932 THE GHOST-DANCE RELIOION [eth.aks.14 



Sinai, where he is directed to alight and pray, because there God had 

 spoken to Moses, alter which he is conducted to Bethlehem, where 

 again he is directed to alight and pray, because there Jesus was born, 

 after which again lie is brought into the presence of Abraham, Moses, 

 Enoch, John the Baptist, and Jesus, by all of whom he was hailed as a 

 worthy brother and prophet. The direct descent becomes plainer still 

 when we learn how Mohammed, on his return from talking with God in 

 the seventh heaven, again meets Moses, who persuades him that the 

 religious exercises prescribed by God for the faithful are too onerous, 

 and goes back with him to plead with the Lord lor a reduction of the 

 daily prayers from fifty to five as Abraham pleaded for Sodom. 



The, spirit world of our Indians is a place where death and old age 

 are unknown, and where every one is happy in the simple happiness 

 which he knew on earth — hunting, feasting, and playing the old-time 

 games with former friends, but without war. for there all is peace. The 

 ideal happiness is material, perhaps, but it is such happiness as the 

 world might long for, with nothing in it gross or beyond reasonable 

 probability. The Semitic ideal, from which our own is derived, is very 

 different. We get one conception in the book of Revelation and 

 another six hundred years later in the vision of Mohammed, which is 

 puerile to the last degree. Among its wonders are an houri,who comes 

 out of a quince, and whose body is composed of camphor, amber, and 

 musk. Then there is a cock which stands with his feet on the lowest 

 earth, while his head reaches the empyrean and his wings outstretched 

 the limits of space, whose business is every morning to praise the Lord 

 and set all the cocks on earth to crowing after him. There is an angel 

 who bathes daily in a river, after which he flaps his wings, and from 

 every drop that falls from them there is created an angel with 20,000 

 faces and 40,000 tongues, each of which speaks a distinct language, 

 unintelligible to the rest. But the masterpiece is the tree tooba, whose 

 fruit is the food of the inhabitants of paradise. Every branch produces 

 a hundred thousand different colored fruits, while from its roots run 

 rivers of water, milk, wine, and honey. As if this were not enough, 

 the tree produces also ready-made clothing. "< m the tree were baskets 

 tilled with garments of the brocade and satin of paradise. A million 

 of baskets are allotted to each believer, each basket containing a hun- 

 dred thousand garments, all of different class and fashion" — and so on 

 ad nauseam. (Merrick's Mohammed.) When we reflect that this is 

 accepted by more than 150,000,000 civilized Orientals, from whom we 

 have derived much of our own culture, we may. perhaps, be more tol- 

 erantly disposed toward the American Indian belief. 



JOAN OF ARC 



The most remarkable, the most heroic and pathetic instance of reli- 

 gious hallucination in Europe is that of .loan of Arc, known as the Maid 

 of Orleans, born in 1411' and burned at the stake in 1-431, and recently 



