The next step in the process is the socialization of this vast company—the imputation of life, soul, purpose, and a rational rôle to them constitutes the epic, which is also the poet’s handiwork.
As the basis of religious expression, Seneca-Iroquoian myths and legends, in common with those of all other men, are to most people the empty tales of superstition, the foundations of idolatry, because its gods and deities, forsooth, have never actually existed. But myths are fictitious only in form and dress, while they are true in matter and spirit, for truth is congruity between reason and objects, and hence is eternal and universal.
The human side of these personifications of the processes and phenomena of nature in some instances has become so real and so natural that these beings no longer act or function in terms of the processes of nature only, but as the thaumaturgic fetishes of potent sorcerers, performing wonderful feats of orenda, as they are represented as doing in a large number of these narratives. Now, these accounts are certainly not myths and are not legends in the true sense of the term, but are, rather, fictitious narratives or tales of reputed individual human achievement, quite incredible, of course, as authentic acts of mankind. They center about the reputed affairs of a human being, or do so at least in the view of the modern story-teller.
In the collection of Seneca narratives of Mr. Curtin eight relate to the Genonsgwa (the Stone Coats or Stone Giants), six to Hiʹʼnoⁿʼ (Hinon) or the Thunder People, six to the Dagwanoenyent or Whirlwind People, five to the Shagodiioweq or Wind People, and three to the Djogeon or Dwarf People. It is probable that the two groups of “wind” peoples originally arose from a single personage. From single personages like Hiʹʼnoⁿʼ or Thunder, Shagodiioweq or the Wind, and Dagwanoenyent or the Cyclone or Whirlwind, the [[62]]story-tellers of to-day have created large bodies of fictitious people, representing a reversal of the original process by which the first great concepts were formed.
But truth seemingly was not readily appreciable by primal men until it was dramatized in saga, in legend, and in myth, in formulas, rites, ceremonies, customs, and material symbols based on those narratives; in short, it had to be couched in terms of human expression and activity. These symbols and figurative expressions bore the fashion and impress of the time and the place, and so before truth so dramatized can be fully understood it must be carefully freed from the garb and trappings of local and temporal use and need; in brief, the literal unreality of myth must be lifted from the substantive and the spiritual realities it symbolizes.
And, for this reason, a deity embodying or representing one of the great recurrent processes of nature or one of the seemingly changeless features of the universe is something vastly more than a mere figment of the human brain; for, although conceived in terms of man, the “deity” in his own sphere and function is limitless in power, incomprehensible in mode of life and action, and abides without beginning of days or end of years—properties which make the god divine and infinitely superior to man, the creature of divine power.
One of the fundamental teachings of the study of the myths of the American Indians is that the so-called Genesis or Creation myths relate the activities and exploits, in more or less detail, of the “elder people,” the “first people,” whom men later call the gods. Rightly understood and sympathetically conceived, these events are not predicated of human beings as such. These narrations explain in just what manner the present order of things in nature arose; they detail what took place in a condition of things different from the present, and which were, in the minds of their relators, the necessary antecedent processes resulting in the establishment of the present order of nature. They treat only of the “first people.” None relate to human beings and none treat of things done since man appeared on earth.
Human in form and in feeling, and yet most divine, were the gods and deities of the ancient Seneca and the other Iroquoian peoples. While the divine social and political organization was necessarily for psychological reasons a close reflex or replica of the human, and although both gods and man derived descent from an original first parent, yet the first divine ancestor was a self-existing god, and the first man was the creature of one of these divine Powers.
The expression of the mythic—the cosmogonic, the cosmologic—in terms of human function and attribute and activity is well illustrated in the legends and myths of the Iroquoian peoples. In these [[63]]sagas the personifications of the elements and forces of nature are classified as human by the use of the term oñʹgwe, “a human being or mankind” (for the word has both a singular and a plural signification), to designate them.
The task of classifying these narratives, even tentatively, is not an easy one, for the proportion of these stories which seem to be unquestionably fiction to those which are myths and legends is relatively much larger than might be suspected without some investigation. It is clearly wrong to call everything legend or myth when the evidence from the facts seems to forbid such action. For it is evident that very many of the narratives are fiction—stories composed and related to amuse, to mystify, or to glorify some hero, or perhaps to spread the fame of some noted sorcerer and his fetishes.