American Hero-Myths

GIONS--THE PURPOSE OF RELIGIONS--RELIGIONS OF RITE AND OF CREED--T

NYMS AND HOMONYMS--OTOSIS--POLYONOMY--HENOTHEISM--BORROWING-

ERPRETATION OF THE MYTH--COMPARISON WITH THE ARYAN HERMES MYTH--WITH THE ARYO-SEMITIC CADMUS

at there are tribes of men without any sort of religion; nowadays the effort

ual or extra-natural agencies. Some learned men say that we had better drop the word "religion," lest we be misunderstood. They would rather use "da

road sense some kind of religion

s. He taught that man begins with fetichism, advances to polytheism, and at last rises to monotheism. More in vogue at present is the theory that

It is the highest of all religions, but it is not monotheism. Look at Buddhism. In its pure

e, the real purpose of religions. This has been diff

forts, poor or noble, conscious or blind, to

is an early system of natural philosophy; later it becomes moral philosophy. Explain the Universe by physical laws, p

ut interacting forces: yet both may be profoundly religious. Nor can morality be accepted as a criterion of religions. The bloody scenes in the Mexic

s good or bad hap, here or hereafter, as it may be. Rooted infinitely deep in the sense of personality, religion was recognized at the beginning, it will be recognized at t

een sought by the cults of the w

avoidance of certain actions. He may credit this or that myth, he may hold to one or many gods; this is unimportant; but he must not fail in the pen

sh dogmas, the mental acceptance of which is the one thing needful. In them mythology passes into theo

of these forms. There alone the imagination of the votary is fr

t illustrates the intimate and immediate relations which the religion in which it grew bore to the individual life

itself with some of the religions which were developed on the American continent before its discovery. My object is to present

me as elsewhere. These are now too generally familiar to need specifi

ia. The definition of this, however, must be extended from the mere representation of inanimate things as animate, to include also the

matical distinctions they draw between animate and inanimate objects, which distinctions must invariably be observed. They cannot say "the boat moves" wi

, the sameness in sound of words with difference in signification. Thus coatl, in the Aztec tongue, is a word frequently appearing in the names of divinities. It has three entirely different meanings, to wit, a serpent, a guest and twins. Now,

as the Cherokee name Nik-a-jak. This the white settlers have transformed into Nigger Jack, and are prepared with a narrative of some runaway slave to explain the cognomen. It may also occur in the same language. In an Algonkin dialect missi wabu means "the great light of the dawn;" and a common

eness;" but the word was similar to Aztatlan, which would mean "the place of herons," some spot where these birds would love to congregate, from az

s; one or another of these becomes prominent, and at last obscures in a particular myth or loc

t to be construed literally as evidences of a monotheism, but simply that at that particular time the worshiper's mind was so filled with the power and majesty of the divinity to whom he appealed, that he applied to him these super

g was something quite foreign to their mode of thought. One of our most eminent students[2] has justly said: "Every Indian synthesis--names of persons and places not excepted--must preserve the consciousness of its roots, and must not only have a meaning, but be so framed as

among the red race. Some exceptions can be pointed out to this statement, in the Aztec and Peruvian monarchies. Some borrowing seems to have been done either by or from the Mayas; and the hero-myth of the Iroquois has so many of the lineaments of that

ne that there was a poverty of resources in these languages, or that their concrete form hemmed in the mind from the study of the abstract, speak without knowledge. One has but to look at the inexhaustible synonymy of the Aztec, as it is

act; but to convey the idea of actual being, the existentia as united to the essentia, we must add the prefix cascan, and thus have runap-cascan-caynin, which strictly means "the essence of being in general, as existent in humanity."[3] I doubt if the dialect of Germa

race. We must not think we have grounds for skepticism if we occasionally come across some that astonish u

ultivated, a sort of "sacred language" being employed to conceal while it conveyed the mysteries of faith. Some linguists think that these dialects are archaic forms of the language, the memory of which was retained in ceremonial obs

n and Peru; and at the other end of the scale we may instance the Guaymis, of Darien, naked savages, but whose "chiefs of the law," we are t

divinities and of localities expressed in terms in the highest degree metaphorical, but they

n led to present it as it occurs among several nations far apart, both geographically and in point of culture. This myth is that of the national hero, their mythical civilizer and teacher of the tribe, who, at the same time, was often identified

interest in its advancement was such that he personally appeared among the ancestors of the nation, and taught them the useful arts, gave them the maize or other food plants, initiated them into the mysteries of their religious rites, framed the laws w

d by mortal man. The hero is apt to come into conflict with his brother, or one of his brothers, and the long and desperate struggle resulting, which often involved the universe in repeated destructions, constitutes one of the leading topics of the myth-

represented this variously. At any rate, his people are not deserted by him, and though absent, and

st came when he appeared as a man among men; toward that point he returned when he di

rican shores, and nearly all historians have summarily rejected their authenticity, on this account. But a most careful scrutiny of their sources positively refutes this opinion. There is irrefragable evidence that these myths and this ideal of the hero-god, were intimately known and widely current in America long before any one of its millions of inhabitants had ever seen a whi

t his chief god. The beginning of the day served, by analogy, for the beginning of the world. Light comes before the

gods. This explains the four brothers, who were nothing else than the four cardinal points, and their mother, who dies in producing them, is the eastern light, which is soon lost in the growing day. The East, as their leader, was also the supposed ruler of the winds, and thus god of the air and rain

early progress in the arts of domestic and social life. Thus light came to be personified as the embodiment of c

wn. Their ample hair and beard are the rays of the sun that flow from his radiant visage. T

c Lif, and in the Norse Baldur, we have also beneficent hero-gods, distinguished by their fair complexion and ample golden locks. "Amongst the dark as well as amongst the fair races, amongst those who are

against some potent enemy, some dark demon or dragon, but as ofte

Hermeias, is but a transliteration of the Sanscrit Sarameyas, under which he appears in the Vedic songs, as the son of Sarama, the Dawn. Even his character as the master thief and patron saint of the light-fingered gentry, drawn from the way the winds and breezes penetrate every crack and cranny of the house, is absolutely repeated in the Mexica

He collected their ancestors into a community, gave them laws, invented the alphabet of sixteen letters, taught them the art of smelting metals, established oracles, and introduced the Dyonisiac wor

of a white bull. Cadmus seeks to recover her, and sets out, following the westward course of the sun. "There can be no rest until the lost one is found again. The sun must journey westward until he sees again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning."[6] Therefore Cadmus leaves the p

source and progress of the light of day, and of the advantages men derive from it. Cadmus brings the letters of the alphabet from the east to Greece, for the same reason that in ancient M

alogies to support this interpretation of

men. This story the Egyptians delighted to repeat under numberless disguises. The groundwork and meaning are the same, whether the actors are Osiris, Isis and Set, Ptah, Hapi and the Virgin Cow, or the many other actors of this drama. There, too, among a brown race of men, the light-god was deemed to be not of their ow

e. The Peruvians, for instance, had large establishments where were kept in rigid seclusion the "virgins of the sun." Did one of these violate her vow of chastity, she and her fellow criminal were at once put to death; but did she claim that the child she bore was of divine parentage, and the contrary could not be

epresent, with others drawn from Aryan and Egyptian legends long familiar to students, and which now are fully recognized as having in them nothing of the su

l, a cultured nation of the Toltecs, when the proof is of the strongest, that every one of these is an absolutely baseless fiction of mythology? Let it be understood, hereafter, that whoever uses these na

s. The science of comparative mythology has assigned to these venerable stories a different, though not less noble, interpretatio

hey are neither to be discarded because they resemble some familiar to their European conquerors, nor does that similarity mean that they are historically derived, the one from

ct, by Gustav Roskoff, disposes of Sir John Lubbock's doubts, as well as the crude statements of the author of Kraft

n the Composition of Indian Geograp

essentia que en Dios y los Angeles y el hombre es modo personal." Diego Gonzalez Holguin,

es y de sus Costumbres, p. 20, in Pinart, Colecci

ntroduction to the Science of Compar

r George W. Cox

e, History of the Egyptian Rel

εγενετο." (Greek: Ton emon chitona oudeis apechaluphen on ego charpon etec