munificence, has enriched the literature and the romantic resources of this world of ours. The Fountain of Eternal Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Island of the Amazons and the marvellous virtues of the Amazon Stone, El Dorado ("the Gilded Man"), the treasure cities of Manoa and Omagua, the lost empire of the Gran Moxo and the Gran Paytiti, Patagonian giants, and "men whose heads do grow between their shoulders," and finally, most wide-spread of all, the miracles of the robed and bearded white man who, long ago, had come to teach the Indian a new way of life and a purer worship and had left the cross to be his sign, in whom no pious mind could see other than the blessed Saint Thomas: all these were in part a freight of the caravels, and they represent collectively a chapter second to none in mythopoesy. There is no match for this cargo of imported fantasy in the parts of America colonized by the English and the French. This, however, need not be accredited merely to cooler blood and calmer race: the North American colonies belong to the seventeenth century, a good hundred years after the Spaniards had completed their most golden conquests, and for the Spaniard, no less than for the others, the hour of intoxication and extravagance had by then gone by—leaving its flamboyant tones to warm the colours of succeeding times. Thus it is that Latin American myth is in no faint degree truly Latinian.
But while there is a certain Old World seasoning in Latin American myth, native traditions are, of course, the substantial material of the study. This material is striking and various. It embraces the usual substrata of demoniac beliefs and animistic credulities, and above these such elaborate formations as the Aztec and Maya pantheons, with their amazing astral and calendric interpretations, or the enigmatic and fervid religion of Peru. Many of the stories are little more than vocal superstitions; others, such as the conquering of death in the Popul Vuh, the Brazilian tale of the release of the imprisoned night, or the superb Surinam legend of Maconaura and Anuanaïtu, will compare, both for dramatic power and subtle suggestion, with the best that the world can show. There is, of course, the constant difficulty of deciding where myth clearly emerges from the misty realm of folk-lore, and, at the other extreme, where it is succeeded by science and religion; but this difficulty is more theoretic than practical: in its central character mythology is present wherever there are animating gods operant in the body of nature, and myth is present wherever spirits or deities are shown as dramatically interacting causes. With a few possible exceptions (the possibility being probably but the expression of our ignorance), all American Indians are mythopoets, whose mythology is characterized in characterizing their beliefs.
The practical problem of handling and apportioning the subject-matter is similar to that presented in the case of North America, and rather more difficult. In the first place, it were idle to undertake the mere narration of stones and superstitions without some delineation of the conditions of the life and culture of those who make them; frequently, the whole relevance of the tale is to the manner of life. In the next place, the feasible mode of apportionment, by regional divisions, is made difficult not only by the vastness of some of the regions, but even more so by the unevenness of culture, and hence of the range of ideas. If the lines were drawn on the scale of Old World studies, Mexico (Nahua and Maya) and Peru would each deserve a volume; and the proportionately slight attention which they receive in the present work is due partly to the need of giving reasonable space to other regions, partly to the fact that the myths of these fallen empires are already represented by an accessible literature. Still a third problem has to do with the order in which the matters should be presented. From the point of view of native affinities, the logical step from the Antilles is to the Orinoco and Guiana region (that is, from Chapter I to Chapter VIII).3 But since, in beginning with the Antilles, one is really following the course of discovery—seeing, as it were, with Spanish eyes—the natural continuation is on to Mexico and Peru, and thence to the more slowly uncovered regions of central South America. This procedure, also, follows a certain bibliographical trend: the relative importance of Spanish authors is much less for the latter chapters of the book, and the sources of material, in general, are of later origin.
Finally, a word might be said with respect to interpretation. No matter how conscientiously one may aim at straight narration, the mere need for coherence will compel some interpreting; while every translation is, in its degree, an interpretation (and one literally impossible). Besides and beyond all this, there are the prepossessions of the recorders to be taken into account—honest men who interpret according to their lights. There are the Biblical prepossessions of the early Padres, for whom the Tower of Babel and the Dispersion were recent and real events: granting a Noachian Deluge of the thoroughness which they had in mind, nothing could be more rational than were their readings of aboriginal legends of events of a kindred nature, or than their speculations as to what sons of Shem the Indians might be. There are the traditionary visions of migratory descendants of the Lost Tribes, of far-wandering Buddhist monks, of sea-faring Orientals, and forgotten Atlantideans; and there is the wonderful Euhemerism of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (ever the more admirable in the more reading)—neither the first nor the last of his tribe, but assuredly the most gifted of them all. There are, again, the theological biases of missionaries, for whom the devil is seldom far and God is generally near; and there are the no less ingrained prejudices of the anthropologists who serenely Tylorize and fetishize the most recalcitrant materials, and of the philologists who solarize and astralize because the model was once set for them. America has proven an abundant field for the illustration of all these methods of reading the riddle of man's fancy; and it is scarcely to be desired that one should report the matters without some reflection of the colourations. But, in sooth, how could myth be myth apart from meaning?
Which leads (by no devious routing of reflection) to some consideration of the meaning of mythology and of our interest in it. Such interest may be of any of several types. A first, and still persistent, interest, and one to which we owe, for America, from Ramon Pane onward, more actual material than to any other, is the desire of the Christian missionary to discover in the native mind those points of approach and elements of community which will best enable him to spread the faith of Christendom. In many cases, of course, the missionary is seized with a purely speculative zeal for recording facts, but it is usually possible in such records to detect the influence of the impulse which first brought him into the field,—and which, it may be added, makes of his services a matter for the gratitude of all who follow him. A second interest, which is often not sharply divorced from the first, as instanced in Missionary Brett's poetizing of the myths of the Guiana Indians,4 is the aesthetic and imaginative. What classical mythology has done for the art and poetry of Christian Europe all men know: Dante and Milton, Botticelli and Michelangelo are only less its debtors than are Homer and Phidias. Further, the Renaissance curiosity, with its passion for the antique gems and heathen gods whose forms so stimulated its own expressions, was at its height when America was discovered and conquered; and it is small wonder that that interest was transformed, where the marvel of the New World was in question, into a wave of American exotism which rose to its crest in the humanitarian enthusiasm of the eighteenth century.5 In our own day this interest is continuing, more soberly but not less fruitfully, in a deliberate effort on the part of artists, of poets, and of musicians to discover the elements of lasting beauty in the native arts and mythic themes. From a certain point of view there is a peril in the aesthetic interest: most investigators consciously or unconsciously possess it, and most recorders of native myths consciously or unconsciously dress their materials with the suaver forms of expression which the cultivated languages of Europe have developed. There is, in other words, some untruth to aboriginal thought in the desire to find or inject art where the original motive was realistic, or, if aesthetic, governed by a taste foreign to our own. On the other hand, we recognize readily enough that the real creative gain, in an artistic sense, must come from an amalgamation, and with such an example of artistic achievement through amalgamation as is afforded by the Renaissance, we can but hope that the more intimate adoption of the ideas and motives of American Indian art into our own aesthetic consciousness may yet result in an American Renaissance no less notable.
A third interest in American mythology is that of the anthropologists, by whom the domain is today most cultivated. Here the foundation is scientific curiosity and the modes are those of the natural and historical sciences. This type of interest, of course, determines its own problems and methods. For example, to it we owe most of the exact recording
