The belief in the power of certain enchanters to take upon themselves at will the forms of animals, fishes, birds, flowers, plants, sticks, stones and other ob jects was general throughout the American continents. Sometimes it was not an indi vidual but a whole tribe that possessed this power. Animals could also metamorphose themselves. The Supernatural People who are sometimes identified with the souls of the dead and sometimes looked upon simply as strange non-human beings are, in Indian myths, fond of assuming the forms of animals. Thus Wakiash, the Kwakiutl hero, on his long journey in search of knowledge to im part to his tribesmen, came to the village of the Supernatural People just as they were holding a great animal dance. He inadver tently restored them to their human form and gained a great store of information from them. This belief in metamorphosis fits in with that of the Indian doctrine of the uni versal wisdom of all created things, their re lationship to man and their close communion with him. It is quite common among the In dians of the United States and Canada and it is one of the most familiar features of their myths and stories. Even in much more cul tured Mexico and Yucatan the people firmly believed that the priests could change them selves into dogs, pigs, tigers and other beasts. Any one encountering them in this form was almost sure to meet with sudden death. Women giving birth to misshapen children were thought to have been bewitched before childbirth by one or more of these sorcerers. Even the dead are believed by various Ameri can tribes to have the power of assuming many forms by means of their great sorcerer knowledge, thus making themselves doubly powerful, fearful and dangerous. This be lief was carried even further. The sorcerer could not only change himself into innumer able shapes, but he could visit the land of the dead and marry the dead; and spirits from the land of the dead were universally believed to have carried off young women and made them their wives and to have had children by them. The Sun, the Moon, the Evening Star, the Wind Gods and the Thunder Spirits fre quently visited this earth and made love to earthly women and begot children earthly in form but possessed of the wonderful powers and attributes of their divine parents. Hia watha's grandmother fell from the moon, and his mother, born upon ear* was be trayed by the handsome West Wind. Though born upon earth, Hiawatha inherited all the powers and attributes of his divine parents. From his mother he received the arts of heal ing and of producing growth, and through his father he had all the active qualities inherent in the winds and was the messenger bringing supernatural knowledge to his people.
As the inherent power of animals, men and spirits was essentially the same in all cases, everything done by a power greater than man's was accomplished by means of magic. Even the greatest of the gods and the most terrible and powerful of spirits from the Land of the Supernatural People were no excep tion to this rule. Hence they could be and frequently were overcome by magic greater than theirs. The powerful magicians of the earth went to the land of the dead and even to the home of the gods and overcame the most powerful of the spirits of the Super natural Lands. When the spirits of the clouds and the air withheld the rain the most re nowned medicine men of the tribe with their strongest were called upon to over come them and to force them to comply with the wishes and supply the necessities of man. Frequently the whole tribe was summoned to take part in these incantations on the principle that each member of the tribe possessing his own special aiding spirit, the whole combined ought to be more effective and powerful by adding it to the knowledge and dread formulae of the priests. This cojoint power of the tribe is very important when it is remembered that upon it depend, in the Indian imagina tion, their enjoyment of rain in season, har vests, good and bad weather, sunlight, heat and cold, sickness and health, life and death, and even the rising and setting of the sun and the moon and the regular coming and go ing of the seasons. Upon the placation of the non-human spirits or the contravention of their magic evilly directed depends also the fertility of the human race, and hence its pres ervation. So young girls about to be married and sterile women resorted to magic to assure that fertility for which they longed. These generally took the form of prayers and power ful incantations and offerings to the Moon Goddess, the greatest of the divinities of growth.
Province of the Myth.— Story-telling was common among most of the American Indians. This is a general characteristic of savage and barbarous races. It is the evidence of their. social and intellectual progress. Before the popularization of education man perpetuated his acquired knowledge in the form of stories, whether in prose or verse. The whole body of these stories contained his philosophy of life, his customs, his traditions, his history and his explanations of all the phenomena of nature. At the time of the discovery of Amer ica the races of the New World were some of them in the stages of savagery and others in the advanced stages of barbarism. So a wide stretch of the highway to civilization separates the lowest of the American races from the highest. Yet they are all distin guished by certain racial characteristics whose earmarks are constantly in evidence in their social and religious systems, in their presenta tion of scientific truths and in the general aspect of their very numerous myths and folk tales. Even in Mexico, Central America and the west coast of South America, where sev eral races had attained to a comparatively high degree of culture and become acquainted with many of the elementary principles of science, the masses of the people still dis played, at the time of the conquest, an all reaching, unreasoning credulity. The origin of the world, the creation of the human race and the lower animals, the vegetable and in animate kingdoms, the sun, the moon and the other planets and their movements; the pecu liar markings and characteristics of animals, the typical 'customs and institutions of men, language, medicine, social and religious insti tutions, all knowledge in short, are explained by the American Indians by means of myths and stories. To these we must go if we would read aright the past and the present of the Indian. There and there only have we the privilege of examining his philosophy and studying his scientific knowledge, his religious beliefs, his social polity, his code of morality and his general attitude toward the mysteri ous world in which he lived and struggled. They teach us that the tribe of the stars, of which the sun was the father and the moon was the mother, ruled the upper heavens; that the Thunder Spirits, in various forms, peopled the lower air and the tops of the highest mountains, while the four great winds ruled the four parts of the earth. On the earth itself the various spirits of growth and germi nation carried on their beneficent work for all sentient beings, while within the earth were confined, by magic, other mysterious be ings, which assumed varying forms and attri butes with different tribes. The Indian myths show us the relation of all of these beings to one another, to man and to the great magic found everywhere throughout the universe. They introduce us to the imprisoned spirits in mountains, trees, plants, stones and rocks; to the powerful beings who guarded the fire and the water and they show us how primitive man overcame them and secured the elements he lacked in his progress toward a higher life. To the Indian imagination all these regions and beings were terribly real. There are evi dences in plenty that a tendency to combine, assimilate and rationalize all Indian knowledge and beliefs, according to the method of reason ing of savage and barbaric man, has been at work for many centuries. The myths and customs, political, social, economic and reli gious, overlap, mingle and apparently contradict one another. They exercise their influences in various ways and through distinct mediums. The tribal story-teller, the slave, the hostage, intermarriage between tribes, the union of clans for defense or other purposes, the blend ing of races through conquest or the peaceful absorption of one tribe by another, all aided in the mixing of myths and folk•tales and the blending of customs and beliefs; so that, in the study of the myths of the American conti nents, we are confronted with a tangle of threads of myth, legand, story, custom, reli gious beliefs and practical supersitions. Yet amid this tangle the parent myth is often dis cernable. The cycle of stones relating to Nanabozho is the great culture hero of the AI gonquins, s one of these. This myth, with slight variations, is or was the common prop erty of the many tribes and sub-tribes of the Algonquin race, and similar myths are to be found in neighboring tribes.