Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/357

Rh About a century later, Father Lafitau wrote passages which illustrate well the transformation of native animistic conceptions under missionary influence into analogues of Christian theology. Such general terms for spiritual beings as 'oki' or 'manitu' had become to him individual names of one supreme being. 'This great Spirit, known among the Caribs under the name of Chemiin, under that of Manitou among the Algonquin nations, and under that of Okki among those who speak the Huron tongue ...' &c. All American tribes, he says, use expressions which can only denote God: they call him the great Spirit, sometimes the Master and Author of Life ...' &c. The longer rude tribes of America have been in contact with European belief, the less confidently can we ascribe to purely native sources the theologic scheme their religions have settled into. Yet the Greeks towards the end of the 18th century preserved some elements of native faith. They believed in the Great Spirit, the Master of Breath (a being whom Bartram represents as a soul and governor of the universe): to him they would address their frequent prayers and ejaculations, at the same time paying a kind of homage to the sun, moon, and stars, as the mediators or ministers of the Great Spirit, in dispensing his attributes for their comfort and well-being in this life. In our own day, among the wild Comanches of the prairies, the Great Spirit, their creator and supreme deity, is above Sun and Moon and Earth; towards him is sent the first puff of tobacco-smoke before the Sun receives the second, and to him is offered the first morsel of the feast.

Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of North America to the complex religion of the half-civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally exceptexpect [sic], a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain