AMERICAN HERO-MYTHS.
A STUDY IN THE NATIVE RELIGIONSOF THE WESTERN CONTINENT.
BY
DANIEL G. BRINTON, M.D.,
MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; THE AMERICAN ANTIQUARIANSOCIETY; THE NUMISMATIC AND ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY OF PHILA., ETC.; AUTHOR OF"THE MYTHS OF THE NEW WORLD;" "THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT." ETC.
1882.
TO
ELI K. PRICE, ESQ.,
PRESIDENT OF THE NUMISMATIC AND ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA, WHOSEENLIGHTENED INTEREST HAS FOR MANY YEARS, AND IN MANY WAYS, FURTHERED THEPROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE, THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THEAUTHOR.
PREFACE.
This little volume is a contribution to the comparative study ofreligions. It is an endeavor to present in a critically correct light someof the fundamental conceptions which are found in the native beliefs ofthe tribes of America.
So little has heretofore been done in this field that it has yielded avery scanty harvest for purposes of general study. It has not yet evenpassed the stage where the distinction between myth and tradition has beenrecognized. Nearly all historians continue to write about some of theAmerican hero-gods as if they had been chiefs of tribes at someundetermined epoch, and the effort to trace the migrations andaffiliations of nations by similarities in such stories is of almost dailyoccurrence. How baseless and misleading all such arguments must be, it isone of my objects to set forth.
At the same time I have endeavored to be temperate in applying theinterpretations of mythologists. I am aware of the risk one runs inlooking at every legend as a light or storm myth. My guiding principle hasbeen that when the same, and that a very extraordinary, story is told byseveral tribes wholly apart in language and location, then theprobabilities are enormous that it is not a legend but a myth, and must beexplained as such. It is a spontaneous production of the mind, not areminiscence of an historic event.
The importance of the study of myths has been abundantly shown of recentyears, and the methods of analyzing them have been established withsatisfactory clearness.
The time has long since passed, at least among thinking men, when thereligious legends of the lower races were looked upon as trivial fables,or as the inventions of the Father of Lies. They are neither the one northe other. They express, in image and incident, the opinions of theseraces on the mightiest topics of human thought, on the origin and destinyof man, his motives for duty and his grounds of hope, and the source,history and fate of all external nature. Certainly the sincere expressionson these subjects of even humble members of the human race deserve ourmost respectful heed, and it may be that we shall discover in their crudeor coarse narrations gleams of a mental light which their proud Aryanbrothers have been long in coming to, or have not yet reached.
The prejudice against all the lower faiths inspired by the claim ofChristianity to a monopoly of religious truth--a claim nowise set up byits founder--has led to extreme injustice toward the so-called heathenreligions. Little effort has been made to distinguish between their goodand evil tendencies, or even to understand them. I do not know of a singleinstance on this continent of a thorough and intelligent study of a nativereligion made by a Protestant missionary.
So little real work has been done in American mythology that very diverseopinions as to its interpretation prevail among writers. Too many of themapply to it facile generalizations, such as "heliolatry," "animism,""ancestral worship," "primitive philosophizing," and think that such asesame will unloose all its mysteries. The resul