BELIEFS AND SUPERSTITIONS OF THE IROQUOIS INDIANS. 361 



Up to within a half century to present a myth acceptably to the reading 

 world, it must first be divested of its aboriginal setting, invested with a hero and 

 heroine, have a plot and counterplot, or, if its kernel admitted, endowed with a 

 great moral lesson laden with some proof of a, universal deluge, or Hiawatha-like 

 teach the doctrine of atonement, and repeat the story of the Ascension. The 

 pagan Iroquois of to-day — and there are many — will tell you that his ancestors 

 worshiped, as he continues to do, the "Great Spirit," and that they like himself 

 held feasts and dances in his honor. But a careful study of their mythology 

 proves clearly that in the place of one prevailing " Great Spirit," the Indian's 

 earliest conception of the white man's God — the Iroquois gods were numerous, 

 for all that which with them inspired reverence, awe, terror or gratitude became 

 deities or human beings endowed with supernatural attributes. "Hih-Nun,"' 

 the beneficent Thunder God of the Iroquois compares most favorably with the 

 same God as worshiped by other races. 



Among the supernatural beings corresponding to good and evil genii, we 

 find the Great Heads with ever watchful argus eyes, and long hair which- served 

 as wings to bear them on missions of mercy or of destruction. 



The only word for heaven in the different dialects is evidently a literal trans- 

 lation of the Christian idea and signifies "in the sky." The medicine man with 

 his supernatural endowments, worked for the good of the Indian, and it is claimed 

 foretold the coming of white man, but the idea of evil spirits inhabiting living 

 forms only came with the white man and his teachings of literal heaven, hell and 

 devils ! 



Among the highly civilized Chaldeans, Egyptians and Greeks the success of 

 magic depended upon the ignorance of the masses. The Iroquois witch stories 

 would alone fill a volume. Gifted as are their narratives with such scopeless im- 

 aginative powers, and free from the trammels of adapting these stories to any 

 standard of possibility, their absurdity might to the pale face seem incomprehensi- 

 ble were not the atrocities of Salem still fresh in his memory. And the same 

 holds true regarding their stories, explaining to their entire satisfaction the various 

 phenomena of nature many of which are the " burning questions " of the scientific 

 world to-day. But how recently were we all content with solutions now consid- 

 ered untenable. Let us then accept these oral traditions reverently as the stirrings 

 of the infant human mind, in its search after the "unknowable" containing per- 

 haps the germ of a belief, certainly revealing that inherent " something" in man 

 which pre-supposes the existence of the hidden forces, powers, or beings in na- 

 ture. At first this may be but a mere blind feeling, but as man develops it be- 

 comes an idea, then a recognized possibility, finally an article of religious faith. 



