No mythologies are so
crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the
philosophic mind, for they are never the empty fictions of an idle
fancy, but rather the utterances, however inarticulate, of an immortal
and ubiquitous intuition.
These considerations embolden me to approach with some confidence even
the aboriginal religions of America, so often stigmatized as incoherent
fetichisms, so barren, it has been said, in grand or beautiful
creations. The task bristles with difficulties. Carelessness,
prepossessions, and ignorance have disfigured them with false colors and
foreign additions without number. The first maxim, therefore, must be to
sift and scrutinize authorities, and to reject whatever betrays the
plastic hand of the European. For the religions developed by the red
race, not those mixed creeds learned from foreign invaders, are to be
the subjects of our study. Then will remain the formidable undertaking
of reducing the authentic materials thus obtained to system and order,
and this not by any preconceived theory of what they ought to conform
to, but learning from them the very laws of religious growth they
illustrate.
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