The time has long since passed, at least among thinking men, when the
religious legends of the lower races were looked upon as trivial fables,
or as the inventions of the Father of Lies. They are neither the one nor
the other. They express, in image and incident, the opinions of these
races on the mightiest topics of human thought, on the origin and destiny
of man, his motives for duty and his grounds of hope, and the source,
history and fate of all external nature. Certainly the sincere expressions
on these subjects of even humble members of the human race deserve our
most respectful heed, and it may be that we shall discover in their crude
or coarse narrations gleams of a mental light which their proud Aryan
brothers have been long in coming to, or have not yet reached.

The prejudice against all the lower faiths inspired by the claim of
Christianity to a monopoly of religious truth--a claim nowise set up by
its founder--has led to extreme injustice toward the so-called heathen
religions. Little effort has been made to distinguish between their good
and evil tendencies, or even to understand them. I do not know of a single
instance on this continent of a thorough and intelligent study of a native
religion made by a Protestant missionary.

So little real work has been done in American mythology that very diverse
opinions as to its interpretation prevail among writers. Too many of them
apply to it facile generalizations, such as "heliolatry," "animism,"
"ancestral worship," "primitive philosophizing," and think that such a
sesame will unloose all its mysteries. The result has been that while each
satisfies himself, he convinces no one else.

I have tried to avoid any such bias, and have sought to discover the
source of the myths I have selected, by close attention to two points:
first, that I should obtain the precise original form of the myth by a