Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some universal mother as the genetrix.

The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by thought.”

We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which mania is “to think”; mana, a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator “broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the world of light and life.[145]

Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless, and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth, Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some older world.[146]

This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians, and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.

The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow, or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]

4. The Earthly Paradise.—Associated with this cycle is the myth of the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]

5. The Conflict of Nature.—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind. Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring the soul to throw itself into the fray.