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Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
This creation myth of the New World is a work of great value, for by aid of it we can bring order into mythology, and reconstruct, at least in outline, and provisionally, that early system of belief which was common to all races: a system which, though expressed in many languages and in endlessly varying details, has one meaning, and was, in the fullest sense of the word, one—a religion truly catholic and œcumenical, for it was believed in by all people, wherever resident, and believed in with a vividness of faith, and a sincerity of attachment, which no civilized man can even imagine, unless he has had long experience of primitive races.13 [56]
The war between the gods continued till it produced on land, in the water, and the air, all creatures that move, and all plants that grow. There is not a beast, bird, fish, reptile, insect, or plant which is not a fallen divinity; and for every one noted there is a story of its previous existence.
This transformation of the former people, or divinities, of America was finished just before the present race of men—that is, the Indians—appeared.14
In some mythologies a few personages who are left unchanged at the eve of man’s coming transform themselves voluntarily. The details of the change vary from tribe to tribe, but in all it takes place in some described way, and forms part of the general change, or metamorphosis, which is the vital element in the American system. In many, perhaps in all, the mythologies, there is an account of how some of the former people, or gods, instead of fighting and taking part in the struggle of creation and being transformed, retained their original character, and either went above the sky or sailed away westward to where the sky comes down, and passed out under it, and beyond, to a pleasant region where they live in delight. This is that contingent to which I have referred, that part of the “first people” in which no passion was developed; they remained in primitive simplicity, undifferentiated, and are happy at present. They correspond to those gods of classic antiquity who enjoyed themselves apart, and took no interest whatever in the sufferings or the joys of mankind.15
Everything in nature had a tale of its own, if some one would but tell it, and during the epoch of constructive power in the race,—the epoch when languages were built up and great stories made,—few things of importance to people of that time were left unconsidered; hence there was among the Indians of America a volume of tales as immense, one might say, as an ocean river. This statement I make in view of materials which I have gathered myself, and which are still unpublished,—materials which, though voluminous, are comparatively meager, merely a hint of what in some tribes was lost, and of what in others is still uncollected.…
From what is known of the mind of antiquity, and from what data we have touching savage life in the present, we may affirm as a theory that primitive beliefs in all places are of the same system essentially as the American. In that system, every individual existence beyond man is a divinity, but a divinity under sentence,—a divinity weighed down by fate, a divinity with a history behind it, a history which is tragedy or comedy as the case may be. These histories extend along the whole line of experience, and include every combination conceivable to primitive man.16
During eight years of investigation among Indian tribes in North America, I obtained the various parts of that Creation myth mentioned in this introduction, from tribes that were remote from one another, and in different degrees of development. Such tales I found in the east, in the central regions, and finally in California and Oregon. Over this space, the extreme points of which are 3,000 miles apart, each tribe has the Creation myth,—one portion being brought out with special emphasis in one tribe, and another portion in a different one. In tribes least developed, the earliest tales are very distinct, and specially valuable on some points relating to the origin and fall of the gods. Materials from the extreme west are more archaic and simple than those of the east. In fact the two regions present the two extremes, in North America, of least developed and most developed, aboriginal thought. In this is their interest. They form one complete system.17 [57]
To sum up, we may say, that the Indian tales reveal to us a whole system of religion, philosophy, and social polity.…
Those tales form a complete series. The whole mental and social life of the race to which they belong is evident in them.18
The results to be obtained from a comparison of systems of thought like the Indian and the Gaelic would be great, if made thoroughly. If extended to all races, such a comparison would render possible a history of the human mind in a form such as few men at present even dream of,—a history with a basis as firm as that which lies under geology.… We must make large additions indeed to our knowledge of primitive peoples. We must complete the work begun in America.… The undertaking is arduous, and there is need to engage in it promptly. The forces of civilized society, at present, are destroying on all sides, not saving that which is precious in primitive people. Civilized society supposes that man, in an early degree of development, should be stripped of all that he owns, both material and mental, and then be refashioned to serve the society that stripped him. If he will not yield to the stripping and training, then slay him.19
In the United States, little was accomplished till recent years; of late, however, public interest has been roused somewhat, and, since Major Powell entered the field, and became Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, more has been done in studying the native races of America than had been done from the discovery of the country up to that time.18
Of course there is no true information in the American ethnic religion as to the real changes which affected the world around us; but there is in it, as in all systems like it, true information regarding the history of the human mind. Every ethnic religion gives us documentary evidence. It gives us positive facts which, in their own sphere, are as true as are facts of geology in the history of the earth’s crust and surface. They do not tell us what took place in the world without, in the physical universe, they had no means of doing so; but they do tell us what took place at certain periods in the world of mind, in the interior of man.20
An ethnic or primitive religion is one which belongs to people of one blood and language, people who increased and developed together with the beliefs of every sort which belong to them. Such a religion includes every species of knowledge, every kind of custom, institution, and art. Every aboriginal nation or human brood has its gods. All people of one blood and origin are under the immediate care and supervision of their gods, and preserve continual communication and converse with them. According to their own beliefs, such people received from their gods all that they have, all that they practice, all that they know. Such people, while their blood is unmixed and their society unconquered, adhere to their gods with the utmost fidelity.
The bonds which connect a nation with its gods, bonds of faith, and those which connect the individuals of that nation with one another, bonds of blood, are the strongest known to primitive man, and are the only social bonds in prehistoric ages.21
A good deal has been given to the world of late on mythology by able writers who with good materials would attain good results; but as the materials at their disposal are faulty, much of their work with all its cleverness is mainly a persistent pouring of the empty into the void. [58]
We have seen attempts made to show that real gods have been developed by savage men from their own dead savage chiefs. Such a thing has never been done since the human race began, and it could never have been imagined by any man who knew the ideas of primitive races from actual experience or from competent testimony. The most striking thing in all savage belief is the low estimate put on man when unaided by divine, uncreated power. In Indian belief every object in the universe is divine except man.22…
Vegetable gods, so called, have been scoffed at by writers on mythology. The scoff is baseless, for the first people were turned, or turned themselves, into trees and various plants as frequently as into beasts and other creatures. Maize or Indian corn is a transformed god who gave himself to be eaten to save man from hunger and death. When Spanish priests saw little cakes of meal eaten ceremonially by Indians, and when the latter informed them that they were eating their god, the good priests thought this a diabolical mockery of the Holy Sacrament, and a blasphemous trick of Satan to ruin poor ignorant Indians.
I have a myth in which the main character is a violent and cruel old personage who is merciless and faith-breaking, who does no end of damage till he is cornered at last by a good hero and turned into the wild parsnip. Before transformation this old parsnip could travel swiftly, but now he must stay in one place, and of course kills people only when they eat him.
The treasure saved to science by the primitive race of America is unique in value and high significance. The first result from it is to carry us back through untold centuries to that epoch when man made the earliest collective and consistent explanation of this universe and its origin.
Occupying this vantage-ground, we can now throw a flood of light on all those mythologies and ethnic religions or systems of thought from which are lost in part, great or small, the materials needed to prove the foundation and beginnings of each of them. In this condition are all ancient recorded religions, whether of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, or India.23
Again, in speaking of the first people, the ancients, or the man-beings of the oldest myth, or rather cycle of myths, in America, Mr. Curtin continues his exposition of the significance of these poetic figures:
After they had lived on an indefinite period, they appear as a vast number of groups, which form two camps, which may be called the good and the bad. In the good camp are the persons who originate all the different kinds of food, establish all institutions, arts, games, amusements, dances, and religious ceremonies for the coming race.
In the other camp are cunning, deceitful beings, ferocious and hungry man-eaters—the harmful powers of every description. The heroes of the good camp overcome these one after another by stratagem, superior skill, swiftness, or the use of the all-powerful wish; but they are immortal, and, though overcome, can not be destroyed.…
When the present race of men (that is, Indians) appear on the scene, the people of the previous order of affairs have vanished. One division, vast in number, a part of the good and all the bad ones, have become the beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects, plants, stones, cold, heat, light, darkness, fire, rain, snow, earthquake, sun, moon, stars—have become, in fact, every living thing, object, agency, phenomenon, process, and power outside of man. Another [59]party much smaller in number, who succeeded in avoiding entanglement in the struggle of preparing the world for man, left the earth. According to some myths they went beyond the sky to the upper land; according to others they sailed in boats over the ocean to the West—sailed till they went out beyond the setting sun, beyond the line where the sky touches the earth. There they are living now free from pain, disease, and death, which came into the world just before they left, but before the coming of man and through the agency of this first people.…
This earliest American myth cycle really describes a period in the beginning of which all things—and there was no thing then which was not a person—lived in company without danger to each other or trouble. This was the period of primæval innocence, of which we hear so many echoes in tradition and early literature, when that infinite variety of character and quality now manifest in the universe was still dormant and hidden, practically uncreated. This was the “golden age” of so many mythologies—the “golden age” dreamed of so often, but never seen by mortal man; a period when, in their original form and power, the panther and the deer, the wolf and the antelope, lay down together, when the rattlesnake was as harmless as the rabbit, when trees could talk and flowers sing, when both could move as nimbly as the swiftest on earth.
Such, in a sketch exceedingly meager and imperfect, a hint rather than a sketch, is the first great cycle of American mythology—the creation-myth of the New World. From this cycle are borrowed the characters and machinery for myths of later construction and stories of inferior importance; myths relating to the action of all observed forces and phenomena; struggles of the seasons, winds, light and darkness; and stories in great numbers containing adventures without end of the present animals, birds, reptiles, and insects—people of the former world in their fallen state.…
To whatever race they may belong, the earliest myths, whether of ancient record or recent collection, point with unerring indication to the same source as those of America, for the one reason that there is no other source. The personages of any given body of myths are such manifestations of force in the world around them, or the result of such manifestations, as the ancient myth-makers observed; and whether they went backwards or forwards, these were the only personages possible to them, because they were the only personages accessible to their senses or conceivable to their minds.…
Since they had passions varying like those of men, the myth-makers narrate the origin of these passions, and carried their personages back to a period of peaceful and innocent chaos, when there was no motive as yet in existence. After a while the shock came. The motive appeared in the form of revenge for acts done through cupidity or ignorance; strife began, and never left the world of the gods till one quota of them was turned into animals, plants, heavenly bodies, everything in the universe, and the other went away unchanged to a place of happy enjoyment.
All myths have the same origin, and all run parallel up to a certain point, which may be taken as the point to which the least-developed people have risen.24
And Mr. Curtin further says:
At that period the earth … was occupied by personages who are called people, though it is well understood at all times that they were not human; they were persons, individuals.25
[60]
To trace the ancestral sources of a people’s thought and character, a careful and critical study of the myths, and later of the mythology of that people, first exclusively and then comparatively, is required. This study deals with ideas and concepts expressed by three well-known Greek terms, mythos, epos, and logos, and also with those expressed by the term resulting from the combination of the first and the last of these words. These are among many words of human speech which comprise all human experience and history. It is remarkable also that each may be translated into English by the term “word.”
The word “mythology” is a philosophic term composed of two very interesting and instructive Greek words, mythos and logos.
The first term, mythos, denoted whatever was thoughtfully uttered by the mouth of savage and barbaric men—the expression of thought which had been shut in to mature—a story of prehistoric time, a naïve, creative concept stated in terms of human life and activity—a poem. In matters of religion and cosmogony such an utterance was final and conclusive to those men.
The second term, logos, having at the beginning approximately the same meaning as mythos, became in Greek philosophic thinking the symbol or expression of the internal constitution as well as the external form and sign of thought, and so became “the expression of exact thought—… exact because it corresponds to universal and unchanging principles,” reaching “its highest exaltation in becoming not only reason in man but the reason in the universe—the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the Son of God, God himself” (Curtin). The logos is thus the expression of the philosophy of men measurably cultured; it is the intelligent exegesis of the content of the mythos in terms of objective and subjective reality; it is scientific because it is logical; it is the later literary criticism—the analytic and synthetic treatment of myths and epics. So, in the experience of every people having an ethnic past, mythos and logos represent two well-defined stages of human thought—the naïve and the philosophic—and also the elder time and the modern. So mythology may be defined as the science or the logic of the myth; it belongs to times of relatively high culture and does not flourish in savagery, for savages have only myths. It may be well to note that a third stage of thought is expressed in the Greek term epos, which is the adornment or garbing and dramatizing of the myth concepts in poetic form, in story, saga, and legend—the epic.
Only modern research with its critical exegesis and sympathetic interpretation brings down the study of the concepts of the myths of the fathers measurably to the character of a science.
The highest type of poetry expresses itself in myth, in the epos, and in the logos. For men of undeveloped thought, of inchoate [61]mentation, this is the mental process through which they dimly apprehend the significance of the complex and closely interrelated phenomena of life and of environing nature, and the medium by which they harmonize the ceaseless functioning of these with their own experience, with the activity of their own subconscious mind, and with the divine promptings and visions vouchsafed them by the dawn of their own superconscious intellect.
The initial step of the process is the ingenuous act of the imagination in personifying, yea, in ideally humanizing, the bodies, elements, and forces of environing nature; as, for instance, the picturing by the Iroquois and their neighbors, the Algonquian, of snow as the living body of a man formed by the God of Winter, whose breath was potent enough to drive animals and birds into their winter retreats and some even into hibernation, represented as the hiding of the animals from his brother, the Master or God of Life.
The next step in the process is the socialization of this vast company—the imputation of life, soul, purpose, and a rational rôle to them constitutes the epic, which is also the poet’s handiwork.