May 25, 1888.] 



SCIENCE. 



245 



low him ; but the infant roars so loudly, that she, terrified almost 

 to death, rushes out of the house, and away on to a mountain, 

 -which is called Grisly Mountain to this day. At the birth of the 

 twins the thigh-bone became a hawk, and flew away to the sky. 

 The Trout comes to the deserted twins, and rears them. The 

 boys call her grandmother. When grown up, they are anxious to 

 know who their mother and father are. The old Trout said, ' Your 

 mother is Grisly Bear, a bad woman. She tried to eat me up, tried 

 to eat you up as soon as you were born. She is living on that 

 mountain over there now. She is a bad woman. But your father 

 is a good man : he is Lade herrit ' (the red-tailed hawk). 



" The brothers go in search of their mother, find her. She pre- 

 tends to be fond of them, tries a second time to eat them, again is 

 frightened and runs away. Later the brothers find her, and this 

 time they kill her. Then they go home, purify themselves after the 

 matricide, and set out to look for their father. ' He is up in the 

 sky,' said Sula pokaila (the old trout), 'biit before ybu go, here is a 

 cup of trout's blood. The cup will always be full, no matter how 

 much you take out. This will always give you strength.' They 

 went up to Nomhlestawa, who lives in Olelpanti (above in the high), 

 who said, ' Stay with me. I will employ you when I need you. 

 He gave Thunder large balls, which he tied to his ankles ; and 

 they make a great noise now, as he runs through the sky. In the 

 tones of Thunder is heard the voice of a Grisly; for he resembles 

 his mother, and inherited her voice. But Lightning is like his 

 father : he flashes with brightness as he goes. 



" This is the account of how lightning and thunder were born into 

 the world, — a beautiful myth, true and easily understood, — a myth 

 of great value, (or it reveals with the utmost clearness the process 

 of genuine myth-making. 



" Compare this with the Sanscrit myth of the creation of Indra's 

 thunderbolt (I quote from memory) : Vritra, at the head of his im- 

 mense host, pursued Indra and the Celestials in every direction. 

 Then Indra and the gods went to Brahma, and stood before him 

 with joined hands. Brahma said, ' Every thing that ye seek is 

 known to me. I know your desire : you want to. kill Vritra. Now, 

 I will tell you how to do it. There is a high-souled and great 

 Rishi named Dadhichi. Go all of you to him and ask a boon. Say 

 ye to him, " For the good of the three worlds give us thy bones.'' 

 Renouncing his body, he will give you his bones. With these 

 bones of his, make a weapon, which you will call vajra, capable of 

 •destroying every enemy. With this weapon will Vritra be slain. 

 They went to the holy hermit, who lived in a jungle on the bank of 

 the Saraswati, and begged the boon, which was granted. The 

 Rishi gave them his body, and left it of his own volition. They 

 took the bones and carried them to Twashtri (the celestial artificer), 

 who was filled with joy when he knew what they wanted, and. 

 .going to work, made of the bones the thunderbolt, vajra, which he 

 gave to Indra, who, armed with it, went^at the head of the Celes- 

 tials to attack Vritra, at that moment occupying all the earth and 

 the heavens. After a terrific encounter, and after he had borrowed 

 strength from all the Celestials, Indra hurled the vajra, and Vritra, 

 great as a mountain, fell headlong. His host fled, and took refuge 

 in the sea. 



" In the American myth there are few, if any, doubtful elements. 

 The characters tell their own story. The Sanscrit myth is an inter- 

 esting example of how similar results may be worked out in differ- 

 ■ent ways in two mythologies. 



" If American myths are used to test the value of the two theories 

 in England to which I have just referred, it will appear with refer- 

 ■ence to the first, — Max Miiller's theory, — that mythology does 

 not owe its origin to any action of language whatever ; neither to a 

 ■disease of language, nor to the influence of language on thought. 

 The framers of the earliest myths — the myths on which succeed- 

 ing ones were fashioned, and from which characters and materials 

 were borrowed in after times ; the myths which were preserved 

 with the greatest care, and are most sacred in the minds of the peo- 

 ple to whom they belong — were men who described what they saw 

 in the most direct manner. The earliest myth is a simple narrative 

 in which the names of the actors were understood in all cases : in 

 most cases they are understood down to the present day. What- 

 ever difiiculty there may be in interpreting such myths was not 

 caused by linguistic influence. 



" In a later period of myth-history, linguistic influence is appar- 

 ent ; in particular cases it may be great, in some mythologies more 

 prominent than in others ; but it is never a main factor, never a 

 predominant element, never the parent of mythology. 



" If American myths are to be used to test the second theory, — 

 that of Herbert Spencer, — which affirms that mythology, no mat- 

 ter what forms it may assume, is simply a worship of the ghosts of 

 human ancestors, who, through the influence of language or some 

 other causes, came to be mistaken, some of them for animals, 

 plants, mountains, seas, sun and moon, while others grew in time to 

 be the gods, the divinities of their race, it will be shown that there 

 is no such ancestor-worship as that in America. There is an an- 

 cestor-worship, however, which is universal, and which I believe 

 can be demonstrated by the mythology of every race on earth, if 

 that mythology is only interpreted faithfully, and if we arrive at its 

 inward and true thought. 



" There is an ancestor-worship in America which is the worship 

 of elemental or nature powers, which, as animals or in their own 

 names as powers or objects in nature, are the myth-persons, the 

 totems, or non-human ancestors, of the North American Indians, — 

 the protectors, the guides, the enlighteners, of those whom we call 

 ' medicine-men,' but who, as represented by the best among them, 

 were the sages and philosophers of their race. That there were such, 

 we know from myths which they constructed, and which we have 

 received from their descendants. 



" This ancestor-worship is the worship of the various manifesta- 

 tions in nature which primitive people noted and named, in all cases 

 having sig ificance for them. They worshipped in detail, and 

 mainly, thoijgh by no means exclusively, in its external aspects, that 

 which the m'an of our day worships as one which acts not merely in 

 the universe outside, but in his own breast, — that Power men of 

 the highest civilization and of every creed call ' Father,' and say 

 that they descended from it. The Indians say that they are de- 

 scended from manifestations of that same Power, are the children 

 of those manifestations. We say, ' Our Father who art in heaven, 

 give us this day our daily bread.' They say in their fashion, and 

 according to the most ancient and sacred utterances of their race, 

 ' Our fathers, give us this day our food,' using the plural where 

 we use the singular. The Indian, therefore, stands precisely on the 

 same line as the most enlightened man of the nineteenth century ; 

 with this difference, that he is nearer the beginning of the line, and 

 sees in detail the Power which we see in unity. 



" The work already done by the Bureau of Ethnology is 

 small, if compared with what remains to be done before we can 

 have a science of mythology on clearly demonstrated and symmet- 

 rically arranged facts ; but it is a very large and important work if 

 compared with what preceded it, and it shows, as no other work 

 has been able to show, the nature of the task before us. When we 

 shall have completed our collection of myths in the leading, if not 

 in all, the American linguistic stocks, and obtained all the possible 

 variants of each myth, we can make our final contribution to the 

 science of mythology, which can never be founded without the 

 American contingent. 



" If much remains to be done in this country, there is still more 

 to be done in Europe Asia, and elsewhere. Lang, in his article on 

 ' Mythology,' omits the mythologies of the Celts and Slavs because 

 so difBcuU and so little known. Now, the Celts are remarkable for 

 the great extent of their recorded mythology, which has extended 

 largely into English and other national literatures of Europe, though 

 the fact is not generally known. Chaucer and Spencer have drawn 

 much from Celtic sources. King Lear, Queen Mab, and othei 

 Shakspearian characters, are Celtic ; and, if we consider the efforts 

 made to destroy their language, the Celts of Ireland have a great 

 number of living myths. The Slavs, though they have very few 

 myths of ancient record, have within the territory they occupy more 

 myths still existing in the minds of the people than all the rest of 

 the nations of Europe taken together. 



" Of Hindu mythology, little is known outside the Sanscrit, which, 

 though extensive beyond any known mythology on record, has not 

 been utilized to an extent at all commensurate with its value. The 

 rest of Asia is practically unknown. Chinese mythology is as a 

 sealed book ; and it must have immense treasures with its so-called 

 ' ancestor-worship,' the origin of which is undoubtedly misunder- 



