href="#n41" type="note">41 In the legends of the Aztecs and Quiches such phrases as “Heart of the Sky,” “Lord of the Sky,” “Prince of the Azure Planisphere,” “He above all,” are of frequent occurrence, and by a still bolder metaphor, the Araucanians, according to Molina, entitled their greatest god “The Soul of the Sky.”
This last expression leads to another train of thought. As the philosopher, pondering on the workings of self-consciousness, recognizes that various pathways lead up to God, so the primitive man, in forming his language, sometimes trod one, sometimes another. Whatever else sceptics have questioned, no one has yet presumed to doubt that if a God and a soul exist at all, they are of like essence. This firm belief has left its impress on language in the names devised to express the supernal, the spiritual world. If we seek hints from languages more familiar to us than the tongues of the Indians, and take for example this word spiritual; we find it is from the Latin spirare, to blow, to breathe. If in Latin again we look for the derivation of animus, the mind, anima, the soul, they point to the Greek anemos, wind, and aémi, to blow. In Greek the words for soul or spirit, psuche, pneuma, thumos, all are directly from verbal roots expressing the motion of the wind or the breath. The Hebrew word ruah is translated in the Old Testament sometimes by wind, sometimes by spirit, sometimes by breath. Etymologically, in fact, ghosts and gusts, breaths and breezes, the Great Spirit and the Great Wind, are one and the same. It is easy to guess the reason of this. The soul is the life, the life is the breath. Invisible, imponderable, quickening with vigorous motion, slackening in rest and sleep, passing quite away in death, it is the most obvious sign of life. All nations grasped the analogy and identified the one with the other. But the breath is nothing but wind. How easy, therefore, to look upon the wind that moves up and down and to and fro upon the earth, that carries the clouds, itself unseen, that calls forth the terrible tempests and the various seasons, as the breath, the spirit of God, as God himself? So in the Mosaic record of creation, it is said “a mighty wind” passed over the formless sea and brought forth the world, and when the Almighty gave to the clay a living soul, he is said to have breathed into it “the wind of lives.”
Armed with these analogies, we turn to the primitive tongues of America, and find them there as distinct as in the Old World. In Dakota niya is literally breath, figuratively life; in Netela piuts is life, breath, and soul; silla, in Eskimo, means air, it means wind, but it is also the word that conveys the highest idea of the world as a whole, and the reasoning faculty. The supreme existence they call Sillam Innua, Owner of the Air, or of the All; or Sillam Nelega, Lord of the Air or Wind. In the Yakama tongue of Oregon wkrisha signifies there is wind, wkrishwit, life; with the Aztecs, ehecatl expressed both air, life, and the soul, and personified in their myths it was said to have been born of the breath of Tezcatlipoca, their highest divinity, who himself is often called Yoalliehecatl, the Wind of Night.42
The descent is, indeed, almost imperceptible which leads to the personification of the wind as God, which merges this manifestation of life and power in one with its unseen, unknown cause. Thus it was a worthy epithet which the Creeks applied to their supreme invisible ruler, when they addressed him as Esaugetuh Emissee, Master of Breath, and doubtless it was at first but a title of equivalent purport which the Cherokees, their neighbors, were wont to employ, Oonawleh unggi, Eldest of Winds, but rapidly leading to a complete identification of the divine with the natural phenomena of meteorology. This seems to have taken place in the same group of nations, for the original Choctaw word for Deity was Hushtoli, the Storm Wind.43 The idea, indeed, was constantly being lost in the symbol. In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan, a name of no signification in their language, one which their remote ancestors brought with them from the Antilles, which finds its meaning in the ancient tongue of Haiti, and which, under the forms of hurricane, ouragan, orkan, was adopted into European marine languages as the native name of the terrible tornado of the Caribbean Sea.44 Mixcohuatl, the Cloud Serpent, chief divinity of several tribes in ancient Mexico, is to this day the correct term in their language for the tropical whirlwind, and the natives of Panama worshipped the same phenomenon under the name Tuyra.45 To kiss the air was in Peru the commonest and simplest sign of adoration to the collective divinities.46
Many writers on mythology have commented on the prominence so frequently given to the winds. None have traced it to its true source. The facts of meteorology have been thought all sufficient for a solution. As if man ever did or ever could draw the idea of God from nature! In the identity of wind with breath, of breath with life, of life with soul, of soul with God, lies the far deeper and far truer reason, whose insensible development I have here traced, in outline indeed, but confirmed by the evidence of language itself.
Let none of these expressions, however, be construed to prove the distinct recognition of One Supreme Being. Of monotheism either as displayed in the one personal definite God of the Semitic races, or in the dim pantheistic sense of the Brahmins, there was not a single instance on the American continent. The missionaries found no word in any of their languages fit to interpret Deus, God. How could they expect it? The associations we attach to that name are the accumulated fruits of nigh two thousand years of Christianity. The phrases Good Spirit, Great Spirit, and similar ones, have occasioned endless discrepancies in the minds of travellers. In most instances they are entirely of modern origin, coined at the suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man’s God. Very rarely do they bring any conception of personality to the native mind, very rarely do they signify any object of worship, perhaps never did in the olden times. The Jesuit Relations state positively that there was no one immaterial god recognized by the Algonkin tribes, and that the title, the Great Manito, was introduced first by themselves in its personal sense.47 The supreme Iroquois Deity Neo or Hawaneu, triumphantly adduced by many writers to show the monotheism underlying the native creeds, and upon whose name Mr. Schoolcraft has built some philological reveries, turns out on closer scrutiny to be the result of Christian instruction, and the words themselves to be but corruptions of the French Dieu and le bon Dieu!48
Innumerable mysterious forces are in activity around the child of nature; he feels within him something that tells him they are not of his kind, and yet not altogether different from him; he sums them up in one word drawn from sensuous experience. Does he wish to express still more forcibly this sentiment, he doubles the word, or prefixes an adjective, or adds an affix, as the genius of his language may dictate. But it still remains to him but an unapplied abstraction, a mere category of thought, a frame for the All. It is never the object of veneration or sacrifice, no myth brings it down to his comprehension, it is not installed in his temples. Man cannot escape the belief that behind all form is one essence; but the moment he would seize and define it, it eludes his grasp, and by a sorcery more sadly ludicrous than that which blinded Titania, he worships not the Infinite he thinks but a base idol of his own making. As in the Zend Avesta behind the eternal struggle of Ormuzd and Ahriman looms up the undisturbed and infinite Zeruana Akerana, as in the pages of the Greek poets we here and there catch glimpses of a Zeus who is not he throned on Olympus, nor he who takes part in the wrangles of the gods, but stands far off and alone, one yet all, “who was, who is, who will be,” so the belief in an Unseen Spirit, who asks neither supplication nor sacrifice, who, as the natives of Texas told Joutel in 1684, “does not concern himself about things here below,”49 who has no name to call him by, and is never a figure in mythology, was doubtless occasionally present to their minds. It was present not more but far less distinctly and often not at all in the more savage tribes, and no assertion can be more contrary to the laws of religious progress than that which pretends that a purer and more monotheistic religion exists among nations devoid of mythology. There are only two instances on the American continent where the worship of an immaterial God was definitely instituted, and these as the highest conquests
My authorities are Riggs,
These terms are found in Gallatin’s vocabularies. The last mentioned is not, as Adair thought, derived from
Webster derives hurricane from the Latin
Oviedo,
Garcia,
See the
Mr. Morgan, in his excellent work,
“Qui ne prend aucun soin des choses icy bas.”
