INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 3 



nians, whose great god Cumango sent his son, the first man, 

 Guaayayp, down to earth to perfect the state of imperfectly 

 created man. Etalapass, the god of other western tribes of 

 America, did, it is true, create men, but they were imperfect 

 and incapable of movement till another god, Ecannin, had 

 compassion on their helplessness and opened their mouth and 

 eyes, bestowed the power of movement on hands and feet and 

 taught them to make boats and nets. In the mythology of the 

 maritime tribes of North America sagas tell of semi-human 

 beings whose definite separation into man and beast only took 

 place later through the intervention of the son of god during 

 his wanderings on earth. 1 



Son of god and creator of the world is also Adam Kad- 

 mon of the cabalistic book of Jezirah ; he proceeds from 

 Ensoph, the highest of beings, as the first source of light ; 

 thereupon ten Sephiroth, or spiritual powers, radiate from him 

 and serve, in conjunction with the twenty-two numerically con- 

 ceived consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, as the instruments 

 of the creation of the world and man. The Gnostics again, 

 whether they incline to the Greek or the Oriental version, are 

 unanimous in attributing the material world, including man, not 

 to the highest divine being, the Pleroma, but to an inferior 

 creator, a demiurge, who is connected with the material world, 

 and subordinate to the Pleroma. " Pleroma " signifies " fulness 

 of Divine life ". 



Whether this idea of a demiurgic son of god be primary or, 

 as Waitz and other anthropologists assume, secondary, of later 

 date, it must certainly be deemed inferior to the conception of 

 a single omnipotent creator. This type of creator is to be 

 found, under the most varied forms, among the savage peoples 

 of all parts of the world. Space does not permit us to attempt 

 a complete enumeration of the names under which the creator 

 appears, and the traditions of the creation of man therewith 

 connected. But we must not overlook the remarkable sagas, 

 current among certain tribes, which treat of the creation of 

 woman as a distinct act of creative power. The Munda Kolhs, 

 for instance, maintain that their god Singbonga only then pro- 



1 A full account of North American mythology will be found in the Bureau 

 of American Ethnology Bull. 30. 



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