American Indian Symbolism

Summary

The North American India is commonly a symbolist, a spiritualist, and a savant. Like most: native people groups, his spirit was en affinity with the grandiose organizations appearing about him. Besides the fact that his Manidos controlled creation from their lifted up seats over the mists, however they additionally plunged into the universe of men and blended with their red kids. The dim mists looming into the great beyond were the smoke from the calumets of the divine beings, who could construct flames of frozen wood and utilize a comet for a fire. The Native American inhabited the woods, streams, and sky with heaps of superphysical and undetectable creatures. There are legends of whole clans of Indians who lived in lake bottoms; of races who were never found in the daytime yet who, approaching from their secret caverns, wandered the earth around evening time and waylaid unwary explorers; likewise of Bat Indians, with human bodies and batlike wings, who lived in bleak woodlands and distant bluffs and who dozed hanging head descending from extraordinary branches and offshoots of rock. The red man's way of thinking of basic animals is evidently the result of his private contact with Nature, whose mysterious miracles become the producing reason for such powerful hypotheses.