The Myths of the New World Part 16

[213-2] Avendano, _Sermones_, Lima, 1648, in Rivero and Tschudi, _Peruv.

Antiqs._, p. 114. In the year 1600, Onate found on the coast of California a tribe whose idol held in one hand a sh.e.l.l containing three eggs, in the other an ear of maize, while before it was placed a cup of water. Vizcaino, who visited the same people a few years afterwards, mentions that they kept in their temples tame ravens, and looked upon them as sacred birds (Torquemada, _Mon. Ind._, lib. v. cap. 40 in Waitz).

Thus, in all parts of the continent do we find the bird, as a symbol of the clouds, a.s.sociated with the rains and the harvests.

[214-1] The deluge was called _hun yecil_, which, according to Cogolludo, means _the inundation of the trees_, for all the forests were swept away (_Hist. de Yucathan_, lib. iv. cap. 5). Bishop Landa adds, to substantiate the legend, that all the woods of the peninsula appear as if they had been planted at one time, and that to look at them one would say they had been trimmed with scissors (_Rel. de las Cosas de Yucatan_, 58, 60).

[215-1] _Vues des Cordilleres_, p. 202.

[216-1] Ubi sup., p. 207.

[216-2] The Scandinavians believed the universe had been destroyed nine times:--

Ni Verdener yeg husker, Og ni Himle,

says the Voluspa (i. 2, in Klee, _Le Deluge_, p. 220). I observe some English writers have supposed from these lines that the Northmen believed in the existence of nine abodes for the blessed. Such is not the sense of the original.

[216-3] At least this is the doctrine of one of the Shastas. The race, it teaches, has been destroyed four times; first by water, secondly by winds, thirdly the earth swallowed them, and lastly fire consumed them (Sepp., _Heidenthum und Christenthum_, i. p. 191).

[217-1] Echevarria y Veitia, _Hist. de la Nueva Espana_, lib. i. cap. 4, in Waitz.

[217-2] Bra.s.seur, _Hist. du Mexique_, iii. p. 495.

[218-1] The contrary has indeed been inferred from such expressions of the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes as, "that which hath been, is now, and that which is to be, hath already been" (chap. iii. 15), and the like, but they are susceptible of an application entirely subjective.

[218-2] Voluspa, xiv. 51, in Klee, _Le Deluge_.

[219-1] _Natur. Quaestiones_, iii. cap. 27.

[220-1] Velasco, _Hist. du Royaume du Quito_, p. 105; Navarrete, _Viages_, iii. p. 444.

[220-2] _Rel. de la Nouv. France_, An 1637, p. 54; Schoolcraft, _Ind.

Tribes_, i. p. 319, iv. p. 420.

[220-3] Schoolcraft, ibid., iv. p. 240.

[221-1] Cogolludo, _Hist. de Yucathan_, lib. iv. cap. 7.

[221-2] The Spanish of Lizana is--

"En la ultima edad, segun esta determinado, Avra fin el culto de dioses vanos; Y el mundo sera purificado con fuego.

El que esto viere sera llamado dichoso Si con dolor llorare sus pecados."

(_Hist. de Nuestra Senora de Itzamal_, in Bra.s.seur, _Hist. du Mexique_, ii. p. 603). I have attempted to obtain a more literal rendering from the original Maya, but have not been successful.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

Usually man is the EARTH-BORN, both in language and myths.--Ill.u.s.trations from the legends of the Caribs, Apalachians, Iroquois, Quichuas, Aztecs, and others.--The underworld.--Man the product of one of the primal creative powers, the Spirit, or the Water, in the myths of the Athapascas, Eskimos, Moxos, and others.--Never literally derived from an inferior species.

No man can escape the importunate question, whence am I? The first replies framed to meet it possess an interest to the thoughtful mind, beyond that of mere fables. They ill.u.s.trate the position in creation claimed by our race, and the early workings of self-consciousness. Often the oldest terms for man are synopses of these replies, and merit a more than pa.s.sing contemplation.

The seed is hidden in the earth. Warmed by the sun, watered by the rain, presently it bursts its dark prison-house, unfolds its delicate leaves, blossoms, and matures its fruit. Its work done, the earth draws it to itself again, resolves the various structures into their original mould, and the unending round recommences.

This is the marvellous process that struck the primitive mind. Out of the Earth rises life, to it it returns. She it is who guards all germs, nourishes all beings. The Aztecs painted her as a woman with countless b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the Peruvians called her Mama Allpa, _mother_ Earth. _h.o.m.o_, _Adam_, _chamaigenes_, what do all these words mean but the earth-born, the son of the soil, repeated in the poetic language of Attica in _anthropos_, he who springs up as a flower?

The word that corresponds to the Latin _h.o.m.o_ in American languages has such singular uniformity in so many of them, that we might be tempted to regard it as a fragment of some ancient and common tongue, their parent stem. In the Eskimo it is _inuk_, _innuk_, plural _innuit_; in Athapasca it is _dinni_, _tenne_; in Algonkin, _inini_, _lenni_, _inwi_; in Iroquois, _onwi_, _eniha_; in the Otomi of Mexico _n-aniehe_; in the Maya, _inic_, _winic_, _winak_; all in North America, and the number might be extended. Of these only the last mentioned can plausibly be traced to a radical (unless the Iroquois _onwi_ is from _onnha_ life, _onnhe_ to live). This Father Ximenes derives from _win_, meaning to grow, to gain, to increase,[223-1] in which the a.n.a.logy to vegetable life is not far off, an a.n.a.logy strengthened by the myth of that stock, which relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of maize.[223-2]

In many other instances religious legend carries out this idea. The mythical ancestor of the Caribs created his offspring by sowing the soil with stones or with the fruit of the Mauritius palm, which sprouted forth into men and women,[224-1] while the Yurucares, much of whose mythology was perhaps borrowed from the Peruvians, clothed this crude tenet in a somewhat more poetic form, fabling that at the beginning the first of men were pegged, Ariel-like, in the knotty entrails of an enormous hole, until the G.o.d Tiri--a second Prospero--released them by cleaving it in twain.[224-2]

As in oriental legends the origin of man from the earth was veiled under the story that he was the progeny of some mountain fecundated by the embrace of Mithras or Jupiter, so the Indians often pointed to some height or some cavern, as the spot whence the first of men issued, adult and armed, from the womb of the All-mother Earth. The oldest name of the Alleghany Mountains is Paemotinck or Pemolnick, an Algonkin word, the meaning of which is said to be "the origin of the Indians."[224-3]

The Witchitas, who dwelt on the Red River among the mountains named after them, have a tradition that their progenitors issued from the rocks about their homes,[225-1] and many other tribes the Tahkalis, Navajos, Coyoteras, and the Haitians, for instance, set up this claim to be autochthones. Most writers have interpreted this simply to mean that they knew nothing at all about their origin, or that they coined these fables merely to strengthen the t.i.tle to the territory they inhabited when they saw the whites eagerly s.n.a.t.c.hing it away on every pretext. No doubt there is some truth in this, but if they be carefully sifted, there is sometimes a deep historical significance in these myths, which has. .h.i.therto escaped the observation of students. An instance presents itself in our own country.

All those tribes, the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chicasaws, and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into one common confederacy under the heads.h.i.+p of the last mentioned, unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence they pretended to have emerged. Fortunately we have a description, though a brief one, of this interesting monument from the pen of an intelligent traveller. It is described as "an elevation of earth about half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high. From its northeast corner a wall of equal height extends for near half a mile to the high land." This was the Nunne Chaha or Nunne Hamgeh, the High Hill, or the Bending Hill, famous in Choctaw stories, and which Captain Gregg found they have not yet forgotten in their western home. The legend was that in its centre was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath. Here he made the first men from the clay around him, and as at that time the waters covered the earth, he raised the wall to dry them on. When the soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he banished the waters to their channels and beds, and gave the dry land to his creatures.[226-1] When in 1826 Albert Gallatin obtained from some Natchez chiefs a vocabulary of their language, they gave to him as their word for _hill_ precisely the same word that a century and a quarter before the French had found among them as their highest term for G.o.d;[226-2] reversing the example of the ancient Greeks who came in time to speak of Olympus, at first the proper name of a peak in Thessaly, as synonymous with heaven and Jove.

A parallel to this southern legend occurs among the Six Nations of the north. They with one consent, if we may credit the account of Cusic, looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego River in the State of New York, as the locality where their forefathers first saw the light of day, and that they had some such legend the name Oneida, people of the Stone, would seem to testify.

The cave of Pacari Tampu, the Lodgings of the Dawn, was five leagues distant from Cuzco, surrounded by a sacred grove and inclosed with temples of great antiquity. From its hallowed recesses the mythical civilizers of Peru, the first of men, emerged, and in it during the time of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of the waves.[227-1] Viracocha himself is said to have dwelt there, though it hardly needed this evidence to render it certain that this consecrated cavern is but a localization of the general myth of the dawn rising from the deep. It refers us for its prototype to the Aymara allegory of the morning light flinging its beams like snow-white foam athwart the waves of Lake t.i.ticaca.

An ancient legend of the Aztecs derived their nation from a place called Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caverns, located north of Mexico. Antiquaries have indulged in all sorts of speculations as to what this means.

Sahagun explains it as a valley so named; Clavigero supposes it to have been a city; Hamilton Smith, and after him Schoolcraft, construed caverns to be a figure of speech for the _boats_ in which the early Americans paddled across from Asia(!); the Abbe Bra.s.seur confounds it with Aztlan, and very many have discovered in it a distinct reference to the fabulous "seven cities of Cibola" and the Casas Grandes, ruins of large buildings of unburnt brick in the valley of the River Gila. From this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans.

When Torquemada adds that _seven_ hero G.o.ds ruled in Chicomoztoc and were the progenitors of all its inhabitants, when one of them turns out to be Xelhua, the giant who with six others escaped the flood by ascending the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise and afterwards built the pyramid of Cholula, and when we remember that in one of the flood-myths _seven_ persons were said to have escaped the waters, the whole narrative acquires a fabulous aspect that shuts it out from history, and brands it as one of those fictions of the origin of man from the earth so common to the race. Fictions yet truths; for caverns and hollow trees were in fact the houses and temples of our first parents, and from them they went forth to conquer and adorn the world; and from the inorganic const.i.tuents of the soil acted on by Light, touched by Divine Force, vivified by the Spirit, did in reality the first of men proceed.

This cavern, which thus dimly lingered in the memories of nations, occasionally expanded to a nether world, imagined to underlie this of ours, and still inhabited by beings of our kind, who have never been lucky enough to discover its exit. The Mandans and Minnetarees on the Missouri River supposed this exit was near a certain hill in their territory, and as it had been, as it were, the womb of the earth, the same power was attributed to it that in ancient times endowed certain shrines with such charms; and thither the barren wives of their nation made frequent pilgrimages when they would become mothers.[229-1] The Mandans added the somewhat puerile fable that the means of ascent had been a grapevine, by which many ascended and descended, until one day an immoderately fat old lady, anxious to get a look at the upper earth, broke it with her weight, and prevented any further communication.

Such tales of an under-world are very frequent among the Indians, and are a very natural outgrowth of the literal belief that the race is earth-born.

Man is indeed like the gra.s.s that springs up and soon withers away; but he is also more than this. The quintessence of dust, he is a son of the G.o.ds as well as a son of the soil. He is the direct product of the great creative power; therefore all the Athapascan tribes west of the Rocky Mountains--the Kenai, the Kolushes, and the Atnai--claim descent from a raven--from that same mighty cloud-bird, who in the beginning of things seized the elements and brought the world from the abyss of the primitive ocean. Those of the same stock situate more eastwardly, the Dogribs, the Chepewyans, the Hare Indians, and also the west coast Eskimos, and the natives of the Aleutian Isles, all believe that they have sprung from a dog.[229-2] The latter animal, we have already seen, both in the old and new world was the fixed symbol of the water G.o.ddess.

Therefore in these myths, which are found over so many thousand square leagues, we cannot be in error in perceiving a reflex of their cosmogonical traditions already discussed, in which from the winds and the waters, represented here under their emblems of the bird and the dog, all animate life proceeded.

Without this symbolic coloring, a tribe to the south of them, a band of the Minnetarees, had the crude tradition that their first progenitor emerged from the waters, bearing in his hand an ear of maize,[230-1]

very much as Viracocha and his companions rose from the sacred waves of Lake t.i.ticaca, or as the Moxos imagined that they were descended from the lakes and rivers on whose banks their villages were situated.

These myths, and many others, hint of general conceptions of life and the world, wide-spread theories of ancient date, such as we are not accustomed to expect among savage nations, such as may very excusably excite a doubt as to their native origin, but a doubt infallibly dispelled by a careful comparison of the best authorities. Is it that hitherto, in the pride of intellectual culture, we have never done justice to the thinking faculty of those whom we call barbarians? Or shall we accept the only other alternative, that these are the unappreciated heirlooms bequeathed a rude race by a period of higher civilization, long since extinguished by constant wars and ceaseless fear? We are not yet ready to answer these questions. With almost unanimous consent the latter has been accepted as the true solution, but rather from the preconceived theory of a state of primitive civilization from which man fell, than from ascertained facts.

It would, perhaps, be pus.h.i.+ng symbolism too far to explain as an emblem of the primitive waters the coyote, which, according to the Root-Diggers of California, brought their ancestors into the world; or the wolf, which the Lenni Lenape pretended released mankind from the dark bowels of the earth by scratching away the soil. They should rather be interpreted by the curious custom of the Toukaways, a wild people in Texas, of predatory and unruly disposition. They celebrate their origin by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth. The others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, snuff around him, howl in lupine style, and finally dig him up with their nails. The leading wolf then solemnly places a bow and arrow in his hands, and to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living, paternally advises him "to do as the wolves do--rob, kill, and murder, rove from place to place, and never cultivate the soil."[231-1] Most wise and fatherly counsel! But what is there new under the sun? Three thousand years ago the Hirpini, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe, were wont to collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites in memory of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain their living as wolves by violence and plunder. Therefore they dressed in wolf-skins, ran with barks and howls over burning coals, and gnawed wolfishly whatever they could seize.[231-2]

Though hasty writers have often said that the Indian tribes claim literal descent from different wild beasts, probably in all other instances, as in these, this will prove, on examination, to be an error resting on a misapprehension arising from the habit of the natives of adopting as their totem or clan-mark the figure and name of some animal, or else, in an ignorance of the animate symbols employed with such marked preference by the red race to express abstract ideas. In some cases, doubtless, the natives themselves came, in time, to confound the symbol with the idea, by that familiar process of personification and consequent debas.e.m.e.nt exemplified in the history of every religion; but I do not believe that a single example could be found where an Indian tribe had a tradition whose real purport was that man came by natural process of descent from an ancestor, a brute.

The reflecting mind will not be offended at the contradictions in these different myths, for a myth is, in one sense, a theory of natural phenomena expressed in the form of a narrative. Often several explanations seem equally satisfactory for the same fact, and the mind hesitates to choose, and rather accepts them all than rejects any. Then, again, an expression current as a metaphor by-and-by crystallizes into a dogma, and becomes the nucleus of a new mythological growth. These are familiar processes to one versed in such studies, and involve no logical contradiction, because they are never required to be reconciled.

FOOTNOTES: