Our authorities on Iroquois traditions, though numerous enough, are not so satisfactory. The best, perhaps, is Father Brebeuf, a Jesuit missionary, who resided among the Hurons in 1626. Their culture myth, which he has recorded, is strikingly similar to that of the Algonkins. Two brothers appear in it, Ioskeha and Tawiscara, names which find their meaning in the Oneida dialect as the White one and the Dark one.[170-1] They are twins, born of a virgin mother, who died in giving them life. Their grandmother was the moon, called by the Hurons Ataensic, a word which signifies literally she bathes herself, and which, in the opinion of Father Bruyas, a most competent authority, is derived from the word for water.[170-2]
The brothers quarrelled, and finally came to blows; the former using the horns of a stag, the latter the wild rose. He of the weaker weapon was very naturally discomfited and sorely wounded. Fleeing for life, the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones. The victor returned to his grandmother, and established his lodge in the far east, on the borders of the great ocean, whence the sun comes. In time he became the father of mankind, and special guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but he destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.[171-1] The woods he stocked with game; and having learned from the great tortoise, who supports the world, how to make fire, taught his children, the Indians, this indispensable art. He it was who watched and watered their crops; and, indeed, without his aid, says the old missionary, quite out of patience with such puerilities, “they think they could not boil a pot.” Sometimes they spoke of him as the sun, but this only figuratively.[171-2]
From other writers of early date we learn that the essential outlines of this myth were received by the Tuscaroras and the Mohawks, and as the proper names of the two brothers are in the Oneida dialect, we cannot err in considering this the national legend of the Iroquois stock. There is strong likelihood that the Taronhiawagon, he who comes from the Sky, of the Onondagas, who was their supreme God, who spoke to them in dreams, and in whose honor the chief festival of their calendar was celebrated about the winter solstice, was, in fact, Ioskeha under another name.[172-1] As to the legend of the Good and Bad Minds given by Cusic, to which I have referred in a previous chapter, and the later and wholly spurious myth of Hiawatha, first made public by Mr. Clark in his History of Onondaga (1849), and which, in the graceful poem of Longfellow, is now familiar to the world, they are but pale and incorrect reflections of the early native traditions.
So strong is the resemblance Ioskeha bears to Michabo, that what has been said in explanation of the latter will be sufficient for both. Yet I do not imagine that the one was copied or borrowed from the other. We cannot be too cautious in adopting such a conclusion. The two nations were remote in everything but geographical position. I call to mind another similar myth. In it a mother is also said to have brought forth twins, or a pair of twins, and to have paid for them with her life. Again the one is described as the bright, the other as the dark twin; again it is said that they struggled one with the other for the mastery. Scholars, likewise, have interpreted the mother to mean the Dawn, the twins either Light and Darkness, or the Four Winds. Yet this is not Algonkin theology; nor is it at all related to that of the Iroquois. It is the story of Sarama in the Rig Veda, and was written in Sanscrit, under the shadow of the Himalayas, centuries before Homer.
Such uniformity points not to a common source in history, but in psychology. Man, chiefly cognizant of his soul through his senses, thought with an awful horror of the night which deprived him of the use of one and foreshadowed the loss of all. Therefore light and life were to him synonymous; therefore all religions promise to lead
“From night to light,
From night to heavenly light;”
therefore He who rescues is ever the Light of the World; therefore it is said “to the upright ariseth light in darkness;” therefore everywhere the kindling East, the pale Dawn, is the embodiment of his hopes and the centre of his reminiscences. Who shall say that his instinct led him here astray? For is not, in fact, all life dependent on light? Do not all those marvellous and subtle forces known to the older chemists as the imponderable elements, without which not even the inorganic crystal is possible, proceed from the rays of light? Let us beware of that shallow science so ready to shout Eureka, and reverently acknowledge a mysterious intuition here displayed which joins with the latest conquests of the human mind to repeat and emphasize that message which the Evangelist heard of the Spirit and declared unto men, that “God is Light.”[173-1]
Both these heroes, let it be observed, live in the uttermost east; both are the mythical fathers of the race. To the east, therefore, should these nations have pointed as their original dwelling place. This they did in spite of history. Cusic, who takes up the story of the Iroquois a thousand years before the Christian era, locates them first in the most eastern region they ever possessed. While the Algonkins with one voice called those of their tribes living nearest the rising sun Abnakis, our ancestors at the east, or at the dawn; literally our white ancestors.[174-1] I designedly emphasize this literal rendering. It reminds one of the white twin of Iroquois legend, and illustrates how the color white came to be intimately associated with the morning light and its beneficent effects. Moreover color has a specific effect on the mind; there is a music to the eye as well as to the ear; and white, which holds all hues in itself, disposes the soul to all pleasant and elevating emotions.[174-2] Not fashion alone bids the bride wreathe her brow with orange flowers, nor was it a mere figure of speech that led the inspired poet to call his love “fairest among women,” and to prophecy a Messiah “fairer than the children of men,” fulfilled in that day when He appeared “in garments so white as no fuller on earth could white them.” No nation is free from the power of this law. “White,” observes Adair of the southern Indians, “is their fixed emblem of peace, friendship, happiness, prosperity, purity, and holiness.”[175-1] Their priests dressed in white robes, as did those of Peru and Mexico; the kings of the various species of animals were all supposed to be white;[175-2] the cities of refuge established as asylums for alleged criminals by the Cherokees in the manner of the Israelites were called “white towns,” and for sacrifices animals of this color were ever most highly esteemed. All these sentiments were linked to the dawn. Language itself is proof of it. Many Algonkin words for east, morning, dawn, day, light, as we have already seen, are derived from a radical signifying white. Or we can take a tongue nowise related, the Quiché, and find its words for east, dawn, morning, light, bright, glorious, happy, noble, all derived from zak, white. We read in their legends of the earliest men that they were “white children,” “white sons,” leading “a white life beyond the dawn,” and the creation itself is attributed to the Dawn, the White One, the White Sacrificer of Blood.[175-3] But why insist upon the point when in European tongues we find the daybreak called l’aube, alva, from albus, white? Enough for the purpose if the error of those is manifest, who, in such expressions, would seek support for any theory of ancient European immigration; enough if it displays the true meaning of those traditions of the advent of benevolent visitors of fair complexion in ante-Columbian times, which both Algonkins and Iroquois[176-1] had in common with many other tribes of the western continent. Their explanation will not be found in the annals of Japan, the triads of the Cymric bards, nor the sagas of Icelandic skalds, but in the propensity of the human mind to attribute its own origin and culture to that white-shining orient where sun, moon, and stars, are daily born in renovated glory, to that fair mother, who, at the cost of her own life, gives light and joy to the world, to the brilliant womb of Aurora, the glowing bosom of the Dawn.
Even the complicated mythology of Peru yields to the judicious application of these principles of interpretation. Its peculiar obscurity arises from the policy of the Incas to blend the religions of conquered provinces with their own. Thus about 1350 the Inca Pachacutec subdued the country about Lima where the worship of Con and Pachacamà prevailed.[176-2] The local myth represented these as father and son, or brothers, children of the sun. They were without flesh or blood, impalpable, invisible, and incredibly swift of foot. Con first possessed the land, but Pachacamà attacked and drove him to the north. Irritated at his defeat he took with him the rain, and consequently to this day the sea-coast of Peru is largely an arid desert. Now when we are informed that the south wind, that in other words which blows to the north, is the actual cause of the aridity of the low-lands,[177-1] and consider the light and airy character of these antagonists, we cannot hesitate to accept this as a myth of the winds. The name of Con tici, the Thunder Vase, was indeed applied to Viracocha in later times, but they were never identical. Viracocha was the culture hero of the ancient Aymara-Quichua stock. He was more than that, for in their creed he was creator and possessor of all things. Lands and herds were assigned to other gods to support their temples, and offerings were heaped on their altars, but to him none. For, asked the Incas: “Shall the Lord and Master of the whole world need these things from us?” To him, says Acosta, “they did attribute the chief power and commandement over all things;” and elsewhere “in all this realm the chief idoll they did worship was Viracocha, and after him the Sunne.”[178-1]
Ere sun or moon was made, he rose from the bosom of Lake Titicaca, and presided over the erection of those wondrous cities whose ruins still dot its islands and western shores, and whose history is totally lost in the night of time. He himself constructed these luminaries and placed them in the sky, and then peopled the earth with its present inhabitants. From the lake he journeyed westward, not without adventures, for he was attacked with murderous intent by the beings whom he had created. When, however, scorning such unequal combat, he had manifested his power by hurling the lightning on the hill-sides and consuming the forests, they recognized their maker, and humbled themselves before him. He was reconciled, and taught them arts and agriculture, institutions and religion, meriting the title they gave him of Pachayachachic, teacher of all things. At last he disappeared in the western ocean. Four personages, companions or sons, were closely connected with him. They rose together with him from the lake, or else were his first creations. These are the four mythical civilizers of Peru, who another legend asserts emerged from the cave Pacarin tampu the Lodgings of the Dawn.[179-1] To these Viracocha gave the earth, to one the north, to another the south, to a third the east, to a fourth the west. Their names are very variously given, but as they have already been identified with the four winds, we can omit their consideration here.[179-2] Tradition, as has rightly been observed by the Inca Garcilasso de la Vega,[179-3] transferred a portion of the story of Viracocha to Manco Capac, first of the historical Incas. King Manco, however, was a real character, the Rudolph of Hapsburg of their reigning family, and flourished about the eleventh century.