Note 199 — Chapter IX

Couto de Magalhães, part i, texts. This is among the most interesting of all American myths; it is clearly cosmogonic in character, yet it reverses the customary procedure of cosmogonies, beginning with an illuminated world rather than a chaotic gloom. Possibly this is an indication of primitiveness, for the conception of night and chaos as the antecedent of cosmic order would seem to call for a certain degree of imaginative austerity; it is not simple nor childlike.