Probably Mr. Strachey’s narrative justifies, by analogy, our suspicion of Major Ellis’s theory that the African Supreme Being is of European origin.  The purpose in the Ahone-Okeus creed is clear.  God (Ahone) is omnipotent and good, yet calamities beset mankind.  How are these to be explained?  Clearly as penalties for men’s sins, inflicted, not by Ahone, but by his lieutenant, Okeus.  But that magistrate can be, and is, appeased by sacrifices, which it would be impious, or, at all events, useless, to offer to the Supreme Being, Ahone.  It is a logical creed, but how was the Supreme Being evolved out of the ghost of a ‘people-devouring king’ like Powhattan?  The facts, very fairly attested, do not fit the anthropological theory.  It is to be remarked that Strachey’s Ahone is a much less mythological conception than that which, on very good evidence, he attributes to the Indians of the Patowemeck River.  Their Creator is spoken of as ‘a godly Hare,’ who receives their souls into Paradise, whence they are reborn on earth again, as in Plato’s myth.  They also regard the four winds as four Gods.  How the god took the mythological form of a hare is diversely explained.[5]

Meanwhile the Ahone-Okeus creed corresponds to the Nyankupon-Bobowissi creed.  The American faith is certainly not borrowed from Europe, so it is less likely that the African creed is borrowed.

As illustrations of the general theory here presented, we may now take two tribal religions among the North American Indians.  The first is that of the equestrian Pawnees, who, thirty years ago, were dwelling on the Loup Fork in Nebraska.  The buffaloes have since been destroyed, the lands seized, and the Pawnees driven into a ‘Reservation,’ where they are, or lately were, cheated and oppressed in the usual way.  They were originally known to Europeans in four hordes, the fourth being the Skidi or Wolf Pawnees.  They seem to have come into Kansas and Nebraska, at a date relatively remote, from Mexico, and are allied with the Lipans and Tonkaways of that region.  The Tonkaways are a tribe who, in a sacred mystery, are admonished to ‘live like the wolves,’ in exactly the same way as were the Hirpi (wolf tribe), of Mount Soracte, who practised the feat of walking unhurt through fire.[6] The Tonkaways regard the Pawnees, who also have a wolf tribe, as a long-separated branch of their race.  If, then, they are of Mexican origin, we might expect to find traces of Aztec ritual among the Pawnees.

Long after they obtained better weapons they used flint-headed arrows for slaying the only two beasts which it was lawful to sacrifice, the deer and the buffalo.  They have long been a hunting and also an agricultural people.  The corn was given to them originally by the Ruler:  their god, Ti-ra-wa, ‘the Spirit Father.’  They offer the sacrifice of a deer with peculiar solemnity, and are a very prayerful people.  The priest ’held a relation to the Pawnees and their deity not unlike