ow
fables about that being are told, and buffooneries are enacted. For,
though I say that certain high ideas are taught in Mysteries, I do not
think I say that in Mysteries no low myths are told.

I take this opportunity, as the earliest, to apologise for an error in
my Making of Religion concerning a passage in the Primitive Culture of
my friend Mr. E. B. Tylor. Mr. Tylor quoted(1) a passage from Captain
John Smith's History of Virginia, as given in Pinkerton, xiii. pp.
13-39, 1632. In this passage no mention occurs of a Virginian deity
named Ahone but "Okee," another and more truculent god, is named. I
observed that, if Mr. Tylor had used Strachey's Historie of Travaile
(1612), he would have found "a slightly varying copy" of Smith's text of
1632, with Ahone as superior to Okee. I added in a note (p. 253): "There
is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith's remarks
published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work with his own MS.
in the British Museum." Here, as presently will be shown, I erred, in
company with Strachey's editor of 1849, and with the writer on Strachey
in the Dictionary of National Biography. What Mr. Tylor quoted from an
edition of Smith in 1632 had already appeared, in 1612, in a book
(Map of Virginia, with a description of the Countrey) described on the
title-page as "written by Captain Smith," though, in my opinion, Smith
may have had a collaborator. There is no evidence whatever that Strachey
had anything to do with this book of 1612, in which there is no mention
of Ahone. Mr. Arber dates Strachey's own MS. (in which Ahone occurs) as
of 1610-1615.(2) I myself, for reasons presently to be alleged, date
the MS. mainly in 1611-1612. If Mr. Arber and I are right, Strachey must
have had access to Smith's MS. before it was published in 1612, and we
shall see how he used it. My point here is that Strachey mentioned Ahone
(in MS.) before Smith's book of 1612 was published. This could not be
gathered from the dedication to Bacon prefixed to Strachey's MS., for
that dedication cannot be earlier that 1618.(3) I now ask leave to
discuss the evidence for an early pre-Christian belief in a primal
Creator, held by the Indian tribes from Plymouth, in New England, to
Roanoke Island, off Southern Virginia.

(1) Prim. Cult. ii. p. 342.

(2) Arber's Smith, p. cxxxiii.

(3) Hakluyt Society, Strachey, 1849, pp. xxi., xxii.

THE GOD AHONE.

An insertion by a manifest plagiary into t