The Myths of the New World

J. M. Stanley, in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Contributions, ii. p. 38.

426

D’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, ii. p. 81.

427

See Balboa, Hist. du Pérou, pp. 28-30.

428

D’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, ii. p. 235.

429

Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, v. p. 652.

430

Dr. Mac Gowan, in the Amer. Hist. Mag., x. p. 139; Whipple, Rep. on the Ind. Tribes, p. 35.

431

Hist. des Incas, lib. iii. ch. 22.

432

Travels in the Carolinas, p. 504.

433

Hist. du Pérou, p. 128; Voiages aux Indes Occidentales, ii. p. 97.

434

Beverly, Hist. de la Virginie, p. 266. The dialect he specifies is “celle d’Occaniches,” and on page 252 he says, “On dit que la langue universelle des Indiens de ces Quartiers est celle des Occaniches, quoiqu’ils ne soient qu’une petite Nation, depuis que les Anglois connoissent ce Pais; mais je ne sais pas la difference qui’l y a entre cette langue et celle des Algonkins.” (French trans., Orleans, 1707.) This is undoubtedly the same people that Johannes Lederer, a German traveller, visited in 1670, and calls Akenatzi. They dwelt on an island, in a branch of the Chowan River, the Sapona, or Deep River (Lederer’s Discovery of North America, in Harris, Voyages, p. 20). Thirty years later the English surveyor, Lawson, found them in the same spot, and speaks of them as the Acanechos (see Am. Hist. Mag., i. p. 163). Their totem was that of the serpent, and their name is not altogether unlike the Tuscarora name of this animal usquauhne. As the serpent was so widely a sacred animal, this gives Beverly’s remarks an unusual significance. It by no means follows from this name that they were of Iroquois descent. Lederer travelled with a Tuscarora (Iroquois) interpreter, who gave them their name in his own tongue. On the contrary, it is extremely probable that they were an Algonkin totem, which had the exclusive right to the priesthood.

435

Riggs, Gram. and Dict. of the Dakota, p. ix; Kane, Second Grinnell Expedition, ii. p. 127. Paul Egede gives a number of words and expressions in the dialect of the sorcerers, Nachrichten von Grönland, p. 122.

436

Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvoelker, i. p. 459.

437

Navarrete, Viages, iii. p. 415.

438

Relation de Cueba, p. 140. Ed. Ternaux-Compans.

439

La Vega, Hist. des Incas, liv. v. cap. 12.

440

Morse, Rep. on the Ind. Tribes, App. p. 345.

441

Ximenes, Origen de los Indios de Guatemala, p. 192; Acosta, Hist. of the New World, lib. v. chap. 18.

442

Joseph de Maistre, Eclaircissement sur les Sacrifices; Trench, Hulsean Lectures, p. 180. The famed Abbé Lammenaais and Professor Sepp, of Munich, with these two writers, may be taken as the chief exponents of a school of mythologists, all of whom start from the theories first laid down by Count de Maistre in his Soirées de St. Petersbourg. To them the strongest proof of Christianity lies in the traditions and observances of heathendom. For these show the wants of the religious sense, and Christianity, they maintain, purifies and satisfies them all. The rites, symbols, and legends of every natural religion, they say, are true and not false; all that is required is to assign them their proper places and their real meaning. Therefore the strange resemblances in heathen myths to what is revealed in the Scriptures, as well as the ethical anticipations which have been found in ancient philosophies, all, so far from proving that Christianity is a natural product of the human mind, in fact, are confirmations of it, unconscious prophecies, and presentiments of the truth.

443

Alfred Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age, p. 8: Paris, 1860.

444

Waitz, Anthropologie, i. pp. 325, 465.

445

So says Dr. Waitz, ibid., p. 465.

446

Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. p. 143.

447

L’Homme Américain, ii. p. 319.

448

Brasseur, Hist. du Mexique, liv. iii. chaps. 1 and 2.

449

Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. x. cap. 29.

450