Ixxviii ETHNOGRAPHIC SKETCH. 



witchcraft only, religious feasts are orgies, divine revelation is human hal- 

 lucination, and the moral element, when present in religion, is not urged 

 upon the conununit}'. While in the religions of the white man the gods 

 originally representing nature's powers gradually become teachers or 

 examples of morality and mental jmprovement, those of the other races 

 remain the stern and remorseless deities of the sky, the atmosphere, and 

 the earth, whose good will has to be proi)itiated by sacrifice. 



As zoodemonism is the most appropriate form of religion for man in 

 the animistic stage, the majority of the mythic characters in American relig- 

 ions are animals, especially quadrupeds ; and even the fully anthropomor- 

 phized deities sometimes assume, in Oregon and elsewhere, the masks of 

 animals. The earlier Indians firmly believed that such animals as were 

 the prototypes of their own species had human faculties, and talked and 

 thought as men do ; in whatever tribe there are totemic gentes or clans 

 the members of these are supposed to have descended from that prototype 

 of a bear, deer, alligator, eagle, or whatever animal a gens is called after. 

 Certain qualities of man, physical and intellectual, found their closest analo- 

 o-ies in those of animals, and the animal world is much nearer akin to man 

 in the mind of the Indian than in the white man's mind Scurrilous and 

 grotesque acts ascribed to so many Indian deities were not intended for 

 derision, as with us, but for faithful portrayings of the habits of typical 

 animals; and zoodemonism — not exactly zoolatry, as in Egypt — is the form 

 of religion existing among the wild Indians of America. 



The large amount of mythologic and transcendental material obtained 

 among the Indians requires subdivision into several chapters. I present it 

 under the following subdivisions: a. Elementary deities ; b. Spirit deities ; 

 c. Animal deities. 



Of the mythologic data embodied in the present article the larger part 

 were obtained by myself, but not all. The others were gathered by 

 Messrs. Stephen Powers and Jeremiah Curtin, mainly by the latter, who 

 obtained over one hundred Modoc myths in 1883 and 1884, now forming 

 part of the unpublished collection of the Bureau of Ethnology. 



