slain, met a friendly dolphin, which advised her to swallow a pebble
and a little sea-water. The birth of Yehl was the result. In his
youth he shot a supernatural crane, and can always fly about in its
feathers, like Odin and Loki in Scandinavian myth. He is usually,
however, regarded as a raven, and holds the same relation to men
and the world as the eagle-hawk Pund-jel does in Australia. His
great opponent (for the eternal dualism comes in) is Khanukh, who
is a wolf, and the ancestor or totem of the wolf-race of men as Yehl
is of the raven. The opposition between the Crow and Eagle-hawk
in Australia will be remembered. Both animals or men or gods
take part in creation. Yehl is the Prometheus Purphoros of the
Tlingits, but myths of the fire-stealer would form matter for a
separate section. Yehl also stole water, in his bird-shape, exactly
as Odin stole “Suttung’s mead” when in the shape of an eagle.[1]
Yehl’s powers of metamorphosis and of flying into the air are the
common accomplishments of sorcerers, and he is a rather crude form
of first father, “culture-hero” and creator.[2]
Among the Karok Indians we find the great hero and divine benefactor in the shape of, not a raven, nor an eagle-hawk, nor a mantis insect, nor a spider, but a coyote. Among both Karok and Navaho the coyote is the Prometheus Purphoros, or, as the Aryans of India call him, Matarisvan the fire-stealer. Among the Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of California, the coyote or prairie wolf is the creative hero and chief supernatural being. In Oregon the coyote is also the “demiurge,” but most of the myths about him refer to his creative exploits, and will be more appropriately treated in the next section.
Moving up the Pacific coast to British Columbia, we find the musk-rat taking the part played by Vishnu, when in his avatar as a boar he fished up the earth from the waters. Among the Tinneh a miraculous dog, who, like an enchanted fairy prince, could assume the form of a handsome young man, is the chief divine being of the myths. He too is chiefly a creative or demiurgic being, answering to Purusha in the Rig Veda. So far the peculiar mark of the wilder American tribe legends is the bestial character of the divine beings, which is also illustrated in Australia and Africa, while the bestial clothing, feathers or fur, drops but slowly off Indra, Zeus and the Egyptian Ammon, and the Scandinavian Odin. All these are more or less anthropomorphic, but retain, as will be seen, numerous relics of a theriomorphic condition.
See C. Hill-Tout and F. Boas in various publications, and, generally, the volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, U.S.A. For Ti-ra-wa, “the Ruler of the Universe,” also styled A-ti-us, “father,” among the Pawnees, see G. B. Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories (1893).
Maori and Polynesian Beliefs.—Passing from the lower savage myths, of which space does not permit us to offer a larger selection, we turn to races in the upper strata of barbarism. Among these the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Polynesian people generally, are remarkable for a mythology largely intermixed with early attempts at more philosophical speculation. The Maoris and Mangaians, and other peoples, have had speculators among them not very far removed from the mental condition of the earliest Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Anaximander, and the rest. In fact the process from the view of nature which we call personalism to the crudest theories of the physicists was apparently begun in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. In Maori mythology it is more than usually difficult to keep apart the origin of the world and the origin and nature of the gods. Long traditional hymns give an account of the “becoming out of nothing” which resulted in the evolution of the gods and the world. In the beginning (as in the Greek myths of Uranus and Gaea), Heaven (Rangi, conceived of as a person) was indissolubly united to his wife Earth (Papa), and between them they begat gods which necessarily dwelt in darkness. These gods were some in vegetable, some in animal form; some traditions place among these gods Tiki the demiurge, who (like Prometheus) made men out of clay. The offspring of Rangi and Papa (kept in the dark as they were) held a council to determine how they should treat their parents, “Shall we slay them, or shall we separate them?” In the Hesiodic fable, Cronus separates the heavenly pair by mutilating his oppressive father Uranus. Among the Maoris the god Tutenganahan cut the sinews which united Earth and Heaven, and Tane Mahuta wrenched them apart, and kept them eternally asunder. The new dynasty now had earth to themselves, but Tawhiramatea, the wind, abode aloft with his father. Some of the gods were in the forms of lizards and fishes; some went to the land, some to the water. As among the gods and Asuras of the Vedas, there were many wars in the divine race, and as the incantations of the Indian Brahmanas are derived from those old experiences of the Vedic gods, so are the incantations of the Maoris. The gods of New Zealand, the greater gods at least, may be called “departmental”; each person who is an elementary force is also the god of that force. As Te Heu, a powerful chief, said, there is division of labour among men, and so there is among gods. “One made this, another that; Tane made trees, Ru mountains, Tanga-roa fish, and so forth.”[3] The “departmental” arrangement prevails among the polytheism of civilized peoples, and is familiar to all from the Greek examples. Leaving the high gods whose functions are so large, while their forms (as of lizard, fish and tree) are often so mean, we come to Maui, the great divine hero of the supernatural race in Polynesia. Maui in some respects answers to the chief of the Adityas in Vedic mythology; in others he answers to Qat, Quawteaht, and other savage divine personages. Like the son of the Vedic Aditi,[4] Maui is a rejected and abortive child of his mother, but afterwards attains to the highest reputation. As Qat brought the hitherto unknown night, so Maui settled the sun and moon in their proper courses. He induced the sun to move orderly by giving him a violent beating. A similar feat was performed by the Sun-trapper, a famous Red Indian chief. These tales belong properly to the department of solar myths. Maui himself is thought by E. B. Tylor to be a myth of the sun, but the sun could hardly give the sun a drubbing. Maui slew monsters, invented barbs for fish-hooks, frequently adopted the form of various birds, acted as Prometheus Purphoros the fire-stealer, drew a whole island up from the bottom of the deep; he was a great sorcerer and magician. Had Maui succeeded in his attempt to pass through the body of Night (considered as a woman) men would have been immortal. But a little bird which sings at sunset wakened Night, she snapped up Maui, and men die. This has been called a myth of sunset, but the sun does what Maui failed to do, he passes through the body of Night unharmed. The adventure is one of the myths of the origin of death, which are almost universally diffused. Maui, though regarded as a god, is not often addressed in prayer.[5]
The whole system, as far as it can be called a system, of Maori mythology is obviously based on the savage conceptions of the world which have already been explained. The Polynesian system differs mainly in detail; we have the separation of heaven and earth, the animal-shaped gods, the fire-stealing, the exploits of Maui, and scores of minor myths in W. W. Gill’s Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, in the researches of W. Ellis, of Williams, in G. Turner’s Polynesia, and in many other accessible works.
Mexican and Peruvian Beliefs.—The Maoris and other Polynesian peoples are perhaps the best examples of a race which has risen far above the savagery of Bushmen and Australians, but has not yet arrived at the stage in which great centralized monarchies appear. The Mexican and Peruvian civilizations were far ahead of Maori culture, in so far as they possessed the elements of a much more settled and highly-organized society. Their religion had its fine lucid intervals, but their mythology and ritual were little better than savage ideas, elaborately worked up by the imagination of a cruel and superstitious priesthood. In cruelty the Aztecs surpassed perhaps all peoples of the Old World, except certain Semitic stocks, and their gods, of course, surpassed almost all other gods in blood-thirstiness. But in grotesque and savage points of faith the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Vedic Indians ran even the Aztecs pretty close.
Bernal Diaz, the old “conquistador,” has described the hideous aspect of the idols which Cortes destroyed, “idols in the shape of hideous dragons as big as calves,” idols half in the form of men, half of dogs, and serpents which were worshipped as divine. The old contemporary missionary Sahagun has left one of the earliest detailed accounts of the natures and myths of these gods, but, though Sahagun took great pains in collecting facts, his speculations must be accepted with caution. He was convinced (like Caxton in his Destruction of Troy, and like St Augustine) that the heathen gods were only dead men worshipped. Ancestor-worship is a great force in early religion, and the qualities of dead chiefs and sorcerers are freely attributed to gods, but it does not follow that each god was once a real man, as Sahagun supposes. Euemerism cannot be judiciously carried so far as this. Of Huitzilopochtli, the famed god, Sahagun says that he was a necromancer, loved “shape-shifting,” like Odin, metamorphosed himself into animal forms, was miraculously conceived, and, among animals, is confused with the humming-bird, whose feathers adorned his statues.[6] This humming-bird god should be compared with the Roman Picus (Servius, 189). That the humming-bird (Nuitziton), which was the god’s old shape, should become merely his attendant (like the owl of Pallas, the mouse of Apollo, the goose of Priapus, the cuckoo of Hera), when the god received anthropomorphic form, is an example of a process common in all mythologies. Plutarch observes that the Greeks, though accustomed to the conceptions of the animal attendants of their own gods, were amazed when they found animals worshipped as gods by the Egyptians. Müller[7] mentions the view that the humming-bird, as the most beautiful flying thing, is a proper symbol of the heaven, and so of the heaven-god, Huitzilopochtli. This vein of symbolism is so easy to work that it must be regarded with distrust. Perhaps it is safer to attribute theriomorphic shapes of
- ↑ Dasent, Bragi’s Telling: Younger Edda, p. 94.
- ↑ Bancroft, vol. iv.
- ↑ Taylor, New Zealand, p. 108.
- ↑ Rig Veda, x. 72, 1, 8; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv. 13, where the fable from the Satapatha-Brahmana is given.
- ↑ The best authorities for the New Zealand myths are the old traditional priestly hymns, collected and translated in the works of Sir George Grey, in Taylor’s New Zealand, in Shortland’s Traditions of New Zealand (1857), in Bastian’s Heilige Sage der Polynesier, and in White’s Ancient History of the Maori, i. 8–13.
- ↑ See also Bancroft, iii. 288-290, and Acosta, pp. 352-361.
- ↑ Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 592.
