es of the world.
They are in a sense religious, because there is usually a supernatural
power, a deus ex machina, of some sort to cut the knot of the problem.
Such stories, then, are the science, and to a certain extent the
religious tradition, of savages.(3)

(1) Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1648, p. 70.

(2) Algic Researches, i. 41.

(3) "The Indians (Algonkins) conveyed instruction--moral, mechanical and
religious--through traditionary fictions and tales."--Schoolcraft, Algic
Researches, i. 12.

Now these tales are necessarily cast in the mould of the savage ideas of
which a sketch has been given. The changes of the heavenly bodies, the
processes of day and night, the existence of the stars, the invention
of the arts, the origin of the world (as far as known to the savage),
of the tribe, of the various animals and plants, the origin of death
itself, the origin of the perplexing traditional tribal customs, are all
accounted for in stories. At the same time, an actual divine Maker is
sometimes postulated. The stories, again, are fashioned in accordance
with the beliefs already named: the belief in human connection with and
kinship with beasts and plants; the belief in magic; the belief in the
perpetual possibility of metamorphosis or "shape shifting"; the belief
in the permanence and power of the ghosts of the dead; the belief in the
personal and animated character of all the things in the world, and so
forth.

No more need be said to explain the wild and (as it seems to us moderns)
the irrational character of savage myth. It is a jungle of foolish
fancies, a walpurgis nacht of gods and beasts and men and stars and
ghosts, all moving madly on a level of common personality and animation,
and all changing shapes at random, as partners are changed in some
fantastic witches' revel. Such is savage mythology, and how could it
be otherwise when we consider the elements of thought and belief out of
which it is mainly composed? We shall see that part of the mythology of
the Greeks or the Aryans of India is but a similar walpurgis nacht, in
which an incestuous or amorous god may become a beast, and the object
of his pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, and then shift
shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races the
genius of the people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild
element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. The Erinyes soon
stop the mouth of the horse o