2 THE HUMAN SPECIES 



the beaver, the otter, or the bear, but wherever the coyote 

 appears it is to him that chief honour is paid, on account of 

 his sagacity, and he is regarded as the creator ; indeed, in the 

 Oregon region, where the language contains no special word 

 for "deity," the "little wolf" half animal, half higher being 

 is the chief object of veneration. 



On a considerably higher plane stand those tribes who 

 attribute the creation of the world and of man to a mediator 

 between God and man, in other words to a demiurge pos- 

 sessing human attributes. All the nomadic tribes of the Polar 

 regions, for instance, believe in a powerful benevolent deity 

 who, however, is too sublime to conduct the work of creation 

 personally, and has consequently entrusted it to his only son. 

 The same fundamental idea is to be traced in the Javanese 

 tradition, according to which there dwelt in the centre of the 

 universe, long before the creation of heaven and earth, a deity 

 named Sang-yang-Wisesa who gained permission from the 

 supreme god to create heaven and earth, sun and moon, and 

 finally man himself. This demiurge, Sang-yang-Wisesa, is 

 identical with the Unkulunkulu of the Zulus of South-West 

 Africa, with the Numank Machana of the Peruvian Indians, 

 and with the demiurgic architect of the Aztecs, who first im- 

 proved the form of the created world on its emerging from the 

 deep, whereupon man, in his original state a formless mass of 

 flesh and blood, was brought to perfection by Quetzalcoatl. 



Although among many American tribes the deity from 

 whom man has descended is of an undeniably anthropomorphous 

 nature, being himself the " First Man" among many others the 

 idea of a demiurge in human form is clearly traceable. For 

 instance, the Leni Lenape represent the first man, Nahabasch, 

 as mediator between god and man ; the Caribbeans maintain 

 that the first man, Loguo, descended from heaven and returned 

 thither after creating the world and man ; finally, the Algon- 

 quins' principal god, Menabogho, is sometimes represented as 

 mediator between the supreme spirit and mankind, sometimes 

 as the progenitor of the human race and creator of the second 

 world, the first having been destroyed by evil spirits. 



We sometimes even find the first man regarded as the 

 son of the supreme spirit ; for instance, among the Califor- 



