Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/270

256 the divine sky as the inner meaning of the Iroquois supreme deity, Taronhiawagon the 'sky-comer' or 'sky-holder,' who had his festival about the winter solstice, who brought the ancestral race out of the mountain, taught them hunting, marriage, and religion, gave them corn and beans, squashes and potatoes and tobacco, and guided them on their migrations as they spread over the land. Among the North American tribes, not only does the conception of the personal divine Heaven thus seem the fundamental idea of the Heaven-god, but it may expand under Christian influence into a yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven. In South Africa, the Zulus speak of the Heaven as a person, ascribing to it the power of exercising a will, and they also speak of a Lord of Heaven, whose wrath they deprecate during a thunderstorm. In the native legends of the Zulu princess in the country of the Half-Men, the captive maiden expostulates personally with the Sky, for only acting in an ordinary way, and not in the way she wishes, to destroy her enemies: —

'Listen, yon heaven. Attend; mayoya, listen. Listen, heaven. It does not thunder with loud thunder. It thunders in an undertone. What is it doing? It thunders to produce rain and change of season.'

Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously; the princess sings again and it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her, but she is left unharmed. West Africa is another district where the Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud; and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of this latter deity, the