THE TYPICAL MYTH FOUND IN MANY PARTS OF THE CONTINENT-DIFFICULTIES IN TRACING IT-RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION IN AMERICA SIMILAR TO THAT IN THE OLD WORLD-FAILURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE RED RACE.

THE CULTURE MYTH OF THE TARASCOS OF Mechoacán-THAT OF THE RICHES OF
GUATEMALA-THE VOTAN MYTH OF THE TZENDALS OF CHIAPAS-A FRAGMENT OF A MIXE
MYTH-THE HERO-GOD OF THE MUYSCAS OF NEW GRANADA-OF THE TUPI-GUARANAY
STEM OF PARAGUAY AND BRAZIL-MYTHS OF THE DENE OF BRITISH AMERICA.

SUN WORSHIP IN AMERICA-GERMS OF PROGRESS IN AMERICAN RELIGIONS-RELATION
OF RELIGION AND MORALITY-THE LIGHT-GOD A MORAL AND BENEFICENT
CREATION-HIS WORSHIP WAS ELEVATING-MORAL CONDITION OF NATIVE SOCIETIES
BEFORE THE CONQUEST-PROGRESS IN THE DEFINITION OF THE IDEA OF GOD IN
PERU, MEXICO, AND YUCATAN-ERRONEOUS STATEMENTS ABOUT THE MORALS OF THE
NATIVES-EVOLUTION OF THEIR ETHICAL PRINCIPLES.

In the foregoing chapters I have passed in review the hero-myths of five nations widely asunder in location, in culture and in language.  I have shown the strange similarity in their accounts of their mysterious early benefactor and teacher, and their still more strange, because true, presentiments of the arrival of pale-faced conquerors from the East.

I have selected these nations because their myths have been most fully recorded, not that they alone possessed this striking legend.  It is, I repeat, the fundamental myth in the religious lore of American nations.  Not, indeed, that it can be discovered in all tribes, especially in the amplitude of incident which it possesses among some.  But there are comparatively few of the native mythologies that do not betray some of its elements, some fragments of it, and, often enough to justify us in the supposition that had we the complete body of their sacred stories, we should find this one in quite as defined a form as I have given it.

The student of American mythology, unfortunately, labors under peculiar disadvantages.  When he seeks for his material, he finds an extraordinary dearth of it.  The missionaries usually refused to preserve the native myths, because they believed them harmful, or at least foolish; while men of science, who have had such opportunities, rejected all those that seemed the least like a Biblical story, as they suspected them to be modern and valueless compositions, and thus lost the very life of the genuine ancient faiths.

A further disadvantage is the slight attention which has been paid to the aboriginal American tongues, and the sad deficiency of material for their study.  It is now recognized on all hands that the key of a mythology is to be found in the language of its believers.  As a German writer remarks, “the formation of the language and the evolution of the myth go hand in hand." We must know the language of a tribe, at least we must understand the grammatical construction and have facilities to trace out the meaning and derivation of names, before we can obtain any accurate notion of the foundation in nature of its religious beliefs.  No convenient generality will help us.

I make these remarks as a sort of apology for the shortcomings of the present study, and especially for the imperfections of the fragments I have still to present.  They are, however, sufficiently defined to make it certain that they belonged to cycles of myths closely akin to those already given.  They will serve to support my thesis that the seemingly confused and puerile fables of the native Americans are fully as worthy the attention of the student of human nature as the more poetic narratives of the Veda or the Edda.  The red man felt out after God with like childish gropings as his white brother in Central Asia.  When his course was interrupted, he was pursuing the same path toward the discovery of truth.  In the words of a thoughtful writer:  “In a world wholly separated from that which it is customary to call the Old World, the religious evolution of man took place precisely in the same manner as in those surroundings which produced the civilization of western Europe."

But this religious development of the red man was violently broken by the forcible imposition of a creed which he could not understand, and which was not suited to his wants, and by the heavy yoke of a priesthood totally out of sympathy with his line of progress.  What has been the result?  “Has Christianity,” asks the writer I have just quoted, “exerted a progressive action on these peoples?  Has it brought them forward, has it aided their natural evolution?  We are obliged to answer, No." This sad reply is repeated by careful observers who have studied dispassionately the natives in their homes. The only difference in the results of the two great divisions of the Christian world seems to be that on Catholic missions has followed the debasement, on Protestant missions the destruction of the race.

It may be objected to this that it was not Christianity, but its accompaniments, the greedy horde of adventurers, the profligate traders, the selfish priests, and the unscrupulous officials, that wrought the degradation of the native race.  Be it so.  Then I merely modify my assertion, by saying that Christianity has shown itself incapable of controlling its inevitable adjuncts, and that it would have been better, morally and socially, for the American race never to have known Christianity at all, than to have received it on the only terms on which it has been possible to offer it.

With the more earnestness, therefore, in view of this acknowledged failure of Christian effort, do I turn to the native beliefs, and desire to vindicate for them a dignified position among the faiths which have helped to raise man above the level of the brute, and inspired him with hope and ambition for betterment.

For this purpose I shall offer some additional evidence of the extension of the myth I have set forth, and then proceed to discuss its influence on the minds of its believers.

The Tarascos were an interesting nation who lived in the province of Michoacan, due west of the valley of Mexico.  They were a polished race, speaking a sonorous, vocalic language, so bold in war that their boast was that they had never been defeated, and yet their religious rites were almost bloodless, and their preference was for peace.  The hardy Aztecs had been driven back at every attempt they made to conquer Michoacan, but its ruler submitted himself without a murmur to Cortes, recognizing in him an opponent of the common enemy, and a warrior of more than human powers.

Among these Tarascos we find the same legend of a hero-god who brought them out of barbarism, gave them laws, arranged their calendar, which, in principles, was the same as that of the Aztecs and Mayas, and decided on the form of their government.  His name was Surites or Curicaberis, words which, from my limited resources in that tongue, I am not able to analyze.  He dwelt in the town Cromuscuaro, which name means the Watch-tower or Look-out, and the hour in which he gave his instructions was always at sunrise, just as the orb of light appeared on the eastern horizon.  One of the feasts which he appointed to be celebrated in his honor was called Zitacuarencuaro, which melodious word is said by the Spanish missionaries to mean “the resurrection from death.”  When to this it is added that he distinctly predicted that a white race of men should arrive in the country, and that he himself should return, his identity with the light-gods of similar American myths is too manifest to require argument.

The king of the Tarascos was considered merely the vicegerent of the absent hero-god, and ready to lay down the sceptre when Curicaberis should return to earth.

We do not know whether the myth of the Four Brothers prevailed among the Tarascos; but there is hardly a nation on the continent among whom the number Four was more distinctly sacred.  The kingdom was divided into four parts (as also among the Itzas, Qquichuas and numerous other tribes), the four rulers of which constituted, with the king, the sacred council of five, in imitation, I can hardly doubt, of the hero-god, and the four deities of the winds.

The goddess of water and the rains, the female counterpart of Curicaberis, was the goddess Cueravaperi.  “She is named,” says the authority I quote, “in all their fables and speeches.  They say that she is the mother of all the gods of the earth, and that it is she who bestows the harvests and the germination of seeds.”  With her ever went four attendant goddesses, the personifications of the rains from the four cardinal points.  At the sacred dances, which were also dramatizations of her supposed action, these attendants were represented by four priests clad respectively in white, yellow, red and black, to represent the four colors of the clouds. In other words, she doubtless bore the same relation to Curicaberis that Ixchel did to Itzamna in the mythology of the Mayas, or the rainbow goddess to Arama in the religious legends of the Moxos. She was the divinity that presided over the rains, and hence over fertility and the harvests, standing in intimate relation to the god of the sun’s rays and the four winds.

The Kiches of Guatemala were not distant relatives of the Mayas of Yucatan, and their mythology has been preserved to us in a rescript of their national book, the Popol Vuh.  Evidently they had borrowed something from Aztec sources, and a flavor of Christian teaching is occasionally noticeable in this record; but for all that it is one of the most valuable we possess on the subject.

It begins by connecting the creation of men and things with the appearance of light.  In other words, as in so many mythologies, the history of the world is that of the day; each begins with a dawn.  Thus the Popol Vuh reads:-

“This is how the heaven exists, how the Heart of Heaven exists, he, the god, whose name is Qabauil.”

“His word came in the darkness to the Lord, to Gucumatz, and it spoke with the Lord, with Gucumatz.”

“They spoke together; they consulted and planned; they understood; they united in words and plans.”

“As they consulted, the day appeared, the white light came forth, mankind was produced, while thus they held counsel about the growth of trees and vines, about life and mankind, in the darkness, in the night (the creation was brought about), by the Heart of Heaven, whose name is Hurakan."

But the national culture-hero of the Kiches seems to have been Xbalanque, a name which has the literal meaning, “Little Tiger Deer,” and is a symbolical appellation referring to days in their calendar.  Although many of his deeds are recounted in the Popol Vuh, that work does not furnish us his complete mythical history.  From it and other sources we learn that he was one of the twins supposed to have been born of a virgin mother in Utatlan, the central province of the Kiches, to have been the guide and protector of their nation, and in its interest to have made a journey to the Underworld, in order to revenge himself on his powerful enemies, its rulers.  He was successful, and having overcome them, he set free the Sun, which they had seized, and restored to life four hundred youths whom they had slain, and who, in fact, were the stars of heaven.  On his return, he emerged from the bowels of the earth and the place of darkness, at a point far to the east of Utatlan, at some place located by the Kiches near Coban, in Vera Paz, and came again to his people, looking to be received with fitting honors.  But like Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, and others of these worthies, the story goes that they treated him with scant courtesy, and in anger at their ingratitude, he left them forever, in order to seek a nobler people.

I need not enter into a detailed discussion of this myth, many points in which are obscure, the less so as I have treated them at length in a monograph readily accessible to the reader who would push his inquiries further.  Enough if I quote the conclusion to which I there arrive.  It is as follows:-

“Suffice it to say that the hero-god, whose name is thus compounded of two signs in the calendar, who is one of twins born of a virgin, who performs many surprising feats of prowess on the earth, who descends into the world of darkness and sets free the sun, moon and stars to perform their daily and nightly journeys through the heavens, presents in these and other traits such numerous resemblances to the Divinity of Light, the Day-maker of the northern hunting tribes, reappearing in so many American legends, that I do not hesitate to identify the narrative of Xbalanque and his deeds as but another version of this wide-spread, this well-nigh universal myth."

Few of our hero-myths have given occasion for wilder speculation than that of Votan.  He was the culture hero of the Tzendals, a branch of the Maya race, whose home was in Chiapas and Tabasco.  Even the usually cautious Humboldt suggested that his name might be a form of Odin or Buddha!  As for more imaginative writers, they have made not the least difficulty in discovering that it is identical with the Odon of the Tarascos, the Oton of the Othomis, the Poudan of the East Indian Tamuls, the Vaudoux of the Louisiana negroes, etc.  All this has been done without any attempt having been made to ascertain the precise meaning and derivation of the name Votan.  Superficial phonetic similarities have been the only guide.

We are not well acquainted with the Votan myth.  It appears to have been written down some time in the seventeenth century, by a Christianized native.  His manuscript of five or six folios, in the Tzendal tongue, came into the possession of Nunez de la Vega, Bishop of Chiapas, about 1690, and later into the hands of Don Ramon Ondonez y Aguiar, where it was seen by Dr. Paul Felix Cabrera, about 1790.  What has become of it is not known.

No complete translation of it was made; and the extracts or abstracts given by the authors just named are most unsatisfactory, and disfigured by ignorance and prejudice.  None of them, probably, was familiar with the Tzendal tongue, especially in its ancient form.  What they tell us runs as follows:-

At some indefinitely remote epoch, Votan came from the far East.  He was sent by God to divide out and assign to the different races of men the earth on which they dwell, and to give to each its own language.  The land whence he came was vaguely called ualum uotan, the land of Votan.

His message was especially to the Tzendals.  Previous to his arrival they were ignorant, barbarous, and without fixed habitations.  He collected them into villages, taught them how to cultivate the maize and cotton, and invented the hieroglyphic signs, which they learned to carve on the walls of their temples.  It is even said that he wrote his own history in them.

He instituted civil laws for their government, and imparted to them the proper cérémonials of religious worship.  For this reason he was also called “Master of the Sacred Drum,” the instrument with which they summoned the votaries to the ritual dances.

They especially remembered him as the inventor of their calendar.  His name stood third in the week of twenty days, and was the first Dominical sign, according to which they counted their year, corresponding to the Kan of the Mayas.

As a city-builder, he was spoken of as the founder of Palenque, Nachan, Huehuetlan-in fact, of any ancient place the origin of which had been forgotten.  Near the last mentioned locality, Huehuetlan in Soconusco, he was reported to have constructed an underground temple by merely blowing with his breath.  In this gloomy mansion he deposited his treasures, and appointed a priestess to guard it, for whose assistance he created the tapirs.

Votan brought with him, according to one statement, or, according to another, was followed from his native land by, certain attendants or subordinates, called in the myth tzequil, petticoated, from the long and flowing robes they wore.  These aided him in the work of civilization.  On four occasions he returned to his former home, dividing the country, when he was about to leave, into four districts, over which he placed these attendants.

When at last the time came for his final departure, he did not pass through the valley of death, as must all mortals, but he penetrated through a cave into the under-earth, and found his way to “the root of heaven.”  With this mysterious expression, the native myth closes its account of him.

He was worshiped by the Tzendals as their principal deity and their beneficent patron.  But he had a rival in their religious observances, the feared Yalahau Lord of Blackness, or Lord of the Waters.  He was represented as a terrible warrior, cruel to the people, and one of the first of men.

According to an unpublished work by Fuentes, Votan was one of four brothers, the common ancestors of the southwestern branches of the Maya family.

All these traits of this popular hero are too exactly similar to those of the other representatives of this myth, for them to leave any doubt as to what we are to make of Votan.  Like the rest of them, he and his long-robed attendants are personifications of the eastern light and its rays.  Though but uncritical epitomes of a fragmentary myth about him remain, they are enough to stamp it as that which meets us so constantly, no matter where we turn in the New World.

It scarcely seems necessary for me to point out that his name Votan is in no way akin to Othomi or Tarasco roots, still less to the Norse Wodan or the Indian Buddha, but is derived from a radical in pure Maya.  Yet I will do so, in order, if possible, to put a stop to such visionary etymologies.

As we are informed by Bishop Nunez de la Vega, uotan in Tzendal means heart.  Votan was spoken of as “the heart or soul of his people.”  This derivation has been questioned, because the word for the heart in the other Maya dialects is different, and it has been suggested that this was but an example of “otosis,” where a foreign proper name was turned into a familiar common noun.  But these objections do not hold good.

In regard to derivation, uotan is from the pure Maya root-word tan, which means primarily “the breast,” or that which is in front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan.  In Tzendal this word means both breast and heart.  This is well illustrated by an ancient manuscript, dating from 1707, in my possession.  It is a guide to priests for administering the sacraments in Spanish and Tzendal.  I quote the passage in point:-

“Con todo tu corazón, hiriendote en los pechos, di, conmigo.”

Ta zpizil auotan, xatigh zny auotan, zghoyoc, alagh ghoyoc.-

Here, a is the possessive of the second person, and uotan is used both for heart and breast.  Thus the derivation of the word from the Maya radical is clear.

The figure of speech by which the chief divinity is called “the heart of the earth,” “the heart of the sky,” is common in these dialects, and occurs repeatedly in the Popol Vuh, the sacred legend of the Kiches of Guatemala.

I may here repeat what I have elsewhere written on this figurative expression in the Maya languages:  “The literal or physical sense of the word heart is not that which is here intended.  In these dialects this word has a richer metaphorical meaning than in our tongue.  It stands for all the psychical powers, the memory, will and reasoning faculties, the life, the spirit, the soul.  It would be more correct to render these names the ‘Spirit’ or ‘Soul’ of the lake, etc., than the ‘Heart.’  They indicate a dimly understood sense of the unity of spirit or energy in all the various manifestations of organic and inorganic existence.” The Names of the Gods in the Kiche Myths, Central America, by Daniel G. Brinton, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. xix, 1881, .]

The immediate neighbors of the Tzendals were the Mixes and Zoques, the former resident in the central mountains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the latter rather in the lowlands and toward the eastern coast.  The Mixes nowadays number but a few villages, whose inhabitants are reported as drunken and worthless, but the time was when they were a powerful and warlike nation.  They are in nowise akin to the Maya stock, although they are so classed in Mr. H.H.  Bancroft’s excellent work. They have, however, a distinct relationship with the Zoques, about thirty per cent of the words in the two languages being similar. The Zoques, whose mythology we unfortunately know little or nothing about, adjoined the Tzendals, and were in constant intercourse with them.

We have but faint traces of the early mythology of these tribes; but they preserved some legends which show that they also partook of the belief, so general among their neighbors, of a beneficent culture-god.

This myth relates that their first father, who was also their Supreme God, came forth from a cave in a lofty mountain in their country, to govern and direct them.  He covered the soil with forests, located the springs and streams, peopled them with fish and the woods with game and birds, and taught the tribe how to catch them.  They did not believe that he had died, but that after a certain length of time, he, with his servants and captives, all laden with bright gleaming gold, retired into the cave and closed its mouth, not to remain there, but to reappear at some other part of the world and confer similar favors on other nations.

The name, or one of the names, of this benefactor was Condoy, the meaning of which my facilities do not enable me to ascertain.

There is scarcely enough of this to reveal the exact linéaments of their hero; but if we may judge from these fragments as given by Carriedo, it appears to be of precisely the same class as the other hero-myths I have collected in this volume.  Historians of authority assure us that the Mixes, Zoques and Zapotecs united in the expectation, founded on their ancient myths and prophecies, of the arrival, some time, of men from the East, fair of hue and mighty in power, masters of the lightning, who would occupy the land.

On the lofty plateau of the Andes, in New Granada, where, though nearly under the equator, the temperature is that of a perpetual spring, was the fortunate home of the Muyscas.  It is the true El Dorado of America; every mountain stream a Pactolus, and every hill a mine of gold.  The natives were peaceful in disposition, skilled in smelting and beating the precious metal that was everywhere at hand, lovers of agriculture, and versed in the arts of spinning, weaving and dying cotton.  Their remaining sculptures prove them to have been of no mean ability in designing, and it is asserted that they had a form of writing, of which their signs for the numerals have alone been preserved.

The knowledge of these various arts they attributed to the instructions of a wise stranger who dwelt among them many cycles before the arrival of the Spaniards.  He came from the East, from the llanos of Venezuela or beyond them, and it was said that the path he made was broad and long, a hundred leagues in length, and led directly to the holy temple at his shrine at Sogamoso.  In the province of Ubaque his footprints on the solid rock were reverently pointed out long after the Conquest.  His hair was abundant, his beard fell to his waist, and he dressed in long and flowing robes.  He went among the nations of the plateaux, addressing each in its own dialect, taught them to live in villages and to observe just laws.  Near the village of Coto was a high hill held in special veneration, for from its prominent summit he was wont to address the people who gathered round its base.  Therefore it was esteemed a sanctuary, holy to the living and the dead.  Princely families from a distance carried their dead there to be interred, because this teacher had said that man does not perish when he dies, but shall rise again.  It was held that this would be more certain to occur in the very spot where he announced this doctrine.  Every sunset, when he had finished his discourse, he retired into a cave in the mountain, not to reappear again until the next morning.

For many years, some said for two thousand years, did he rule the people with equity, and then he departed, going back to the East whence he came, said some authorities, but others averred that he rose up to heaven.  At any rate, before he left, he appointed a successor in the sovereignty, and recommended him to pursue the paths of justice.

What led the Spanish missionaries to suspect that this was one of the twelve apostles, was not only these doctrines, but the undoubted fact that they found the symbol of the cross already a religious emblem among this people.  It appeared in their sacred paintings, and especially, they erected one over the grave of a person who had died from the bite of a serpent.

A little careful investigation will permit us to accept these statements as quite true, and yet give them a very different interpretation.

That this culture-hero arrives from the East and returns to the East are points that at once excite the suspicion that he was the personification of the Light.  But when we come to his names, no doubt can remain.  These were various, but one of the most usual was Chimizapagua, which, we are told, means “a messenger from Chiminigagua.”  In the cosmogonical myths of the Muyscas this was the home or source of Light, and was a name applied to the demiurgic force.  In that mysterious dwelling, so their account ran, light was shut up, and the world lay in primeval gloom.  At a certain time the light manifested itself, and the dawn of the first morning appeared, the light being carried to the four quarters of the earth by great black birds, who blew the air and winds from their beaks.  Modern grammarians profess themselves unable to explain the exact meaning of the name Chiminigagua, but it is a compound, in which, evidently, appear the words chie, light, and gagua, Sun.

Other names applied to this hero-god were Nemterequeteba, Bochica, and Zuhe, or Sua, the last mentioned being also the ordinary word for the Sun.  He was reported to have been of light complexion, and when the Spaniards first arrived they were supposed to be his envoys, and were called sua or gagua, just as from the memory of a similar myth in Peru they were addressed as Viracochas.

In his form as Bochica, he is represented as the supreme male divinity, whose female associate is the Rainbow, Cuchaviva, goddess of rains and waters, of the fertility of the fields, of medicine, and of child-bearing in women, a relationship which I have already explained.

Wherever the widespread Tupi-Guaranay race extended-from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and the boundless plains of the Pampas, north to the northernmost islands of the West Indian Archipelago-the early explorers found the natives piously attributing their knowledge of the arts of life to a venerable and benevolent old man whom they called “Our Ancestor,” Tamu, or Tume, or Zume.

The early Jesuit missionaries to the Guaranís and affiliated tribes of Paraguay and southern Brazil, have much to say of this personage, and some of them were convinced that he could have been no other than the Apostle St. Thomas on his proselytizing journey around the world.

The legend was that Pay Zume, as he was called in Paraguay (Pay = magician, diviner, priest), came from the East, from the Sun-rising, in years long gone by.  He instructed the people in the arts of hunting and agriculture, especially in the culture and preparation of the manioca plant, their chief source of vegetable food.  Near the city of Assumption is situated a lofty rock, around which, says the myth, he was accustomed to gather the people, while he stood above them on its summit, and delivered his instructions and his laws, just as did Quetzalcoatl from the top of the mountain Tzatzitepec, the Hill of Shouting.  The spot where he stood is still marked by the impress of his feet, which the pious natives of a later day took pride in pointing out as a convincing proof that their ancestors received and remembered the preachings of St. Thomas. This was not a suggestion of their later learning, but merely a christianized term given to their authentic ancient legend.  As early as 1552, when Father Emanuel Nobrega was visiting the missions of Brazil, he heard the legend, and learned of a locality where not only the marks of the feet, but also of the hands of the hero-god had been indelibly impressed upon the hard rock.  Not satisfied with the mere report, he visited the spot and saw them with his own eyes, but indulged in some skepticism as to their origin.

The story was that wherever this hero-god walked, he left behind him a well-marked path, which was permanent, and as the Muyscas of New Granada pointed out the path of Bochica, so did the Guaranays that of Zume, which the missionaries regarded “not without astonishment." He lived a certain length of time with his people and then left them, going back over the ocean toward the East, according to some accounts.  But according to others, he was driven away by his stiff-necked and unwilling auditors, who had become tired of his advice.  They pursued him to the bank of a river, and there, thinking that the quickest riddance of him was to kill him, they discharged their arrows at him.  But he caught the arrows in his hand and hurled them back, and dividing the waters of the river by his divine power he walked between them to the other bank, dry-shod, and disappeared from their view in the distance.

The connection of this myth with the course of the sun in the sky, “the path of the bright God,” as it is called in the Veda, appears obvious.  So also in later legend we read of the wonderful slot or trail of the dragon Fafnir across the Glittering Heath, and many cognate instances, which mythologists now explain by the same reference.]

Like all the hero-gods, he left behind him the well-remembered promise that at some future day he should return to them, and that a race of men should come in time, to gather them into towns and rule them in peace. These predictions were carefully noted by the missionaries, and regarded as the “unconscious prophecies of heathendom” of the advent of Christianity; but to me they bear too unmistakably the stamp of the light-myth I have been following up in so many localities of the New World for me to entertain a doubt about their origin and meaning.

I have not yet exhausted the sources from which I could bring evidence of the widespread presence of the elements of this mythical creation in America.  But probably I have said enough to satisfy the reader on this point.  At any rate it will be sufficient if I close the list with some manifest fragments of the myth, picked out from the confused and generally modern reports we have of the religions of the Athabascan race.  This stem is one of the most widely distributed in North America, extending across the whole continent south of the Eskimos, and scattered toward the warmer latitudes quite into Mexico.  It is low down in the intellectual scale, its component tribes are usually migratory savages, and its dialects are extremely synthetic and of difficult phonetics, requiring as many as sixty-five letters for their proper orthography.  No wonder, therefore, that we have but limited knowledge of their mental life.

Conspicuous in their myths is the tale of the Two Brothers.  These mysterious beings are upon the earth before man appears.  Though alone, they do not agree, and the one attacks and slays the other.  Another brother appears on the scene, who seems to be the one slain, who has come to life, and the two are given wives by the Being who was the Creator of things.  These two women were perfectly beautiful, but invisible to the eyes of mortals.  The one was named, The Woman of the Light or The Woman of the Morning; the other was the Woman of Darkness or the Woman of Evening.  The brothers lived together in one tent with these women, who each in turn went out to work.  When the Woman of Light was at work, it was daytime; when the Woman of Darkness was at her labors, it was night.

In the course of time one of the brothers disappeared and the other determined to select a wife from one of the two women, as it seems he had not yet chosen.  He watched what the Woman of Darkness did in her absence, and discovered that she descended into the waters and enjoyed the embraces of a monster, while the Woman of Light passed her time in feeding white birds.  In course of time the former brought forth black man-serpents, while the Woman of Light was delivered of beautiful boys with white skins.  The master of the house killed the former with his arrows, but preserved the latter, and marrying the Woman of Light, became the father of the human race, and especially of the Dene Dindjie, who have preserved the memory of him.

In another myth of this stock, clearly a version of the former, this father of the race is represented as a mighty bird, called Yel, or Yale, or Orelbale, from the root ell, a term they apply to everything supernatural.  He took to wife the daughter of the Sun (the Woman of Light), and by her begat the race of man.  He formed the dry land for a place for them to live upon, and stocked the rivers with salmon, that they might have food.  When he enters his nest it is day, but when he leaves it it is night; or, according to another myth, he has the two women for wives, the one of whom makes the day, the other the night.

In the beginning Yel was white in plumage, but he had an enemy, by name Cannook, with whom he had various contests, and by whose machinations he was turned black.  Yel is further represented as the god of the winds and storms, and of the thunder and lightning.

Thus we find, even in this extremely low specimen of the native race, the same basis for their mythology as in the most cultivated nations of Central America.  Not only this; it is the same basis upon which is built the major part of the sacred stories of all early religions, in both continents; and the excellent Father Petitot, who is so much impressed by these resemblances that he founds upon them a learned argument to prove that the Dene are of oriental extraction, would have written more to the purpose had his acquaintance with American religions been as extensive as it was with those of Asiatic origin.

There is one point in all these myths which I wish to bring out forcibly.  That is, the distinction which is everywhere drawn between the God of Light and the Sun.  Unless this distinction is fully comprehended, American mythology loses most of its meaning.

The assertion has been so often repeated, even down to the latest writers, that the American Indians were nearly all sun-worshipers, that I take pains formally to contradict it.  Neither the Sun nor the Spirit of the Sun was their chief divinity.

Of course, the daily history of the appearance and disappearance of light is intimately connected with the apparent motion of the sun.  Hence, in the myths there is often a seeming identification of the two, which I have been at no pains to avoid.  But the identity is superficial only; it entirely disappears in other parts of the myth, and the conceptions, as fundamentally distinct, must be studied separately, to reach accurate results.  It is an easy, but by no means a profound method of treating these religions, to dismiss them all by the facile explanations of “animism,” and “sun and moon worship.”

I have said, and quoted strong authority to confirm the opinion, that the native tribes of America have lost ground in morals and have retrograded in their religious life since the introduction of Christianity.  Their own faiths, though lower in form, had in them the germs of a religious and moral evolution, more likely, with proper regulation, to lead these people to a higher plane of thought than the Aryan doctrines which were forced upon them.

This may seem a daring, even a heterodox assertion, but I think that most modern ethnologists will agree that it is no more possible for races in all stages of culture and of widely different faculties to receive with benefit any one religion, than it is for them to thrive under one form of government, or to adopt with advantage one uniform plan of building houses.  The moral and religious life is a growth, and the brash wood of ancient date cannot be grafted on the green stem.  It is well to remember that the heathendoms of America were very far from wanting living seeds of sound morality and healthy mental education.  I shall endeavor to point this out in a few brief paragraphs.

In their origin in the human mind, religion and morality have nothing in common.  They are even antagonistic.  At the root of all religions is the passionate desire for the widest possible life, for the most unlimited exercise of all the powers.  The basis of all morality is self-sacrifice, the willingness to give up our wishes to the will of another.  The criterion of the power of a religion is its ability to command this sacrifice; the criterion of the excellence of a religion is the extent to which its commands coincide with the good of the race, with the lofty standard of the “categorical imperative.”

With these axioms well in mind, we can advance with confidence to examine the claims of a religion.  It will rise in the scale just in proportion as its behests, were they universally adopted, would permanently increase the happiness of the human race.

In their origin, as I have said, morality and religion are opposites; but they are opposites which inevitably attract and unite.  The first lesson of all religions is that we gain by giving, that to secure any end we must sacrifice something.  This, too, is taught by all social intercourse, and, therefore, an acute German psychologist has set up the formula,” All manners are moral," because they all imply a subjection of the personal will of the individual to the general will of those who surround him, as expressed in usage and custom.

Even the religion which demands bloody sacrifices, which forces its votaries to futile and abhorrent rites, is at least training its adherents in the virtues of obedience and renunciation, in endurance and confidence.

But concerning American religions I need not have recourse to such a questionable vindication.  They held in them far nobler elements, as is proved beyond cavil by the words of many of the earliest missionaries themselves.  Bigoted and bitter haters of the native faiths, as they were, they discovered in them so much that was good, so much that approximated to the purer doctrines that they themselves came to teach, that they have left on record many an attempt to prove that there must, in some remote and unknown epoch, have come Christian teachers to the New World, St. Thomas, St. Bartholomew, monks from Ireland, or Asiatic disciples, to acquaint the natives with such salutary doctrines.  It is precisely in connection with the myths which I have been relating in this volume that these theories were put forth, and I have referred to them in various passages.

The facts are as stated, but the credit of developing these elevated moral conceptions must not be refused to the red race.  They are its own property, the legitimate growth of its own religious sense.

The hero-god, the embodiment of the Light of Day, is essentially a moral and beneficent creation.  Whether his name be Michabo, Ioskeha, or Quetzalcoatl, Itzamna, Viracocha or Tamu, he is always the giver of laws, the instructor in the arts of social life, the founder of commonwealths, the patron of agriculture.  He casts his influence in favor of peace, and against wars and deeds of violence.  He punishes those who pursue iniquity, and he favors those who work for the good of the community.

In many instances he sets an example of chaste living, of strict temperance, of complete subjection of the lusts and appetites.  I have but to refer to what I have already said of the Maya Kukulcan and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, to show this.  Both are particularly noted as characters free from the taint of indulgence.

Thus it occurred that the early monks often express surprise that these, whom they chose to call savages and heathens, had developed a moral law of undeniable purity.  “The matters that Bochica taught,” says the chronicler Piedrahita, “were certainly excellent, inasmuch as these natives hold as right to do just the same that we do.”  “The priests of these Muyscas,” he goes on to say, “lived most chastely and with great purity of life, insomuch that even in eating, their food was simple and of small quantity, and they refrained altogether from women and marriage.  Did one transgress in this respect, he was dismissed from the priesthood."

The prayers addressed to these deities breathe as pure a spirit of devotion as many now heard in Christian lands.  Change the names, and some of the formulas preserved by Christobal de Molina and Sahagun would not jar on the ears of a congregation in one of our own churches.

Although sanguinary rites were common, they were not usual in the worship of these highest divinities, but rather as propitiations to the demons of the darkness, or the spirits of the terrible phenomena of nature.  The mild god of light did not demand them.

To appreciate the effect of all this on the mind of the race, let it be remembered that these culture-heroes were also the creators, the primal and most potent of divinities, and that usually many temples and a large corps of priests were devoted to their worship, at least in the nations of higher civilization.  These votaries were engaged in keeping alive the myth, in impressing the supposed commands of the deity on the people, and in imitating him in example and precept.  Thus they had formed a lofty ideal of man, and were publishing this ideal to their fellows.  Certainly this could not fail of working to the good of the nation, and of elevating and purifying its moral conceptions.

That it did so we have ample evidence in the authentic accounts of the ancient society as it existed before the Europeans destroyed and corrupted it, and in the collections of laws, all distinctly stamped with the seal of religion, which have been preserved, as they were in vogue in Anahuac, Utatlan, Peru and other localities. Any one who peruses these will see that the great moral principles, the radical doctrines of individual virtue, were clearly recognized and deliberately enforced as divine and civil precepts in these communities.  Moreover, they were generally and cheerfully obeyed, and the people of many of these lands were industrious, peaceable, moral, and happy, far more so than they have ever been since.

There was also a manifest progress in the definition of the idea of God, that is, of a single infinite intelligence as the source and controlling power of phenomena.  We have it on record that in Peru this was the direct fruit of the myth of Viracocha.  It is related that the Inca Yupangui published to his people that to him had appeared Viracocha, with admonition that he alone was lord of the world, and creator of all things; that he had made the heavens, the sun, and man; and that it was not right that these, his works, should receive equal homage with himself.  Therefore, the Inca decreed that the image of Viracocha should thereafter be assigned supremacy to those of all other divinities, and that no tribute nor sacrifice should be paid to him, for He was master of all the earth, and could take from it as he chose. This was evidently a direct attempt on the part of an enlightened ruler to lift his people from a lower to a higher form of religion, from idolatry to theism.  The Inca even went so far as to banish all images of Viracocha from his temples, so that this, the greatest of gods, should be worshiped as an immaterial spirit only.

A parallel instance is presented in Aztec annals.  Nezahualcoyotzin, an enlightened ruler of Tezcuco, about 1450, was both a philosopher and a poet, and the songs which he left, seventy in number, some of which are still preserved, breathe a spirit of emancipation from the idolatrous superstition of his day.  He announced that there was one only god, who sustained and created all things, and who dwelt above the ninth heaven, out of sight of man.  No image was fitting for this divinity, nor did he ever appear bodily to the eyes of men.  But he listened to their prayers and received their souls.

These traditions have been doubted, for no other reason than because it was assumed that such thoughts were above the level of the red race.  But the proper names and titles, unquestionably ancient and genuine, which I have analyzed in the preceding pages refute this supposition.

We may safely affirm that other and stronger instances of the kind could be quoted, had the early missionaries preserved more extensively the sacred chants and prayers of the natives.  In the Maya tongue of Yucatan a certain number of them have escaped destruction, and although they are open to some suspicion of having been colored for proselytizing purposes, there is direct evidence from natives who were adults at the time of the Conquest that some of their priests had predicted the time should come when the worship of one only God should prevail.  This was nothing more than another instance of the monotheistic idea finding its expression, and its apparition is not more extraordinary in Yucatan or Peru than in ancient Egypt or Greece.

The actual religious and moral progress of the natives was designedly ignored and belittled by the early missionaries and conquerors.  Bishop Las Casas directly charges those of his day with magnifying the vices of the Indians and the cruelties of their worship; and even such a liberal thinker as Roger Williams tells us that he would not be present at their ceremonies, “Lest I should have been partaker of Satan’s Inventions and Worships." This same prejudice completely blinded the first visitors to the New World, and it was only the extravagant notion that Christianity had at some former time been preached here that saved us most of the little that we have on record.

Yet now and then the truth breaks through even this dense veil of prejudice.  For instance, I have quoted in this chapter the evidence of the Spanish chroniclers to the purity of the teaching attributed to Bochica.  The effect of such doctrines could not be lost on a people who looked upon him at once as an exemplar and a deity.  Nor was it.  The Spaniards have left strong testimony to the pacific and virtuous character of that nation, and its freedom from the vices so prevalent in lower races.

Now, as I dismiss from the domain of actual fact all these legendary instructors, the question remains, whence did these secluded tribes obtain the sentiments of justice and morality which they loved to attribute to their divine founders, and, in a measure, to practice themselves?

The question is pertinent, and with its answer I may fitly close this study in American native religions.

If the theory that I have advocated is correct, these myths had to do at first with merely natural occurrences, the advent and departure of the daylight, the winds, the storm and the rains.  The beneficent and injurious results of these phenomena were attributed to their personifications.  Especially was the dispersal of darkness by the light regarded as the transaction of all most favorable to man.  The facilities that it gave him were imputed to the goodness of the personified Spirit of Light, and by a natural association of ideas, the benevolent emotions and affections developed by improving social intercourse were also brought into relation to this kindly Being.  They came to be regarded as his behests, and, in the national mind, he grew into a teacher of the friendly relations of man to man, and an ideal of those powers which “make for righteousness.”  Priests and chieftains favored the acceptance of these views, because they felt their intrinsic wisdom, and hence the moral evolution of the nation proceeded steadily from its mythology.  That the results achieved were similar to those taught by the best religions of the eastern world should not excite any surprise, for the basic principles of ethics are the same everywhere and in all time.