Whatever, therefore, the final terms are in which men at any time and place define their deities, the premises of their reasoning about them is always quite the same—namely, to define the unknown man in terms of the known men themselves—but this known quantity, man, is variable and inconstant, changing with time and place. All powers and functions and attributes of mind and body, inherent in man and distinctive of him—no matter whether beneficent or evil—men imputed to their gods in more or less idealized form.
Guided by inchoate reasoning, the crude thinking of unscientific minds, all early men, responsive to external stimuli and the internal yearning for truth, ascribed to their gods and spirits not only all human functions and attributes measurably idealized, but also all their arts and social and religious institutions were likewise attributed, probably quite unconsciously, to their gods and deities. These anthropic features and activities and anthropopathic mind were not ascribed, of course, to other men, but rather to the so-called “first people”—the personified, animated and humanized phenomena and processes of nature, of the environments of their experience. Thus, the social and institutional organization of the gods becomes a somewhat idealized epitome or reflex of the human society as it existed and exists among the people in whose minds these divine organizations had their origin. By so doing men painted, either consciously or unconsciously, in their religious activities and in their god-lore a faithful picture of the earliest culture and civilization of their own ethnic progenitors.
Hence, when authentic historical records are wanting the student may by close and sympathetic analysis and interpretation of the myths and the religion of a people acquire a fairly accurate knowledge of the history and culture of such a people. In this manner, indeed, the gods verily become the revealers of all history and the teachers of the arts and crafts and industries and the true founders of the institutions—human and divine—to that people. In this interaction of the human mind with the forces and phenomena of life and environing nature lies the true source of inspiration and prophecy. The history of the gods is the history of man. Because the gods, in general, symbolize universal processes in life and nature they and their attributes and functions in time become more or less highly idealized creations of the conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious thinking of men.
The lesson of these myths and legends is that man is other than the material world; that while he is in it he is not of it; that while he feels nature’s elemental activities impelling him and impinging on his senses, his apprehensive yearning heart sees the beckoning finger of a higher and nobler destiny. [[71]]
All bodies of myths agree perfectly on one fundamental principle, transformation, through which all things on this earth have become what they are.
This principle of metamorphosis indicates the mental process by which these things were represented as becoming what they seemed to be—animated things, subjectively endowed with human form, thought, and volition, to explain the phenomena of life and surrounding nature.
I desire to record here my grateful acknowledgment of the assistance rendered by Mr. F. W. Hodge, ethnologist in charge of the Bureau of American Ethnology, in the form of valuable suggestions in connection with the work and in other ways. I wish also to express my appreciation of the courtesy of Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., of Boston, in giving the bureau permission to use freely the material contained in the instructive “Introductions” written by the late Jeremiah Curtin for his interesting books, published by that company under the titles: “Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars”; “Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland”; “Hero-Tales of Ireland”; and “Creation Myths of Primitive America.” [[73]]
[1] The manuscript of this Journal was discovered in Amsterdam in 1895 by the late Gen. James Grant Wilson, who published it in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1895, under the caption “Arent Van Curler And His Journal of 1634–35.” But the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, edited by the learned Mr. A. J. F. van Laer, show that van Curler could not have made the journey, as he did not reach Rensselaerswyck until 1637, then a youth of only eighteen. It seems probable that Marmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, the surgeon of the fort, was the author of the Journal. Consult the Introduction to this same Journal as published in “Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664,” ed. by J. Franklin Jameson, in Original Narratives of Early American History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1909). [↑]