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CHAPTER VIII.
THE ORIGIN OF MAN
Usually man is the Earth-born, both in language and myths.—Illustrations 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 illustrate 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 passing 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 breasts, the Peruvians called her Mama Allpa, mother Earth. Homo, Adam, chamaigenēs, 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 homo 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, tenné; 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,340 in which the analogy to vegetable life is not far off, an analogy strengthened by the myth of that stock, which relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of maize.341
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,342 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 god Tiri—a second Prospero—released them by cleaving it in twain.343
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.”344
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,345 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 title to the territory they inhabited when they saw the whites eagerly snatching 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 hitherto 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 headship 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.346 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 God;347 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.348 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 Titicaca.
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 Abbé Brasseur 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 gods 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 constituents 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.349 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 grass that springs up and soon withers away; but he is also more than this. The quintessence of dust, he is a son of the gods 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.350 The latter animal, we have already seen, both in the old and new world was the fixed symbol of the water goddess. 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,351 very much as Viracocha and his companions rose from the sacred waves of Lake Titicaca, 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 pushing 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.”352 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.353
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 debasement 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.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY
Universality of the belief in a soul and a future state shown by the aboriginal tongues, by expressed opinions, and by sepulchral rites.—The future world never a place of rewards and punishments.—The house of the Sun the heaven of the red man.—The terrestrial paradise and the under-world.—Çupay.—Xibalba.—Mictlan.—Metempsychosis?—Belief in a resurrection of the dead almost universal.
THE missionary Charlevoix wrote several excellent works on America toward the beginning of the last century, and he is often quoted by later authors; but probably no one of his sayings has been thus honored more frequently than this: “The belief the best established among our Americans is that of the immortality of the soul.”354 The tremendous stake that every one of us has on the truth of this dogma makes it quite a satisfaction to be persuaded that no man is willing to live wholly without it. Certainly exceptions are very rare, and most of those which materialistic philosophers have taken such pains to collect, rest on misunderstandings or superficial observation.
In the new world I know of only one well authenticated instance where all notion of a future state appears to have been entirely wanting, and this in quite a small clan, the Lower Pend d’Oreilles, of Oregon. This people had no burial ceremonies, no notion of a life hereafter, no word for soul, spiritual existence, or vital principle. They thought that when they died, that was the last of them. The Catholic missionaries who undertook the unpromising task of converting them to Christianity, were at first obliged to depend upon the imperfect translations of half-breed interpreters. These “made the idea of soul intelligible to their hearers by telling them they had a gut which never rotted, and that this was their living principle!” Yet even they were not destitute of religious notions. No tribe was more addicted to the observance of charms, omens, dreams, and guardian spirits, and they believed that illness and bad luck generally were the effects of the anger of a fabulous old woman.355 The aborigines of the Californian peninsula were as near beasts as men ever become. The missionaries likened them to “herds of swine, who neither worshipped the true and only God, nor adored false deities.” Yet they must have had some vague notion of an after.world, for the writer who paints the darkest picture of their condition remarks, “I saw them frequently putting shoes on the feet of the dead, which seems to indicate that they entertain the idea of a journey after death.”356
Proof of Charlevoix’s opinion may be derived from three independent sources. The aboriginal languages may be examined for terms corresponding to the word soul, the opinions of the Indians themselves may be quoted, and the significance of sepulchral rites as indicative of a belief in life after death may be determined.
The most satisfactory is the first of these. We call the soul a ghost or spirit, and often a shade. In these words, the breath and the shadow are the sensuous perceptions transferred to represent the immaterial object of our thought. Why the former was chosen, I have already explained; and for the latter, that it is man’s intangible image, his constant companion, and is of a nature akin to darkness, earth, and night, are sufficiently obvious reasons.
These same tropes recur in American languages in the same connection. The New England tribes called the soul chemung, the shadow, and in Quiché natub, in Eskimo tarnak, express both these ideas. In Mohawk atonritz, the soul, is from atonrion, to breathe, and other examples to the same purpose have already been given.357
Of course no one need demand that a strict immateriality be attached to these words. Such a colorless negative abstraction never existed for them, neither does it for us, though we delude ourselves into believing that it does. The soul was to them the invisible man, material as ever, but lost to the appreciation of the senses.
Nor let any one be astonished if its unity was doubted, and several supposed to reside in one body. This is nothing more than a somewhat gross form of a doctrine upheld by most creeds and most philosophies. It seems the readiest solution of certain psychological enigmas, and may, for aught we know, be an instinct of fact. The Rabbis taught a threefold division—nephesh, the animal, ruah, the human, and neshamah, the divine soul, which corresponds to that of Plato into thumos, epithumia, and nous. And even Saint Paul seems to have recognized such inherent plurality when he distinguishes between the bodily soul, the intellectual soul, and the spiritual gift, in his Epistle to the Romans. No such refinements of course as these are to be expected among the red men; but it may be looked upon either as the rudiments of these teachings, or as a gradual debasement of them to gross and material expression, that an old and wide-spread notion was found among both Iroquois and Algonkins, that man has two souls, one of a vegetative character, which gives bodily life, and remains with the corpse after death, until it is called to enter another body; another of more ethereal texture, which in life can depart from the body in sleep or trance, and wander over the world, and at death goes directly to the land of Spirits.358
The Sioux extended it to Plato’s number, and are said to have looked forward to one going to a cold place, another to a warm and comfortable country, while the third was to watch the body. Certainly a most impartial distribution of rewards and punishments.359 Some other Dakota tribes shared their views on this point, but more commonly, doubtless owing to the sacredness of the number, imagined four souls, with separate destinies, one to wander about the world, one to watch the body, the third to hover around the village, and the highest to go to the spirit land.360 Even this number is multiplied by certain Oregon tribes, who imagine one in every member; and by the Caribs of Martinique, who, wherever they could detect a pulsation, located a spirit, all subordinate, however, to a supreme one throned in the heart, which alone would be transported to the skies at death.361 For the heart that so constantly sympathizes with our emotions and actions, is, in most languages and most nations, regarded as the seat of life; and when the priests of bloody religions tore out the heart of the victim and offered it to the idol, it was an emblem of the life that was thus torn from the field of this world and consecrated to the rulers of the next.
Various motives impel the living to treat with respect the body from which life has departed. Lowest of them is a superstitious dread of death and the dead. The stoicism of the Indian, especially the northern tribes, in the face of death, has often been the topic of poets, and has often been interpreted to be a fearlessness of that event. This is by no means true. Savages have an awful horror of death; it is to them the worst of ills; and for this very reason was it that they thought to meet it without flinching was the highest proof of courage. Everything connected with the deceased was, in many tribes, shunned with superstitious terror. His name was not mentioned, his property left untouched, all reference to him was sedulously avoided. A Tupi tribe used to hurry the body at once to the nearest water, and toss it in; the Akanzas left it in the lodge and burned over it the dwelling and contents; and the Algonkins carried it forth by a hole cut opposite the door, and beat the walls with sticks to fright away the lingering ghost. Burying places were always avoided, and every means taken to prevent the departed spirits exercising a malicious influence on those remaining behind.
These craven fears do but reveal the natural repugnance of the animal to a cessation of existence, and arise from the instinct of self-preservation essential to organic life. Other rites, undertaken avowedly for the behoof of the soul, prove and illustrate a simple but unshaken faith in its continued existence after the decay of the body.
None of these is more common or more natural than that which attributes to the emancipated spirit the same wants that it felt while on earth, and with loving foresight provides for their satisfaction. Clothing and utensils of war and the chase were, in ancient times, uniformly placed by the body, under the impression that they would be of service to the departed in his new home. Some few tribes in the far west still retain the custom, but most were soon ridiculed into its neglect, or were forced to omit it by the violation of tombs practised by depraved whites in hope of gain. To these harmless offerings the northern tribes often added a dog slain on the grave; and doubtless the skeletons of these animals in so many tombs in Mexico and Peru point to similar customs there. It had no deeper meaning than to give a companion to the spirit in its long and lonesome journey to the far off land of shades. The peculiar appropriateness of the dog arose not only from the guardianship it exerts during life, but further from the symbolic signification it so often had as representative of the goddess of night and the grave.
Where a despotic form of government reduced the subject almost to the level of a slave and elevated the ruler almost to that of a superior being, not animals only, but men, women, and children were frequently immolated at the tomb of the cacique. The territory embraced in our own country was not without examples of this horrid custom. On the lower Mississippi, the Natchez Indians brought it with them from Central America in all its ghastliness. When a sun or chief died, one or several of his wives and his highest officers were knocked on the head and buried with him, and at such times the barbarous privilege was allowed to any of the lowest caste to at once gain admittance to the highest by the deliberate murder of their own children on the funeral pyre—a privilege which respectable writers tell us human beings were found base enough to take advantage of.362
Oviedo relates that in the province of Guataro, in Guatemala, an actual rivalry prevailed among the people to be slain at the death of their cacique, for they had been taught that only such as went with him would ever find their way to the paradise of the departed.363 Theirs was therefore somewhat of a selfish motive, and only in certain parts of Peru, where polygamy prevailed, and the rule was that only one wife was to be sacrificed, does the deportment of husbands seem to have been so creditable that their widows actually disputed one with another for the pleasure of being buried alive with the dead body, and bearing their spouse company to the other world.364 Wives who have found few parallels since the famous matron of Ephesus!
The fire built nightly on the grave was to light the spirit on his journey. By a coincidence to be explained by the universal sacredness of the number, both Algonkins and Mexicans maintained it for four nights consecutively. The former related the tradition that one of their ancestors returned from the spirit land and informed their nation that the journey thither consumed just four days, and that collecting fuel every night added much to the toil and fatigue the soul encountered, all of which could be spared it by the relatives kindling nightly a fire on the grave. Or as Longfellow has told it:—
“Four days is the spirit’s journey
To the land of ghosts and shadows,
Four its lonely night encampments.
Therefore when the dead are buried,
Let a fire as night approaches
Four times on the grave be kindled,
That the soul upon its journey
May not grope about in darkness.”
The same length of time, say the Navajos, does the departed soul wander over a gloomy marsh ere it can discover the ladder leading to the world below, where are the homes of the setting and the rising sun, a land of luxuriant plenty, stocked with game and covered with corn. To that land, say they, sink all lost seeds and germs which fall on the earth and do not sprout. There below they take root, bud, and ripen their fruit.365
After four days, once more, in the superstitions of the Greenland Eskimos, does the soul, for that term after death confined in the body, at last break from its prison-house and either rise in the sky to dance in the aurora borealis or descend into the pleasant land beneath the earth, according to the manner of death.366
That there are logical contradictions in this belief and these ceremonies, that the fire is always in the same spot, that the weapons and utensils are not carried away by the departed, and that the food placed for his sustenance remains untouched, is very true. But those who would therefore argue that they were not intended for the benefit of the soul, and seek some more recondite meaning in them as “unconscious emblems of struggling faith or expressions of inward emotions,”367 are led astray by the very simplicity of their real intention. Where is the faith, where the science, that does not involve logical contradictions just as gross as these? They are tolerable to us merely because we are used to them. What value has the evidence of the senses anywhere against a religious faith? None whatever. A stumbling block though this be to the materialist, it is the universal truth, and as such it is well to accept it as an experimental fact.
The preconceived opinions that saw in the meteorological myths of the Indian, a conflict between the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil, have with like unconscious error falsified his doctrine of a future life, and almost without an exception drawn it more or less in the likeness of the Christian heaven, hell, and purgatory. Very faint traces of any such belief except where derived from the missionaries are visible in the New World. Nowhere was any well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the next-world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torments and a realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard. The typical belief of the tribes of the United States was well expressed in the reply of Esau Hajo, great medal chief and speaker for the Creek nation in the National Council, to the question, Do the red people believe in a future state of rewards and punishments? “We have an opinion that those who have behaved well are taken under the care of Esaugetuh Emissee, and assisted; and that those who have behaved ill are left to shift for themselves; and that there is no other punishment.”368
Neither the delights of a heaven on the one hand, nor the terrors of a hell on the other, were ever held out by priests or sages as an incentive to well-doing, or a warning to the evil-disposed. Different fates, indeed, awaited the departed souls, but these rarely, if ever, were decided by their conduct while in the flesh, but by the manner of death, the punctuality with which certain sepulchral rites were fulfilled by relatives, or other similar arbitrary circumstance beyond the power of the individual to control. This view, which I am well aware is directly at variance with that of all previous writers, may be shown to be that natural to the uncultivated intellect everywhere, and the real interpretation of the creeds of America. Whether these arbitrary circumstances were not construed to signify the decision of the Divine Mind on the life of the man, is a deeper question, which there is no means at hand to solve.
