PRE-ANIMISM 63 



give an intelligible account. They have not yet been clothed 

 with individual attributes ; they linger on as survivals of the 

 impersonal stage of religion." x 



It is not clear from this account whether the tribes of 

 Chutia Nagpur have any name for these " indeterminates " ; 

 but among the Red Indians names have been bestowed 

 apparently without assumptions of personality, because 

 retaining an abstract meaning. 2 This has example in the 

 Algonkin manitou, the Iroquois oki or orenda, and the 

 wakonda or wakanda of the Dakotas and the Omaha. 

 According to Mr. McGee, an authority on the Dakotan 

 language, the sun is wakanda not the wakanda; the moon, 

 the star, thunder, lightning, even a man, if he be a shaman, 

 are each wakanda. The term may be translated into 

 " mystery " perhaps more satisfactorily than in any other 

 English word ; yet this rendering is too limited, as wakanda 

 vaguely denotes also power sacred, animate, immortal. 

 Another authority tells us that in the Omaha belief 

 " animate and inanimate were permeated by a common life, 

 wakonda was the power that makes or brings to pass. The 

 question arises : Did the Omaha regard wakonda as a 

 Supreme Being? There is no evidence that he did so. 

 The word wakonda seems to have expressed the Indian's 

 idea of immanent life manifest in all things." The like 

 meaning appears to be attached to manitou and orenda, 

 manitou being applied to any manifestation of extraordinary 

 power, or to any person or thing supposed to possess such 

 power. In an exhaustive article on that word Mr. W. Jones 

 shows the correspondence of idea with wakonda. Manitou^ 

 he says, "is an impersonal substantive." In the Algonkin 

 dialect of the Sac, Fox and Kickapoo, a rigid distinction of 

 gender is made between things with life and things without 

 life ; when they refer to manitou in the sense of a virtue, 

 a property, an abstraction, they employ the form expressive 

 of inanimate gender. They feel that the property is every- 

 where, is omnipresent. 3 Among the Iroquois orenda is this 

 impersonal, inhering, investing power. When a storm is 

 brewing, it the storm-maker is said to be preparing its 

 orenda; when it is ready to burst, it has finished its orenda. 



1 People of India (Calcutta, 1908), p. 215. 



2 For the examples which follow I am chiefly indebted to a brochure on 

 The Fundamental Concept of the Primitive Philosophy, reprinted from the 

 Monist, vol. xvi, No. i, kindly sent me by the author, Arthur O. Lovejoy. 

 And see Mr. Sidney Hartland's Ritual and Belief, pp. 27, 34, 48, 124. 



3 The Algonkin Manitou. 



F 



