"They have another Power they call Hobamock, which we conceive the
Devill, and upon him they call to cure their wounds and diseases;
when they are curable he persuades them he sent them, because they
have displeased him; but, if they be mortal, then he saith,
'Kiehtan sent them'; which makes them never call on him in their
sickness. They say this Hobamock appears to them sometimes like a
man, a deer, or an eagle, but most commonly like a snake; not to
all but to their Powahs to cure diseases, and Undeses . . . and
these are such as conjure in Virginia, and cause the people to do
what they list." Winslow (or rather Smith editing Winslow here),
had already said, "They believe, as do the Virginians, of many
divine powers, yet of one above all the rest, as the Southern
Virginians call their chief god Kewassa [an error], and that we now
inhabit Oke. . . . The Massachusetts call their great god
Kiehtan."[1]


[1] Arber, pp. 767, 768.


Here, then, in Heriot (1586), Strachey (1611-12) and Winslow
(1622), we find fairly harmonious accounts of a polydaemonism with
a chief, primal, creative being above and behind it; a being
unnamed, and Ahone and Kiehtan.

Is all this invention? Or was all this derived from Europeans
before 1586, and, if so, from what Europeans? Mr. Tylor, in 1873,
wrote, "After due allowance made for misrendering of savage