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The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

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When we turn from the Algonquin family of tribes to that of the Iroquois,
we find another cosmogony, and other conceptions of spiritual existence.
While the earth was as yet a waste of waters, there was, according to
Iroquois and Huron traditions, a heaven with lakes, streams, plains,
and forests, inhabited by animals, by spirits, and, as some affirm,
by human beings. Here a certain female spirit, named Ataentsic, was once
chasing a bear, which, slipping through a hole, fell down to the earth.
Ataentsic's dog followed, when she herself, struck with despair, jumped
after them. Others declare that she was kicked out of heaven by the
spirit, her husband, for an amour with a man; while others, again,
hold the belief that she fell in the attempt to gather for her husband
the medicinal leaves of a certain tree. Be this as it may, the animals
swimming in the watery waste below saw her falling, and hastily met in
council to determine what should be done. The case was referred to the
beaver. The beaver commended it to the judgment of the tortoise, who
thereupon called on the other animals to dive, bring up mud, and place it
on his back. Thus was formed a floating island, on which Ataentsic fell;
and here, being pregnant, she was soon delivered of a daughter, who in
turn bore two boys, whose paternity is unexplained. They were called
Taouscaron and Jouskeha, and presently fell to blows, Jouskeha killing
his brother with the horn of a stag. The back of the tortoise grew into
a world full of verdure and life; and Jouskeha, with his grandmother,
Ataentsic, ruled over its destinies.

[ The above is the version of the story given by Brébeuf, Relation des
Hurons, 1636, 86 (Cramoisy). No two Indians told it precisely alike,
though nearly all the Hurons and Iroquois agreed as to its essential
points. Compare Vanderdonck, Cusick, Sagard, and other writers.
According to Vanderdonck, Ataentsic became mother of a deer, a bear,
and a wolf, by whom she afterwards bore all the other animals, mankind
included. Brébeuf found also among the Hurons a tradition inconsistent
with that of Ataentsic, and bearing a trace of Algonquin origin. It
declares, that, in the beginning, a man, a fox, and a skunk found
themselves together on an island, and that the man made the world out of
mud brought him by the skunk.

The Delawares, an Algonquin tribe, seem to have borrowed somewhat of the
Iroquois cosmogony, since they believed that the earth was formed on the
back of a tortoise.

According to some, Jouskeha became the father of the human race; but,
in the third generation, a deluge destroyed his posterity, so that it
was necessary to transform animals into men.--Charlevoix, III. 345. ]

He is the Sun; she is the Moon. He is beneficent; but she is malignant,
like the female demon of the Algonquins. They have a bark house, made
like those of the Iroquois, at the end of the earth, and they often come
to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha raises corn for
himself, and makes plentiful harvests for mankind. Sometimes he is seen,
thin as a skeleton, with a spike of shrivelled corn in his hand, or
greedily gnawing a human limb; and then the Indians know that a grievous
famine awaits them. He constantly interposes between mankind and the
malice of his wicked grandmother, whom, at times, he soundly cudgels.
It was he who made lakes and streams: for once the earth was parched and
barren, all the water being gathered under the armpit of a colossal frog;
but Jouskeha pierced the armpit, and let out the water. No prayers were
offered to him, his benevolent nature rendering them superfluous.

[ Compare Brébeuf, as before cited, and Sagard, Voyage des Hurons,
p. 228. ]

The early writers call Jouskeha the creator of the world, and speak of
him as corresponding to the vague Algonquin deity, Atahocan. Another
deity appears in Iroquois mythology, with equal claims to be regarded as
supreme. He is called Areskoui, or Agreskoui, and his most prominent
attributes are those of a god of war. He was often invoked, and the
flesh of animals and of captive enemies was burned in his honor.
[ Father Jogues saw a female prisoner burned to Areskoui, and two bears
offered to him to atone for the sin of not burning more captives.--Lettre
de Jogues, 6 Aug., 1643. ] Like Jouskeha, he was identified with the
sun; and he is perhaps to be regarded as the same being, under different
attributes. Among the Iroquois proper, or Five Nations, there was also a
divinity called Tarenyowagon, or Teharonhiawagon, [ 1 ] whose place and
character it is very difficult to determine. In some traditions he
appears as the son of Jouskeha. He had a prodigious influence; for it
was he who spoke to men in dreams. The Five Nations recognized still
another superhuman personage,--plainly a deified chief or hero. This was
Taounyawatha, or Hiawatha, said to be a divinely appointed messenger,
who made his abode on earth for the political and social instruction of
the chosen race, and whose counterpart is to be found in the traditions
of the Peruvians, Mexicans, and other primitive nations. [ 2 ]

[ 1 Le Mercier, Relation, 1670, 66; Dablon, Relation, 1671, 17. Compare
Cusick, Megapolensis, and Vanderdonck. Some writers identify
Tarenyowagon and Hiawatha. Vanderdonck assumes that Areskoui is the
Devil, and Tarenyowagon is God. Thus Indian notions are often
interpreted by the light of preconceived ideas. ]

[ 2 For the tradition of Hiawatha, see Clark, History of Onondaga,
I. 21. It will also be found in Schoolcraft's Notes on the Iroquois,
and in his History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes.

The Iroquois name for God is Hawenniio, sometimes written Owayneo; but
this use of the word is wholly due to the missionaries. Hawenniio is an
Iroquois verb, and means, "he rules, he is master". There is no Iroquois
word which, in its primitive meaning, can be interpreted, the Great
Spirit, or God. On this subject, see Études Philologiques sur quelques
Langues Sauvages (Montreal, 1866), where will also be found a curious
exposure of a few of Schoolcraft's ridiculous blunders in this
connection. ]

Close examination makes it evident that the primitive Indian's idea of a
Supreme Being was a conception no higher than might have been expected.
The moment he began to contemplate this object of his faith, and sought
to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly ridiculous.
The Creator of the World stood on the level of a barbarous and degraded
humanity, while a natural tendency became apparent to look beyond him to
other powers sharing his dominion. The Indian belief, if developed,
would have developed into a system of polytheism.

[ Some of the early writers could discover no trace of belief in a
supreme spirit of any kind. Perrot, after a life spent among the Indians,
ignores such an idea. Allouez emphatically denies that it existed among
the tribes of Lake Superior. (Relation, 1667, 11.) He adds, however,
that the Sacs and Foxes believed in a great _génie_, who lived not far
from the French settlements.--Ibid., 21. ]

In the primitive Indian's conception of a God the idea of moral good has
no part. His deity does not dispense justice for this world or the next,
but leaves mankind under the power of subordinate spirits, who fill and
control the universe. Nor is the good and evil of these inferior beings
a moral good and evil. The good spirit is the spirit that gives good
luck, and ministers to the necessities and desires of mankind: the evil
spirit is simply a malicious agent of disease, death, and mischance.

In no Indian language could the early missionaries find a word to express
the idea of God. Manitou and Oki meant anything endowed with
supernatural powers, from a snake-skin, or a greasy Indian conjurer,
up to Manabozho and Jouskeha. The priests were forced to use a
circumlocution,--"The Great Chief of Men," or "He who lives in the Sky."
[ See "Divers Sentimens," appended to the Relation of 1635, § 27; and
also many other passages of early missionaries. ] Yet it should seem
that the idea of a supreme controlling spirit might naturally arise from
the peculiar character of Indian belief. The idea that each race of
animals has its archetype or chief would easily suggest the existence of
a supreme chief of the spirits or of the human race,--a conception
imperfectly shadowed forth in Manabozho. The Jesuit missionaries seized
this advantage. "If each sort of animal has its king," they urged, "so,
too, have men; and as man is above all the animals, so is the spirit that
rules over men the master of all the other spirits." The Indian mind
readily accepted the idea, and tribes in no sense Christian quickly rose
to the belief in one controlling spirit. The Great Spirit became a
distinct existence, a pervading power in the universe, and a dispenser of
justice. Many tribes now pray to him, though still clinging obstinately
to their ancient superstitions; and with some, as the heathen portion of
the modern Iroquois, he is clothed with attributes of moral good.

[ In studying the writers of the last and of the present century, it is
to be remembered that their observations were made upon savages who had
been for generations in contact, immediate or otherwise, with the
doctrines of Christianity. Many observers have interpreted the religious
ideas of the Indians after preconceived ideas of their own; and it may
safely be affirmed that an Indian will respond with a grunt of
acquiescence to any question whatever touching his spiritual state.
Loskiel and the simple-minded Heckewelder write from a missionary point
of view; Adair, to support a theory of descent from the Jews; the worthy
theologian, Jarvis, to maintain his dogma, that all religious ideas of
the heathen world are perversions of revelation; and so, in a greater or
less degree, of many others. By far the most close and accurate
observers of Indian superstition were the French and Italian Jesuits of
the first half of the seventeenth century. Their opportunities were
unrivalled; and they used them in a spirit of faithful inquiry,
accumulating facts, and leaving theory to their successors. Of recent
American writers, no one has given so much attention to the subject as
Mr. Schoolcraft; but, in view of his opportunities and his zeal, his
results are most unsatisfactory. The work in six large quarto volumes,
History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes, published by
Government under his editorship, includes the substance of most of his
previous writings. It is a singularly crude and illiterate production,
stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page
of a striking unfitness either for historical or philosophical inquiry,
and taxing to the utmost the patience of those who would extract what is
valuable in it from its oceans of pedantic verbiage. ]

The primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, [ 1 ] but
he did not always believe in a state of future reward and punishment.
Nor, when such a belief existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral good,
or the evil to be punished a moral evil. Skilful hunters, brave warriors,
men of influence and consideration, went, after death, to the happy
hunting-ground; while the slothful, the cowardly, and the weak were
doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.
In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all
alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been in life,
wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead,
subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the
crouching posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted the shades of
animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees
and rocks: for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal,
and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.

[ 1 The exceptions are exceedingly rare. Father Gravier says that a
Peoria Indian once told him that there was no future life. It would be
difficult to find another instance of the kind. ]

The belief respecting the land of souls varied greatly in different
tribes and different individuals. Among the Hurons there were those who
held that departed spirits pursued their journey through the sky, along
the Milky Way, while the souls of dogs took another route, by certain
constellations, known as the "Way of the Dogs." [ Sagard, Voyage des
Hurons, 233. ]

At intervals of ten or twelve years, the Hurons, the Neutrals, and other
kindred tribes, were accustomed to collect the bones of their dead,
and deposit them, with great ceremony, in a common place of burial.
The whole nation was sometimes assembled at this solemnity; and hundreds
of corpses, brought from their temporary resting-places, were inhumed in
one capacious pit. From this hour the immortality of their souls began.
They took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the
greater number declared that they journeyed on foot, and in their own
likeness, to the land of shades, bearing with them the ghosts of the
wampum-belts, beaver-skins, bows, arrows, pipes, kettles, beads, and
rings buried with them in the common grave. [ The practice of burying
treasures with the dead is not peculiar to the North American aborigines.
Thus, the London Times of Oct. 25, 1885, describing the funeral rites of
Lord Palmerston, says: "And as the words, 'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,'
were pronounced, the chief mourner, as a last precious offering to the
dead, threw into the grave several diamond and gold rings." ] But as the
spirits of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are
forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly villages, where the
living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin-doors, and the
weak voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their
corn-fields. [ Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 99 (Cramoisy). ]
An endless variety of incoherent fancies is connected with the Indian
idea of a future life. They commonly owe their origin to dreams, often
to the dreams of those in extreme sickness, who, on awaking, supposed
that they had visited the other world, and related to the wondering
bystanders what they had seen.

The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom.
The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead--those of their
dogs included--as dancing joyously in the presence of Ataentsic and
Jouskeha. According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of
endless festivity, the ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the
drum, and greeting with hospitable welcome the occasional visitor from
the living world: for the spirit-land was not far off, and roving hunters
sometimes passed its confines unawares.

Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits, on their journey
heavenward, were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift
river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet,
while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the
abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts
speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving
rocks, which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less
nimble of the pilgrims who essayed to pass. The Hurons believed that a
personage named Oscotarach, or the Head-Piercer, dwelt in a bark house
beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the
heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality.
This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according
to which, however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner.

[ On Indian ideas of another life, compare Sagard, the Jesuit Relations,
Perrot, Charlevoix, and Lafitau, with Tanner, James, Schoolcraft, and the
Appendix to Morse's Indian Report.

Le Clerc recounts a singular story, current in his time among the
Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick. The favorite son of an
old Indian died; whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out
for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade
through a shallow lake, several days' journey in extent. This they did,
sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the
water. At length they arrived, and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian
Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war-club upraised; but,
presently relenting, changed his mind, and challenged them to a game of
ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn,
tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The
bereaved father now begged hard for his son's soul, and Papkootparout at
last gave it to him, in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing it
hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The
delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert it
in the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the
adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue of their journey,
there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in
it, gave his son's soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being
curious to see it, she opened the bag; on which it escaped at once,
and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the
abodes of the living.--Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie,
310-328. ]

Dreams were to the Indian a universal oracle. They revealed to him his
guardian spirit, taught him the cure of his diseases, warned him of the
devices of sorcerers, guided him to the lurking-places of his enemy or
the haunts of game, and unfolded the secrets of good and evil destiny.
The dream was a mysterious and inexorable power, whose least behests must
be obeyed to the letter,--a source, in every Indian town, of endless
mischief and abomination. There were professed dreamers, and professed
interpreters of dreams. One of the most noted festivals among the Hurons
and Iroquois was the Dream Feast, a scene of frenzy, where the actors
counterfeited madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned loose.
Each pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his welfare,
and rushed from house to house, demanding of all he met to guess his
secret requirement and satisfy it.

Believing that the whole material world was instinct with powers to
influence and control his fate, that good and evil spirits, and
existences nameless and indefinable, filled all Nature, that a pervading
sorcery was above, below, and around him, and that issues of life and
death might be controlled by instruments the most unnoticeable and
seemingly the most feeble, the Indian lived in perpetual fear. The
turning of a leaf, the crawling of an insect, the cry of a bird, the
creaking of a bough, might be to him the mystic signal of weal or woe.

An Indian community swarmed with sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners,
whose functions were often united in the same person. The sorcerer,
by charms, magic songs, magic feasts, and the beating of his drum,
had power over the spirits and those occult influences inherent in
animals and inanimate things. He could call to him the souls of his
enemies. They appeared before him in the form of stones. He chopped and
bruised them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth; and the
intended victim, however distant, languished and died. Like the sorcerer
of the Middle Ages, he made images of those he wished to destroy, and,
muttering incantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon the persons
represented sickened and pined away.

The Indian doctor relied far more on magic than on natural remedies.
Dreams, beating of the drum, songs, magic feasts and dances, and howling
to frighten the female demon from his patient, were his ordinary methods
of cure.

The prophet, or diviner, had various means of reading the secrets of
futurity, such as the flight of birds, and the movements of water and
fire. There was a peculiar practice of divination very general in the
Algonquin family of tribes, among some of whom it still subsists.
A small, conical lodge was made by planting poles in a circle, lashing
the tops together at the height of about seven feet from the ground,
and closely covering them with hides. The prophet crawled in, and closed
the aperture after him. He then beat his drum and sang his magic songs
to summon the spirits, whose weak, shrill voices were soon heard, mingled
with his lugubrious chanting, while at intervals the juggler paused to
interpret their communications to the attentive crowd seated on the
ground without. During the whole scene, the lodge swayed to and fro with
a violence which has astonished many a civilized beholder, and which some
of the Jesuits explain by the ready solution of a genuine diabolic
intervention.

[ This practice was first observed by Champlain. (See "Pioneers of
France in the New World." ) From his time to the present, numerous
writers have remarked upon it. Le Jeune, in the Relation of 1637,
treats it at some length. The lodge was sometimes of a cylindrical,
instead of a conical form. ]

The sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners did not usually exercise the
function of priests. Each man sacrificed for himself to the powers he
wished to propitiate, whether his guardian spirit, the spirits of animals,
or the other beings of his belief. The most common offering was tobacco,
thrown into the fire or water; scraps of meat were sometimes burned to
the manitous; and, on a few rare occasions of public solemnity, a white
dog, the mystic animal of many tribes, was tied to the end of an upright
pole, as a sacrifice to some superior spirit, or to the sun, with which
the superior spirits were constantly confounded by the primitive Indian.
In recent times, when Judaism and Christianity have modified his
religious ideas, it has been, and still is, the practice to sacrifice
dogs to the Great Spirit. On these public occasions, the sacrificial
function is discharged by chiefs, or by warriors appointed for the
purpose.

[ Many of the Indian feasts were feasts of sacrifice,--sometimes to the
guardian spirit of the host, sometimes to an animal of which he has
dreamed, sometimes to a local or other spirit. The food was first
offered in a loud voice to the being to be propitiated, after which the
guests proceeded to devour it for him. This unique method of sacrifice
was practised at war-feasts and similar solemnities. For an excellent
account of Indian religious feasts, see Perrot, Chap. V.

One of the most remarkable of Indian sacrifices was that practised by the
Hurons in the case of a person drowned or frozen to death. The flesh of
the deceased was cut off; and thrown into a fire made for the purpose,
as an offering of propitiation to the spirits of the air or water.
What remained of the body was then buried near the fire.--Brébeuf,
Relation des Hurons, 1636, 108.

The tribes of Virginia, as described by Beverly and others, not only had
priests who offered sacrifice, but idols and houses of worship. ]

Among the Hurons and Iroquois, and indeed all the stationary tribes,
there was an incredible number of mystic ceremonies, extravagant, puerile,
and often disgusting, designed for the cure of the sick or for the
general weal of the community. Most of their observances seem originally
to have been dictated by dreams, and transmitted as a sacred heritage
from generation to generation. They consisted in an endless variety of
dances, masqueradings, and nondescript orgies; and a scrupulous adherence
to all the traditional forms was held to be of the last moment, as the
slightest failure in this respect might entail serious calamities.
If children were seen in their play imitating any of these mysteries,
they were grimly rebuked and punished. In many tribes secret magical
societies existed, and still exist, into which members are initiated with
peculiar ceremonies. These associations are greatly respected and
feared. They have charms for love, war, and private revenge, and exert a
great, and often a very mischievous influence. The societies of the
Metai and the Wabeno, among the Northern Algonquins, are conspicuous
examples; while other societies of similar character have, for a century,
been known to exist among the Dahcotah.

[ The Friendly Society of the Spirit, of which the initiatory ceremonies
were seen and described by Carver (Travels, 271), preserves to this day
its existence and its rites. ]

A notice of the superstitious ideas of the Indians would be imperfect
without a reference to the traditionary tales through which these ideas
are handed down from father to son. Some of these tales can be traced
back to the period of the earliest intercourse with Europeans. One at
least of those recorded by the first missionaries, on the Lower
St. Lawrence, is still current among the tribes of the Upper Lakes.
Many of them are curious combinations of beliefs seriously entertained
with strokes intended for humor and drollery, which never fail to awaken
peals of laughter in the lodge-circle. Giants, dwarfs, cannibals,
spirits, beasts, birds, and anomalous monsters, transformations, tricks,
and sorcery, form the staple of the story. Some of the Iroquois tales
embody conceptions which, however preposterous, are of a bold and
striking character; but those of the Algonquins are, to an incredible
degree, flimsy, silly, and meaningless; nor are those of the Dahcotah
tribes much better. In respect to this wigwam lore, there is a curious
superstition of very wide prevalence. The tales must not be told in
summer; since at that season, when all Nature is full of life, the
spirits are awake, and, hearing what is said of them, may take offence;
whereas in winter they are fast sealed up in snow and ice, and no longer
capable of listening.

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