I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.--Joel.

How is it then, brethren? When ye come together every one of vou hath a doc-
trine, hath a revelation.--I Corinthians.

The remote in time or distance is always strange. The familiar
present is always natural and a matter of course. Beyond the narrow
range of our horizon imagination creates a new world, but as we advance
in any direction, or as we go back over forgotten paths, we find ever
a continuity and a succession. The human race is one in thought and
action. The systems of our highest modern civilizations have their coun-
terparts among all the nations, and their chain of parallels stretches
backward link by link until we find their origin and interpretation in
the customs and rites of our own barbarian ancestors, or of our still
existing aboriginal tribes. There is nothing new under the sun.

The Indian messiah religion is the inspiration of a dream. Its ritual
is the dance, the ecstasy, and the trance. Its priests are hypnotics and
cataleptics. All these have formed a part of every great religious devel-
opment of which we have knowledge from the beginning of history.

In the ancestors of the Hebrews, as described in the Old Testament,
we have a pastoral people, living in tents, acquainted with metal work-
ing, but without letters, agriculture, or permanent habitations. They
had reached about the plane of our own Navaho, but were below that
of the Pueblo. Their mythologic and religious system was closely
parallel. Their chiefs were priests who assumed to govern by inspira-
tion from God, communicated through frequent dreams and waking
visions. Each of the patriarchs is the familiar confidant of God and
his angels, going up to heaven in dreams and receiving direct instruc-
tions in waking visits, and regulating his family and his tribe, and
ordering their religious ritual, in accord with these instructions. Jacob,
alone in the desert, sleeps and dreams, and sees a ladder reaching to
heaven, with angels going up and down upon it, and God himself, who
tells him of the future greatness of the Jewish nation. So Wovoka,
asleep on the mountain, goes up to the Indian heaven and is told by
the Indian god of the coming restoration of his race. Abraham is
"tempted" by God and commanded to sacrifice his son, and proceeds
to carry out the supernatural injunction. So Black Coyote dreams and
is commanded to sacrifice himself for the sake of his children.

-928-