But while thus regretting the use he has made of them, all interested in American antiquity cannot too much thank this indefatigable explorer for the priceless materials he has unearthed in the neglected libraries of Spain and Central America, and laid before the public. For the present purpose the most significant of these is the Sacred National Book of the Quiches, a tribe of Guatemala. This contains their legends, written in the original tongue, and transcribed by Father Francisco Ximenes about 1725. The manuscripts of this missionary were used early in the present century, by Don Felix Cabrera, but were supposed to be entirely lost even by the Abbé Brasseur himself in 1850 (Lettre à M. le Duc de Valmy, Mexique, Oct. 15, 1850). Made aware of their importance by the expressions of regret used in the Abbés letters, Dr. C. Sherzer, in 1854, was fortunate enough to discover them in the library of the University of San Carlos in the city of Guatemala. The legends were in Quiche with a Spanish translation and scholia. The Spanish was copied by Dr. Scherzer and published in Vienna, in 1856, under the title Las Historias del Origen de los Indios de Guatemala, por el R. P. F. Francisco Ximenes. In 1855 the Abbé Brasseur took a copy of the original which he brought out at Paris in 1861, with a translation of his own, under the title Vuh Popol: Le Livre Sacré des Quichés et les Mythes de lAntiquité Américaine. Internal evidence proves that these legends were written down by a converted native some time in the seventeenth century. They carry the national history back about two centuries, beyond which all is professedly mythical. Although both translations are colored by the peculiar views of their makers, this is incomparably the most complete and valuable work on American mythology extant.
Another authority of inestimable value has been placed within the reach of scholars during the last few years. This is the Relations de la Nouvelle France, containing the annual reports of the Jesuit missionaries among the Iroquois and Algonkins from and after 1611. My references to this are always to the reprint at Quebec, 1858. Of not less excellence for another tribe, the Creeks, is the brief Sketch of the Creek Country, by Col. Benjamin Hawkins, written about 1800, and first published in full by the Georgia Historical Society in 1848. Most of the other works to which I have referred are too well known to need any special examination here, or will be more particularly mentioned in the foot-notes when quoted.
CHAPTER II.
THE IDEA OF GOD
An intuition common to the species.Words expressing it in American languages derived either from ideas of above in space, or of life manifested by breath.Examples.No conscious monotheism, and but little idea of immateriality discoverable.Still less any moral dualism of deities, the Great Good Spirit and the Great Bad Spirit being alike terms and notions of foreign importation.
IF we accept the definition that mythology is the idea of God expressed in symbol, figure, and narrative, and always struggling toward a clearer utterance, it is well not only to trace this idea in its very earliest embodiment in language, but also, for the sake of comparison, to ask what is its latest and most approved expression. The reply to this is given us by Immanuel Kant. He has shown that our reason, dwelling on the facts of experience, constantly seeks the principles which connect them together, and only rests satisfied in the conviction that there is a highest and first principle which reconciles all their discrepancies and binds them into one. This he calls the Ideal of Reason. It must be true, for it is evolved from the laws of reason, our only test of truth. Furthermore, the sense of personality and the voice of conscience, analyzed to their sources, can only be explained by the assumption of an infinite personality and an absolute standard of right. Or, if to some all this appears but wire-drawn metaphysical subtlety, they are welcome to the definition of the realist, that the idea of God is the sum of those intelligent activities which the individual, reasoning from the analogy of his own actions, imagines to be behind and to bring about natural phenomena.33 If either of these be correct, it were hard to conceive how any tribe or even any sane man could be without some notion of divinity.
Certainly in America no instance of its absence has been discovered. Obscure, grotesque, unworthy it often was, but everywhere man was oppressed with a sensus numinis, a feeling that invisible, powerful agencies were at work around him, who, as they willed, could help or hurt him. In every heart was an altar to the Unknown God. Not that it was customary to attach any idea of unity to these unseen powers. The supposition that in ancient times and in very unenlightened conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed, which afterwards at various times was revived by reformers, is a belief that should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises of a state of nature ceased to be the themes of philosophers. We are speaking of a people little capable of abstraction. The exhibitions of force in nature seemed to them the manifestations of that mysterious power felt by their self-consciousness; to combine these various manifestations and recognize them as the operations of one personality, was a step not easily taken. Yet He is not far from every one of us. Whenever man thinks clearly, or feels deeply, he conceives God as self-conscious unity, says Carriere, with admirable insight; and elsewhere, we have monotheism, not in contrast to polytheism, not clear to the thought, but in living intuition in the religious sentiments.34
Thus it was among the Indians. Therefore a word is usually found in their languages analogous to none in any European tongue, a word comprehending all manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity. It has been rendered spirit, demon, God, devil, mystery, magic, but commonly and rather absurdly by the English and French, medicine. In the Algonkin dialects this word is manito and oki, in Iroquois oki and otkon, the Dakota has wakan, the Aztec teotl, the Quichua huaca, and the Maya ku. They all express in its most general form the idea of the supernatural. And as in this word, supernatural, we see a transfer of a conception of place, and that it literally means that which is above the natural world, so in such as we can analyze of these vague and primitive terms the same trope appears discoverable. Wakan as an adverb means above, oki is but another orthography for oghee, and otkon seems allied to hetken, both of which have the same signification.35
The transfer is no mere figure of speech, but has its origin in the very texture of the human mind. The heavens, the upper regions, are in every religion the supposed abode of the divine. What is higher is always the stronger and the nobler; a superior is one who is better than we are, and therefore a chieftain in Algonkin is called oghee-ma, the higher one. There is, moreover, a naif and spontaneous instinct which leads man in his ecstasies of joy, and in his paroxysms of fear or pain, to lift his hands and eyes to the overhanging firmament. There the sun and bright stars sojourn, emblems of glory and stability. Its azure vault has a mysterious attraction which invites the eye to gaze longer and longer into its infinite depths.36 Its color brings thoughts of serenity, peace, sunshine, and warmth. Even the rudest hunting tribes felt these sentiments, and as a metaphor in their speeches, and as a paint expressive of friendly design, blue was in wide use among them.37
So it came to pass that the idea of God was linked to the heavens long ere man asked himself, are the heavens material and God spiritual, is He one, or is He many? Numerous languages bear trace of this. The Latin Deus, the Greek Zeus, the Sanscrit Dyaus, the Chinese Tien, all originally meant the sky above, and our own word heaven is often employed synonymously with God. There is at first no personification in these expressions. They embrace all unseen agencies, they are void of personality, and yet to the illogical primitive man there is nothing contradictory in making them the object of his prayers. The Mayas had legions of gods; ku, says their historian,38 does not signify any particular god; yet their prayers are sometimes addressed to kue, which is the same word in the vocative case.
As the Latins called their united divinities Superi, those above, so Captain John Smith found that the Powhatans of Virginia employed the word oki, above, in the same sense, and it even had passed into a definite personification among them in the shape of an idol of wood evil-favoredly carved. In purer dialects of the Algonkin it is always indefinite, as in the terms nipoon oki, spirit of summer, pipoon oki, spirit of winter. Perhaps the word was introduced into Iroquois by the Hurons, neighbors and associates of the Algonkins. The Hurons applied it to that demoniac power who rules the seasons of the year, who holds the winds and the waves in leash, who can give fortune to their undertakings, and relieve all their wants.39 In another and far distant branch of the Iroquois, the Nottoways of southern Virginia, it reappears under, the curious form quaker, doubtless a corruption of the Powhatan qui-oki, lesser gods.40 The proper Iroquois name of him to whom they prayed was garonhia, which again turns out on examination to be their common word for sky, and again in all probability from the verbal root gar, to be above.41 In the legends of the Aztecs and Quiches such phrases as Heart of the Sky, Lord of the Sky, Prince of the Azure Planisphere, He above all, are of frequent occurrence, and by a still bolder metaphor, the Araucanians, according to Molina, entitled their greatest god The Soul of the Sky.
This last expression leads to another train of thought. As the philosopher, pondering on the workings of self-consciousness, recognizes that various pathways lead up to God, so the primitive man, in forming his language, sometimes trod one, sometimes another. Whatever else sceptics have questioned, no one has yet presumed to doubt that if a God and a soul exist at all, they are of like essence. This firm belief has left its impress on language in the names devised to express the supernal, the spiritual world. If we seek hints from languages more familiar to us than the tongues of the Indians, and take for example this word spiritual; we find it is from the Latin spirare, to blow, to breathe. If in Latin again we look for the derivation of animus, the mind, anima, the soul, they point to the Greek anemos, wind, and aémi, to blow. In Greek the words for soul or spirit, psuche, pneuma, thumos, all are directly from verbal roots expressing the motion of the wind or the breath. The Hebrew word ruah is translated in the Old Testament sometimes by wind, sometimes by spirit, sometimes by breath. Etymologically, in fact, ghosts and gusts, breaths and breezes, the Great Spirit and the Great Wind, are one and the same. It is easy to guess the reason of this. The soul is the life, the life is the breath. Invisible, imponderable, quickening with vigorous motion, slackening in rest and sleep, passing quite away in death, it is the most obvious sign of life. All nations grasped the analogy and identified the one with the other. But the breath is nothing but wind. How easy, therefore, to look upon the wind that moves up and down and to and fro upon the earth, that carries the clouds, itself unseen, that calls forth the terrible tempests and the various seasons, as the breath, the spirit of God, as God himself? So in the Mosaic record of creation, it is said a mighty wind passed over the formless sea and brought forth the world, and when the Almighty gave to the clay a living soul, he is said to have breathed into it the wind of lives.
Armed with these analogies, we turn to the primitive tongues of America, and find them there as distinct as in the Old World. In Dakota niya is literally breath, figuratively life; in Netela piuts is life, breath, and soul; silla, in Eskimo, means air, it means wind, but it is also the word that conveys the highest idea of the world as a whole, and the reasoning faculty. The supreme existence they call Sillam Innua, Owner of the Air, or of the All; or Sillam Nelega, Lord of the Air or Wind. In the Yakama tongue of Oregon wkrisha signifies there is wind, wkrishwit, life; with the Aztecs, ehecatl expressed both air, life, and the soul, and personified in their myths it was said to have been born of the breath of Tezcatlipoca, their highest divinity, who himself is often called Yoalliehecatl, the Wind of Night.42
The descent is, indeed, almost imperceptible which leads to the personification of the wind as God, which merges this manifestation of life and power in one with its unseen, unknown cause. Thus it was a worthy epithet which the Creeks applied to their supreme invisible ruler, when they addressed him as Esaugetuh Emissee, Master of Breath, and doubtless it was at first but a title of equivalent purport which the Cherokees, their neighbors, were wont to employ, Oonawleh unggi, Eldest of Winds, but rapidly leading to a complete identification of the divine with the natural phenomena of meteorology. This seems to have taken place in the same group of nations, for the original Choctaw word for Deity was Hushtoli, the Storm Wind.43 The idea, indeed, was constantly being lost in the symbol. In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan, a name of no signification in their language, one which their remote ancestors brought with them from the Antilles, which finds its meaning in the ancient tongue of Haiti, and which, under the forms of hurricane, ouragan, orkan, was adopted into European marine languages as the native name of the terrible tornado of the Caribbean Sea.44 Mixcohuatl, the Cloud Serpent, chief divinity of several tribes in ancient Mexico, is to this day the correct term in their language for the tropical whirlwind, and the natives of Panama worshipped the same phenomenon under the name Tuyra.45 To kiss the air was in Peru the commonest and simplest sign of adoration to the collective divinities.46
Many writers on mythology have commented on the prominence so frequently given to the winds. None have traced it to its true source. The facts of meteorology have been thought all sufficient for a solution. As if man ever did or ever could draw the idea of God from nature! In the identity of wind with breath, of breath with life, of life with soul, of soul with God, lies the far deeper and far truer reason, whose insensible development I have here traced, in outline indeed, but confirmed by the evidence of language itself.