Characterization of Contents
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
As the basis of religious expression, Seneca-Iroquoian myths and legends, in common with those of all other men, are to most people the empty tales of superstition, the foundations of idolatry, because its gods and deities, forsooth, have never actually existed. But myths are fictitious only in form and dress, while they are true in matter and spirit, for truth is congruity between reason and objects, and hence is eternal and universal.
The human side of these personifications of the processes and phenomena of nature in some instances has become so real and so natural that these beings no longer act or function in terms of the processes of nature only, but as the thaumaturgic fetishes of potent sorcerers, performing wonderful feats of orenda, as they are represented as doing in a large number of these narratives. Now, these accounts are certainly not myths and are not legends in the true sense of the term, but are, rather, fictitious narratives or tales of reputed individual human achievement, quite incredible, of course, as authentic acts of mankind. They center about the reputed affairs of a human being, or do so at least in the view of the modern story-teller.
In the collection of Seneca narratives of Mr. Curtin eight relate to the Genonsgwa (the Stone Coats or Stone Giants), six to Hiʹʼnoⁿʼ (Hinon) or the Thunder People, six to the Dagwanoenyent or Whirlwind People, five to the Shagodiioweq or Wind People, and three to the Djogeon or Dwarf People. It is probable that the two groups of “wind” peoples originally arose from a single personage. From single personages like Hiʹʼnoⁿʼ or Thunder, Shagodiioweq or the Wind, and Dagwanoenyent or the Cyclone or Whirlwind, the [62]story-tellers of to-day have created large bodies of fictitious people, representing a reversal of the original process by which the first great concepts were formed.
But truth seemingly was not readily appreciable by primal men until it was dramatized in saga, in legend, and in myth, in formulas, rites, ceremonies, customs, and material symbols based on those narratives; in short, it had to be couched in terms of human expression and activity. These symbols and figurative expressions bore the fashion and impress of the time and the place, and so before truth so dramatized can be fully understood it must be carefully freed from the garb and trappings of local and temporal use and need; in brief, the literal unreality of myth must be lifted from the substantive and the spiritual realities it symbolizes.
And, for this reason, a deity embodying or representing one of the great recurrent processes of nature or one of the seemingly changeless features of the universe is something vastly more than a mere figment of the human brain; for, although conceived in terms of man, the “deity” in his own sphere and function is limitless in power, incomprehensible in mode of life and action, and abides without beginning of days or end of years—properties which make the god divine and infinitely superior to man, the creature of divine power.
One of the fundamental teachings of the study of the myths of the American Indians is that the so-called Genesis or Creation myths relate the activities and exploits, in more or less detail, of the “elder people,” the “first people,” whom men later call the gods. Rightly understood and sympathetically conceived, these events are not predicated of human beings as such. These narrations explain in just what manner the present order of things in nature arose; they detail what took place in a condition of things different from the present, and which were, in the minds of their relators, the necessary antecedent processes resulting in the establishment of the present order of nature. They treat only of the “first people.” None relate to human beings and none treat of things done since man appeared on earth.
Human in form and in feeling, and yet most divine, were the gods and deities of the ancient Seneca and the other Iroquoian peoples. While the divine social and political organization was necessarily for psychological reasons a close reflex or replica of the human, and although both gods and man derived descent from an original first parent, yet the first divine ancestor was a self-existing god, and the first man was the creature of one of these divine Powers.
The expression of the mythic—the cosmogonic, the cosmologic—in terms of human function and attribute and activity is well illustrated in the legends and myths of the Iroquoian peoples. In these [63]sagas the personifications of the elements and forces of nature are classified as human by the use of the term oñʹgwe, “a human being or mankind” (for the word has both a singular and a plural signification), to designate them.
The task of classifying these narratives, even tentatively, is not an easy one, for the proportion of these stories which seem to be unquestionably fiction to those which are myths and legends is relatively much larger than might be suspected without some investigation. It is clearly wrong to call everything legend or myth when the evidence from the facts seems to forbid such action. For it is evident that very many of the narratives are fiction—stories composed and related to amuse, to mystify, or to glorify some hero, or perhaps to spread the fame of some noted sorcerer and his fetishes.
The setting and the framework of the narrative or story may be taken from a myth and one or more myth episodes incorporated in it, but the result is a fabrication because it does not rest on facts of human experience.
Now, for example, the narratives concerning the so-called Stone Coats, Stone Giants, or the Genonsgwa are not myths but legends. These beings do not figure in the Creation Myth of the Iroquois, but are a brood of beings whose connection with Stone is due to false etymology of a proper name in a myth.26 This is an interesting and instructive example of forgotten derivations of words and names and the resultant new conceptions.
In the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples the Winter Season, by personification, was placed in the class of man-beings with the name, “He-who-is-clad-in-ice,” or “He-who-is-ice-clad.” Now it so happens that the word for ice and for chert or flint stone is derived from a common stem whose fundamental meaning is “glare,” “crystal,” or “what is ice-like.” But the myth-tellers, in order to add an air of the mystical to their recital, did not fail to play on the double meaning of the word for ice, and so represented the Winter Man-being as “The Flint-clad Man-being” rather than as “The Ice-clad Man-being.” And the results of Winter’s cold and frost were told in terms of flint or chert stone, and so bergs and cakes and blocks of ice became in the narration objects of flint and chert stone. Winter’s cold is conveyed from place to place by means of cakes and bergs of ice, which are transformed by the poet into canoes of flint or stone. And in time the stone canoe is transferred from myth to the realm of fiction and legend to glorify the fame of some human hero.
And in the thinking of the Iroquois the Flint-clad Man-being became separated and distinct from the Man-being of the Winter. [64]At this point the fictitious Man-being who was Stone-clad parted company forever with the personified nature force or process that was frost-bearing and ice-clad. The former was gradually reduced to a peculiar species of mankind—the stone giant, for he was represented as stone-clad, while the latter retained his first estate as one of the chief characters in the Genesis myth of the Iroquoian peoples.
The ordinary Iroquoian concept of the Stone Coat or Stone Giant indicates, to the student at least, that the Winter God, the Great Frost Giant of the common Iroquoian Genesis myth, was its source. Aside from the evident etymologic connection, the most significant feature is the constant tradition that the home land of these anthropoid monsters is in the regions of the north where this same authority usually places the burial place of the Winter God after his defeat and death at the hands of his twin brother, the Life God, sometimes called the Master of Life.
The tales which relate how the Stone Coat people are made from perverse men and women first by carefully covering the body with pitch and then by rolling and wallowing in sand and down sand banks repeatedly, shows how utterly forgotten is the true source of this interesting concept among the story tellers and their hearers. There is no doubt that the original “Stone Coat” was the “Ice-Clad Winter God.” In the Curtin collection there are eight stories which refer to the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats, sometimes called Stone Giants, but there is nothing in them to connect these peculiar fictitious monsters with the original conception. In none are the operations of the winter process predicated of these fictitious beings. They are merely exaggerated human figures and not symbols of a process of nature, their deeds are the deeds of men, and are not the acts of a process of nature expressed in terms of human activity.
And thus is founded the race of the Stone Giants or Stone Coats, or more popularly the Giants. When once these fictitious beings were regarded as human monsters they soon became confused with cruel hermits and bloodthirsty sorcerers who because of evil tastes were cannibals and dwelt apart from the habitations of men, who shunned and feared them, and the tales about them became narratives that do not detail the activities of the Winter God—the personified process of nature; and so, like their human prototypes, they increased and multiplied mightily, and so were as numerous as the leaves on the trees.
The persons or figures produced by the attribution of human life and mind to all objective and subjective things were, by virtue of the reality of the elements they embodied, the deities or the gods of this system of thought. In brief, they were composed of both the metamorphosed and of the unchanged first or ancient people who in distinctive character were conceived of as the formal and outward expression [65]of human mind. In the course of time these deities or gods are said to have taught their people the arts and crafts and the elements of their culture and their faith, thus revealing their will and the things which were to be in the future. This divine knowledge, this wisdom of the gods, was obtained or revealed in dreams or visions and by theophanies. But a knowledge of the activities of the people holding these views makes it evident that the doctrines and the arts and the crafts taught by the gods and the institutions founded by them for the people are in fact the activities of the people themselves which had been unconsciously imputed to these deities. Of course, the gods can teach and can reveal only what has been before imputed to them by the people.
The original and chief person in the myth was not a human being, although he was represented as possessed of the form, the desires, and the volition of a person. He is reputed to have performed acts which no human being had the power to perform, acts which only the functioning of a process of nature or of life could accomplish.
In some of these narratives human beings, bearing human names, have been substituted and the heroes and heroines of these stories are men, women, and children.
The substitution of human beings in the stead of the personified forces or processes of nature supplies the reason that apparently wonderful superhuman deeds are accomplished by the human substitutes, whereas the acts portrayed are those of natural forces, not of human brain and brawn.
The stories of the Dagwanoenyent, or Flying Heads, Cyclones, and Whirlwinds, of the Genonsgwa, or Stone Coats (the Frost Giants, or Gods of Winter, but originally named Tawiskaron), and of the Sʻhagodiyoweqgowa, or Wind God, purport to relate historical events, although they are mythic and legendary in form. But unlettered peoples do not transmit history. The writing of history presupposes not only the art of writing but also some kind of permanent social and political organization. Individual experiences fade rapidly, for lacking the needful general interest they do not unite with others in forming even some phase of the local history of a group. The experiences of individuals and even of small unimportant groups of people also lack the interest necessary to bring about their transmission as history. Hence such uncivilized peoples leave to their posterity no authentic accounts of the events of their times, for only in song and saga, where poetry mingles with fact, do they attempt to transmit the narratives of historical events and experiences.
But with the organization and development of society into greater complexity of social and governmental organization there arises the need for the transmission of a record of tribal or communal experiences [66]in which a certain number of persons are intensely interested—tribal wars, feats and acts and sayings of great leaders and reformers, and other noteworthy public events claim permanency of record, and thus history is written.
Popular tradition treats historical events in a naïve poetical way, and authentic historical experiences may thus be preserved. Through poetic treatment oral tradition becomes legend, so that one of the clearest criterions of legend is the fact that it frequently relates things that are not credible. Legend is the tradition of men who have not the art of writing and is a particular form of poetic narrative. So that in origin and nature history differs from legend because of difference of spheres of interest. Private and personal affairs and experiences and things that are of some interest to the common people and heroes, great personages, and public events and affairs are made attractive to the popular minds by means of poetic treatment. Legend is oral tradition in use among folk who do not make use of writing or other graphic art to secure permanency of record, while history is the written record of events and achievements and thoughts of men, which always presupposes the existence and the practice of graphic or scriptorial art.
Now, oral tradition, or legend, is not transmitted without important variation in details from generation to generation, and so it is an untrustworthy medium for the conveyance of historical events.
The saga, or popular story, may become sacred legend—that is, a characteristically “sacred” narrative about the “first people,” or the gods—or it may remain simply a story or tale. These two classes of story or narrative had specific names among the Seneca and their congeners of the Iroquoian stock. The sacred legend was called Kăʹkāāʼ, or Kăʹkarăʼ by the r-using dialects of the Iroquoian tribes. The literal meaning of this noun is not known; in the Onondaga dialect the k-sound would be replaced by the g-sound. These legends are “sacred” to the extent that they would not be related except during certain seasons of the year for the fear of breaking a religious taboo, forbidding strictly the telling of this class of narrative. The transgression of this prohibition was punished by the offended and vexed “first people,” concerning whom the myths or stories are related, although modern story-tellers, with scarce an exception, who have forgotten the true and logical reason for the inhibition mistakenly declare that the aforesaid penalty would be inflicted by the toads or snakes or by some other subtle animal.
The myths of the American Indian refer to an order of things which preceded the present order, and to a race of man-beings who dwelt first in the world above the sky and later in small number only on this earth and who were the so-called “first people,” “the ancients.” [67]It is evident that myths of origins project backward to an assumed condition of things the story of a day or of a year, and creation is described as Spring on a universal scale, that is, it explains the manner in which the order of things, existent where the stories are told, came about, as a Rebirth of Nature. But no one will contend that there were human eyewitnesses of what the narratives report.
The wise men, prophets, and priests of tribal men painted these tales with the glamour and witchery of poetry. Myths are the poetic judgments of tribal men about the phenomena of life and the outside world and embody the philosophy of these men about the problems and mysteries of the universe around them and in their own lives. So, in order to understand these narratives, it is necessary to study them with the deepest sympathy. But our sympathy with the viewpoint of the myth narratives of tribal men should not veil the realities of science from our minds.
Piloted by science in seeking to know the truth about the universe, scholars do not expect to discover it in the myth-lore or the folk-lore of tribal men. To study the birth and the growth of opinions forms one of the most instructive chapters in the science of mind or psychology.
The Seneca name Sʻhagodiioweʹʻgōwā or Sʻhagodiioweʹqgōwā designates one of the famous “man-beings” who are of the lineage of the “first people.” Some unknowing Indian interpreters render this term erroneously by the English words “false face,” which is a translation which effectually conceals the literal meaning of the expression, which is freely “The Great Ones Who Defend Them.” But as an appellative the term is also applied to a single one of these fictitious beings. The plural concept is evidently a late development, and probably arose after the establishment of societies whose members, when ceremonially attired, must for one thing wear a wooden mask having as its essential mark a wry mouth. So it is clear that the expression “false face” applies to the members of such societies and not at all to the man-beings so impersonated. The Iroquoian myth of Creation knows only one man-being, who assumed the duty of protecting mankind from pestilence and disease. He was the God of the Air or the Wind, sometimes appearing as the Whirlwind. Ceremonially he is addressed as Sʻhedwásōʹdăʻ or as Etʻhiʻsōʹdăʻ, both meaning “He Who Is Our Grandfather.”
It would seem that the pluralizing of the concept has resulted in a marked forgetting of the original objective reality represented in the concept, which in turn detracts from the high esteem in which the original Wind God was held. The Onondaga name of this personage is Haduʹʼiʼ; the Mohawk, Akoñʹwărăʼ. Both these names have arisen from something peculiar to members of the so-called “False Face Societies,” the first meaning, from the common postures [68]assumed by the members, “hunch-backed,” and the second, “mask,” from the wooden mask worn by the members of the society when in session. So the expression of the evil side of the manifestations of the Power of the Wind or Air, Pestilence, Disease, and Death may safely be predicated of this member of the “first people.”
A god or deity exerts or maintains its influence over the mind and heart of man because it is something more than a mere creature of the human brain. The god exercises certain attributes, peculiarities and forces which place him outside the sphere of human knowledge and experience and competence into a class by himself; he embodies in himself, according to belief, the power to function as a process or force of the universe plus the attributed human faculties and aspect.
Some of the French writers among the early explorers in North America refer to a native belief in “the ancients of animals,” which, it was stated, were regarded as the type and the progenitors of each particular species of animal. But this statement gives only a glimpse of a larger faith. These so-called “ancients of animals” were indeed only a part of the great company of “the ancients,” “the ancestors,” or “the first people,” each being a personified element or process of life or of outside nature, who became by fated metamorphosis the reputed progenitors of all faunal and floral life on the earth.
But an interpretative understanding of the Genesis myth of the American Indians shows that these “ancients,” these primal “ancestors,” were regarded as “human beings,” as belonging to that class of animate beings to which the Indian himself belonged. Yet, these “ancients” were the “gods,” “the beings,” or “the existences,” of anthropic form, character, and volition, whose metamorphosis later produced, according to the Indian philosophy, the present order of things on earth. So, the “first beings,” conceived as “human beings,” were indeed the gods—the personified agents of the powers, processes, and phenomena of nature.
It is this principle of transformation, or metamorphosis, that in part explains why there are represented largely “anthropic gods” with “animal masks” in Central America, Mexico, India, China, Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, and not many true “animal gods” with “human masks.”
But in some places there arose confusion between these poetic creations of a childlike faith and the lineal ancestors of men. When pride of birth and of position dominated the minds of aristocratic men they sought to trace their pedigree to the gods, and so they blindly claimed descent from these primal gods, who, in their anthropic aspect, were mere fictions of the mind, and so in time and in some lands this process resulted in what is usually called “ancestor worship.” This is, therefore, never a primitive faith, but only a decadent culture. [69]
All early men of inchoate mentation, of self-centered thinking, shared their needs and afflictions, their woes and ambitions, their sufferings and aspirations, and their joys and blessings with their gods, feeling that their gods who bore their own likeness by the unconscious imputation of human nature to them were endowed with the attributes, whims, virtues, and frailties of human nature. They believed that their gods must be men—man-beings, men like themselves—else these deities could not foresee and understand their necessities and so could not sympathize with men everywhere. Hence an Iroquois, thinking and speaking of their deities only in terms of human speech and thought, designates a god or other spirit of his faith by the word denoting man, human being, or mankind.
Of the gods and deities of Iroquois myths the editor has written:
Like most American Indian mythologies, the Iroquoian deals with three great mythic cosmical periods. In the first dwelt a race of gigantic anthropic beings—man-beings, let them be called, because though they were reputed to have been larger, purer, wiser, more ancient, and possessed of more potent orenda (q. v.), than man, and having superior ability to perform the great elemental functions characterizing definitely the things represented by them, they nevertheless had the form, mien, and mind of man, their creator; for unconsciously did man create the gods, the great primal beings of cosmic time—the controllers or directors, or impersonations, of the bodies and phenomena of nature—in his own image. To these man-beings, therefore, were imputed the thought, manners, customs, habits, and social organization of their creators; notwithstanding this, man regarded them as uncreated, eternal, and immortal; for by a curious paradox, man, mistaking his own mental fictions, his metaphors, for realities, explained his own existence, wisdom, and activities as the divine product of the creations of his own inchoate mind. The dwelling-place of the first great primal beings, characterized by flora and fauna respectively identical with the plant and animal life appearing later on the earth, was conceived to have been the upper surface of the visible sky, which was regarded as a solid plain. Here lived the first beings in peace and contentment for a very long period of time: no one knows or ever knew the length of this first cosmic period of tranquil existence.
But there came a time when an event occurred which resulted in a metamorphosis in the state and aspect of celestial and earthly things; in fact, the seeming had to become or to assume the real, and so came to pass the cataclysmic change of things of the first period into that now seen on the earth and in the sky, and the close of this period was the dawn of the gods of this mythology.27
So the character and the nature of the deities and spirits of the faith of the Iroquois peoples were a direct reflex of those attributes of the people themselves. It may be inferred in general that the more primitive and cultureless the people are the more crude, the more barbaric and savage will be their conceptions of their gods and the nature and functions of these naïve creations, but, conversely, it is only with the possession of a higher degree of intelligence that come nobler, more refined, grander, and more spiritual ideas of their gods. This admits of no exception. [70]