BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE MYTHS AND RELIGIONS OF AMERICA.
By the Editor.
The earliest scholarly examination of the whole subject, which has been produced by an American author, is Daniel G. Brinton’s Myths of the New World, a treatise on the symbolism and mythology of the Red Race of America (N. Y., 1868; 2d ed., 1876). It is a comparative study, “more for the thoughtful general reader than for the antiquary,” as the author says. “The task,” he adds, “bristles with difficulties. Carelessness, prepossessions, and ignorance have disfigured the subject with false colors and foreign additions without number” (p. 3). After describing the character of the written, graphic, or symbolic records, which the student of history has to deal with in tracing North American history back before the Conquest, he adds, while he deprives mythology of any historical value, that the myths, being kept fresh by repetition, were also nourished constantly by the manifestations of nature, which gave them birth. So while taking issue with those who find history buried in the myths, he warns us to remember that the American myths are not the reflections of history or heroes. In the treatment of his subject he considers the whole aboriginal people of America as a unit, with “its religion as the development of ideas common to all its members, and its myths as the garb thrown around those ideas by imaginations more or less fertile; but seeking everywhere to embody the same notions.”[1894] This unity of the American races is far from the opinion of other ethnologists.
Brinton gives a long bibliographical note on those who had written on the subject before him, in which he puts, as the first (1819) to take a philosophical survey, Dr. Samuel Farmer Jarvis in a Discourse on the religion of the Indian tribes of North America, printed in the N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, iii. (1821). Jarvis confined himself to the tribes north of Mexico, and considered their condition, as he found it, one of deterioration from something formerly higher. There had been, of course, before this, amassers of material, like the Jesuits in Canada, as preserved in their Relations,[1895] sundry early French writers on the Indians,[1896] the English agents of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, and the Moravian missionaries in Pennsylvania and the Ohio country, to say nothing of the historians, like Loskiel (Geschichte der Mission, 1789), Vetromile (Abnakis and their History, New York, 1866), Cusick (Six Nations), not to mention local observers, like Col. Benjamin Hawkins, Sketch of the Creek Country (Georgia Hist. Soc. Collections, 1848, but written about 1800).
If the placing of Brinton’s book as the earliest scholarly contribution is to be contested, it would be for E. G. Squier’s Serpent Symbol in America (N. Y., 1851);[1897] but the book is not broadly based, except so far as such comprehensiveness can be deduced from his tendency to consider all myths as having some force of nature for their motive, and that all are traceable to an instinct that makes the worship of fire or of the sun the centre of a system.[1898] With this as the source of life, Squier allies the widespread phallic worship. In Bancroft’s Native Races (iii. p. 501) there is a summary of what is known of this American worship of the generative power. Brinton doubts (Myths, etc., 149) if anything like phallic worship really existed, apart from a wholly unreligious surrender to appetite.
Another view which Squier maintains is, that above all this and pervading all America’s religious views there was a sort of rudimentary monotheism.[1899]
When we add to this enumeration the somewhat callow and wholly unsatisfactory contributions of Schoolcraft in the great work on the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-59), which the U. S. government in a headlong way sanctioned, we have included nearly all that had been done by American authors in this field when Bancroft published the third volume of his Native Races. This work constitutes the best mass of material for the student—who must not confound mythology and religion—to work with, the subject being presented under the successive heads of the origin of myths and of the world, physical and animal myths, gods, supernatural beings, worship and the future state; but of course, like all Bancroft’s volumes, it must be supplemented by special works pertaining to the more central and easterly parts of the United States, and to the regions south of Panama. The deficiency, however, is not so much as may be expected when we consider the universality of myths. “Unfortunately,” says this author, “the philologic and mythologic material for such an exhaustive synthesis of the origin and relations of the American creeds as Cox has given to the world in the Aryan legends in his Mythology of the Aryan Nations (London, 1870) is yet far from complete.”
In 1882 Brinton, after riper study, again recast his views of a leading feature of the subject in his American hero-myths; a study in the native religions of the western continent (Philad., 1882), in which he endeavored to present “in a critically correct light some of the fundamental conceptions in the native beliefs.” His purpose was to counteract what he held to be an erroneous view in the common practice of considering “American hero-gods as if they had been chiefs of tribes at some undetermined epoch,” and to show that myths of similar import, found among different peoples, were a “spontaneous production of the mind, and not a reminiscence of an historic event.” He further adds as one of the impediments in the study that he does “not know of a single instance on this continent of a thorough and intelligent study of a native religion made by a Protestant missionary.”[1900] After an introductory chapter on the American myths, Brinton in this volume takes up successively the consideration of the hero-gods of the Algonquins and Iroquois, the Aztecs, Mayas, and the Quichuas of Peru. These myths of national heroes, civilizers, and teachers are, as Brinton says, the fundamental beliefs of a very large number of American tribes, and on their recognition and interpretation depends the correct understanding of most of their mythology and religious life,—and this means, in Brinton’s view, that the stories connected with these heroes have no historic basis.[1901]
The best known of the comprehensive studies by a European writer is J. G. Müller’s Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen (Basle, 1855; again in 1867), in which he endeavors to work out the theory that at the south there is a worship of nature, with a sun-worship for a centre, contrasted at the north with fetichism and a dread of spirits, and these he considers the two fundamental divisions of the Indian worship. Bancroft finds him a chief dependence at times, but Brinton, charging him with quoting in some instances at second-hand, finds him of no authority whatever.
One of the most reputable of the German books on kindred subjects is the Anthropologie der Naturvölker (Leipzig, 1862-66) of Theodor Waitz. Brinton’s view of it is that no more comprehensive, sound, and critical work on the American aborigines has been written; but he considers him astray on the religious phases, and that his views are neither new nor tenable when he endeavors to subject moral science to a realistic philosophy.[1902]