cisHiKB] EFFECT OF SPANISH INTERCOURSE. 339 



"old ones of the missa times knew also these things of the missa; and 

 so, that they be lured near aud come not as strangers, but find iiieans 

 of recognition and niovenient (manifestation) to us, aud happily receive 

 our offerings of food to the fire, they must (in place of the summoning 

 songs and drums and rattles) hear the church bells aud chants of the 

 Spaniards and see the things which they, perforce, held to most famil- 

 iarly and with least fear and secrecy in times of festival while yet they 

 lived iu daylight." 



I need not add that this fully accounts for tlie contradictory behavior 

 of the Indians iu reference to the old church, the burial ground, and 

 other things pertaining to it. The church could not be rebuilt. It had 

 been dead so long that, rehabilitated, it would be no longer familiar to 

 the "fathers" who in spirit had witnessed its decay. Nor could it be 

 takeu suddenly away. It had stood so long that, missing it, they 

 would be sad, or might perhaps even abandon it. 



The Zuni faith, as revealed in this sketch of more than three hun- 

 dred and fifty years of Spanish intercourse, is as a drop of oil in water, 

 surrounded and touched at every point, yet in no place penetrated or 

 changed inwardly by the flood of alien belief that descended upon it. 

 Herein is exemplified anew the tendency of i)rimitive-iuinded man to 

 interpret unfamiliar things more directly than simply, according to their 

 appearances merely, not by analysis in our sense of the term; and to 

 make his interpretations, no less than as we ourselves do, always 

 in the light of what he already familiarly believes or habitually thinks 

 he knows. Hence, of necessity he adjusts other beliefs and opinions 

 to his own, but never his own beliefs and opinions to others; and 

 even his usages are almost never changed in spirit, however much so iu 

 . externals, until all else in his life is changed. Thus, he is slow to adopt 

 from alien peoples any but material suggestions, these even, strictly 

 according as they suit his ways of life; and whatever he does adopt, or 

 rather absorb and assimilate, from the culture and lore of another ])eo- 

 ple, neither distorts nor obscures his native culture, neither discolors 

 nor displaces his original lore. 



All of the foregoing suggests what might be more fully shown by 

 further examples, the aboriginal and uncontanuuated character — so far 

 as a modern like myself can represent it — of the myths delineated in 

 the following series of outlines. Yet a casual visitor to Zufii, seeing 

 but unable to analyze the signs above noted, would be led to infer quite 

 the contrary by other and more patent signs. He would see horses, 

 cattle aud donkeys, sheep and goats, to say nothing of swine aud a 

 few scrawny chickens. He would see peach orchards and wheat fields, 

 carts (and wagons now), and tools of metal; would find, too, in (]ueer out- 

 of-the-way little rooms native silversmiths plying their primitive bel- 

 lows and deftly using a few crude t()ols of iron and stone to turu their 

 scant silver coins into bright buttons, bosses, beads, and bracelets, 

 which every well-conditioned Zuni wears; and he wonld see worn also. 



