Page:Myths of the Iroquois.djvu/41



The instinctive desire in man to fathom the mystery of human life, to solve the enigma of whence he came and whither he goes, and to account for the marvels ever presented to his senses, has in all times excited the imagination and originated speculation.

To explain the phenomena of life and nature the untutored mind has seized upon every analogy suggesting the slightest clew, and imagination has aided the crude reasoning faculties.

In the numerous Iroquois myths relating to the origin of both animate and inanimate objects in nature there appears a reflex of the Indian's mind as he solves, to his entire satisfaction, mysteries, many of which are the "burning questions" of this enlightened age.

These tales only vary with the temperament of the narrator or the exigencies of the locality. Where oft repeated they have in time been recorded on the hearts and minds of the people either as myths or folk-lore, embodying the fossilized knowledge and ideas of a previous age, misinterpreted, perhaps, by those who have inherited them.

For the ethnologist who would trace in mythology the growth of the human mind, nowhere is the harvest more rich than among the aborigines of our own country; and prominent among these, in this lore of "faded metaphors", are the Iroquois. To what dignity their folklore might have attained had they been left to reach a lettered civilization for themselves we cannot know; but, judging from the history of other peoples, their first chroniclers would have accepted many of these oral traditions as facts.

To many from whom the writer received these myths they were realities, for there remain among these forest children those who still cling to their oft-told tales as the only link binding them to a happier past. Nor should they be considered as idle tales by the civilized man, who has not yet rid himself of the shackles of superstition in a thousand forms, and who sees daily his household gods torn down before him by comparative mythology and its allied sciences. Let him rather accept them reverently as the striving of the infant human mind in its search after the unknowable, revealing that inherent something in man which presupposes the existence of hidden forces, powers, or beings in nature. At first, perhaps, this is a mere blind feeling, but as man develops, it becomes an idea, then a recognized possibility; later, an article of religious faith.