ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 13 



of savagery and barbarism, not only the repulsive details of 

 actual fetich ism, but its survival in higher forms; not only 

 the worship of animals, and, indeed, of all imaginable forces, 

 in explanation of phenomena, but seem, in the more advanced 

 stages of their myths, to have mounted those loftier heights 

 of nature-worship from which the students of Aryan records 

 have traced the classic tales of Greece and Rome, as well as 

 the gloomier traditions of Scandinavia. If it is true that our 

 Indians reached what we call oriental nature-myths, out of 

 the two successive planes of fetichism and animal worship, 

 the popular authors may be wrong in supposing that the 

 adoration of the sun and moon in their daily and seasonal 

 motions was the primordial religion, and that fetichism, zool- 

 atry and anthropomorphism appeared only in the degrada- 

 tion of thought and language. A thorough examination of 

 our continent's myths shows that they contain all the pris- 

 tine forms of superstition, such as ancientism, metempsy- 

 chosis of man and beast, apparitions and sorcery, oracles and 

 disease-possession ; and, further, that several of the linguistic 

 families here had begun to approach the religious plane of 

 our own distant forefathers whose records have lately been 

 rescued for our study by the translation of the Veda, the 

 Zend Avesta, and Tripitaka. 



Most of the earlier writers on the religion of our Indians 

 were missionaries, who, unacquainted with the truths of 

 evolution, applied the theory of degradation to all who dif- 

 fered with themselves. Convinced that their own religion 

 was pure and natural, that is, divinely revealed, it was their 

 object to find concordance in the cis-Atlantic faiths, also 

 supposed to be " natural," though, for want of a written bible, 

 not preserved in purity. Hence, all matters bearing on the 

 religions of North America, and especially on the existence 

 of any personal or definite God, were examined and recorded 

 with error and distortion. 



A large number of the now accurately translated myths 

 and traditions of the Algonkian, Iroquoian, Cherokian, Mus- 

 kokian, Dakotan, Tsinukan, and other families were ana- 



