THE NARRATIVEChapter IPARADISE LOST
THE NARRATIVE
There are hours long departed which memory bringsLike blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.Moore.
There are hours long departed which memory bringsLike blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.Moore.
There are hours long departed which memory bringsLike blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.Moore.
There are hours long departed which memory brings
Like blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart.
Moore.
The wise men tell us that the world is growing happier—that we live longer than did our fathers, have more of comfort and less of toil, fewer wars and discords, and higher hopes and aspirations. So say the wise men; but deep in our own hearts we know they are wrong. For were not we, too, born in Arcadia, and have we not—each one of us—in that May of life when the world was young, started out lightly and airily along the path that led through green meadows to the blue mountains on the distant horizon, beyond which lay the great world we were to conquer? And though others dropped behind, have we not gone on through morning brightness and noonday heat, with eyes always steadily forward, until the fresh grass began to be parched and withered, and the way grew hard and stony, and the blue mountains resolved into gray rocks and thorny cliffs? And when at last we reached the toilsome summits, we found the glory that had lured us onward was only the sunset glow that fades into darkness while we look, and leaves us at the very goal to sink down, tired in body and sick at heart, with strength and courage gone, to close our eyes and dream again, not of the fame and fortune that were to be ours, but only of the old-time happiness that we have left so far behind.
As with men, so is it with nations. The lost paradise is the world’s dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden age, before Pandora’s box was loosed, when women were nymphs and dryads and men were gods and heroes? And when the race lies crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke, how natural is the dream of a redeemer, an Arthur, who shall return from exile or awake from some long sleep to drive out the usurper and win back for his people what they have lost. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesûnanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.
Probably every Indian tribe, north and south, had its early hero god, the great doer or teacher of all first things, from the Inskeha and Manabozho of the rude Iroquoian and Algonquian to the Quetzalcoatl, the Bochica, and the Viracocha of the more cultivated Aztecs, Muyscas, and Quichuas of the milder southland. Among the roving tribes of the north this hero is hardly more than an expert magician, frequently degraded to the level of a common trickster, who, after ridding the world of giants and monsters, and teaching his people a few simple arts, retires to the upper world to rest and smoke until some urgent necessity again requires his presence below. Under softer southern skies the myth takes more poetic form and the hero becomes a person of dignified presence, a father and teacher of his children, a very Christ, worthy of all love and reverence, who gathers together the wandering nomads and leads them to their destined country, where he instructs them in agriculture, house building, and the art of government, regulates authority, and inculcates peaceful modes of life. “Under him, the earth teemed with fruits and flowers without the pains of culture. An ear of Indian corn was as much as a single man could carry. The cotton, as it grew, took of its own accord the rich dyes of human art. The air was filled with intoxicating perfumes and the sweet melody of birds. In short, these were the halcyon days, which find a place in the mythic systems of so many nations in the Old World. It was the golden age of Anahuac.” (Prescott, 1.)[1]When at last his work is well accomplished, he bids farewell to his sorrowing subjects, whom he consoles with the sacred promise that he will one day return and resume his kingdom, steps into his magic boat by the seashore, and sails away out of their sight to the distant land of sunrise.
Such was Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, and such in all essential respects was the culture god of the more southern semicivilized races. Curiously enough, this god, at once a Moses and a messiah, is usually described as a white man with flowing beard. From this and other circumstances it has been argued that the whole story is only another form of the dawn myth, but whether the Indian god be an ancient deified lawgiver of their own race, or some nameless missionary who found his way across the trackless ocean in the early ages of Christianity, or whether we have here only a veiled parable of the morning light bringing life and joy to the world and then vanishing to return again from the east with the dawn, it is sufficient to our purpose that the belief in the coming of a messiah, who should restore them to their original happy condition, was well nigh universal among the American tribes.
This faith in the return of a white deliverer from the east opened the gate to the Spaniards at their first coming alike in Haiti, Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. (Brinton, 1.) The simple native welcomed the white strangers as the children or kindred of their long-lost benefactor,immortal beings whose near advent had been foretold by oracles and omens, whose faces borrowed from the brightness of the dawn, whose glistening armor seemed woven from the rays of sunlight, and whose god-like weapons were the lightning and the thunderbolt. Their first overbearing demands awakened no resentment; for may not the gods claim their own, and is not resistance to the divine will a crime? Not until their most sacred things were trampled under foot, and the streets of the holy city itself ran red with the blood of their slaughtered princes, did they read aright the awful prophecy by the light of their blazing temples, and know that instead of the children of an incarnate god they had welcomed a horde of incarnate devils. “The light of civilization would be poured on their land. But it would be the light of a consuming fire, before which their barbaric glory, their institutions, their very existence and name as a nation, would wither and become extinct. Their doom was sealed when the white man had set his foot on their soil.” (Prescott, 2.)
The great revolt of the Pueblo Indians in August, 1680, was one of the first determined efforts made by the natives on the northern continent to throw off the yoke of a foreign oppressor. The Pueblo tribes along the Rio Grande and farther to the west, a gentle, peaceful race, had early welcomed the coming of the Spaniards, with their soldiers and priests, as friends who would protect them against the wild marauding tribes about them and teach them the mysteries of a greater “medicine” than belonged to their own kachinas. The hope soon faded into bitter disappointment. The soldiers, while rough and overbearing toward their brown-skin allies, were yet unable to protect them from the inroads of their enemies. The priests prohibited their dances and simple amusements, yet all their ringing of bells and chanting of hymns availed not to bring more rain on the crops or to turn aside the vengeful Apache. “What have we gained by all this?” said the Pueblos one to another; “not peace and not happiness, for these new rulers will not protect us from our enemies, and take from us all the enjoyments we once knew.”
The pear was ripe. Popé, a medicine-man of the Tewa, had come back from a pilgrimage to the far north, where he claimed to have visited the magic lagoon of Shipapu, whence his people traced their origin and to which the souls of their dead returned after leaving this life. By these ancestral spirits he had been endowed with occult powers and commanded to go back and rouse the Pueblos to concerted effort for deliverance from the foreign yoke of the strangers.
Wonderful beings were these spirit messengers. Swift as light and impalpable as thought, they passed under the earth from the magic lake to the secret subterranean chamber of the oracle and stood before him as shapes of fire, and spoke, telling him to prepare the strings of yucca knots and send them with the message to all the Pueblos far and near, so that in every village the chiefs might untie one knot from the string each day, and know when they came to the last knot that then was the time to strike.
From the Pecos, across the Rio Grande to Zuñi and the far-distant Hopi mesas, every Pueblo village accepted the yucca string and began secret preparation for the rising. The time chosen was the new moon of August, 1680, but, through a partial discovery of the plot, the explosion was precipitated on the 10th. So sudden and complete was the surprise that many Spaniards in the Pueblo country, priests, soldiers, and civilians, were killed, and the survivors, after holding out for a time under Governor Otermin at Santa Fé, fled to El Paso, and in October there remained not a single Spaniard in all New Mexico. (Bandelier, 1a, 1b.)
Despite their bitter disappointment, the southern nations continued to cherish the hope of a coming redeemer, who now assumed the character of a terrible avenger of their wrongs, and the white-skin conqueror has had bloody occasion to remember that his silent peon, as he toils by blue Chapala or sits amid the ruins of his former grandeur in the dark forests of Yucatan, yet waits ever and always the coming of the day which shall break the power of the alien Spaniard and restore to their inheritance the children of Anahuac and Mayapan. In Peru the natives refused to believe that the last of the Incas had perished a wanderer in the forests of the eastern Cordilleras. For more than two centuries they cherished the tradition that he had only retired to another kingdom beyond the mountains, from which he would return in his own good time to sweep their haughty oppressors from the land. In 1781 the slumbering hope found expression in a terrible insurrection under the leadership of the mestizo Condorcanqui, a descendant of the ancient royal family, who boldly proclaimed himself the long lost Tupac Amaru, child of the sun and Inca of Peru. With mad enthusiasm the Quichua highlanders hailed him as their destined deliverer and rightful sovereign, and binding around his forehead the imperial fillet of the Incas, he advanced at the head of an immense army to the walls of Cuzco, declaring his purpose to blot out the very memory of the white man and reestablish the Indian empire in the City of the Sun. Inspired by the hope of vengeance on the conqueror, even boys became leaders of their people, and it was only after a bloody struggle of two years’ duration that the Spaniards were able to regain the mastery and consigned the captive Inca, with all his family, to an ignominious and barbarous death. Even then so great was the feeling of veneration which he had inspired in the breasts of the Indians that “notwithstanding their fear of the Spaniards, and though they were surrounded by soldiers of the victorious army, they prostrated themselves at the sight of the last of the children of the sun, as he passed along the streets to the place of execution.” (Humboldt, 1.)
In the New World, as in the Old, the advent of the deliverer was to be heralded by signs and wonders. Thus in Mexico, a mysterious rising of the waters of Lake Tezcuco, three comets blazing in the sky, and a strange light in the east, prepared the minds of the people for the nearcoming of the Spaniards. (Prescott, 3.) In this connection, also, there was usually a belief in a series of previous destructions by flood, fire, famine, or pestilence, followed by a regeneration, through, the omnipotent might of the savior. The doctrine that the world is old and worn out, and that the time for its renewal is near at hand, is an essential part of the teaching of the Ghost dance. The number of these cycles of destruction was variously stated among different tribes, but perhaps the most sadly prophetic form of the myth was found among the Winnebago, who forty years ago held that the tenth generation of their people was near its close, and that at the end of the thirteenth the red race would be destroyed. By prayers and ceremonies they were then endeavoring to placate their angry gods and put farther away the doom that now seems rapidly closing in on them. (Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, 1.)