Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/27

Rh These are almost invariably in the form of dramatic prayers—combinations of sacrifice, song, and symbolic personation—addressed to the great nature-powers, to sun and earth, to the rain-bringers, and to the givers of food and game. A final group is formed of rites in honour of the dead or of ancestral tutelaries, ceremonies usually annual and varying in purpose from solicitude for the welfare of the departed to desire for their assistance and propitiation of their possible ill will.

In these rituals are defined the essential beings of the Indian's pagan religion. There is the Great Spirit, represented by Father Sky or by the sky s great incarnation, the Sun Father. There are Mother Earth and her daughter, the Corn Mother. There are the intermediaries between the powers be low and those above, including the birds and the great mythic Thunderbird, the winds and the clouds and the celestial bodies. There are the Elders, or Guardians, of the animal kinds, who replenish the earth with game and come as helpers to the hunts men; and there is the vast congeries of things potent, belong ing both to the seen and to the unseen world, whose help may be won in the form of "medicine" by the man who knows the usages of Nature.

Inevitably these powers find a fluctuating representation in the varying imagery of myth. Consistency is not demanded, for the Indian s mode of thought is too deeply symbolic for him to regard his own stories as literal: they are neither allegory nor history; they are myth, with a truth midway between that of allegory and that of history. Myth can properly be defined only with reference to its sources and motives. Now the motives of Indian stories are in general not difficult to determine. The vast majority are obviously told for entertainment; they represent an art, the art of fiction; and they fall into the classes of fiction, satire and humour, romance, adventure. Again, not a few are moral allegories, or they are fables with obvious lessons, such as often appear in the story of the theft of fire when it details the kinds of wood from which