DAIMONISM.
§ 96. Lynd says:
The divinities of evil among the Dakotas may be called legion. Their special delight is to make man miserable or to destroy him. Demons wander through the earth, causing sickness and death. Spirits of evil are ever ready to pounce upon and destroy the unwary. Spirits of earth, air, fire, and water (see § 36) surround him upon every side, and with but one great governing object in view—the misery and destruction of the human race.[92]
ANIMISM.
§ 97. Their religious system gives to everything a soul or spirit. Even the commonest sticks and clays have a spiritual essence attached to them which must needs be reverenced; for these spirits, too, vent their wrath upon mankind. Indeed, there is no object, however trivial, but has its spirit.[93]
In his article on the Mythology of the Dakotas,[94] Riggs says of the Dakota:
They pray to the sun, earth, moon, lakes, rivers, trees, plants, snakes, and all kinds of animals and vegetables—many of them say, to everything, for they pray to their guns and arrows—to any object, artificial as well as natural, for they suppose that every object, artificial as well as natural, has a spirit which may hurt or help, and so is a proper object of worship.
Lynd says:
The essentially physical cast of the Indian mind (if I may be allowed the expression) requires some outward and tangible representation of things spiritual before he can comprehend them. The god must be present, by image or in person, ere he can offer up his devotions. * * * Similar to this “belief in a spiritual essence” is the general Dakota belief that each class of animals or objects of a like kind possesses a peculiar guardian divinity, which is the mother archetype. * * * Sexuality is a prominent feature in the religion of the Dakotas. Of every species of divinity, with the exception of the Wakantanka, there is a plurality, part male and part female. Even the spirits, which are supposed to dwell in the earth, twigs, and other inanimate substances, are invested with distinctions of sex.[95]
§ 98. Pond asserts that “evidence is wanting to show that these people divide their Taku-wakan into classes of good and evil. They are all simply wakan.”[96]