Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/223

 Various Ethnographic Notes.

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��Dr. Frobenius in his publication is figuring many samples of African masks made of wood, bark, leaves, parts of skulls, and other substances. None of them shows any noteworthy artistic develop- ment, or other spark of natural geuius, but they all typify the coarse and brutish naturalism which we are accustomed to find with the populations living within the tropics. 1

The Deities of the Early New England Indians. — These are better known to us than the so-called "gods" of most of the present North American tribes. We owe this interesting informa- tion to Capt. John Smith, Strachey, Roger Williams, and a few other authors. In these parts, the teachers of Christianity called God and Jehovah manit, mundtu, " he is God ; " manittw, which properly stands for spirit, ghost ; for the plural number gods, they used ma- nittowok, spirits. When manit serves to form compounds, the prefix m- y which is impersonal and indefinite, is retrenched, and what re- mains is -anit, -ant, -and. Roger Williams, who had settled in Rhode Island, states that Indians around him "have given me the names of thirty-seven, which I have, all which, in their solemn worships, they invocate." (Chapt. 21st.) From J. H. Trumbull's lexical manuscript, " On Eliot's Bible," I copy a list of them, accom- panied by his own comments : —

" Kautantowwit, the great southwest god, to whose house all souls go, and from whom came their corn and beans, as they say. This name is found again in Keih-tannit (the ' great God,' kehte-dnit,) and thus they called Jehovah. Capt. J. Smith says the Massachu- setts call their great god Kiehtan ; the Penobscots, Tantum. Lech- ford states that they worship Kitan, their good God, or Hobbamoco, their evil God. Tantum is a contraction of Keihtanit-om, my (or our) great God. Winslow, 1624, is of opinion that Kiehtan is their principal God, and the maker of all the rest [of the gods], and to be made by none ; . . . who dwelleth above in the heavens far . . . westward, whither all good men go when they die. About Squantam Josselyn says that ' they acknowledge a god whom they call Squan- tam, but worship him they do not.' This name explains itself by the verb musquantam (he is angry,) and by Roger Williams's remark, ' They (the Narraganset Indians) will say, when an ordinary acci- dent, as a fall, has occurred to somebody : musquantam manit (God was angry and did it).' "

The Devil, or evil spirit of Indian mythology, was called Hobba- moco, Habamouk, Abbamocho or Chepie by the Massachusetts In- dians. Josselyn also says that this spirit " many times smites them with incurable diseases, scares them with his apparitions and panic terrors, by reason of which they live in a wretched consternation, 1 Leo Frobenius, Die Masken und Geheimbiinde Afrikas. Halle, 1S9S, illustr.

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