62 SENECA FICTION, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS [eth. ann. 32 



story-tellers of to-day have created large bodies of fictitious people, 

 representing a reversal of the original process by which the first 

 great concepts were formed. 



But truth seemingly was not readily appreciable by primal men 

 until it was dramatized in saga, in legend, and in myth, in formulas, 

 rites, ceremonies, customs, and material syinbols based on those nar- 

 ratives; in short, it had to be couched in terms of huiuan expression 

 and activity. These symbols and figurative expressions bore the 

 fashion and impress of the time and the place, and so before truth so 

 dramatized can be fully undei-stood it must be carefully freed from 

 the garb and trappings of local and temporal use and need; in brief, 

 the literal unreality of myth must be lifted from the substantive and 

 the spiritual realities it symbolizes. 



And. for this reason, a deity embodying or representing one of 

 the great recurrent processes of nature or one of the seemingly 

 changeless features of the universe is something vastly more than 

 a mere figment of the human brain ; for, although conceived in terms 

 of man, the " deity " in his own sphere and function is limitless in 

 power, incomprehensible in mode of life and action, and abides with- 

 out beginning of days or end of years — properties which make the 

 god divine and infinitely superior to man. the creature of divine 

 power. 



One of the fundamental teachings of the study of the myths of 

 the Amei'ican Indians is that the so-called (lenesis or Creation myths 

 relate the activities and exploits, in more or less detail, of the " elder 

 people," the " first people," whom men later call the gods. Rightly 

 understood and sympathetically conceived, these events are not predi- 

 cated of human beings as such. These narrations explain in just 

 what manner the present order of things in nature ai'ose; they 

 detail what took place in a condition of things dift'erent from the 

 present, and which were, in the minds of their relators, the neces- 

 sary antecedent processes resulting in the establishment of the pres- 

 ent order of nature. They treat only of the " first people." None 

 relate to human beings and none treat of things d(me since man 

 appeared on earth. 



Iluuuin in form and in feeling, and yet most divine, were the gods 

 and deities of the ancient Seneca and the other Troquoian peoples. 

 While the divine social and political organization was necessarily for 

 psychological reasons a close reflex or replica of the human, and 

 although both gods and man derived descent from an original first 

 parent, yet the first divine ancestor was a self-existing god, and the 

 first man was the creature of one of these divine Powers. 



The expression of the mythic — the cosmogonic, the cosmologic — in 

 terms of human function and attribute and activity is well illus- 

 trated in the legends and myths of the Iroquoian peoples. In these 



