But besides this pagan element—the more insidious because scarcely suspected by most, and which many even now would treat as absolutely null for evil—the country was, in its aboriginal inhabitants, utterly pagan; and within our limits the remnant of those nations and tribes which now represent the original occupants are to a very great extent as pagan as they were three centuries ago. Even where tribes have been converted to Christianity, and been for a long series of years under Christian teachers, a pagan element often remains, nurtured in secret, and heathen rites are practised with the utmost fidelity by many who keep up the semblance of being faithful worshippers of the true God. This crypto-paganism is termed by the Spanish writers in Mexico nagualism, and, from its secret character, formed one of the greatest afflictions of the missionaries, eating out the very heart of the apparently flourishing tree planted by the toil and watered by the blood of the earlier heralds of the Gospel.
Another pagan element came with the negro slaves—barbarous men torn from Africa, without culture, imbued with the most degrading superstitions of fetichism, and believers in the power of intercourse with the evil spirits whom they dreaded and invoked. In the utter disregard of their moral welfare which prevailed in the English colonies, no attempt was made in colonial days to eradicate their pagan ideas and to instil Christian principles; on the contrary, efforts were actually made to prevent their instruction and baptism, from an idea that Christianity was incompatible with a condition of slavery.
In time the negro slaves and their descendants imitated externally the religious manner of their white masters, but their old fetichism was maintained, with the invocation of evil spirits and attempted intercourse with them. The more Christianity in any form penetrated among these people, the more this pagan element assumed a secret character, until it became, as it is in our day in the West Indies and the South, under the name of vaudoux or voodoo worship, the secret pagan religion of the negro and mixed races.
Another pagan element—which cannot be called cryptic, because it meets the full meridian blaze of day, as though it were a thing entitled to existence and protection without limit or check—is the Buddhic worship of the Chinese, with perhaps the less debasing ancient paganism of that nation. Temples arise and pagan worship is carried on before hundreds of altars, chiefly on the Pacific slope. This, with the degraded morals of the heathenism it represents, forms a question difficult to solve, and exciting grave attention not only in California, but in other parts of the country.
The facility with which Mormonism has gained hundreds of thousands of votaries to its monstrous doctrines, and the difficulty under our system of laws of counteracting its influence, leaving its suppression simply to the general condemnation it receives from the public opinion of the country, convince all thinking men that it is a great and serious danger to the well-being of our country in the future. It lies between the unchecked, uncensured paganism of the Chinese in California and the heathenism of the wild Indian tribes, the nagualism of the New Mexican Pueblos, and, still further east, the voodooism of the negro. Who can foresee the fearful creation of evil that the Prince of Darkness may form out of this material ready to his hand? Buddhism overran nations of various origin, civilization, and mode of life—the lettered Chinese, the nobler Japanese, the wild Tartar; it has adaptability, as seen in its assuming external Christian dress and ideas, taken from early envoys of the faith. Mormonism shows a vitality and a power of extension that none who remember its origin could, at the time it arose, have believed within the limits of possibility. The voodoo mysteries permeate through a population numbered by millions. If nagualism and Indian paganism exist only among tribes rapidly hurrying to extinction, these tribes have shown in some cases recuperative power, and, fostered by the stronger heathen elements, may revive sufficiently to be a source of mischief. It may be said that, except in the case of the Mormons, this element is confined to inferior races—the Mongolian, negro, and Indian—and cannot affect the mass of the American people; but this is really not the fact, as in almost every case whites living near the inferior races do actually imbibe some of these pagan superstitions and become believers in them and in their power, while the spread of the so-called spiritualism through all classes in this country shows at once a vehicle for the propagation of any form of diabolism that may rise up with dazzling powers of attraction.
The influence of crypto-paganism on the whites can be seen in our history. The New England settlers made comparatively short work of the native tribes, who were in their eyes Chanaanites not to be spared. But though they slaughtered the men, women were saved, and not always from motives that will stand too close a scrutiny. Indian women became slaves in the houses of the New England colonists. If there was any outward conformity to Christian usage, most of them remained at heart as heathen as ever. The Indians of almost every known tribe avowedly worshipped the Spirit of Evil. North and South missionaries found the natives acknowledge and justify this practice. As a rule they admitted a Spirit of Good, but, as they argued, being inherently good, he could do only good to them, and need not be propitiated; whereas the Spirit of Evil continually sought to injure men, and must necessarily be propitiated to ward off the intended scourge. This adoration of the Evil One, and the attempt to propitiate him, win his favor, and do his will, the Indian slaves bore with them in their bondage. What New England witchcraft really was—diabolic, delusion, or imposture—has never been settled. No sound Catholic divine versed in mystic theology has ever, to our knowledge, marshalled and sifted the facts, and the evidence cited to support them, in order to come to any reasonable theory in the matter. New England of the seventeenth century firmly believed it diabolical; New England of the nineteenth century as dogmatically decides that it was delusion or imposture; but, unfortunately, neither seventeenth-century nor nineteenth-century New Englandism can be deemed a very safe guide, and each is condemned by the other and admits its liability to err, although both had the same energy for forcing their opinions for the time being on all mankind.
But, whatever the real character of New England witchcraft was, one thing is certain: Indian crypto-paganism was at the root of it. Tituba, the Indian servant of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem, practised wild incantations and imbued the daughter and niece of her master with her whole system of diabolism. The strange actions of the children excited alarm. Tituba was arraigned as a witch and confessed her incantations; but the devil protects his own. Witchcraft trials began, and Tituba and her fellow Indian slaves, who must have quaked for the moment, saw themselves, not punished, but used as witnesses, until more than a hundred women were apprehended and most of them committed to prison. It did not end there. The gallows was to play its part. Nineteen were hanged, and one Giles Corey was pressed to death. If Tituba invoked her demon to avenge his fallen votaries in her tribe, she was gratified by beholding the victorious whites murder each other at her instance. Neither Tituba nor any other of the Indians, though they avowed their intercourse with the fallen spirits, was tried or condemned for witchcraft. What took place in the Parris household took place in hundreds of others where Indian slaves were kept, as in our time in the South. Thousands of children have there been imbued by their negro nurses with the pagan obeah and voodoo superstitions, as doubtless on the Pacific slope many a mother is horrified to find her child’s mind filled with the grossest heathenism by the Chinese servant, and fondly hopes she has disabused her little one, when, in reality, the faith and the terror then implanted in the child’s susceptible mind will last through life, burned into the very soul by the vivid impression produced.
A Catholic may say that the grace of baptism will protect many from this evil; but, alas! to how many thousands of families in this land is baptism a stranger! In them there is nothing to check the insidious progress of evil.
The Huron nation was converted to Christianity by the early Catholic missionaries, and the Iroquois were induced by them to abandon the worship of their evil spirit Tharonhyawagon, or Agreskoue, whose name even seems to be unknown to the present so-called pagan bands, who worship the God of the Christians, but with strange heathenish rites. The vices prevalent among the Hurons of Ohio, nominal Catholics in the last century, show that secret worship of evil spirits still prevailed. All know how the medicine-men have maintained their ground among the Chippewas, Ottawas, and other Algonquin tribes on the borders of the great lakes, although Catholic missionaries began their labors among them two centuries ago. Whenever for a time Catholicity has seemed to gain a tribe, any interruption of the mission for a brief period seems to revive the old diabolism. There are medicine-men now with votaries as earnest as any whom Dablon, Marquette, and Allouez tried to convert in the seventeenth century. But data are wanting for a full consideration of the subject as to these and other northern tribes.
Of the nagualism in the Texas tribes after their conversion by the Franciscan missionaries we have evidence in the life of Father Margil, a holy and illustrious laborer in that field. The tribes among whom he and his compeers labored have vanished, but the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico still remain. The succession of missionaries became irregular; no bishop visited those parts to confirm the converts; the revolutions following that which separated Mexico from Spain almost utterly destroyed the Indian missions of New Mexico. Then the nagualism which had been evidently maintained from the first by a few adepts and in great secrecy became bolder; and these tribes, whose conversion dates back nearly three centuries, revived the old paganism of their ancestry, mingled with dreams of Montezuma’s future coming, taught them by the Mexican Indians who accompanied the first Spanish settlers.