The Geat Spirit.docVIP

The Great Spirit The Algonquians of the north recognize as the chief of their Manitos, Gitche (or Kitshi) Manito, the Great Spirit, whom they also call the Master of Life. It should not be inferred that a manlike personality is ascribed to the Great Spirit. He is invisible and immaterial; the author of life, but himself uncreated; he is the source of good to man, and is invoked with reverence: but he is not a definite personality about whom myths are told; he is aloof from the world of sense; and he is perhaps best named, as some translators prefer, the Great Mystery of all things. Yet the Great Spirit is not without proper names. P鑢e Le Jeune wrote thus in 1633, concerning the Montagnais: They say that there is a certain one whom they call Atahocan, who made all things. Talking one day of God, in a cabin, they asked me what this God was. I told them that it was he who could do everything, and who had made the Sky and Earth. They began to say to one another, `Atahocan, Atahocan, it is Atahocan. Winslow, writing in 1622, mentions a similar spirit, Kiehtan, recognized by the Massachusetts Indians; and the early writers on the Virginia Indians tell of their belief that there is one chiefe God that hath beene from all eternitie who made the world and set the sun and moon and stars to be his ministers. The Iroquoian tribes have no precise equivalent for the Algonquian Kitshi Manito, but they believed in a similar spirit, known by the name of Areskoui or Agreskoui, to whom they offered the first-fruits of the chase and of victorious war. The terrible letter in which P鑢e Isaac Jogues recounts his stay among the Iroquois, as a prisoner, tells of the sacrifice of a woman captive to this deity: And as often as they applied the fire to that unhappy one with torches and burning brands, an old man cried in a loud voice: `Aireskoi, we sacrifice to thee this victim that thou mayst satisfy thyself with her flesh, and give us victory over our enemies. The usual rite to the Great S