s of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, and said to
be their wicked spirit, is in fact the only name in their language for
spiritual existence in general; and Aka-kanet, sometimes mentioned as
the father of evil in the mythology of the Araucanians, is the benign
power appealed to by their priests, who is throned in the Pleiades, who
sends fruits and flowers to the earth, and is addressed as
"grandfather."[61-2] The Cupay of the Peruvians never was, as Prescott
would have us believe, "the shadowy embodiment of evil," but simply and
solely their god of the dead, the Pluto of their pantheon, corresponding
to the Mictla of the Mexicans.

The evidence on the point is indeed conclusive. The Jesuit missionaries
very rarely distinguish between good and evil deities when speaking of
the religion of the northern tribes; and the Moravian Brethren among the
Algonkins and Iroquois place on record their unanimous testimony that
"the idea of a devil, a prince of darkness, they first received in
later times through the Europeans."[62-1] So the Cherokees, remarks an
intelligent observer, "know nothing of the Evil One and his domains,
except what they have learned from white men."[62-2] The term Great
Spirit conveys, for instance, to the Chipeway just as much the idea of a
bad as of a good spirit; he is unaware of any distinction until it is
explained to him.[62-3] "I have never been able to discover from the
Dakotas themselves," remarks the Rev. G. H. Pond, who had lived among
them as a missionary for eighteen years,[62-4] "the least degree of
evidence that they divide the gods into classes of good and evil, and am
persuaded that those persons who represent them as doing so, do it
inconsiderately, and because it is so natural to subscribe to a long
cherished popular opinion."

Very soon after coming in contact with the whites, the Indians caught
the notion of a bad and good spirit, pitted one against the other in
eternal warfare, and engrafted it on their ancient traditions. Writers
anxious to discover Jewish or Christian analogies, forcibly construed
myths to suit their pet theories, and for indolent observers it was
convenient to catalogue their gods in antithetical classes. In Mexican
and Peruvian mythology this is so plainly false that historians no
longer insist upon it, but as a popular error it still holds its ground
with reference to the more barbarous and less known tribes.

Perhaps no myth has been so often quoted in its confirmati