Adair's History of the American IndiansAdair, James
History
Adair's History of the American Indians
Adair, James
Indians -- Origin; Indians of North America -- Southern States
Mooney gives Cherokee myths built upon Tlanuwa (the great hawk). On
the north bank of Little Tennessee River, in Blount County, Tennessee,
is a high overhanging cliff in which is a cave, the place where lived
the mythic great hawk. _Myths of the Cherokees_, 315. A reciter of one
of the myths insisted that the whites must also believe in it, as
evidence pointing to a coin of the United States and to what he called
the Tlanuwa, holding in its talons the arrows and in its beak the
serpent of the myth. _Ibid._, 466.
Footnote 14:
Confirmed as of later date: Cushman, _op. cit._, 487.
ARGUMENT II.
By a strict, permanent, divine precept, the Hebrew nation were ordered
to worship at Jerusalem, _Jehovah_ the true and living God, and who by
the Indians is stiled _Yohewah_; which the seventy-two interpreters,
either from ignorance or superstition, have translated _Adonai_; and
is the very same as the Greek _Kurios_, signifying Sir, Lord, or
Master; which is commonly applied to earthly potentates, without the
least signification of, or relation to, that most great and awful
name, which describes the divine essence, who naturally {18} and
necessarily exists of himself, without beginning or end. The ancient
heathens, it is well known, worshipped a plurality of gods—Gods which
they formed to themselves, according to their own liking, as various
as the countries they inhabited, and as numerous, with some, as the
days of the year. But these Indian Americans pay their religious
devoir to _Loak-Ishtōhoollo-Aba_, “the great, beneficent, supreme,
holy spirit of fire,” who resides (as they think) above the clouds,
and on earth also with unpolluted people. He is with them the sole
author of warmth, light, and of all animal and vegetable life. They do
not pay the least perceivable adoration to any images, or to dead
persons; neither to the celestial luminaries, nor evil spirits, nor
any created being whatsoever. They are utter strangers to all the
gestures practised by the pagans in their religious rites. They kiss
no idols;[15] nor, if they were placed out of their reach, would they
kiss their hands, in token of reverence and a willing obedience.
The ceremonies of the Indians in their religious worship, are more after
the Mosaic institution, than of pagan imitation: which could not be, if
the majority of the old natives were of heathenish descent; for all
bigots and enthusiasts will fight to death for the very shadow of their
superstitious worship, when they have even lost all the substance. There
yet remain so many marks, as to enable us to trace the Hebrew extraction
and rites, through all the various nations of Indians; and we may with a
great deal of probability conclude, that, if any heathens accompanied
them to the American world, or were settled in it before them, they
became proselytes of justice, and their pagan rites and customs were
swallowed up in the Jewish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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