Pagan Prayers

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Pagan Prayers

-  Pages scanned from original 1913 book
 - Instant Download - PDF - Ebook
 - 115 Pages

BOOK INTRODUCTION /PREFACE:

THIS little book of thoughts big, and
thoughts childish, goes to the reader
with the hope that it bears the little known
fact that Ancient America had a written
aboriginal literature much of which was
beautiful.

The Apache and the Navajo prayers are
oral, transmitted from priest to priest
through the centuries; but the Mexican are
fragments, rescued from a wide literature by
the learned and courageous Franciscan,
Bernardino de Sahagun, in the Seventeenth
century.

The first archbishop of Mexico took
credit to himself for the burning, in one
town, of 60,000 Mexican books and manuscripts
on history, religion, law, medicine,
astrology, genealogy and poetry. It was
his part of the approved battle against the
false gods. For four centuries he has had
ardent imitators which accounts for much.

The masked, dramatized prayers of the
Indians of the Southwest of today, suggested
to the compiler a key to ancient Mexican
rituals where god or goddess replies directly
to priest or suppliant. This is the one
special liberty taken with the records the
deity or priest is placed as the Indian places
him, in the temple of feast or sacrifice;
while the Spanish records gave only the
spoken words with little to indicate the
ritual or the speakers.

The Peruvian had reached a higher
spiritual and philosophic stage of culture
before his annihilation, though at loss of the
spontaneous poetic imagery, wistful or
colorful, of the Mexican.

Such as they are, these prayers reflect the
culture of both extinct and living primitive
peoples of the world we call the New, and
they go out for judgment side by side with
the better known rituals of the world we call
the Old.