Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/338

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324
ANIMISM.

dess of Day and Night, had already acquired the characters of the great friend and enemy of man, the Good and Evil Deity. And as to the related cosmic legend of Day and Night, contrasted in the persons of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, though this was originally pure unethic nature-myth, yet it naturally took the same direction among the half-Europeanized Indians of later times, becoming a moral myth of Good and Evil. The idea comes to full maturity in the modern shaping of Iroquois religion, where the good and great deity Häwenneyu the Ruler has opposed to him a rival deity keeping the same name as in the myth, Hänegoategeh the Evil-minded. We have thus before us the profoundly interesting fact, that the rude North American Indians have more than once begun the same mythologic transition which in ancient Asia shaped the contrast of light and darkness into the contrast of righteousness and wickedness, by following out the same thought which still in the European mind arrays in the hostile forms of Light and Darkness the contending powers of Good and Evil.

Judging by such evidence, at once of the rudimentary dualism springing up in savage animism, and of the tendency of this to amalgamate with similar thought brought in by foreign intercourse, it is possible to account for many systems of the dualistic class found in the native religions of America. While the evidence may lead us to agree with Waitz that the North American Indian dualism, the most distinct and universal feature of their religion, is not to be altogether referred to a modern Christian origin, yet care must be taken not to claim as the result of primitive religious development what shows signs of being borrowed civilized theology. The records remain of the Jesuit missionary teaching under which the Algonquins came to use their native term Manitu, that is, spirit or demon, in speaking of the Christian God and Devil as the good and the evil Manitu. Still later, the Great Spirit and the Evil Spirit, Kitchi Manitu and Matchi Manitu, gained