The phrases Good Spirit, Great Spirit, and similar ones, have occasioned endless discrepancies in the minds of…
- Date of account
- Revised nineteenth-century edition
- Source
- The Myths of the New World A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America
- Reference
- The Myths of the New World A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America · selected passage 2
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English comparative scholarship drawing on Indigenous American sources
- Translation
- Daniel G. Brinton
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
The phrases Good Spirit, Great Spirit, and similar ones, have occasioned endless discrepancies in the minds of travellers
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyThe phrases Good Spirit, Great Spirit, and similar ones, have occasioned endless discrepancies in the minds of travellers. In most instances they are entirely of modern origin, coined at the suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man's God. Very rarely do they bring any conception of personality to the native mind, very rarely do they signify any object of worship, perhaps never did in the olden times. The Jesuit Relations state positively that there was no one immaterial god recognized by the Algonkin tribes, and that the title, the Great Manito, was introduced first by themselves in its personal sense.[53-1] The supreme Iroquois Deity Neo or Hawaneu, triumphantly adduced by many writers to show the monotheism underlying the native creeds, and upon whose name Mr.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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