Chapter XV] 

 PARALLELS LN T OTHER SYSTEMS 



I will pour out ray spirit upon all flesh; and your sons unci your daughters shall 

 prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your youngmen shall see visions. — Toel. 



How is it then, brethren? When ye come together every one of vou hath a doc- 

 trine, hath a revelation. — / Corinthians. 



THE BIBLICAL PERIOD 



The remote in time or distance is always strange. The familiar 

 present is always natural and a matter of course. Beyond the narrow 

 range of onr horizon imagination creates a new world, bnt as we advance 

 in any direction, or as we go back over forgotten paths, we find ever 

 a continuity and a succession. The human race is one in thought and 

 action. The systems of our highest modern civilizations have their coun- 

 terparts among all the nations, and their chain of parallels stretches 

 backward link by link until we find their origin and interpretation in 

 the customs and rites of our own barbarian ancestors, or of our still 

 existing aboriginal tribes. There is nothing new under the sun. 



The Indian messiah religion is the inspiration of a dream. Its ritual 

 is the dance, the ecstasy, and the trance. Its priests are hypnotics and 

 cataleptics. All these have formed a part of every great religious devel- 

 opment of which we have knowledge from the beginning of history. 



In the ancestors of the Hebrews, as described in the Old Testament, 

 we have a pastoral people, living in tents, acquainted with metal work- 

 ing, but without letters, agriculture, or permanent habitations. They 

 had reached about the plane of our own Navaho, but were below that 

 of the Pueblo. Their mythologic and religions system was closely 

 parallel. Their chiefs were priests who assumed to govern by inspira- 

 tion from God, communicated through frequent dreams and waking 

 visions. Each of the patriarchs is the familiar confidant of God aud 

 his angels, going up to heaven in dreams and receiving direct instruc- 

 tions in waking visits, and regulating his family and his tribe, and 

 ordering their religious ritual, in accord with these instructions. Jacob, 

 alone in the desert, sleeps and dreams, and sees a ladder reaching to 

 heaven, with angels going up and down upon it, and God himself, who 

 tells him of the future greatness of the Jewish nation. So Wovoka, 

 asleep on the mountain, goes up to the Indian heaven and is told by 

 the Indian god of the coming restoration of his race. Abraham is 

 "tempted" by God and commanded to sacrifice his son, aud proceeds 

 to carry out the supernatural injunction. So Black Coyote dreams aud 

 is commanded to sacrifice himself for the sake of his children. 



JIl'S 



