded Lord Bacon, nearly three hundred years ago, "and thoroughly seen into the levity which the mind indulges for allegories and illusions, yet I cannot but retain a high value for the ancient mythology." Indeed, to ancient myths has been attributed the preservation of shattered fragments of lost sciences, even as some have alleged that we are indebted to the writings of Democritus and Aristotle for modern geographical discoveries.

That these ductile narratives have suffered in their transmission to us, that through the magnifying and refracting influences of time, and the ignorance and fanaticism of those to whom they were first recited, we receive them mutilated and distorted, there can be no doubt. Not one in a thousand of those aboriginal beliefs which were held by the people of the Pacific Coast at the time of its first occupation by foreigners, has been preserved. And for the originality and purity of such as we have, in many instances, no one can vouch. Certain writers who saw in the native fable probable evidence of the presence of an apostle, or a miraculous interposition in the affairs of benighted heathendom, could but render the narrative in accordance with their prepossessions. The desire of some to prove a certain origin for the Indians, and the contempt of others for native character, also led to imperfect or colored narrations. But happily, enough has been preserved in authentic picture-writings, and by narrators whose integrity and intelligence are above suspicion, to give us a fair insight into the native psychological structure and belief; and if the knowledge we have is but infinitesimal in comparison with what has been lost, we may thereby learn to prize more highly such as we have.

Again we come to the ever-recurring question—Whence is it? Whence arise belief, worship, superstition? Whence the striking likeness in all supernatural conceptions between nations and ages the most diverse? Why is it that so many peoples, during the successive stages of their progress, have their creation myth, their origin myth, their flood myth, their animal, and plant, and planet myths? This coincidence of evolution can scarcely be the result of accident. Mythologies, then, being like languages common to mankind, uniform in substance yet varying in detail, what follows with regard to the essential system of their supernatural conceptions? Is it a perfected gift of the Creator, the invention of a designing priesthood, or a spontaneous generation and natural development? So broad a question, involving as it does the weightiest matters connected with man, may scarcely expect exactly the same answer from any two persons. Origin of life, origin of mind, origin of belief, are as much problems to the profoundest philosopher of to-day, as they were to the first wondering, bewildered savage who wandered through primeval forests.

ORIGIN OF BELIEF.

Life is defined by Herbert Spencer as "the coördination of actions, or their continuous adjustment;" by Lewes as "a series of definite and successive changes, both of structure and composition, which take place within an individual without destroying its identity;" by Schelling as "the tendency to individuation;" by Richeraud as "a collection of phenomena which succeed each other during a limited time in an organized body;" and by De Blainville as "the two-fold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous." According to Hume, Mind is but a bundle of ideas and impressions which are the sum of all knowledge, and consequently, "the only things known to exist." In the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, intellectual development is divided into three phases; namely, the Supernatural, in which the mind seeks for supernatural causes; the Metaphysical, wherein abstract forces are set up in place of supernatural agencies; and the Positive, which inquires into the laws which engender phenomena. Martineau, commenting upon intuition and the mind's place in nature, charges the current doctrine of evolution with excluding the element of life from developing organisms. Until the origin of mind, and the relation of mind to its environment is determined, the origin of the supernatural must remain unaccounted for. Yet we may follow the principle of worship back to very near its source, if we are unable entirely to account for it.

We have seen how the inability of brutes to form in the mind long sequences of thought, prevents speech; so, in primitive societies, when successions of unrecorded events are forgotten before any conception of general laws can be formed therefrom, polytheism in its grossest form is sure to prevail. Not until the earlier stages of progress are passed, and, from a multitude of correlative and oft-repeated experiences, general deductions made, can there be any higher religious conceptions than that of an independent cause for every consequence.

By some it is alleged that the religious sentiment is a divine idea perfected by the Creator and implanted in man as part of his nature, before his divergence from a primitive centre. Singularly enough, the Fathers of the Church referred the origin of fable as well as the origin of fact to the Hebrew Scriptures. Supported by the soundest sophistry, they saw in every myth, Grecian or barbarian, a biblical character. Thus the Greek Hercules was none other than the Hebrew Sampson; Arion was Jonah, and Deucalion Noah. Other mythological characters were supposed by them to have been incarnated fiends, who disappeared after working for a time their evil upon men.

There have been those who held myths to be the fictions of sorcery, as there are now those who believe that forms of worship were invented by a designing priesthood, or that mythology is but a collection of tales, physical, ethical and historical, invented by the sages and ancient wise men of the nation, for the purpose of overawing the wicked and encouraging the good. Some declare that religion is a factitious or accidental social phenomenon; others that it is an aggregation of organized human experiences; others that it is a bundle of sentiments which were originally projected by the imagination, and ultimately adopted as entities; others that it is a feeling or emotion, the genesis of which is due to surrounding circumstances.

Many believe all mythological personages to have been once real human heroes, the foundations of whose histories were laid in truth, while the structure was reared by fancy. The Egyptians informed Herodotus that their deities—the last of whom was Orus son of Osiris, the Apollo of the Grecians—were originally their kings. Others affirm that myths are but symbolic ideas deified; that they are but the embodiment of a maxim in the form of an allegory, and that under these allegorical forms were taught history, religion, law and morality.

Intermingled with all these hypotheses are elements of truth, and yet none of them appear to be satisfying explanations. All imply that religion, in some form, is an essential constituent of humanity, and that whatever its origin and functions, it has exercised from the earliest ages and does yet exercise the most powerful influence upon man; working like leaven in the lump, keeping the world in a ferment, stirring up men to action, banding and disrupting nations, uniting and dividing communities, and forming the nucleus of numberless societies and institutions.

RISE OF THE PRIMITIVE PRIESTHOOD.

In every society, small and great, there are undoubtedly certain intellects of quicker than ordinary perception, which seize upon occasions, and by a skillful use of means obtain a mastery over inferior minds. It is thus that political and social, as well as ecclesiastical power arises. Not that the leader creates a want—he is but the mouth-piece or agent of pent-up human instincts. One of these instincts is dependence. That we are created subordinate, not absolute nor unrestrained, is a fact from which none can escape. Thraldom, constant and insurmountable, we feel we have inherited. Most naturally, therefore, the masses of mankind seek from among their fellows some embodiment of power, and ranging themselves under the banner of leaders, follow blindly whithersoever they are led. Perceiving the power thus placed in their hands, these born leaders of men are not slow to invent means for retaining and increasing it. To the inquiry of the child or unsophisticated savage, who, startled by a peal of distant thunder, cries, "What is that?" the explanation is given; "That is the storm-god speaking." "I am afraid, protect me!" implores the supplicant. "I will, only obey," is the reply. The answer is sufficient, curiosity is satisfied, and terror allayed; the barbarian teacher gains a devotee. In this manner, the superstructure of creeds, witchcrafts, priestcrafts, may have arisen; some gods may thus have been made, forms of worship invented, and intercourse opened with beings supernal and infernal. Then devotion advances and becomes an art; professors by practice become experts. Meanwhile, craft is economized; the wary Shamán rain-doctor—like the worthy clergyman of civilized orthodoxy, who refused to pray for rain "while the wind was in that quarter"—watches well the gathering ripeness of the cloud before he attempts to burst it with an arrow. And in the end, a more than ordinary skill in the exercise of this power, deifies or demonizes the possessor.

But whence arises the necessity for craft and whence the craft? The faculty of invention implies skill. Skill successfully to play upon the instincts of humanity can only be acquired through the medium of like instincts, and although the skill be empirical, the play must be natural. Craft alone will not suffice to satisfy the desire; the hook must be baited with some small element of truth before the most credulous will seize it. If religious beliefs are the fruits of invention, how shall we account for the strange coincidences of thought and worship which prevail throughout all myths and cults? Why is it that all men of every age, in conditions diverse, and in countries widely sundered, are found searching out the same essential facts? All worship; nearly all have their creation-myth, their flood-myth, their theory of origin, of distribution from primitive centres, and of a future state. In this regard as in many another, civilization is but an evolution of savagism; for almost every principle of modern philosophy there may be found in primitive times its parallel.

The nature and order of supernatural conceptions are essentially as follows: The first and rudest form of belief is Fetichism, which invests every phenomenon with an independent personality. In the sunshine, fire, and water, in the wind and rock and stream, in every animal, bird, and plant, there is a separate deity; for every effect there is a cause. Even Kepler, whose intellect could track the planets in their orbits, must needs assume a guiding spirit for every world. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of self-creative or self-existent forces.

In time the personalities of the fetich-worshiper become to some extent generalized. Homogeneous appearances are grouped into classes, and each class referred to a separate deity, and hence Polytheism. Pantheism then comes in and makes all created substance one with the creator; nature and the universe are God. From the impersonating of the forces of nature to the creation of imaginary deities there is but a step. Every virtue and vice, every good and evil becomes a personality, under the direct governance of which lie certain passions and events; and thus in place of one god for many individuals, each individual may have a multitude of his own personal gods. The theogony of Hesiod was but a system of materialized love and hate; while, on the other hand, the gods of Homer, although personating human passions, were likewise endowed with moral perceptions. In them the blind forces of nature are lighted up into a human-divine intelligence.

In Monotheism the distinct personalities, which to the savage underlie every appearance, become wholly generalized, and the origin of all phenomena is referred to one First Cause. The subtle and philosophic Greeks well knew that God to be God must be omnipotent, and omnipotency is indivisible. That the Aztecs could believe and practice the absurdities they did is less an object of wonder, than that the intellectual philosophers of Athens could have tolerated the gods of Homer. Indeed, the religion of the more cultivated Greeks appears to us monstrous, in proportion as they were superior to other men in poetry, art, and philosophy.

THEORIES CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF WORSHIP.

Comparative mythologists explain the origin of worship by two apparently oppugnant theories. The first is that whatever is seen in nature strange and wonderful, is deemed by primitive man an object worthy of worship. The other is, that upon certain noted individuals are fastened metaphorical names, symbolic of some quality alike in them and in the natural object after which they are called; that this name, which at the first was but the surname of an individual, after its possessor is dead and forgotten, lives, reverts to the plant or animal whence it came, becomes impersonal, and is worshiped by a conservative posterity. In other words, one theory fastens upon natural phenomena, human attributes, and worships nature under covering of those attributes, while the other worships in the natural object only the memory of a dead and forgotten man. I have no doubt that in both of these hypotheses are elements of truth.

In the earlier acts of worship the tendency is to assimilate the object worshiped and the character of the worshiper, and also to assign habitations to deities, behind man's immediate environment. Every people has its heaven and hell; the former most generally located beyond the blue sky, and the latter in the dark interior caves of the earth. Man in nature reproduces himself; invests appearances with attributes analogous to his own. This likeness of the supernatural to the natural, of gods to man, is the first advance from fetichism, but as the intellect advances anthropomorphism declines. As one by one the nearest mysteries are solved by science, the emptiness of superstition becomes apparent, and the wonderless wonder is referred by the waking mind to general laws of causation; but still clinging to its first conceptions it places them on objects more remote. Man fixes his eyes upon the planets, discovers their movements, and fancies their controlling spirit also controls his destiny; and when released by reason from star-worship, as formerly from fetichism, again an advance is made, always nearing the doctrine of universal law.

In one tersely comprehensive sentence Clarke gives the old view of what were called natural religions: "They considered them, in their source, the work of fraud; in their essence, corrupt superstitions; in their doctrines, wholly false; in their moral tendency, absolutely injurious; and in their result, degenerating more and more into greater evil."

PRIESTCRAFT AND PROPITIATION.

And this view seems to him alike uncharitable and unreasonable: "To assume that they are wholly evil is disrespectful to human nature. It supposes man to be the easy and universal dupe of fraud. But these religions do not rest on such a sandy foundation, but on the feeling of dependence, the sense of accountability, the recognition of spiritual realities very near to this world of matter, and the need of looking up and worshiping some unseen power higher and better than ourselves. We shall find them always feeling after God, often finding him. We shall see that in their origin they are not the work of priestcraft, but of human nature; in their essence not superstitions, but religions; in their doctrines true more frequently than false; in their moral tendency good rather than evil. And instead of degenerating toward something worse, they come to prepare the way for something better."

The nearest case to deliberate invention of deities was, perhaps, the promulgation as objects of worship in primitive times of such abstractions as Hope (Spes), Fear (Pallor), Concord (Concordia), Courage (Virtus), etc. How far these gods were gods, however, in even the ordinary heathen sense of the word, is doubtful. In any case, they were but the extension of an old and existent principle—the personification of divine aspects or qualities; they added no more to what went before than a new Saint or Virgin of Loretto does to the Catholic Church.

"It was a favorite opinion with the Christian apologists, Eusebius and others," says Gladstone, "that the pagan deities represented deified men. Others consider them to signify the powers of external nature personified. For others they are, in many cases, impersonations of human passions and propensities, reflected back from the mind of man. A fourth mode of interpretation would treat them as copies, distorted and depraved, of a primitive system of religion given by God to man. The Apostle St. Paul speaks of them as devils; by which he may perhaps intend to convey that, under the names and in connection with the worship of those deities, the worst influences of the Evil One were at work. This would rather be a subjective than an objective description; and would rather convey an account of the practical working of a corrupted religion, than an explanation of its origin or its early course. As between the other four, it seems probable that they all, in various degrees and manners, entered into the composition of the later paganism, and also of the Homeric or Olympian system. That system, however, was profoundly adverse to mere Nature-worship; while the care of departments or provinces of external nature were assigned to its leading personages. Such worship of natural objects or elemental powers, as prevailed in connection with it, was in general local or secondary. And the deification of heroes in the age of Homer was rare and merely titular. We do not find that any cult or system of devotion was attached to it."

So humanly divine, so impotently great are the gods of Homer; so thoroughly invested with the passions of men, clothed in distinctive shades of human character; such mingled virtue and vice, love and hate, courage and cowardice; animal passions uniting with noble sentiments; base and vulgar thoughts with lofty and sublime ideas; and all so wrought up by his inimitable fancy into divine and supernatural beings, as to work most powerfully upon the nature of the people.

These concrete conceptions of his deities have ever been a source of consolation to the savage; for, by thus bringing down the gods to a nearer level with himself, they could be more materially propitiated, and their protection purchased with gifts and sacrifices. Thus the Greeks could obtain advice through oracles, the Hindoo could pass at once into eternal joys by throwing himself under the car of Juggernaut, while the latter-day offender seeks in the assistance of the departed to buy forgiveness with charities, and to compound crime by building churches.

UNRECORDED FACTS SOON BECOME MYTHOLOGICAL.

The difficulty is, that in attempting to establish any theory concerning the origin of things, the soundest logic is little else than wild speculation. Mankind progress unconsciously. We know not what problems we ourselves are working out for those who come after us; we know not by what process we arrive at many of our conclusions; much of that which is clear to ourselves is never understood by our neighbor, and never will be even known by our posterity. Events the most material are soon forgotten, or else are made spiritual and preserved as myths. Blot out the process by which science arrived at results, and in every achievement of science, in the steam engine, the electric telegraph, we should soon have a heaven-descended agency, a god for every machine. Where mythology ceases and history begins, is in the annals of every nation a matter of dispute. What at first appears to be wholly fabulous may contain some truth, whereas much of what is held to be true is mere fable, and herein excessive skepticism is as unwise as excessive credulity.

Historical facts, if unrecorded, are soon lost. Thus when Juan de Oñate penetrated New Mexico in 1596, Fray Marco de Niza, and the expedition of Coronado in 1540, appear to have been entirely forgotten by the Cibolans. Fathers Crespi and Junípero Serra, in their overland explorations of 1769, preparatory to the establishment of a line of Missions along the Californian seaboard, could find no traces, in the minds of the natives, of Cabrillo's voyage in 1542, or of the landing of Sir Francis Drake in 1579; although, so impressed were the savages in the latter instance, that, according to the worthy chaplain of the expedition, they desired "with submission and fear to worship us as gods." Nor can we think civilized memories—which ascribe the plays of Shakespeare to Bacon, and parcel out the Iliad of Homer among numberless unrecorded verse-makers—more tenacious. Frederick Augustus Wolf denies that a Homer ever existed; or, if he did, that he ever wrote his poem, as writing was at that time not generally known; but he claims that snatches of history, descending orally from one generation to another, in the end coalesced into the matchless Iliad and Odyssey. The event which so strongly impressed the father, becomes vague in the mind of the son, and in the third generation is either lost or becomes legendary. Incidents of recent occurrence, contemporary perhaps with the narration, are sometimes so misinterpreted by ignorance or distorted by prejudice, as to place the fact strangely at variance with the recital. Yet no incident nor action falls purposeless to the ground. Unrecorded it may be, unwitnessed, unheard by beings material; a thought-wave even, lost in space invisible, acting, for aught we know, only upon the author; yet so acting, it casts an influence, stamps on fleeting time its record, thereby fulfilling its destiny. Thus linger vapory conceits long after the action which created them has sunk into oblivion; undefined shadows of substance departed; none the less impressive because mingled with immortal imagery.

Turn now from outward events to inner life; from events grown shadowy with time, to life ever dim and mysterious alike to savage and sage. Everywhere man beholds much that is incomprehensible; within, around, the past, the future. Invisible forces are at work, invisible agencies play upon his destiny. And in the creations of fancy, which of necessity grow out of the influence of nature upon the imagination, it is not strange that mysteries darken, facts and fancies blend; the past and the future uniting in a supernatural present.

We are never content with positive knowledge. From the earliest workings of the mind, creations of fancy play as important a part in ethical economy as positive perceptions. Nor does culture in any wise lessen these fanciful creations of the intellect. In the political arena of civilized nations, wars and revolutions for the enforcement of opinion concerning matters beyond the reach of positive knowledge, have equaled if they have not exceeded wars for empire or ascendancy. In the social and individual affairs of life we are governed more by the ideal than by the real. On reaching the limits of positive knowledge, reason pauses, but fancy overleaps the boundary, and wanders forward in an endless waste of speculation.

RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC ULTIMATES.

The tendency of intellectual progress, according to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, is from the concrete to the abstract, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the knowable to the unknowable. Primordially nothing was known; as superstitions and priestcraft grew rank, everything became known; there was not a problem in the natural or in the supernatural world unsolvable by religion. Now, when some elements of absolute knowledge are beginning to appear, we discover, not only that little is positively known, but that much of what has been hitherto deemed past controverting, is, under the present régime of thought, absolutely unknowable. Formerly ultimate religious knowledge was attained by the very novices of religion, and ultimate scientific knowledge was explained through their fanatical conceptions. Not only were all the mysteries of the material universe easily solved by the Fathers, but heaven was measured and the phenomena of hell minutely described. Now we are just beginning to comprehend that ultimate facts will probably ever remain unknowable facts, for when the present ultimate is attained, an eternity of undiscovered truth will still lay stretched out before the searcher. Until the finite becomes infinite, and time lapses into eternity, the realm of thought will remain unfilled. At present, and until the scope of the intellect is materially enlarged, such theories as the origin of the universe—held by atheists to be self-existent, by pantheists to have been self-created, and by theists to have been originated by an external agency—must remain, as they are now admitted to be, questions beyond even the comprehension of the intellect. Likewise scientific ultimates—such as the qualities of time and space, the divisibility of matter, the co-ordination of motion and rest, the correlation of forces, the mysteries of gravitation, light and heat—are found to be not only not solvable, but not conceivable. And, as with the external, so with the inward life; we cannot conceive the nature, nor explain the origin and duration, of consciousness. The endless speculations of biology and psychology only leave impressions at once of the strength and weakness of the mind of man; strong in empirical knowledge, impotent in every attempt rationally to penetrate the unfathomable. Nowhere in mythology do we find the world self-created or self-existent. Some external agency is ever brought in to perform the work, and in the end the structure of the universe is resolved into its original elements.

Primordial man finds himself surrounded by natural phenomena, the operations of which his intelligence is capable of grasping but partially. Certain appetites sharpen, at once, certain instincts. Hunger makes him acquainted with the fruits of the earth; cold with the skins of beasts. Accident supplies him with rude implements, and imparts to him a knowledge of his power over animals. But as instinct merges into intellect, strange powers in nature are felt; invisible agents wielding invisible weapons; realities which exist unheard and move unseen; outward manifestations of hidden strength. Humanity, divine, but wild and wondering, half-fed, half-clad, ranges woods primeval, hears the roar of battling elements, sees the ancient forest-tree shivered into fragments by heaven's artillery, feels the solid earth rise up in rumbling waves beneath his feet. He receives, as it were, a blow from within the darkness, and flinging himself upon the ground he begs protection; from what he knows not, of whom he knows not. "Bury me not, O tumultuous heavens," he cries, "under the clouds of your displeasure!" "Strike me not down in wrath, O fierce flaming fire!" "Earth, be firm!" Here, then, is the origin of prayer. And to render more effectual his entreaties, a gift is offered. Seizing upon whatever he prizes most, his food, his raiment, he rushes forth and hurls his propitiatory offering heavenward, earthward, whithersoever his frenzied fancy dictates. Or, if this is not enough, the still more dearly valued gift of human blood or human life is offered. His own flesh he freely lacerates; to save his own life he gives that of his enemy, his slave, or even his child. Hence arises sacrifice.

ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF PRIESTCRAFT.

And here also conjurings commence. The necessity is felt of opening up some intercourse with these mysterious powers; relations commercial and social; calamities and casualties, personal and public, must be traced to causes, and the tormenting demon bought off. But it is clearly evident that these elemental forces are not all of them inimical to the happiness of mankind. Sunshine, air and water, the benign influences in nature, are as powerful to create, as the adverse elements are to destroy. And as these forces appear conflicting, part productive of life and enjoyment, and part of destruction, decay, and death, a separation is made. Hence principles of good and evil are discovered; and to all these unaccountable forces in nature, names and properties are given, and causations invented. For every act there is an actor—for every deed a doer; for every power and passion there is made a god.

Thus we see that worship in some form is a human necessity, or, at least, a constant accompaniment of humanity. Until perfect wisdom and limitless power are the attributes of humanity, adoration will continue; for men will never cease to reverence what they do not understand, nor will they cease to fear such elements of strength as are beyond their control. The form of this conciliatory homage appears to arise from common human instincts; for, throughout the world and in all ages, a similarity in primitive religious forms has existed. It is a giving of something; the barter of a valuable something for a something more valuable. As in his civil polity all crimes may be compounded or avenged, so in his worship, the savage gives his pride, his property, or his blood.

At first, this spirit power is seen in everything; in the storm and in the soft evening air; in clouds and cataracts, in mountains, rocks, and rivers; in trees, in reptiles, beasts, and fishes. But when progressive man obtains a more perfect mastery over the brute creation, brute worship ceases; as he becomes familiar with the causes of some of the forces in nature, and is better able to protect himself from them, the fear of natural objects is lessened. Leaving the level of the brute creation he mounts upward, and selecting from his own species some living or dead hero, he endows a king or comrade with superhuman attributes, and worships his dead fellow as a divine being. Still he tunes his thoughts to subtler creations, and carves with skillful fingers material images of supernatural forms. Then comes idolatry. The great principles of causation being determined and embodied in perceptible forms, adorations ensue. Cravings, however, increase. As the intellect expands, one idol after another is thrown down. Mind assumes the mastery over matter. From gods of wood and stone, made by men's fingers, and from suns and planets, carved by the fingers of omnipotence, the creature now turns to the Creator. A form of ideal worship supplants the material form; gods known and tangible are thrown aside for the unknown God. And well were it for the intellect could it stop here. But, as the actions of countless material gods were clear to the primitive priest, and by him satisfactorily explained to the savage masses; so, in this more advanced state men are not wanting who receive from their ideal god revelations of his actions and motives. To its new, unknown, ideal god, the partially awakened human mind attaches the positive attributes of the old, material deities, or invents new ones, and starts anew to tread the endless mythologic circle; until in yet a higher state it discovers that both god and attributes are wholly beyond its grasp, and that with all its progress, it has advanced but slightly beyond the first savage conception;—a power altogether mysterious, inexplicable to science, controlling phenomena of mind and matter.

Barbarians are the most religious of mortals. While the busy, overworked brain of the scholar or man of business is occupied with more practical affairs, the listless mind of the savage, thrown as he is upon the very bosom of nature, is filled with innumerable conjectures and interrogatories. His curiosity, like that of a child, is proverbial, and as superstition is ever the resource of ignorance, queer fancies and fantasms concerning life and death, and gods and devils float continually through his unenlightened imagination.

Ill-protected from the elements, his comfort and his uncertain food-supply depending upon them, primitive man regards nature with eager interest. Like the beasts, his forest companions, he places himself as far as possible in harmony with his environment. He migrates with the seasons; feasts when food is plenty, fasts in famine-time; basks and gambols in the sunshine, cowers beneath the fury of the storm, crawls from the cold into his den, and there quasi-torpidly remains until nature releases him. Is it therefore strange that savage intellect peoples the elements with supernatural powers; that God is everywhere, in everything; in the most trifling accident and incident, as well as in the sun, the sea, the grove; that when evil comes God is angry, when fortune smiles God is favorable; and that he speaks to his wild, untutored people in signs and dreams, in the tempest and in the sunshine. Nor does he withhold the still, small voice, which breathes upon minds most darkened, and into breasts the most savage, a spirit of progress, which, if a people be left to the free fulfillment of their destiny, is sure, sooner or later, to ripen into full development.

ORIGIN OF FETICHISM.

We will now glance at the origin of fetichism, which indeed may be called the origin of ideal religion, from the other standpoint; that which arises from the respect men feel for the memory of their departed ancestors.

The first conception of a dualty in man's nature has been attributed to various causes; it may be the result of a combination of causes. There is the shadow upon the ground, separate, yet inseparable; the reflection of the form upon the water; the echo of the voice, the adventures of fancy portrayed by dreams. Self is divisible from and inseparably connected with this other self. Herefrom arise innumerable superstitions; it was portentous of misfortune for one's clothes to be stepped on; no food must be left uneaten; nail clippings and locks of hair must not fall into the hands of an enemy. Catlin, in sketching his portraits, often narrowly escaped with his life, the Indians believing that in their likenesses he carried away their other self. And when death comes, and this other self departs, whither has it gone? The lifeless body remains, but where is the life? The mind cannot conceive of the total extinguishment of an entity, and so the imagination rears a local habitation for every departed spirit. Every phenomenon and every event is analyzed under this hypothesis. For every event there is not only a cause, but a personal cause, an independent agent behind every consequence. Every animal, every fish and bird, every rock and stream and plant, the ripening fruit, the falling rain, the uncertain wind, the sun and stars, are all personified. There is no disease without its god or devil, no fish entangled in the net, no beast or bird that falls before the hunter, without its special sender.

Savages are more afraid of a dead man than a live one. They are overwhelmed with terror at the thought of this unseen power over them. The spirit of the departed is omnipotent and omnipresent. At any cost or hazard it must be propitiated. So food is placed in the grave; wives and slaves, and horses and dogs, are slain, and in spirit sent to serve the ghost of the departed; phantom messengers are sent to the region of shadows from time to time; the messengers sometimes even volunteering to go. So boats and weapons and all the property of the deceased are burned or deposited with him. In the hand of the dead child is placed a toy; in that of the departed warrior, the symbolic pipe of peace, which is to open a tranquil entrance into his new abode; clothes, and ornaments, and paint, are conveniently placed, and thus a proper personal appearance guaranteed. Not that the things themselves are to be used, but the souls of things. The body of the chief rots, as does the material substance of the articles buried with it; but the soul of every article follows the soul of its owner, to serve its own peculiar end in the land of phantoms.

THE WORSHIP OF DEAD ANCESTORS.

The Chinese, grown cunning with the great antiquity of their burial customs, which require money and food to be deposited for the benefit of the deceased, spiritualize the money, by making an imitation coin of pasteboard, while the food, untouched by the dead, is finally eaten by themselves.

But whence arises the strange propensity of all primitive nations to worship animals, and plants, and stones, things animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural? Why is it that all nations or tribes select from nature some object which they hold to be sacred, and which they venerate as deity? It is the opinion of Herbert Spencer that "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still existing, and to be capable of working good or evil to their descendants." It is the universal custom with savage tribes, as the character of their members becomes developed, to drop the real name of individuals and to fix upon them the attribute of some external object, by whose name only they are afterwards known. Thus a swift runner is called the 'antelope,' the slow of foot, the 'tortoise,' a merciless warrior, the 'wolf,' a dark-eyed maid may be likened to the 'raven,' a majestic matron to the 'cypress.' And so the rivulet, the rock, the dawn, the sun, and even elements invisible, are seized upon as metaphors and fastened upon individuals, according to a real or fancied resemblance between the qualities of nature and the character of the men. Inferiority and baseness, alike with nobleness and wise conduct, perpetuate a name. Even in civilized societies, a nickname often takes the place of the real name. Schoolboys are quick to distinguish peculiarities in their fellows, and fasten upon them significant names. A dull scholar is called 'cabbage-head,' the girl with red ringlets, 'carrots.' In the family there is the greedy 'pig,' the darling 'duck,' the little 'lamb.' In new countries, and abnormal communities, where strangers from all parts are promiscuously thrown together, not unfrequently men live on terms of intimacy for years without ever knowing each other's real name. Among miners, such appellations as 'Muley Bill,' 'Sandy,' 'Shorty,' 'Sassafras Jack,' often serve all the purposes of a name. In more refined circles, there is the hypocritical 'crocodile,' the sly 'fox,' the gruff 'bear.' We say of the horse, 'he is as fleet as the wind,' of a rapid accountant, 'he is as quick as lightning.' These names, which are used by us but for the moment, or to fit occasions, are among rude nations permanent—in many instances the only name a person ever receives.

Sometimes the nickname of the individual becomes first a family name and then a tribal name; as when the chief, 'Coyote,' becomes renowned, his children love to call themselves 'Coyotes.' The chieftainship descending to the son and grandson of Coyote, the name becomes famous, the Coyote family the dominant family of the tribe; members of the tribe, in their intercourse with other tribes, call themselves 'coyotes,' to distinguish themselves from other tribes; the head, or tail, or claws, or skin, of the coyote ornaments the dress or adorns the body; the name becomes tribal, and the animal the symbol or totem of the tribe. After a few generations have passed, the great chieftain, Coyote, and his immediate progeny are forgotten; meanwhile the beast becomes a favorite with the people; he begins to be regarded as privileged; is not hunted down like other beasts; the virtues and exploits of the whole Coyote clan become identified with the brute; the affections of the people are centered in the animal, and finally, all else being lost and forgotten, the descendants of the chieftain, Coyote, are the offspring of the veritable beast, coyote.

ABSTRACT CONCEPTIONS, MONSTERS, AND METAPHORS.

Concerning image-worship and the material representation of ideal beings, Mr. Tylor believes that "when man has got some way in developing the religious element in him, he begins to catch at the device of setting up a puppet, or a stone, as the symbol and representative of the notions of a higher being which are floating in his mind."

Primitive languages cannot express abstract qualities. For every kind of animal or bird or plant there may be a name, but for animals, plants, and birds in general, they have no name or conception. Therefore, the abstract quality becomes the concrete idea of a god, and the descendants of a man whose symbolic name was 'dog,' from being the children of the man become the children of the dog.

Hence also arise monsters, beings compounded of beast, bird, and fish, sphinxes, mermaids, human-headed brutes, winged animals; as when the descendant of the 'hawk' carries off a wife from the 'salmon' tribe, a totem representing a fish with a hawk's head for a time keeps alive the occurrence and finally becomes the deity.

Thus realities become metaphors and metaphors realities; the fact dwindles into shadowy nothingness and the fancy springs into actual being. The historical incident becomes first indistinct and then is forgotten; the metaphorical name of the dead ancestor is first respected in the animal or plant, then worshiped in the animal or plant, and finally the nickname and the ancestor both are forgotten and the idea becomes the entity, and the veritable object of worship. From forgetfulness of primogenitor and metaphor, conceiving the animal to be the very ancestor, words are put into the animal's mouth, the sayings of the ancestor become the sayings of the brute; hence mythological legends of talking beasts, and birds, and wise fishes. To one animal is attributed a miraculous cure, to another, assistance in time of trouble; one animal is a deceiver, another a betrayer; and thus through their myths and metaphors we may look back into the soul of savagism and into their soul of nature.

That this is the origin of some phases of fetichism there can be no doubt; that it is the origin of all religions, or even the only method by which animal and plant worship originates, I do not believe. While there are undoubtedly general principles underlying all religious conceptions, it does not necessarily follow, that in every instance the methods of arriving at those fundamental principles must be identical. As with us a child weeps over a dead mother's picture, regarding it with fond devotion, so the dutiful barbarian son, in order the better to propitiate the favor of his dead ancestor, sometimes carves his image in wood or stone, which sentiment with time lapses into idolatry. Any object which strikes the rude fancy as analogous to the character of an individual may become an object of worship.

The interpretation of myth can never be absolute and positive; yet we may in almost every instance discover the general purport. Thus a superior god, we may be almost sure, refers to some potent hero, some primitive ruler, whom tradition has made superhuman in origin and in power; demigods, subordinate or inferior beings in power, must be regarded as legendary, referring to certain influential persons, identified with some element or incident in which the deified personage played a conspicuous part.

Although in mythology religion is the dominant element, yet mythology is not wholly made up of religion, nor are all primitive religions mythical. "There are few mistakes" says Professor Max Müller "so widely spread and so firmly established as that which makes us confound the religion and the mythology of the ancient nations of the world. How mythology arises, necessarily and naturally, I tried to explain in my former lectures, and we saw that, as an affection or disorder of language, mythology may infect every part of the intellectual life of man. True it is that no ideas are more liable to mythological disease than religious ideas, because they transcend those regions of our experience within which language has its natural origin, and must therefore, according to their very nature, be satisfied with metaphorical expressions. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man. Yet even the religions of the ancient nations are by no means inevitably and altogether mythological. On the contrary, as a diseased frame pre-supposes a healthy frame, so a mythological religion pre-supposes, I believe, a healthy religion."

FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF RELIGION.

The universal secrets of supernatural beings are wrapped up in probable or possible fable; the elements of physical nature are impersonated in allegories, and arrayed in forms perceptible to the imagination; deities are sometimes introduced into the machinery of the supernatural in order to gratify that love for the marvelous which every attempt to explain the mysterious forces of nature creates in the ignorant mind. Yet it cannot truly be said that any form of religion, much less any religion was wholly invented. Fanatics sometimes originate doctrines, and the Church sets forth its dogmas, but there must be a foundation of truth or the edifice cannot stand. Inventions there undoubtedly have been and are, but inventions, sooner or later fall to the ground, while the essential principles underlying religion and mythology, though momentarily overcome or swept away, are sure to remain.

Every one of the fundamental ideas of religion is of indigenous origin, generating spontaneously in the human heart. It is a characteristic of mythology that the present inhabitants of the world descended from some nobler race. From the nobler impulses of fancy the savage derives his origin. His higher instincts teach him that his dim distant past, and his impenetrable future, are alike of a lighter, more ethereal nature; that his earthly nature is base, that that which binds him to earth is the lowest, vilest part of himself.

The tendency of positive knowledge is to overthrow superstition. Hence as science develops, many tenets of established religions, palpably erroneous, are dropped, and the more knowledge becomes real, the more real knowledge is denied. Superstition is not the effect of an active imagination, but shows rather a lack of imagination, for we see that the lower the stage of intelligence, and the feebler the imagination, the greater the superstition. A keen, vivid imagination, although capable of broader and more complicated conceptions, is able to explain the cruder marvels, and consequently to dispel the coarser phases of superstition, while the dull intellect accepts everything which is put upon it as true. Ultimate religious conceptions are symbolic rather than actual. Ultimate ideas of the universe are even beyond the grasp of the profoundest intellect. We can form but an approximate idea of the sphere on which we live. To form conceptions of the relative and actual distances and magnitudes of heavenly bodies, of systems of worlds, and eternities of space, the human mind is totally inadequate. If, therefore, the mind is unable to grasp material visible objects, how much less are we able to measure the invisible and eternal.

When therefore the savage attempts to solve the problem of natural phenomena, he first reduces broad conceptions to symbolic ideas. He moulds his deity according to the measure of his mind; and in forming a skeleton upon which to elaborate his religious instincts, proximate theories are accepted, and almost any explanation appears to him plausible. The potential creations of his fancy are brought within the compass of his comprehension; symbolic gods are moulded from mud, or carved from wood or stone; and thus by segregating an infinitesimal part of the vast idea of deity, the worshiper meets the material requirements of his religious conceptions. And although the lower forms of worship are abandoned as the intellect unfolds, the same principle is continued. We set up in the mind symbols of the ultimate idea which is too great for our grasp, and imagining ourselves in possession of the actual idea, we fall into numberless errors concerning what we believe or think. The atheistic hypothesis of self-existence, the pantheistic hypothesis of self-creation, and the theistic hypothesis of creation by an external agency are equally unthinkable, and therefore as postulates equally untenable. Yet underlying all, however gross or superstitious the dogma, is one fundamental truth, namely, that there is a problem to be solved, an existent mysterious universe to be accounted for.

Deep down in every human breast is implanted a religiosity as a fundamental attribute of man's nature; a consciousness that behind visible appearances is an invisible power; underlying all conception is an instinct or intuition from which there is no escape, that beyond material actualities potential agencies are at work; and throughout all belief, from the stupidest fetichism to the most exalted monotheism, as part of these instinctive convictions, it is held that the beings, or being, who rule man's destiny may be propitiated.

The first cry of nature is hushed. From time immemorial nations and peoples have come and gone, whence and whither no one knows; entering existence unannounced they disappear and leave no trace, save perhaps their impress on the language or the mythology of the world. Thus from historic fact blended with the religious sentiments springs the Mythic Idea.

CLASSIFICATION OF PACIFIC STATES' MYTHS.

In the following chapters, I have attempted, as far as practicable, to classify the Myths of the Pacific States under appropriate heads. In making such a classification there is no difficulty, except where in one myth occur two or more divisions of the subject, in which case it becomes necessary, either to break the narrative, or make exceptions in the general rule of classifying. I have invariably adopted the latter alternative. The divisions which I make of Mythology are as follows: I. Origin and End of Things; II. Physical Myths; III. Animal Myths; IV. Gods, Supernatural Beings, and Worship; V. The Future State.

CHAPTER II.
ORIGIN AND END OF THINGS.

Quiché Creation-Myth—Aztec Origin-Myths—The Papagos—Montezuma and the Coyote—The Moquis—The Great Spider's Web of the Pimas—Navajo and Pueblo Creations—Origin of Clear Lake and Lake Tahoe—Chareya of the Cahrocs—Mount Shasta, the Wigwam of the Great Spirit—Idaho Springs and Water Falls—How Differences in Language Occurred—Yehl, the Creator of the Thlinkeets—The Raven and the Dog.

THE POPOL VUH.

Of all American peoples the Quichés, of Guatemala, have left us the richest mythological legacy. Their description of the creation as given in the Popol Vuh, which may be called the national book of the Quichés,[II-1] is, in its rude strange eloquence and poetic originality, one of the rarest relics of aboriginal thought. Although obliged in reproducing it to condense somewhat, I have endeavored to give not only the substance, but also, as far as possible, the peculiar style and phraseology of the original. It is with this primeval picture, whose simple silent sublimity is that of the inscrutable past, that we begin:—

And the heaven was formed, and all the signs thereof set in their angle and alignment, and its boundaries fixed towards the four winds by the Creator and Former, and Mother and Father of life and existence—he by whom all move and breathe, the Father and Cherisher of the peace of nations and of the civilization of his people—he whose wisdom has projected the excellence of all that is on the earth, or in the lakes, or in the sea.

Behold the first word and the first discourse. There was as yet no man, nor any animal, nor bird, nor fish, nor crawfish, nor any pit, nor ravine, nor green herb, nor any tree; nothing was but the firmament. The face of the earth had not yet appeared—only the peaceful sea and all the space of heaven. There was nothing yet joined together, nothing that clung to anything else; nothing that balanced itself, that made the least rustling, that made a sound in the heaven. There was nothing that stood up; nothing but the quiet water, but the sea, calm and alone in its boundaries: nothing existed; nothing but immobility and silence, in the darkness, in the night.[II-2]

THE QUICHÉ IDEA OF CREATION.

Alone also the Creator, the Former, the Dominator, the Feathered Serpent—those that engender, those that give being, they are upon the water, like a growing light. They are enveloped in green and blue; and therefore their name is Gucumatz.[II-3] Lo, now how the heavens exist, how exists also the Heart of Heaven; such is the name of God; it is thus that he is called. And they spake; they consulted together and meditated; they mingled their words and their opinion. And the creation was verily after this wise: Earth, they said, and on the instant it was formed; like a cloud or a fog was its beginning. Then the mountains rose over the water like great lobsters; in an instant the mountains and the plains were visible, and the cypress and the pine appeared. Then was the Gucumatz filled with joy, crying out: Blessed be thy coming, O Heart of Heaven, Hurakan, Thunderbolt. Our work and our labor has accomplished its end.

The earth and its vegetation having thus appeared, it was peopled with the various forms of animal life. And the Makers said to the animals: Speak now our name, honor us, us your mother and father; invoke Hurakan, the Lightning-flash, the Thunderbolt that strikes, the Heart of Heaven, the Heart of the Earth, the Creator and Former, Him who begets, and Him who gives being—speak, call on us, salute us! So was it said to the animals. But the animals could not answer; they could not speak at all after the manner of men; they could only cluck, and croak, each murmuring after his kind in a different manner. This displeased the Creators, and they said to the animals: Inasmuch as ye can not praise us, neither call upon our names, your flesh shall be humiliated; it shall be broken with teeth; ye shall be killed and eaten.

Again the gods took counsel together; they determined to make man. So they made a man of clay; and when they had made him, they saw that it was not good. He was without cohesion, without consistence, motionless, strengthless, inept, watery; he could not move his head, his face looked but one way; his sight was restricted, he could not look behind him; he had been endowed with language, but he had no intelligence, so he was consumed in the water.

Again is there counsel in heaven: Let us make an intelligent being who shall adore and invoke us. It was decided that a man should be made of wood and a woman of a kind of pith. They were made; but the result was in no wise satisfactory. They moved about perfectly well, it is true; they increased and multiplied; they peopled the world with sons and daughters, little wooden mannikins like themselves; but still the heart and the intelligence were wanting; they held no memory of their Maker and Former; they led a useless existence, they lived as the beasts live; they forgot the Heart of Heaven. They were but an essay, an attempt at men; they had neither blood, nor substance, nor moisture, nor fat; their cheeks were shrivelled, their feet and hands dried up; their flesh languished.

DESTRUCTION AND RE-CREATION OF MAN.

Then was the Heart of Heaven wroth; and he sent ruin and destruction upon those ingrates; he rained upon them night and day from heaven with a thick resin; and the earth was darkened. And the men went mad with terror; they tried to mount upon the roofs and the houses fell; they tried to climb the trees and the trees shook them far from their branches; they tried to hide in the caves and dens of the earth, but these closed their holes against them. The bird Xecotcovach came to tear out their eyes; and the Camalotz cut off their head; and the Cotzbalam devoured their flesh; and the Tecumbalam broke and bruised their bones to powder. Thus were they all devoted to chastisement and destruction, save only a few who were preserved as memorials of the wooden men that had been; and these now exist in the woods as little apes.[II-4]

Once more are the gods in counsel; in the darkness, in the night of a desolated universe do they commune together; of what shall we make man? And the Creator and Former made four perfect men; and wholly of yellow and white maize was their flesh composed. These were the names of the four men that were made: the name of the first was Balam-Quitzé; of the second, Balam-Agab; of the third Mahucutah; and of the fourth, Iqi-Balam.[II-5] They had neither father nor mother, neither were they made by the ordinary agents in the work of creation; but their coming into existence was a miracle extraordinary, wrought by the special intervention of him who is preëminently The Creator. Verily, at last, were there found men worthy of their origin and their destiny; verily, at last, did the gods look on beings who could see with their eyes, and handle with their hands, and understand with their hearts. Grand of countenance and broad of limb the four sires of our race stood up under the white rays of the morning star—sole light as yet of the primeval world—stood up and looked. Their great clear eyes swept rapidly over all; they saw the woods and the rocks, the lakes and the sea, the mountains and the valleys, and the heavens that were above all; and they comprehended all and admired exceedingly. Then they returned thanks to those who had made the world and all that therein was: We offer up our thanks, twice—yea verily, thrice! We have received life; we speak, we walk, we taste; we hear and understand; we know both that which is near and that which is far off; we see all things, great and small, in all the heaven and earth. Thanks then, Maker and Former, Father and Mother of our life! we have been created; we are.

But the gods were not wholly pleased with this thing; Heaven they thought had overshot its mark; these men were too perfect; knew, understood, and saw too much. Therefore there was counsel again in heaven: What shall we do with man now? It is not good, this that we see; these are as gods; they would make themselves equal with us; lo, they know all things, great and small. Let us now contract their sight, so that they may see only a little of the surface of the earth and be content. Thereupon the Heart of Heaven breathed a cloud over the pupil of the eyes of men, and a veil came over it as when one breathes on the face of a mirror; thus was the globe of the eye darkened; neither was that which was far off clear to it any more, but only that which was near.

Then the four men slept, and there was counsel in heaven: and four women were made—to Balam-Quitzé was allotted Caha-Paluma to wife; to Balam-Agab, Chomiha; to Mahucutah, Tzununiha; and to Iqi-Balam, Cakixaha.[II-6] Now the women were exceedingly fair to look upon; and when the men awoke, their hearts were glad because of the women.

THE QUICHÉS SET OUT FOR TULAN-ZUIVA.

Next, as I interpret the narrative, there were other men created, the ancestors of other peoples, while the first four were the fathers of all the branches of the Quiché race. The different tribes at first, however, lived together amicably enough, in a primitive state; and increased and multiplied, leading happy lives under their bright and morning star, precursor of the yet unseen sun. They had as yet no worship save the breathing of the instinct of their soul, as yet no altars to the gods; only—and is there not a whole idyl in the simple words?—only they gazed up into heaven, not knowing what they had come so far to do![II-7] They were filled with love, with obedience, and with fear; and lifting their eyes towards heaven, they made their requests:—

Hail! O Creator, O Former! thou that hearest and understandest us! abandon us not, forsake us not! O God, thou that art in heaven and on the earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth! give us descendants and a posterity as long as the light endure. Give us to walk always in an open road, in a path without snares; to lead happy, quiet, and peaceable lives, free of all reproach. It was thus they spake, living tranquilly, invoking the return of the light, waiting the rising of the sun, watching the star of the morning, precursor of the sun. But no sun came, and the four men and their descendants grew uneasy: We have no person to watch over us, they said, nothing to guard our symbols. So the four men and their people set out for Tulan-Zuiva,[II-8] otherwise called the Seven-caves or Seven-ravines, and there they received gods, each man as head of a family, a god; though inasmuch as the fourth man, Iqi-Balam, had no children and founded no family, his god is not usually taken into the account. Balam-Quitzé received the god Tohil; Balam Agab received the god Avilix; and Mahucutah received the god Hacavitz; all very powerful gods, but Tohil seems to have been the chief, and in a general way, god of the whole Quiché nation. Other people received gods at the same time; and it had been for all a long march to Tulan.

Now the Quichés had as yet no fire, and as Tulan was a much colder climate than the happy eastern land they had left, they soon began to feel the want of it. The god Tohil who was the creator of fire had some in his possession; so to him, as was most natural, the Quichés applied, and Tohil in some way supplied them with fire.

But shortly after, there fell a great rain that extinguished all the fires of the land; and much hail also fell on the heads of the people; and because of the rain and the hail, their fires were utterly scattered and put out. Then Tohil created fire again by stamping with his sandal. Several times thus fire failed them, but Tohil always renewed it. Many other trials also they underwent in Tulan, famines and such things, and a general dampness and cold—for the earth was moist, there being as yet no sun.

Here also the language of all the families was confused so that no one of the first four men could any longer understand the speech of another. This also made them very sad. They determined to leave Tulan; and the greater part of them, under the guardianship and direction of Tohil, set out to see where they should take up their abode. They continued on their way amid the most extreme hardships for want of food; sustaining themselves at one time upon the mere smell of their staves, and by imagining that they were eating, when in verity and in truth, they ate nothing. Their heart, indeed, it is again and again said, was almost broken by affliction. Poor wanderers! they had a cruel way to go, many forests to pierce, many stern mountains to overpass and a long passage to make through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand—the sea being, however, parted for their passage.

QUICHÉ ORIGIN OF THE SUN.

At last they came to a mountain that they named Hacavitz, after one of their gods, and here they rested—for here they were by some means given to understand that they should see the sun. Then indeed, was filled with an exceeding joy the heart of Balam-Quitzé, of Balam-Agab, of Mahucutah, and of Iqi-Balam. It seemed to them that even the face of the morning star caught a new and more resplendent brightness. They shook their incense pans and danced for very gladness: sweet were their tears in dancing, very hot their incense—their precious incense. At last the sun commenced to advance: the animals, small and great, were full of delight; they raised themselves to the surface of the water; they fluttered in the ravines; they gathered at the edge of the mountains, turning their heads together toward that part from which the sun came. And the lion and the tiger roared. And the first bird that sang was that called the Queletzu. All the animals were beside themselves at the sight; the eagle and the kite beat their wings, and every bird, both small and great. The men prostrated themselves on the ground, for their hearts were full to the brim.

And the sun, and the moon, and the stars were now all established. Yet was not the sun then in the beginning the same as now; his heat wanted force, and he was but as a reflection in a mirror; verily, say the histories, not at all the same sun as that of to-day. Nevertheless he dried up and warmed the surface of the earth, and answered many good ends.

Another wonder when the sun rose! The three tribal gods, Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz, were turned into stone, as were also the gods connected with the lion, the tiger, the viper, and other fierce and dangerous animals. Perhaps we should not be alive at this moment—continues the chronicle—because of the voracity of these fierce animals, of these lions, and tigers, and vipers; perhaps to-day our glory would not be in existence, had not the sun caused this petrification.

And the people multiplied on this Mount Hacavitz, and here they built their city. It is here also that they began to sing that song called Kamucu, 'we see.' They sang it, though it made their hearts ache, for this is what they said in singing: Alas! We ruined ourselves in Tulan, there lost we many of our kith and kin, they still remain there, left behind! We indeed have seen the sun, but they—now that his golden light begins to appear, where are they?

And they worshiped the gods that had become stone, Tohil, Avilix, and Hacavitz; and they offered them the blood of beasts, and of birds, and pierced their own ears and shoulders in honor of these gods, and collected the blood with a sponge, and pressed it out into a cup before them.

Toward the end of their long and eventful life Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqi-Balam were impelled, apparently by a supernatural vision, to lay before their gods a more awful offering than the life of senseless beasts. They began to wet their altars with the heart's blood of human victims. From their mountain hold they watched for lonely travelers belonging to the surrounding tribes, seized, overpowered, and slew them for a sacrifice. Man after man was missing in the neighboring villages; and the people said: Lo! the tigers have carried them away—for wherever the blood was of a man slain, were always found the tracks of many tigers. Now this was the craft of the priests, and at last the tribes began to suspect the thing and to follow the tracks of the tigers. But the trails had been made purposely intricate, by steps returning on themselves and by the obliteration of steps; and the mountain region where the altars were was already covered with a thick fog and a small rain, and its paths flowed with mud.

The hearts of the villagers were thus fatigued within them, pursuing unknown enemies. At last, however, it became plain that the gods Tohil, Avilix and Hacavitz, and their worship, were in some way or other the cause of this bereavement: so the people of the villages conspired against them. Many attacks, both openly and by ruses, did they make on the gods, and on the four men, and on the children and people connected with them; but not once did they succeed, so great was the wisdom, and power, and courage of the four men and of their deities. And these three gods petrified, as we have told, could nevertheless resume a movable shape when they pleased; which indeed they often did, as will be seen hereafter.

At last the war was finished. By the miraculous aid of a horde of wasps and hornets, the Quichés utterly defeated and put to the rout in a general battle all their enemies. And the tribes humiliated themselves before the face of Balam-Quitzé, of Balam-Agab, and of Mahucutah: Unfortunates that we are, they said, spare to us at least our lives. Let it be so, it was answered, although you be worthy of death; you shall, however, be our tributaries and serve us, as long as the sun endure, as long as the light shall follow his course. This was the reply of our fathers and mothers, upon Mount Hacavitz; and thereafter they lived in great honor and peace, and their souls had rest, and all the tribes served them there.

THE END OF THE QUICHÉ CREATION.

Now it came to pass that the time of the death of Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqi-Balam drew near. No bodily sickness nor suffering came upon them; but they were forewarned that their death and their end was at hand. Then they called their sons and their descendants round them to receive their last counsels.

And the heart of the old men was rent within them. In the anguish of their heart they sang the Kamucu, the old sad song that they had sung when the sun first rose, when the sun rose and they thought of the friends they had left in Tulan, whose face they should see no more forever. Then they took leave of their wives, one by one; and of their sons, one by one; of each in particular they took leave; and they said: We return to our people; already the King of the Stags is ready, he stretches himself through the heaven. Lo, we are about to return; our work is done; the days of our life are complete. Remember us well; let us never pass from your memory. You will see still our houses and our mountains; multiply in them, and then go on upon your way and see again the places whence we are come.

So the old men took leave of their sons and of their wives; and Balam-Quitzé spake again: Behold! he said, I leave you what shall keep me in remembrance. I have taken leave of you—and am filled with sadness, he added. Then instantly the four old men were not; but in their place was a great bundle; and it was never unfolded, neither could any man find seam therein on rolling it over and over. So it was called the Majesty Enveloped; and it became a memorial of these fathers, and was held very dear and precious in the sight of the Quichés; and they burned incense before it.[II-9]

Thus died and disappeared on Mount Hacavitz Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqi-Balam, these first men who came from the east, from the other side of the sea. Long time had they been here when they died; and they were very old, and surnamed the Venerated and the Sacrificers.

Such is the Quiché account of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants and of the first years of the existence of mankind. Although we find here described in the plainest and least equivocal terms a supreme, all-powerful Creator of all things, there are joined with him in a somewhat perplexing manner a number of auxiliary deities and makers. It may be that those whose faith the Popol Vuh represents, conceiving and speaking of their supreme god under many aspects and as fulfilling many functions, came at times, either unconsciously or for dramatic effect, to bring this one great Being upon their mythic stage, sustaining at once many of his different parts and characters. Or perhaps, like the Hebrews, they believed that the Creator had made out of nothing or out of his own essence, in some mysterious way, angels and other beings to obey and to assist him in his sovereign designs, and that these 'were called gods.' That these Quiché notions seem foolishness to us, is no argument as to their adaptation to the life and thoughts of those who believed them; for, in the words of Professor Max Müller, "the thoughts of primitive humanity were not only different from our thoughts, but different also from what we think their thoughts ought to have been."[II-10]

MEXICAN COSMOGONY.

Yet whatever be the inconsistencies that obscure the Popol Vuh, we find them multiplied in the Mexican cosmogony, a tangled string of meagre and apparently fragmentary traditions. There appear to have been two principal schools of opinion in Anáhuac, differing as to who was the Creator of the world, as well as on other points—two veins of tradition, perhaps of common origin, which often seem to run into one, and are oftener still considered as one by historians to whom these heathen vanities were matters of little importance. The more advanced school, ascribing its inspiration to Toltec sources, seems to have flourished notably in Tezcuco, especially while the famous Nezahualcoyotl reigned there, and to have had very definite monotheistic ideas. It taught, as is asserted in unmistakable terms, that all things had been made by one God, omnipotent and invisible; and to this school were probably owing the many gentle and beautiful ideas and rites, mingled with the hard, coarse, and prosaic cult of the mass of the people.[II-11]

The other school may be considered as more distinctively national, and as representing more particularly the ordinary Mexican mind. To it is to be ascribed by far the larger part of all we know about the Mexican religion.[II-12] According to the version of this school, Tezcatlipoca, a god whose birth and adventures are set forth hereafter, was the creator of the material heaven and earth, though not of mankind; and sometimes even the honor of this partial creation is disputed by others of the gods.

One Mexican nation, again, according to an ancient writer of their own blood, affirmed that the earth had been created by chance; and as for the heavens, they had always existed.[II-13]

CHIMALPOPOCA MANUSCRIPT.

From the fragments of the Chimalpopoca manuscript given by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg we learn that the Creator—whoever he may have been—produced his work in successive epochs. In the sign Tochtli, the earth was created; in the sign Acatl was made the firmament, and in the sign Tecpatl the animals. Man it is added, was made and animated out of ashes or dust by God on the seventh day, Ehecatl, but finished and perfected by that mysterious personage Quetzalcoatl. However this account may be reconciled with itself or with others, it further appears that man was four times made and four times destroyed.[II-14]

This may perhaps be looked upon as proceeding from what I have called for convenience the Toltecan school, though this particular fragment shows traces of Christian influence. What follows seems however to belong to a distinctively Mexican and ruder vein of thought. It is gathered from Mendieta, who was indebted again to Fray Andres de Olmos, one of the earliest missionaries among the Mexicans of whom he treats; and it is decidedly one of the most authentic accounts of such matters extant.

AZTEC CREATION-MYTHS.

The Mexicans in most of the provinces were agreed that there was a god in heaven called Citlalatonac, and a goddess called Citlalicue;[II-15] and that this goddess had given birth to a flint knife, Tecpatl. Now she had many sons living with her in heaven, who seeing this extraordinary thing were alarmed, and flung the flint down to the earth. It fell in a place called Chicomoztoc, that is to say the Seven Caves, and there immediately sprang up from it one thousand six hundred gods. These gods being alone on the earth—though as will hereafter appear, there had been men in the world at a former period—sent up their messenger Tlotli, the Hawk, to pray their mother to empower them to create men, so that they might have servants as became their lineage. Citlalicue seemed to be a little ashamed of these sons of hers, born in so strange a manner, and she twitted them cruelly enough on what they could hardly help: Had you been what you ought to have been, she exclaimed, you would still be in my company. Nevertheless she told them what to do in the matter of obtaining their desire: Go beg of Mictlanteuctli, Lord of Hades, that he may give you a bone or some ashes of the dead that are with him; which having received you shall sacrifice over it, sprinkling blood from your own bodies. And the fallen gods having consulted together, sent one of their number, called Xolotl,[II-16] down to hades as their mother had advised. He succeeded in getting a bone of six feet long from Mictlanteuctli; and then, wary of his grisly host, he took an abrupt departure, running at the top of his speed. Wroth at this, the infernal chief gave chase; not causing to Xolotl, however, any more serious inconvenience than a hasty fall in which the bone was broken in pieces. The messenger gathered up what he could in all haste, and despite his stumble made his escape. Reaching the earth, he put the fragments of bone into a basin, and all the gods drew blood from their bodies and sprinkled it into the vessel. On the fourth day there was a movement among the wetted bones and a boy lay there before all; and in four days more, the blood-letting and sprinkling being still kept up, a girl was lifted from the ghastly dish. The children were given to Xolotl to bring up; and he fed them on the juice of the maguey.[II-17] Increasing in stature, they became man and woman; and from them are the people of the present day descended, who, even as the primordial bone was broken into unequal pieces, vary in size and shape. The name of this first man was Iztacmixcuatl, and the name of his wife Ilancueitl,[II-18] and they had six sons born to them, whose descendants, with their god-masters, in process of time moved eastward from their original home, almost universally described as having been towards Jalisco.

Now there had been no sun in existence for many years; so the gods being assembled in a place called Teotihuacan, six leagues from Mexico, and gathered at the time round a great fire, told their devotees that he of them who should first cast himself into that fire, should have the honor of being transformed into a sun. So one of them called Nanahuatzin—either as most say, out of pure bravery, or as Sahagun relates, because his life had become a burden to him through a syphilitic disease—flung himself into the fire. Then the gods began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light and to make bets as to what part of heaven he should first appear in. And some said Here, and some said There; but when the sun rose they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east.[II-19] And in that same hour, though they knew it not, the decree went forth that they should all die by sacrifice.

HOW THE SUN WAS PLACED IN THE HEAVENS.

The sun had risen indeed, and with a glory of the cruel fire about him that not even the eyes of the gods could endure; but he moved not. There he lay on the horizon; and when the deities sent Tlotli their messenger to him, with orders that he should go on upon his way, his ominous answer was, that he would never leave that place till he had destroyed and put an end to them all. Then a great fear fell upon some, while others were moved only to anger; and among the latter was one Citli, who immediately strung his bow and advanced against the glittering enemy. By quickly lowering his head the Sun avoided the first arrow shot at him; but the second and third had attained his body in quick succession, when, filled with fury, he seized the last and launched it back upon his assailant. And the brave Citli laid shaft to string nevermore, for the arrow of the sun pierced his forehead.

Then all was dismay in the assembly of the gods, and despair filled their heart, for they saw that they could not prevail against the shining one; and they agreed to die, and to cut themselves open through the breast. Xolotl was appointed minister, and he killed his companions one by one, and last of all he slew himself also.[II-20] So they died like gods; and each left to the sad and wondering men who were his servants, his garments for a memorial. And these servants made up, each party, a bundle of the raiment that had been left to them, binding it about a stick into which they had bedded a small green stone to serve as a heart. These bundles were called tlaquimilloli, and each bore the name of that god whose memorial it was; and these things were more reverenced than the ordinary gods of stone and wood of the country. Fray Andres de Olmos found one of these relics in Tlalmanalco, wrapped up in many cloths, and half rotten with being kept hid so long.[II-21]

Immediately on the death of the gods the sun began his motion in the heavens; and a man called Tecuzistecatl, or Tezcociztecatl, who, when Nanahuatzin leaped into the fire, had retired into a cave, now emerged from his concealment as the moon. Others say that instead of going into a cave, this Tecuzistecatl, had leaped into the fire after Nanahuatzin, but that, the heat of the fire being somewhat abated, he had come out less brilliant than the sun. Still another variation is, that the sun and moon came out equally bright, but this not seeming good to the gods, one of them took a rabbit by the heels and slung it into the face of the moon, dimming its lustre with a blotch whose mark may be seen to this day.

After the gods had died in the way herein related, leaving their garments behind as relics, those servants went about everywhere, bearing these relics like bundles upon their shoulders, very sad and pensive and wondering if ever again they would see their departed gods. Now the name of one of these deceased deities was Tezcatlipoca, and his servant having arrived at the sea coast, was favored with an apparition of his master in three different shapes. And Tezcatlipoca spake to his servant saying: Come hither, thou that lovest me so well, that I may tell thee what thou hast to do. Go now to the House of the Sun and fetch thence singers and instruments so that thou mayest make me a festival; but first call upon the whale, and upon the siren, and upon the tortoise, and they shall make thee a bridge to the sun.

Then was all this done; and the messenger went across the sea upon his living bridge, towards the House of the Sun, singing what he had to say. And the Sun heard the song, and he straitly charged his people and servants, saying: See now that ye make no response to this chant, for whoever replies to it must be taken away by the singer. But the song was so exceeding sweet that some of them could not but answer, and they were lured away, bearing with them the drum, teponaztli, and the kettle-drum, vevetl. Such was the origin of the festivals and the dances to the gods; and the songs sung during these dances they held as prayers, singing them always with great accuracy of intonation and time.

THE TEZCUCAN ACCOUNT OF THE CREATION.

In their oral traditions, the Tezcucans agreed with the usual Mexican account of creation—the falling of the flint from heaven to earth, and so on—but what they afterward showed in a picture, and explained to Fray Andres de Olmos as the manner of the creation of mankind, was this: The event took place in the land of Aculma, on the Tezcucan boundary at a distance of two leagues from Tezcuco and of five from Mexico. It is said that the sun, being at the hour of nine, cast a dart into the earth at the place we have mentioned and made a hole; from this hole a man came out, the first man and somewhat imperfect withal, as there was no more of him than from the arm-pits up, much like the conventional European cherub, only without wings. After that the woman came up out of the hole. The rest of the story was not considered proper for printing by Mendieta; but at any rate from these two are mankind descended. The name of the first man was Aculmaitl—that is to say, aculli, shoulder, and maitl, hand or arm—and from him the town of Aculma is said to take its name.[II-22] And this etymology seems to make it probable that the details of this myth are derived, to some extent, from the name of the place in which it was located; or that the name of the first man belonging to an early phase of the language, has been misunderstood, and that to the false etymology the details of the myth are owing.

As already stated there had been men on the earth previous to that final and perfect creation of man from the bone supplied by Mictlanteuctli, and wetted by the gods with their own blood at the place of the Seven Caves. These men had been swept away by a succession of great destructions. With regard to the number of these destructions it is hard to speak positively, as on no single point in the wide range of early American religion, does there exist so much difference of opinion. All the way from twice to five times, following different accounts, has the world been desolated by tremendous convulsions of nature. I follow most closely the version of the Tezcucan historian Ixtlilxochitl, as being one of the earliest accounts, as, prima facie, from its origin, one of the most authentic, and as being supported by a majority of respectable historians up to the time of Humboldt.

THE AGES OR SUNS OF THE MEXICANS.

Of the creation which ushered in the first age we know nothing; we are only told by Boturini, that giants then began to appear on the earth. This First Age; or 'sun,' was called the Sun of the Water, and it was ended by a tremendous flood in which every living thing perished, or was transformed, except, following some accounts, one man and one woman of the giant race, of whose escape more hereafter. The Second Age, called the Sun of the Earth, was closed with earthquakes, yawnings of the earth, and the overthrow of the highest mountains. Giants, or Quinamés, a powerful and haughty race still appear to be the only inhabitants of the world. The Third Age was the Sun of the Air. It was ended by tempests and hurricanes, so destructive that few indeed of the inhabitants of the earth were left; and those that were saved, lost, according to the Tlascaltec account, their reason and speech, becoming monkeys.

The present is the Fourth Age. To it appear to belong the falling of the goddess-born flint from heaven, the birth of the sixteen hundred heroes from that flint, the birth of mankind from the bone brought from hades, the transformation of Nanahuatzin into the sun, the transformation of Tezcatecatl into the moon, and the death of the sixteen hundred heroes or gods. It is called the Sun of Fire, and is to be ended by a universal conflagration.[II-23]

Connected with the great flood of water, there is a Mexican tradition presenting some analogies to the story of Noah and his ark. In most of the painted manuscripts supposed to relate to this event, a kind of boat is represented floating over the waste of water, and containing a man and a woman. Even the Tlascaltecs, the Zapotecs, the Miztecs, and the people of Michoacan are said to have had such pictures. The man is variously called Coxcox, Teocipactli, Tezpi, and Nata; the woman Xochiquetzal and Nena.[II-24]

THE TOWER OF BABEL.

The following has been usually accepted as the ordinary Mexican version of this myth: In Atonatiuh, the Age of Water, a great flood covered all the face of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof were turned into fishes. Only one man and one woman escaped, saving themselves in the hollow trunk of an ahahuete or bald cypress; the name of the man being Coxcox, and that of his wife Xochiquetzal. On the waters abating a little they grounded their ark on the Peak of Colhuacan, the Ararat of Mexico. Here they increased and multiplied, and children began to gather about them, children who were all born dumb. And a dove came and gave them tongues, innumerable languages. Only fifteen of the descendants of Coxcox, who afterward became heads of families, spake the same language or could at all understand each other; and from these fifteen are descended the Toltecs, the Aztecs, and the Acolhúas. This dove is not the only bird mentioned in these deluvial traditions, and must by no means be confounded with the birds of another palpably Christianized story. For in Michoacan a tradition was preserved, following which the name of the Mexican Noah was Tezpi. With better fortune than that ascribed to Coxcox, he was able to save, in a spacious vessel, not only himself and his wife, but also his children, several animals, and a quantity of grain for the common use. When the waters began to subside, he sent out a vulture that it might go to and fro on the earth and bring him word again when the dry land began to appear. But the vulture fed upon the carcasses that were strewed in every part, and never returned. Then Tezpi sent out other birds, and among these was a humming-bird. And when the sun began to cover the earth with a new verdure, the humming-bird returned to its old refuge bearing green leaves. And Tezpi saw that his vessel was aground near the mountain of Colhuacan and he landed there.

The Mexicans round Cholula had a special legend, connecting the escape of a remnant from the great deluge with the often-mentioned story of the origin of the people of Anáhuac from Chicomoztoc, or the Seven Caves. At the time of the cataclysm, the country, according to Pedro de los Rios, was inhabited by giants. Some of these perished utterly; others were changed into fishes; while seven brothers of them found safety by closing themselves into certain caves in a mountain called Tlaloc. When the waters were assuaged, one of the giants, Xelhua, surnamed the Architect, went to Cholula and began to build an artificial mountain, as a monument and a memorial of the Tlaloc that had sheltered him and his when the angry waters swept through all the land. The bricks were made in Tlamanalco, at the foot of the Sierra de Cocotl, and passed to Cholula from hand to hand along a file of men—whence these came is not said—stretching between the two places. Then were the jealousy and the anger of the gods aroused, as the huge pyramid rose slowly up, threatening to reach the clouds and the great heaven itself; and the gods launched their fire upon the builders and slew many, so that the work was stopped.[II-25] But the half-finished structure, afterwards dedicated by the Cholultecs to Quetzalcoatl, still remains to show how well Xelhua, the giant, deserved his surname of the Architect.

THE MEXICAN DELUGE.

Yet another record remains to us of a traditional Mexican deluge, in the following extract from the Chimalpopoca Manuscript. Its words seem to have a familiar sound; but it would hardly be scientific to draw from such a fragment any very sweeping conclusion as to its relationship, whether that be Quiché or Christian:—

When the Sun, or Age, Nahui-Atl came, there had passed already four hundred years; then came two hundred years, then seventy and six, and then mankind were lost and drowned and turned into fishes. The waters and the sky drew near each other; in a single day all was lost; the day Four Flower consumed all that there was of our flesh. And this year was the year Ce-Calli; on the first day, Nahui-Atl, all was lost. The very mountains were swallowed up in the flood and the waters remained, lying tranquil during fifty and two spring-times. But before the flood began, Titlacahuan had warned the man Nata and his wife Nena, saying: Make now no more pulque, but hollow out to yourselves a great cypress, into which you shall enter when, in the month Tozoztli, the waters shall near the sky. Then they entered into it, and when Titlacahuan had shut them in, he said to the man: Thou shalt eat but a single ear of maize, and thy wife but one also. And when they had finished eating, each an ear of maize, they prepared to set forth, for the waters remained tranquil and their log moved no longer; and opening it they began to see the fishes. Then they lit a fire, rubbing pieces of wood together, and they roasted fish. And behold the deities Citlallinicué and Citlallatonac looking down from above, cried out: O divine Lord! what is this fire that they make there? wherefore do they so fill the heaven with smoke? And immediately Titlacahuan Tetzcatlipoca came down, and set himself to grumble, saying: What does this fire here? Then he seized the fishes and fashioned them behind and before, and changed them into dogs.[II-26]

We turn now to the traditions of some nations situated on the outskirts of the Mexican Empire, traditions differing from those of Mexico, if not in their elements, at least in the combination of those elements. Following our usual custom, I give the following legend belonging to the Miztecs just as they themselves were accustomed to depict and to interpret it in their primitive scrolls:—[II-27]

THE FLYING HEROES OF MIZTECA.

In the year and in the day of obscurity and darkness, yea even before the days or the years were, when the world was in a great darkness and chaos, when the earth was covered with water and there was nothing but mud and slime on all the face of the earth—behold a god became visible, and his name was the Deer, and his surname was the Lion-Snake. There appeared also a very beautiful goddess called the Deer, and surnamed the Tiger-Snake.[II-28] These two gods were the origin and beginning of all the gods.

Now when these two gods became visible in the world, they made, in their knowledge and omnipotence, a great rock, upon which they built a very sumptuous palace, a masterpiece of skill, in which they made their abode upon earth. On the highest part of this building there was an axe of copper, the edge being uppermost, and on this axe the heavens rested.

This rock and the palace of the gods were on a mountain in the neighborhood of the town of Apoala in the province of Mizteca Alta. The rock was called The Place of Heaven; there the gods first abode on earth, living many years in great rest and content, as in a happy and delicious land, though the world still lay in obscurity and darkness.

The father and mother of all the gods being here in their place, two sons were born to them, very handsome and very learned in all wisdom and arts. The first was called the Wind of Nine Snakes, after the name of the day on which he was born; and the second was called, in like manner, the Wind of Nine Caves. Very daintily indeed were these youths brought up. When the elder wished to amuse himself, he took the form of an eagle, flying thus far and wide; the younger turned himself into a small beast of a serpent shape, having wings that he used with such agility and sleight that he became invisible, and flew through rocks and walls even as through the air. As they went, the din and clamor of these brethren was heard by those over whom they passed. They took these figures to manifest the power that was in them, both in transforming themselves and in resuming again their original shape. And they abode in great peace in the mansion of their parents, so they agreed to make a sacrifice and an offering to these gods, to their father and to their mother. Then they took each a censer of clay, and put fire therein, and poured in ground beleño for incense; and this offering was the first that had ever been made in the world. Next the brothers made to themselves a garden, in which they put many trees, and fruit-trees, and flowers, and roses, and odorous herbs of different kinds. Joined to this garden they laid out a very beautiful meadow, which they fitted up with all things necessary for offering sacrifice to the gods. In this manner the two brethren left their parents' house, and fixed themselves in this garden to dress it and to keep it, watering the trees and the plants and the odorous herbs, multiplying them, and burning incense of powder of beleño in censers of clay to the gods, their father and mother. They made also vows to these gods, and promises, praying that it might seem good to them to shape the firmament and lighten the darkness of the world, and to establish the foundation of the earth, or rather to gather the waters together so that the earth might appear—as they had no place to rest in save only one little garden. And to make their prayers more obligatory upon the gods, they pierced their ears and tongues with flakes of flint, sprinkling the blood that dropped from the wounds over the trees and plants of the garden with a willow branch, as a sacred and blessed thing. After this sort they employed themselves, postponing pleasure till the time of the granting of their desire, remaining always in subjection to the gods, their father and mother, and attributing to them more power and divinity than they really possessed.

Fray Garcia here makes a break in the relation—that he may not weary his readers with so many absurdities—but it would appear that the firmament was arranged and the earth made fit for mankind, who about that time must also have made their appearance. For there came a great deluge afterwards, wherein perished many of the sons and daughters that had been born to the gods; and it is said that when the deluge was passed the human race was restored as at the first, and the Miztec kingdom populated, and the heavens and the earth established.

This we may suppose to have been the traditional origin of the common people; but the governing family of Mizteca proclaimed themselves the descendants of two youths born from two majestic trees that stood at the entrance of the gorge of Apoala, and that maintained themselves there despite a violent wind continually rising from a cavern in the vicinity.

THE DUEL WITH THE SUN.

Whether the trees of themselves produced these youths, or whether some primeval Æsir, as in the Scandinavian story, gave them shape and blood and breath and sense, we know not. We are only told that soon or late the youths separated, each going his own way to conquer lands for himself. The braver of the two coming to the vicinity of Tilantongo, armed with buckler and bow, was much vexed and oppressed by the ardent rays of the sun, which he took to be the lord of that district striving to prevent his entrance therein. Then the young warrior strung his bow, and advanced his buckler before him, and drew shafts from his quiver. He shot there against the great light even till the going down of the same; then he took possession of all that land, seeing he had grievously wounded the sun, and forced him to hide behind the mountains. Upon this story is founded the lordship of all the caciques of Mizteca, and upon their descent from this mighty archer their ancestor. Even to this day, the chiefs of the Miztecs blazon as their arms a plumed chief with bow, arrows, and shield, and the sun in front of him setting behind gray clouds.[II-29]

Of the origin of the Zapotecs, a people bordering on these Miztecs, Burgoa says, with a touching simplicity, that he could find no account worthy of belief. Their historical paintings he ascribes to the invention of the devil, affirming hotly that these people were blinder in such vanities than the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. Some, he said, to boast of their valor made themselves out the sons of lions and divers wild beasts; others, grand lords of ancient lineage, were produced by the greatest and most shady trees; while still others of an unyielding and obstinate nature, were descended from rocks. Their language, continues the worthy Provincial, striking suddenly and by an undirected shot the very center of mythological interpretation—their language was full of metaphors; those who wished to persuade spake always in parables, and in like manner painted their historians.[II-30]

In Guatemala, according to the relations given to Father Gerónimo Roman by the natives, it was believed there was a time when nothing existed but a certain divine Father called Xchmel, and a divine Mother called Xtmana. To these were born three sons,[II-31] the eldest of whom, filled with pride and presumption, set about a creation contrary to the will of his parents. But he could create nothing save old vessels fit for mean uses, such as earthen pots, jugs, and things still more despicable; and he was hurled into hades. Then the two younger brethren, called respectively Hunchevan and Hunavan, prayed their parents for permission to attempt the work in which their brother had failed so signally. And they were granted leave, being told at the same time, that inasmuch as they had humbled themselves, they would succeed in their undertaking. Then they made the heavens, and the earth with the plants thereon, and fire and air, and out of the earth itself they made a man and a woman—presumably the parents of the human race.

According to Torquemada, there was a deluge some time after this, and after the deluge the people continued to invoke as god the great Father and the great Mother already mentioned. But at last a principal woman[II-32] among them, having received a revelation from heaven, taught them the true name of God, and how that name should be adored; all this, however, they afterward forgot.[II-33]

In Nicaragua, a country where the principal language was a Mexican dialect, it was believed that ages ago the world was destroyed by a flood in which the most part of mankind perished. Afterward the teotes, or gods, restocked the earth as at the beginning. Whence came the teotes, no one knows; but the names of two of them who took a principal part in the creation were Tamagostat and Cipattonal.[II-34]

THE COYOTE OF THE PAPAGOS.

Leaving now the Central American region we pass north into the Papago country, lying south of the Gila, with the river Santa Cruz on the east and the Gulf of California on the west. Here we meet for the first time the coyote, or prairie wolf; we find him much more than an animal, something more even than a man, only a little lower than the gods. In the following Papago myth[II-35] he figures as a prophet, and as a minister and assistant to a certain great hero-god Montezuma, whom we are destined to meet often, and in many characters, as a central figure in the myths of the Gila valley:—

LEGEND OF MONTEZUMA.

The Great Spirit made the earth and all living things, before he made man. And he descended from heaven, and digging in the earth, found clay such as the potters use, which, having again ascended into the sky, he dropped into the hole that he had dug. Immediately there came out Montezuma and, with the assistance of Montezuma, the rest of the Indian tribes in order. Last of all came the Apaches, wild from their natal hour, running away as fast as they were created. Those first days of the world were happy and peaceful days. The sun was nearer the earth than he is now; his grateful rays made all the seasons equal, and rendered garments unnecessary. Men and beasts talked together, a common language made all brethren. But an awful destruction ended this happy age. A great flood destroyed all flesh wherein was the breath of life; Montezuma and his friend the Coyote alone escaping. For before the flood began, the Coyote prophesied its coming, and Montezuma took the warning and hollowed out a boat to himself, keeping it ready on the topmost summit of Santa Rosa. The Coyote also prepared an ark; gnawing down a great cane by the river bank, entering it, and stopping up the end with a certain gum. So when the waters rose these two saved themselves, and met again at last on dry land after the flood had passed away. Naturally enough Montezuma was now anxious to know how much dry land had been left, and he sent the Coyote off on four successive journeys, to find exactly where the sea lay toward each of the four winds. From the west and from the south, the answer swiftly came: The sea is at hand. A longer search was that made towards the east, but at last there too was the sea found. On the north only was no water found, though the faithful messenger almost wearied himself out with searching. In the meantime the Great Spirit, aided by Montezuma, had again repeopled the world, and animals and men began to increase and multiply. To Montezuma had been allotted the care and government of the new race; but puffed up with pride and self importance, he neglected the most important duties of his onerous position, and suffered the most disgraceful wickedness to pass unnoticed among the people. In vain the Great Spirit came down to earth and remonstrated with his vicegerent, who only scorned his laws and advice, and ended at last by breaking out into open rebellion. Then indeed the Great Spirit was filled with anger, and he returned to heaven, pushing back the sun on his way, to that remote part of the sky he now occupies. But Montezuma hardened his heart, and collecting all the tribes to aid him, set about building a house that should reach up to heaven itself. Already it had attained a great height, and contained many apartments lined with gold, silver, and precious stones, the whole threatening soon to make good the boast of its architect, when the Great Spirit launched his thunder, and laid its glory in ruins. Still Montezuma hardened himself; proud and inflexible, he answered the thunderer out of the haughty defiance of his heart; he ordered the temple-houses to be desecrated, and the holy images to be dragged in the dust, he made them a scoff and byword for the very children in the village streets. Then the Great Spirit prepared his supreme punishment. He sent an insect flying away towards the east, towards an unknown land, to bring the Spaniards. When these came, they made war upon Montezuma and destroyed him, and utterly dissipated the idea of his divinity.[II-36]

DELUGE OF THE PIMAS.

The Pimas,[II-37] a neighboring and closely allied people to the Papagos, say that the earth was made by a certain Chiowotmahke, that is to say Earth-prophet. It appeared in the beginning like a spider's web, stretching far and fragile across the nothingness that was. Then the Earth-prophet flew over all lands in the form of a butterfly, till he came to the place he judged fit for his purpose, and there he made man. And the thing was after this wise: The Creator took clay in his hands, and mixing it with the sweat of his own body, kneaded the whole into a lump. Then he blew upon the lump till it was filled with life and began to move; and it became man and woman. This Creator had a son called Szeukha, who, when the world was beginning to be tolerably peopled, lived in the Gila valley, where lived also at the same time a great prophet, whose name has been forgotten. Upon a certain night when the prophet slept, he was wakened by a noise at the door of his house, and when he looked, a great Eagle stood before him. And the Eagle spake: Arise, thou that healest the sick, thou that shouldest know what is to come, for behold a deluge is at hand. But the prophet laughed the bird to scorn and gathered his robes about him and slept. Afterwards the Eagle came again and warned him of the waters near at hand; but he gave no ear to the bird at all. Perhaps he would not listen because this Eagle had an exceedingly bad reputation among men, being reported to take at times the form of an old woman that lured away girls and children to a certain cliff so that they were never seen again; of this, however, more anon. A third time, the Eagle came to warn the prophet, and to say that all the valley of the Gila should be laid waste with water; but the prophet gave no heed. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, and even as the flapping of the Eagle's wings died away into the night, there came a peal of thunder and an awful crash; and a green mound of water reared itself over the plain. It seemed to stand upright for a second, then, cut incessantly by the lightning, goaded on like a great beast, it flung itself upon the prophet's hut. When the morning broke there was nothing to be seen alive but one man—if indeed he were a man; Szeukha, the son of the Creator, had saved himself by floating on a ball of gum or resin. On the waters falling a little, he landed near the mouth of the Salt River, upon a mountain where there is a cave that can still be seen, together with the tools and utensils Szeukha used while he lived there. Szeukha was very angry with the Great Eagle, who he probably thought had had more to do with bringing on the flood than appears in the narrative. At any rate the general reputation of the bird was sufficiently bad, and Szeukha prepared a kind of rope ladder from a very tough species of tree, much like woodbine, with the aid of which he climbed up to the cliff where the Eagle lived, and slew him.[II-38] Looking about here, he found the mutilated and decaying bodies of a great multitude of those that the Eagle had stolen and taken for a prey; and he raised them all to life again and sent them away to repeople the earth. In the house or den of the Eagle, he found a woman that the monster had taken to wife, and a child. These he sent also upon their way, and from these are descended that great people called Hohocam, 'ancients or grandfathers,' who were led in all their wanderings by an eagle, and who eventually passed into Mexico.[II-39] One of these Hohocam named Sivano, built the Casa Grande on the Gila, and indeed the ruins of this structure are called after his name to this day. On the death of Sivano, his son led a branch of the Hohocam to Salt River, where he built certain edifices and dug a large canal, or acequia. At last it came about that a woman ruled over the Hohocam. Her throne was cut out of a blue stone, and a mysterious bird was her constant attendant. These Hohocam were at war with a people that lived to the east of them, on the Rio Verde, and one day the bird warned her that the enemy was at hand. The warning was disregarded or it came too late, for the eastern people came down in three bands; destroyed the cities of the Hohocam, and killed or drove away all the inhabitants.

Most of the Pueblo tribes call themselves the descendants of Montezuma;[II-40] the Moquis, however, have a quite different story of their origin. They believe in a great Father living where the sun rises; and in a great Mother, whose home is where the sun goes down. The Father is the father of evil, war, pestilence, and famine; but from the Mother are all joys, peace, plenty, and health. In the beginning of time the Mother produced from her western home nine races of men in the following primary forms: First, the Deer race; second, the Sand race; third, the Water race; fourth, the Bear race; fifth, the Hare race; sixth, the Prairie-wolf race; seventh, the Rattle-snake race; eighth, the Tobacco-plant race; and ninth, the Reed-grass race. All these the Mother placed respectively on the spots where their villages now stand, and transformed them into the men who built the present Pueblos. These race-distinctions are still sharply kept up; for they are believed to be realities, not only of the past and present, but also of the future; every man when he dies shall be resolved into his primeval form; shall wave in the grass, or drift in the sand, or prowl on the prairie as in the beginning.[II-41]

CAVE-ORIGIN OF THE NAVAJOS.

The Navajos, living north of the Pueblos, say that at one time all the nations, Navajos, Pueblos, Coyoteros, and white people, lived together, underground in the heart of a mountain near the river San Juan. Their only food was meat, which they had in abundance, for all kinds of game were closed up with them in their cave; but their light was dim and only endured for a few hours each day. There were happily two dumb men among the Navajos, flute-players who enlivened the darkness with music. One of these striking by chance on the roof of the limbo with his flute, brought out a hollow sound, upon which the elders of the tribes determined to bore in the direction whence the sound came. The flute was then set up against the roof, and the Raccoon sent up the tube to dig a way out; but he could not. Then the Moth-worm mounted into the breach, and bored and bored till he found himself suddenly on the outside of the mountain and surrounded by water. Under these novel circumstances, he heaped up a little mound and set himself down on it to observe and ponder the situation. A critical situation enough! for, from the four corners of the universe, four great white Swans bore down upon him, every one with two arrows, one under either wing. The Swan from the north reached him first, and having pierced him with two arrows, drew them out and examined their points, exclaiming as the result: He is of my race. So also, in succession, did all the others. Then they went away; and towards the directions in which they departed, to the north, south, east, and west, were found four great arroyos, by which all the water flowed off, leaving only mud. The worm now returned to the cave, and the Raccoon went up into the mud, sinking in it mid-leg deep, as the marks on his fur show to this day. And the wind began to rise, sweeping up the four great arroyos, and the mud was dried away. Then the men and the animals began to come up from their cave, and their coming up required several days. First came the Navajos, and no sooner had they reached the surface then they commenced gaming at patole, their favorite game. Then came the Pueblos and other Indians who crop their hair and build houses. Lastly came the white people, who started off at once for the rising sun and were lost sight of for many winters.

While these nations lived underground they all spake one tongue; but with the light of day and the level of earth, came many languages. The earth was at this time very small and the light was quite as scanty as it had been down below; for there was as yet no heaven, nor sun, nor moon, nor stars. So another council of the ancients was held and a committee of their number appointed to manufacture these luminaries. A large house or workshop was erected; and when the sun and moon were ready, they were entrusted to the direction and guidance of the two dumb fluters already mentioned. The one who got charge of the sun came very near, through his clumsiness in his new office, to making a Phaethon of himself and setting fire to the earth. The old men, however, either more lenient than Zeus or lacking his thunder, contented themselves with forcing the offender back by puffing the smoke of their pipes into his face. Since then the increasing size of the earth has four times rendered it necessary that he should be put back, and his course farther removed from the world and from the subterranean cave to which he nightly retires with the great light. At night also the other dumb man issues from this cave, bearing the moon under his arm, and lighting up such part of the world as he can. Next the old men set to work to make the heavens, intending to broider in the stars in beautiful patterns, of bears, birds, and such things. But just as they had made a beginning a prairie-wolf rushed in, and crying out: Why all this trouble and embroidery? scattered the pile of stars over all the floor of heaven, just as they still lie.

When now the world and its firmament had been finished, the old men prepared two earthen tinages or water-jars, and having decorated one with bright colors, filled it with trifles; while the other was left plain on the outside, but filled within with flocks and herds and riches of all kinds. These jars being covered and presented to the Navajos and Pueblos, the former chose the gaudy but paltry jar; while the Pueblos received the plain and rich vessel; each nation showing in its choice traits which characterize it to this day. Next there arose among the Navajos a great gambler, who went on winning the goods and the persons of his opponents till he had won the whole tribe. Upon this, one of the old men became indignant, set the gambler on his bowstring and shot him off into space—an unfortunate proceeding, for the fellow returned in a short time with firearms and the Spaniards. Let me conclude by telling how the Navajos came by the seed they now cultivate: All the wise men being one day assembled, a turkey-hen came flying from the direction of the morning star, and shook from her feathers an ear of blue corn into the midst of the company; and in subsequent visits brought all the other seeds they possess.[II-42]

ORIGIN-MYTHS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

Of some tribes, we do not know that they possess any other ideas of their origin than the name of their first ancestor, or the name of a creator or a tradition of his existence.

The Sinaloas, from Culiacan north to the Yaqui River, have dances in honor of a certain Viriseva, the mother of the first man. This first man, who was her son, and called Vairubi, they hold in like esteem.[II-43] The Cochimis, of Lower California, amid an apparent multiplicity of gods, say there is in reality only one, who created heaven, earth, plants, animals, and man.[II-44] The Pericues, also of Lower California, call the creator Niparaya, and say that the heavens are his dwelling-place. A sect of the same tribe add that the stars are made of metal, and are the work of a certain Purutabui; while the moon has been made by one Cucunumic.[II-45]

The nations of Los Angeles County, California, believe that their one god, Quaoar, came down from heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, put the world on the back of seven giants. He then created the lower animals, and lastly a man and a woman. These were made separately out of earth and called, the man Tobohar, and the woman Pabavit.[II-46]

Hugo Reid, to whom we are mainly indebted for the mythology of Southern California, and who is an excellent authority, inasmuch as his wife was an Indian woman of that country, besides the preceding gives us another and different tradition on the same subject: Two great Beings made the world, filled it with grass and trees, and gave form, life, and motion to the various animals that people land and sea. When this work was done, the elder Creator went up to heaven and left his brother alone on the earth. The solitary god left below, made to himself men-children, that he should not be utterly companionless. Fortunately also, about this time, the moon came to that neighborhood; she was very fair in her delicate beauty, very kind-hearted, and she filled the place of a mother to the men-children that the god had created. She watched over them, and guarded them from all evil things of the night, standing at the door of their lodge. The children grew up very happily, laying great store by the love with which their guardians regarded them; but there came a day when their heart saddened, in which they began to notice that neither their god-creator nor their moon foster-mother gave them any longer undivided affection and care, but that instead, the two great ones seemed to waste much precious love upon each other. The tall god began to steal out of their lodge at dusk, and spend the night watches in the company of the white-haired moon, who, on the other hand, did not seem on these occasions to pay such absorbing attention to her sentinel duty as at other times. The children grew sad at this, and bitter at the heart with a boyish jealousy. But worse was yet to come: one night they were awakened by a querulous wailing in their lodge, and the earliest dawn showed them a strange thing, which they afterwards came to know was a new-born infant, lying in the doorway. The god and the moon had eloped together; their Great One had returned to his place beyond the ether, and that he might not be separated from his paramour, he had appointed her at the same time a lodge in the great firmament; where she may yet be seen, with her gauzy robe and shining silver hair, treading celestial paths. The child left on the earth was a girl. She grew up very soft, very bright, very beautiful, like her mother; but like her mother also, O so fickle and frail! She was the first of woman-kind, from her are all other women descended, and from the moon; and as the moon changes so they all change, say the philosophers of Los Angeles.[II-47]

CENTRAL-CALIFORNIAN CREATION-MYTHS.

A much more prosaic and materialistic origin is that accorded to the moon in the traditions of the Gallinomeros of Central California.[II-48] In the beginning, they say, there was no light, but a thick darkness covered all the earth. Man stumbled blindly against man and against the animals, the birds clashed together in the air, and confusion reigned everywhere. The Hawk happening by chance to fly into the face of the Coyote, there followed mutual apologies and afterwards a long discussion on the emergency of the situation. Determined to make some effort toward abating the public evil, the two set about a remedy. The Coyote gathered a great heap of tules, rolled them into a ball, and gave it to the Hawk, together with some pieces of flint. Gathering all together as well as he could, the Hawk flew straight up into the sky, where he struck fire with the flints, lit his ball of reeds, and left it there, whirling along all in a fierce red glow as it continues to the present; for it is the sun. In the same way the moon was made, but as the tules of which it was constructed were rather damp, its light has been always somewhat uncertain and feeble.[II-49]

In northern California, we find the Mattoles,[II-50] who connect a tradition of a destructive flood with Taylor Peak, a mountain in their locality, on which they say their forefathers took refuge. As to the creation, they teach that a certain Big Man began by making the naked earth, silent and bleak, with nothing of plant or animal thereon, save one Indian, who roamed about in a wofully hungry and desolate state. Suddenly there rose a terrible whirlwind, the air grew dark and thick with dust and drifting sand, and the Indian fell upon his face in sore dread. Then there came a great calm, and the man rose and looked, and lo, all the earth was perfect and peopled; the grass and the trees were green on every plain and hill; the beasts of the fields, the fowls of the air, the creeping things, the things that swim, moved everywhere in his sight. There is a limit set to the number of the animals, which is this: only a certain number of animal spirits are in existence; when one beast dies, his spirit immediately takes up its abode in another body, so that the whole number of animals is always the same, and the original spirits move in an endless circle of earthy immortality.[II-51]

THE COYOTE OF THE CALIFORNIANS.

We pass now to a train of myths in which the Coyote again appears, figuring in many important and somewhat mystical rôles—figuring in fact as the great Somebody of many tribes. To him, though involuntarily as it appears, are owing the fish to be found in Clear Lake. The story runs that one summer long ago there was a terrible drought in that region, followed by a plague of grasshoppers. The Coyote ate a great quantity of these grasshoppers, and drank up the whole lake to quench his thirst. After this he lay down to sleep off the effects of his extraordinary repast, and while he slept a man came up from the south country and thrust him through with a spear. Then all the water he had drunk flowed back through his wound into the lake, and with the water the grasshoppers he had eaten; and these insects became fishes, the same that still swim in Clear Lake.[II-52]

The Californians in most cases describe themselves as originating from the Coyote, and more remotely, from the very soil they tread. In the language of Mr. Powers—whose extended personal investigations give him the right to speak with authority—"All the aboriginal inhabitants of California, without exception, believe that their first ancestors were created directly from the earth of their respective present dwelling-places, and, in very many cases, that these ancestors were coyotes."[II-53]

The Potoyantes give an ingenious account of the transformation of the first coyotes into men: There was an age in which no men existed, nothing but coyotes. When one of these animals died, his body used to breed a multitude of little animals, much as the carcass of the huge Ymir, rotting in Ginnunga-gap, bred the maggots that turned to dwarfs. The little animals of our story were in reality spirits, which, after crawling about for a time on the dead coyote, and taking all kinds of shapes, ended by spreading wings and floating off to the moon. This evidently would not do; the earth was in danger of becoming depopulated; so the old coyotes took counsel together if perchance they might devise a remedy. The result was a general order that, for the time to come, all bodies should be incinerated immediately after death. Thus originated the custom of burning the dead, a custom still kept up among these people. We next learn—what indeed might have been expected of animals of such wisdom and parts—that these primeval coyotes began by degrees to assume the shape of men. At first, it is true, with many imperfections; but, a toe, an ear, a hand, bit by bit, they were gradually builded up into the perfect form of man looking upward. For one thing they still grieve, however, of all their lost estate—their tails are gone. An acquired habit of sitting upright, has utterly erased and destroyed that beautiful member. Lost is indeed lost, and gone is gone for ever, yet still when in dance and festival, the Potoyante throws off the weary burden of hard and utilitarian care, he attaches to himself, as nearly as may be in the ancient place, an artificial tail, and forgets for a happy hour the degeneracy of the present in simulating the glory of the past.[II-54]

The Californians tell again of a great flood, or at least of a time when the whole country, with the exception of Mount Diablo and Reed Peak, was covered with water. There was a Coyote on the peak, the only living thing the wide world over, and there was a single feather tossing about on the rippled water. The Coyote was looking at the feather, and even as he looked, flesh and bones and other feathers, came and joined themselves to the first, and became an Eagle. There was a stir on the water, a rush of broad pinions, and before the widening circles reached the island-hill, the bird stood beside the astonished Coyote. The two came soon to be acquainted and to be good friends, and they made occasional excursions together to the other hill, the Eagle flying leisurely overhead while the Coyote swam. After a time they began to feel lonely, so they created men; and as the men multiplied the waters abated, till the dry land came to be much as it is at present.

HOW THE GOLDEN GATE WAS OPENED.

Now, also, the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin began to find their way into the Pacific, through the mountains which, up to this time, had stretched across the mouth of San Francisco Bay. No Poseidon clove the hills with his trident, as when the pleasant vale of Tempe was formed, but a strong earthquake tore the rock apart and opened the Golden Gate between the waters within and those without. Before this there had existed only two outlets for the drainage of the whole country; one was the Russian River, and the other the San Juan.[II-55]

The natives in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe, ascribe its origin to a great natural convulsion. There was a time, they say, when their tribe possessed the whole earth, and were strong, numerous, and rich; but a day came in which a people rose up stronger than they, and defeated and enslaved them. Afterwards the Great Spirit sent an immense wave across the continent from the sea, and this wave engulfed both the oppressors and the oppressed, all but a very small remnant. Then the taskmasters made the remaining people raise up a great temple, so that they, of the ruling caste, should have a refuge in case of another flood, and on the top of this temple the masters worshiped a column of perpetual fire.

Half a moon had not elapsed, however, before the earth was again troubled, this time with strong convulsions and thunderings, upon which the masters took refuge in their great tower, closing the people out. The poor slaves fled to the Humboldt River, and getting into canoes paddled for life from the awful sight behind them. For the land was tossing like a troubled sea, and casting up fire, smoke, and ashes. The flames went up to the very heaven and melted many stars, so that they rained down in molten metal upon the earth, forming the ore that the white men seek. The Sierra was mounded up from the bosom of the earth; while the place where the great fort stood sank, leaving only the dome on the top exposed above the waters of Lake Tahoe. The inmates of the temple-tower clung to this dome to save themselves from drowning; but the Great Spirit walked upon the waters in his wrath, and took the oppressors one by one like pebbles, and threw them far into the recesses of a great cavern, on the east side of the lake, called to this day the Spirit Lodge, where the waters shut them in. There must they remain till a last great volcanic burning, which is to overturn the whole earth, shall again set them free. In the depths of their cavern-prison they may still be heard, wailing and moaning, when the snows melt and the waters swell in the lake.[II-56]

We again meet the Coyote among the Cahrocs of Klamath River in Northern California. These Cahrocs believe in a certain Chareya, Old Man Above, who made the world, sitting the while upon a certain stool now in the possession of the high-priest, or chief medicine-man. After the creation of the earth, Chareya first made fishes, then the lower animals, and lastly man, upon whom was conferred the power of assigning to each animal its respective duties and position. The man determined to give each a bow, the length of which should denote the rank of the receiver. So he called all the animals together, and told them that next day, early in the morning, the distribution of bows would take place. Now the Coyote greatly desired the longest bow; and, in order to be in first at the division, he determined to remain awake all night. His anxiety sustained him for some time; but just before morning he gave way, and fell into a sound sleep. The consequence was, he was last at the rendezvous, and got the shortest bow of all. The man took pity on his distress, however, and brought the matter to the notice of Chareya, who, on considering the circumstances, decreed that the Coyote should become the most cunning of animals, as he remains to this time. The Coyote was very grateful to the man for his intercession, and he became his friend and the friend of his children, and did many things to aid mankind as we shall see hereafter.[II-57]

MOUNT SHASTA THE WIGWAM OF THE GREAT SPIRIT.

The natives in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta, in Northern California, say that the Great Spirit made this mountain first of all. Boring a hole in the sky, using a large stone as an auger, he pushed down snow and ice until they had reached the desired height; then he stepped from cloud to cloud down to the great icy pile, and from it to the earth, where he planted the first trees by merely putting his finger into the soil here and there. The sun began to melt the snow; the snow produced water; the water ran down the sides of the mountains, refreshed the trees, and made rivers. The Creator gathered the leaves that fell from the trees, blew upon them, and they became birds. He took a stick and broke it into pieces; of the small end he made fishes; and of the middle of the stick he made animals—the grizzly bear excepted, which he formed from the big end of his stick, appointing him to be master over all the others. Indeed this animal was then so large, strong, and cunning, that the Creator somewhat feared him, and hollowed out Mount Shasta as a wigwam for himself, where he might reside while on earth, in the most perfect security and comfort. So the smoke was soon to be seen curling up from the mountain, where the Great Spirit and his family lived, and still live, though their hearth-fire is alight no longer, now that the white man is in the land. This was thousands of snows ago, and there came after this a late and severe spring-time, in which a memorable storm blew up from the sea, shaking the huge lodge to its base. The Great Spirit commanded his daughter, little more than an infant, to go up and bid the wind to be still, cautioning her at the same time in his fatherly way, not to put her head out into the blast, but only to thrust out her little red arm and make a sign before she delivered her message. The eager child hastened up to the hole in the roof, did as she was told, and then turned to descend; but the Eve was too strong in her to leave without a look at the forbidden world outside and the rivers and the trees, at the far ocean and the great waves that the storm had made as hoary as the forests when the snow is on the firs. She stopped, she put out her head to look; instantly the storm took her by the long hair, and blew her down to the earth, down the mountain side, over the smooth ice and soft snow, down to the land of the grizzly bears.

Now the grizzly bears were somewhat different then from what they are at present. In appearance they were much the same it is true; but they walked then on their hind legs like men, and talked, and carried clubs, using the fore-limbs as men use their arms.

THE GRIZZLY FAMILY OF MOUNT SHASTA.

There was a family of these grizzlies living at the foot of the mountain, at the place where the child was blown to. The father was returning from the hunt with his club on his shoulder and a young elk in his hand, when he saw the little shivering waif lying on the snow with her hair all tangled about her. The old Grizzly, pitying and wondering at the strange forlorn creature, lifted it up, and carried it in to his wife to see what should be done. She too was pitiful, and she fed it from her own breast, bringing it up quietly as one of her family. So the girl grew up, and the eldest son of the old Grizzly married her, and their offspring was neither grizzly nor Great Spirit, but man. Very proud indeed were the whole grizzly nation of the new race, and uniting their strength from all parts of the country, they built the young mother and her family a mountain wigwam near that of the Great Spirit; and this structure of theirs is now known as Little Mount Shasta. Many years passed away, and at last the old grandmother Grizzly became very feeble and felt that she must soon die. She knew that the girl she had adopted was the daughter of the Great Spirit, and her conscience troubled her that she had never let him know anything of the fate of his child. So she called all the grizzlies together to the new lodge, and sent her eldest grandson up on a cloud to the summit of Mount Shasta, to tell the father that his daughter yet lived. When the Great Spirit heard that, he was so glad that he immediately ran down the mountain, on the south side, toward where he had been told his daughter was; and such was the swiftness of his pace that the snow was melted here and there along his course, as it remains to this day. The grizzlies had prepared him an honorable reception, and as he approached his daughter's home, he found them standing in thousands in two files, on either side of the door, with their clubs under their arms. He had never pictured his daughter as aught but the little child he had loved so long ago; but when he found that she was a mother, and that he had been betrayed into the creation of a new race, his anger overcame him; he scowled so terribly on the poor old grandmother Grizzly that she died upon the spot. At this all the bears set up a fearful howl, but the exasperated father, taking his lost darling on his shoulder, turned to the armed host, and in his fury cursed them. Peace! he said. Be silent for ever! Let no articulate word ever again pass your lips, neither stand any more upright; but use your hands as feet, and look downward until I come again! Then he drove them all out; he drove out also the new race of men, shut to the door of Little Mount Shasta, and passed away to his mountain, carrying his daughter; and her or him no eye has since seen. The grizzlies never spoke again, nor stood up; save indeed when fighting for their life, when the Great Spirit still permits them to stand as in the old time, and to use their fists like men. No Indian tracing his descent from the spirit mother and the grizzly, as here described, will kill a grizzly bear; and if by an evil chance a grizzly kill a man in any place, that spot becomes memorable, and every one that passes casts a stone there till a great pile is thrown up.[II-58]

Let us now pass on, and going east and north, enter the Shoshone country. In Idaho there are certain famous Soda Springs whose origin the Snakes refer to the close of their happiest age. Long ago, the legend runs, when the cotton-woods on the Big River were no larger than arrows, all red men were at peace, the hatchet was everywhere buried, and hunter met hunter in the game-lands of the one or the other, with all hospitality and good-will. During this state of things, two chiefs, one of the Shoshone, the other of the Comanche nation, met one day at a certain spring. The Shoshone had been successful in the chase, and the Comanche very unlucky, which put the latter in rather an ill humor. So he got up a dispute with the other as to the importance of their respective and related tribes, and ended by making an unprovoked and treacherous attack on the Shoshone, striking him into the water from behind, when he had stooped to drink. The murdered man fell forward into the water, and immediately a strange commotion was observable there; great bubbles and spirts of gas shot up from the bottom of the pool, and amid a cloud of vapor there arose also an old white-haired Indian, armed with a ponderous club of elk-horn. Well the assassin knew who stood before him; the totem on the breast was that of Wankanaga, the father both of the Shoshone and of the Comanche nations, an ancient famous for his brave deeds, and celebrated in the hieroglyphic pictures of both peoples. Accursed of two nations! cried the old man, this day hast thou put death between the two greatest peoples under the sun; see, the blood of this Shoshone cries out to the Great Spirit for vengeance. And he dashed out the brains of the Comanche with his club, and the murderer fell there beside his victim into the spring. After that the spring became foul and bitter, nor even to this day can any one drink of its nauseous water. Then Wankanaga, seeing that it had been defiled, took his club and smote a neighboring rock, and the rock burst forth into clear bubbling water, so fresh and so grateful to the palate that no other water can even be compared to it.[II-59]

THE GIANTS OF THE PALOUSE RIVER.

Passing into Washington, we find an account of the origin of the falls of Palouse River and of certain native tribes. There lived here at one time a family of giants, four brothers and a sister. The sister wanted some beaver-fat and she begged her brothers to get it for her—no easy task, as there was only one beaver in the country, and he an animal of extraordinary size and activity. However, like four gallant fellows, the giants set out to find the monster, soon catching sight of him near the mouth of the Palouse, then a peaceful gliding river with an even though winding channel. They at once gave chase, heading him up the river. A little distance up-stream they succeeded in striking him for the first time with their spears, but he shook himself clear, making in his struggle the first rapids of the Palouse, and dashed on up-stream. Again the brothers overtook him, pinning him to the river-bed with their weapons, and again the vigorous beast writhed away, making thus the second falls of the Palouse. Another chase, and, in a third and fatal attack, the four spear-shafts are struck again through the broad wounded back. There is a last stubborn struggle at the spot since marked by the great falls called Aputaput, a tearing of earth and a lashing of water in the fierce death-flurry, and the huge Beaver is dead. The brothers having secured the skin and fat, cut up the body and threw the pieces in various directions. From these pieces have originated the various tribes of the country, as the Cayuses, the Nez Percés, the Walla Wallas, and so on. The Cayuses sprang from the beaver's heart, and for this reason they are more energetic, daring, and successful than their neighbors.[II-60]

In Oregon the Chinooks and neighboring people tell of a pre-human demon race, called Ulháipa by the Chinooks, and Sehuiáb by the Clallams and Lummis. The Chinooks say that the human race was created by Italapas, the Coyote. The first men were sent into the world in a very lumpish and imperfect state, their mouth and eyes were closed, their hands and feet immovable. Then a kind and powerful spirit called Ikánam, took a sharp stone, opened the eyes of these poor creatures, and gave motion to their hands and feet. He taught them how to make canoes as well as all other implements and utensils; and he threw great rocks into the rivers and made falls, to obstruct the salmon in their ascent, so that they might be easily caught.[II-61]

Farther north among the Ahts of Vancouver Island, perhaps the commonest notion of origin is that men at first existed as birds, animals, and fishes. We are told of a certain Quawteaht, represented somewhat contradictorily, as the first Aht that ever lived, thickset and hairy-limbed, and as the chief Aht deity, a purely supernatural being, if not the creator, at least the maker and shaper of most things, the maker of the land and the water, and of the animals that inhabit the one or the other. In each of these animals as at first created, there resided the embryo or essence of a man. One day a canoe came down the coast, paddled by two personages in the, at that time, unknown form of men. The animals were frightened out of their wits, and fled, each from his house, in such haste that he left behind him the human essence that he usually carried in his body. These embryos rapidly developed into men; they multiplied, made use of the huts deserted by the animals, and became in every way as the Ahts are now. There exists another account of the origin of the Ahts, which would make them the direct descendants of Quawteaht and an immense bird that he married—the great Thunder Bird, Tootooch, with which, under a different name and in a different sex, we shall become more familiar presently. The flapping of Tootooch's wings shook the hills with thunder, tootah; and when she put out her forked tongue, the lightning quivered across the sky.

The Ahts have various legends of the way in which fire was first obtained, which legends may be reduced to the following: Quawteaht withheld fire, for some reason or other, from the creatures that he had brought into the world, with one exception; it was always to be found burning in the home of the cuttle-fish, telhoop. The other beasts attempted to steal this fire, but only the deer succeeded; he hid a little of it in the joint of his hind leg, and escaping, introduced the element to general use.

Not all animals, it would appear, were produced in the general creation; the loon and the crow had a special origin, being metamorphosed men. Two fishermen, being out at sea in their canoes, fell to quarreling, the one ridiculing the other for his small success in fishing. Finally the unsuccessful man became so infuriated by the taunts of his companion that he knocked him on the head, and stole his fish, cutting out his tongue before he paddled off, lest by any chance the unfortunate should recover his senses and gain the shore. The precaution was well taken, for the mutilated man reached the land and tried to denounce his late companion. No sound however could he utter but something resembling the cry of a loon, upon which the Great Spirit, Quawteaht, became so indiscriminatingly angry at the whole affair that he changed the poor mute into a loon, and his assailant into a crow. So when the mournful voice of the loon is heard from the silent lake or river, it is still the poor fisherman that we hear, trying to make himself understood and to tell the hard story of his wrongs.[II-62]

NOOTKA AND SALISH CREATION-MYTHS.

The general drift of many of the foregoing myths would go to indicate a wide-spread belief in the theory of an evolution of man from animals.[II-63] Traditions are not wanting, however, whose teaching is precisely the reverse. The Salish, the Nisquallies, and the Yakimas of Washington, all hold that beasts, fishes, and even edible roots are descended from human originals. One account of this inverse Darwinian development is this: The son of the Sun—whoever he may have been—caused certain individuals to swim through a lake of magic oil, a liquid of such Circean potency that the unfortunates immersed were transformed as above related. The peculiarities of organism of the various animals, are the results of incidents of their passage; the bear dived, and is therefore fat all over; the goose swam high, and is consequently fat only up to the water-line; and so on through all the list.[II-64]

Moving north to the Tacullies of British Columbia, we find the Musk-rat an active agent in the work of creation. The flat earth, following the Tacully cosmogony, was at first wholly covered with water. On the water a Musk-rat swam to and fro, seeking food. Finding none there, he dived to the bottom and brought up a mouthful of mud, but only to spit it out again when he came to the surface. All this he did again and again till quite an island was formed and by degrees the whole earth. In some unexplained way this earth became afterwards peopled in every part, and so remained, until a fierce fire of several days' duration swept over it, destroying all life, with two exceptions; one man and one woman hid themselves in a deep cave in the heart of a mountain, and from these two has the world been since repeopled.[II-65]

YEHL, THE CREATOR OF THE THLINKEETS.

From the Tacully country we pass north and west to the coast inhabited by the Thlinkeets, among whom the myth of a great Bird, or of a great hero-deity, whose favorite disguise is the shape of a bird, assumes the most elaborate proportions and importance. Here the name of this great Somebody is Yehl, the Crow or Raven, creator of most things, and especially of the Thlinkeets. Very dark, damp, and chaotic was the world in the beginning; nothing with breath or body moved there except Yehl; in the likeness of a raven he brooded over the mist, his black wings beat down the vast confusion, the waters went back before him and the dry land appeared. The Thlinkeets were placed on the earth—though how or when does not exactly appear—while the world was still in darkness, and without sun or moon or stars. A certain Thlinkeet, we are further informed, had a wife and a sister. Of the wife he was devouringly jealous, and when employed in the woods at his trade of building canoes, he had her constantly watched by eight red birds of the kind called kun. To make assurance surer, he even used to coop her up in a kind of box every time he left home. All this while his sister, a widow it would appear, was bringing up certain sons she had, fine tall fellows, rapidly approaching manhood. The jealous uncle could not endure the thought of their being in the neighborhood of his wife. So he inveigled them one by one, time after time, out to sea with him on pretense of fishing, and drowned them there. The poor mother was left desolate, she went to the sea-shore to weep for her children. A dolphin—some say a whale—saw her there, and pitied her; the beast told her to swallow a small pebble and drink some sea-water. She did so, and in eight months was delivered of a child. That child was Yehl, who thus took upon himself a human shape, and grew up a mighty hunter and notable archer. One day a large bird appeared to him, having a long tail like a magpie, and a long glittering bill as of metal; the name of the bird was Kutzghatushl, that is, Crane that can soar to heaven. Yehl shot the bird, skinned it, and whenever he wished to fly used to clothe himself in its skin.

Now Yehl had grown to manhood, and he determined to avenge himself upon his uncle for the death of his brothers; so he opened the box in which the well-guarded wife was shut up. Instantly the eight faithful birds flew off and told the husband, who set out for his home in a murderous mood. Most cunning, however, in his patience, he greeted Yehl with composure, and invited him into his canoe for a short trip to sea. Having paddled out some way, he flung himself on the young man and forced him overboard: Then he put his canoe about and made leisurely for the land, rid as he thought of another enemy. But Yehl swam in quietly another way, and stood up in his uncle's house. The baffled murderer was beside himself with fury, he imprecated with a potent curse a deluge upon all the earth, well content to perish himself so he involved his rival in the common destruction, for jealousy is cruel as the grave. The flood came, the waters rose and rose; but Yehl clothed himself in his bird-skin, and soared up to heaven, where he struck his beak into a cloud, and remained till the waters were assuaged.

ADVENTURES OF YEHL AND KHANUKH.

After this affair Yehl had many other adventures, so many that "one man cannot know them all," as the Thlinkeets say. One of the most useful things he did was to supply light to mankind—with whom, as appears, the earth had been again peopled after the deluge. Now all the light in the world was stored away in three boxes, among the riches of a certain mysterious old Chief, who guarded his treasure closely. Yehl set his wits to work to secure the boxes; he determined to be born into the chief's family. The old fellow had one daughter upon whom he doted, and Yehl transforming himself into a blade of grass, got into the girl's drinking-cup and was swallowed by her. In due time she gave birth to a son, who was Yehl, thus a second time born of a woman into the world. Very proud was the old chief of his grandson, loving him even as he loved his daughter, so that Yehl came to be a decidedly spoiled child. He fell a crying one day, working himself almost into a fit; he kicked and scratched and howled, and turned the family hut into a little pandemonium as only an infant plague can. He screamed for one of the three boxes; he would have a box; nothing but a box should ever appease him! The indulgent grandfather gave him one of the boxes; he clutched it, stopped crying, and crawled off into the yard to play. Playing, he contrived to wrench the lid off, and lo! the beautiful heaven was thick with stars, and the box empty. The old man wept for the loss of his stars, but he did not scold his grandson, he loved him too blindly for that. Yehl had succeeded in getting the stars into the firmament, and he proceeded to repeat his successful trick, to do the like by the moon and sun. As may be imagined, the difficulty was much increased; still he gained his end. He first let the moon out into the sky, and some time afterward, getting possession of the box that held the sun, he changed himself into a raven and flew away with his greatest prize of all. When he set up the blazing light in heaven, the people that saw it were at first afraid. Many hid themselves in the mountains, and in the forests, and even in the water, and were changed into the various kinds of animals that frequent these places.

There are still other feats of Yehl's replete with the happiest consequences to mankind. There was a time, for instance, when all the fire in the world was hid away in an island of the ocean. Thither flew the indefatigable deity, fetching back a brand in his mouth. The distance, however, was so great that most of the wood was burned away and a part of his beak, before he reached the Thlinkeet shore. Arrived there, he dropped the embers at once, and the sparks flew about in all directions among various sticks and stones; therefore it is that by striking these stones, and by friction on this wood, fire is always to be obtained.

Light they now had, and fire; but one thing was still wanting to men; they had no fresh water. A personage called Khanukh[II-66] kept all the fresh water in his well, in an island to the east of Sitka, and over the mouth of the well, for its better custody, he had built his hut. Yehl set out to the island in his boat, to secure the water, and on his way he met Khanukh himself, paddling along in another boat. Khanukh spoke first: How long hast thou been living in the world? Proudly Yehl answered: Before the world stood in its place, I was there. Yehl in his turn questioned Khanukh: But how long hast thou lived in the world? To which Khanukh replied: Ever since the time that the liver came out from below.[II-67] Then said Yehl: Thou art older than I. Upon this Khanukh, to show that his power was as great as his age, took off his hat, and there rose a dense fog, so that the one could no longer see the other. Yehl then became afraid, and cried out to Khanukh; but Khanukh answered nothing. At last when Yehl found himself completely helpless in the darkness, he began to weep and howl; upon which the old sorcerer put on his hat again, and the fog vanished. Khanukh then invited Yehl to his house, and entertained him handsomely with many luxuries, among which was fresh water. The meal over, host and guest sat down, and the latter began a long relation of his many exploits and adventures. Khanukh listened as attentively as he could, but the story was really so interminable that he at last fell asleep across the cover of his well. This frustrated Yehl's intention of stealing the water while its owner slept, so he resorted to another stratagem: he put some filth under the sleeper, then waking him up, made him believe he had bewrayed himself. Khanukh, whose own nose abhorred him, at once hurried off to the sea to wash, and his deceiver as quickly set about securing the precious water. Just as All-father Odin, the Raven-god, stole Suttung's mead, drinking it up and escaping in the form of a bird, so Yehl drank what fresh water he could, filling himself to the very beak, then took the form of a raven and attempted to fly off through the chimney of the hut. He stuck in the flue however, and Khanukh returning at that instant recognized his guest in the struggling bird. The old man comprehended the situation, and quietly piling up a roaring fire, he sat down comfortably to watch the choking and scorching of his crafty guest. The raven had always been a white bird, but so thoroughly was he smoked in the chimney on this occasion that he has ever since remained the sootiest of fowls. At last Khanukh watching the fire, became drowsy and fell asleep; so Yehl escaped from the island with the water. He flew back to the continent, where he scattered it in every direction; and wherever small drops fell there are now springs and creeks, while the large drops have produced lakes and rivers. This is the end of the exploits of Yehl; having thus done everything necessary to the happiness of mankind, he returned to his habitation, which is in the east, and into which no other spirit, nor any man can possibly enter.

The existing difference in language between the Thlinkeets and other people is one of the consequences of a great flood—perhaps that flood already described as having been brought on through the jealousy of the canoe-builder. Many persons escaped drowning by taking refuge in a great floating building. When the waters fell, this vessel grounded upon a rock, and was broken into two pieces; in the one fragment were left those whose descendants speak the Thlinkeet language, in the other remained all whose descendants employ a different idiom.

CHETHL AND AHGISHANAKHOU.

Connected with the history of this deluge is another myth in which a great Bird figures. When the waters rose a certain mysterious brother and sister found it necessary to part. The name of the brother was Chethl, that is, Thunder or Lightning, and the name of the sister was Ahgishanakhou, which means the Underground Woman. As they separated Chethl said to her: Sister, you shall never see me again, but while I live you shall hear my voice. Then he clothed himself in the skin of a great bird, and flew towards the south-west. His sister climbed to the top of Mount Edgecomb, which is near Sitka, and it opened and swallowed her up, leaving a great hole, or crater. The world itself is an immense flat plate supported on a pillar, and under the world, in silence and darkness, this Under-ground Woman guards the great pillar from evil and malignant powers. She has never seen her brother since she left the upper world, and she shall never see him again; but still, when the tempest sweeps down on Edgecomb, the lightning of his eyes gleams down her crater-window, and the thundering of his wings re-echoes through all her subterranean halls.[II-68]

The Koniagas, north of the Thlinkeets, have their legendary Bird and Dog—the latter taking the place occupied in the mythology of many other tribes by the wolf or coyote. Up in heaven, according to the Koniagas, there exists a great deity called Shljam Schoa. He created two personages and sent them down to the earth, and the Raven accompanied them carrying light. This original pair made sea, rivers, mountains, forests, and such things. Among other places they made the Island of Kadiak, and so stocked it that the present Koniagas assert themselves the descendants of a Dog.[II-69]

The Aleuts of the Aleutian Archipelago seem to disagree upon their origin. Some say that in the beginning a Bitch inhabited Unalaska, and that a great Dog swam across to her from Kadiak; from which pair the human race have sprung. Others, naming the bitch-mother of their race Mahakh, describe a certain Old Man, called Iraghdadakh, who came from the north to visit this Mahakh. The result of this visit was the birth of two creatures, male and female, with such an extraordinary mixing up of the elements of nature in them that they were each half man, half fox. The name of the male creature was Acagnikakh, and by the other creature he became father of the human race. The Old Man however seems hardly to have needed any help to people the world, for like the great patriarch of Thessaly, he was able to create men by merely casting stones on the earth. He flung also other stones into the air, into the water, and over the land, thus making beasts, birds, and fishes. In another version of the narrative, the first father of the Aleuts is said to have fallen from heaven in the shape of a dog.[II-70]

THE DOG-ORIGIN OF THE HYPERBOREANS.

In the legends of the Tinneh, living inland, north-east of the Koniagas, the familiar Bird and Dog again appear. These legends tell us that the world existed at first as a great ocean frequented only by an immense Bird, the beating of whose wings was thunder, and its glance lightning. This great flying monster descended and touched the waters, upon which the earth rose up and appeared above them; it touched the earth, and therefrom came every living creature—except the Tinneh, who owe their origin to a Dog. Therefore it is that to this day a dog's flesh is an abomination to the Tinneh, as are also all who eat such flesh. A few years before Captain Franklin's visit they almost ruined themselves by following the advice of some fanatic reformer. Convinced by him of the wickedness of exacting labor from their near relations, the dogs, they got rid at once of the sin and of all temptation to its recommission, by killing every cur in their possession.

To return to the origin of the Tinneh, the wonderful Bird before mentioned made and presented to them a peculiar arrow, which they were to preserve for all time with great care. But they would not; they misappropriated the sacred shaft to some common use, and immediately the great Bird flew away never to return. With its departure ended the Golden Age of the Tinneh—an age in which men lived till their throats were worn through with eating, and their feet with walking.[II-71]

Belonging to the Northern-Indian branch of the Tinneh we find a narrative in which the Dog holds a prominent place, but in which we find no mention at all of the Bird: The earth existed at first in a chaotic state, with only one human inhabitant, a woman who dwelt in a cave and lived on berries. While gathering these one day, she encountered an animal like a dog, which followed her home. This Dog possessed the power of transforming himself into a handsome young man, and in this shape he became the father by the woman of the first men. In course of time a giant of such height that his head reached the clouds, arrived on the scene and fitted the earth for its inhabitants. He reduced the chaos to order; he established the land in its boundaries, he marked out with his staff the position or course of the lakes, ponds, and rivers. Next he slew the Dog and tore him to pieces, as the four giants did the Beaver of the Palouse River, or as the creating Æsir did Aurgelmir. Unlike the four brothers, however, and unlike the sons of Bör, this giant of the Tinneh used the fragments not to create men or things, but animals. The entrails of the dog he threw into the water, and every piece became a fish; the flesh he scattered over the land, and every scrap became an animal; the bits of skin he sowed upon the wind, and they became birds. All these spread over the earth, and increased and multiplied; and the giant gave the woman and her progeny power to kill and eat of them according to their necessities. After this he returned to his place, and he has not since been heard of.[II-72]

Leaving now this division of our subject, more particularly concerned with cosmogony, it may not be amiss to forestall possible criticism as to the disconnected manner in which the various myths are given. I have but to repeat that the mythology with which we have to deal is only known in fragments, and to submit that a broken statue, or even a broken shard, of genuine or presumably genuine antiquity, is more valuable to science and even to poetry, than the most skillful ideal restoration.

INTERPRETATION OF MYTHS.