Joseph Henry Gest

“ Besides the spirits in living bodies and in nature, are the souls released by death, but imagined still to wander at times about the earth, and to have some influence on living men, especially in controlling the fate of their bodily descendants. From this conception arose ancestral worship, and the many ceremonies at the grave intended to give peaceful rest beyond, that the departed spirit might thus be kindly disposed toward his offspring. A belief in a future life was necessary to a strong, active people having a tenacious love of life. ”

“ They preserve the religious feeling of what is considered the earliest civilization, and are, therefore, valuable to a student of the progressive growth of religion; and this, however different anthropology and physiology may show the Aryan and Indian.
In all religions there are two great omnipresent relations of man to nature, to God, and of man to man. One is the worship side, the other the moral side. Confining ourselves to the relation of man to nature, what has the study of early Aryan myths shown to be man's first conception of the nature around him? ”

“ The Indian myths are a tangle of animism and polytheism, and only when we approach them with the information gained from the study of early Aryan religious worship do the hitherto senseless crudities open their hidden meanings. A few instances will show the animist or spiritual character. When the Algonquin Indian meets something he can not understand, there he fancies a manito present. This word has the several meanings of spirit, soul, and the first. The mysterious steel of the white man is manito-biwabwik, i. e., spirit-stone. The strange woven cloth is manito-wegin, spirit-skin. ”

“ Out of this has grown, after a long and tedious struggle, our complicated commercial civilization.
The Indian belongs to the first of these stages, and in attempting to civilize him we are trying to raise him to the third, without his having passed through the second. To say the least, it is extremely doubtful if even our assistance can accomplish a result which Nature has denied everywhere else. However, to return, the Indian myths are those of a hunter; and the Aryan was once, long, long ago, a hunter. This point of contact is what gives the myths their principal interest. ”

“ When the world still lay in darkness, say the Mixtecas, there appeared a god, 'lion-serpent' by name, and a goddess, 'tiger-serpent.' They went to live on a high mountain, where two sons were born to them, one of whom they named 'Wind of the Nine Serpents,' and the other, 'Wind of the Nine Caves.' When the elder of these wanted amusement, he assumed the form of an eagle and flew about in the world ”