Foreword

In the course of the seventeenth century, ideas concerning the beliefs of Canadian Indians underwent a slow process of modification. Chroniclers at the beginning of the century, influenced by those who, the century before, had flatly declared a number of Indian nations to be "faithless, kingless and lawless," continued to describe them pejoratively. However, as they gradually came to see that the Indians were not irreligious, their declarations grew increasingly contradictory. An attentive reading of documents left by missionaries and explorers reveals that towards the middle of the seventeenth century - at a time when, in Europe, conceptions of witchcraft and religion were changing - the observation of American facts became more nuanced. The discovery of a "false religion" launched the debate as to whether or not the Indians had preserved a secret sentiment of God. 

Were the Indians monotheistic or polytheistic ? At the beginning of the twentienth century, Paul Radin was to take up the question and propose a tertium quid - namely that the Indians had practised monolatry or henotheism.

In order to understand what the notion of polytheism signifies in the 17th century, I have read the chroniclers of this period and sought their comments on that subject. Because I wanted to give my subject a certain unity I have limited myself to one region : New France and the East coast of North America. I have sometimes had the impression of conducting a veritable ethnohistorical investigation of the chroniclers so as to discover the way they perceived the "superfluous religion" (that is, full of superstitions). Even had I wished, I could not have found the word polytheism in their writings, since the word does not belong to the usual vocabulary of the 17th century chroniclers (on this subject, see Schmidt, 1985 : 84-88), even though what they describe often corresponds to it. On the other hand, what stands out (with exceptions, as we will see), is their insistent denial that the Amerindians possessed any religion or beliefs at all. How is such total negation possible ? Influenced by the prejudices of the preceding century, marked by such a concise expression as sans foi, sans roi, sans loi (no faith, no king, no law) which would become in time an accepted concept, the chroniclers applied themselves to demonstrating, with more or less success, not what was, but what was not. Fortunately, their thesis was difficult to defend, and because they wanted so much to prove it, they constantly contradicted themselves, even going so far as to give strikingly beautiful descriptions of the "false religion." 

I have therefore structured my article around a fundamental and highly ambiguous 17th century question : do the Indians have a religion, and if so, to what category (or categories) does it belong ? Given that Lafitau, in his work Les Moeurs (1724), constructs a powerful indictment against the Jesuits of the preceding century, I will begin with this author. The following sections are devoted to recurrent and typical themes of the 17th century : since the Indians lived in a state of total ignorance, it should have been easy for the missionaries to instill the precepts of the "true Religion". However there were important obstacles : did the Devil not hold sway over the whole of Amerindian society, and did the sorcerers not communicate with him ? This Manichean vision of the American world led the chroniclers to oscillate constantly between the notions of Good and Evil, and to grant the Devil a supremacy of position such that any religious manifestation would be directly inspired by him. As the century unfolded, and especially after 1640 - a period when a change in mentality towards sorcery and the devil occurred in France - our chroniclers were eventually seized by doubt, and no longer dared to put forward with such assurance the opinions they earlier affirmed so peremptorily. Although they continued to repeat that the Indians had no religion, they destroyed the effect of their negation by relating it to descriptions of religious rites. Thus they discovered that the Indians, not being "irreligious," could not be atheists. Some had religious beliefs, others a "false religion" ; consequently, the tabula rasa remained in their imagination. In the final analysis, the missionaries would be faced with a serious problem of conscience : if the Indians had been able to create for themselves different gods, why, among all these deities would they not choose a single One ? Actually, the idea that the Indians, corrupted by the Fall, were nevertheless molded from the same clay as all of humanity, had never been altogether absent from the minds of the chroniclers. The Indians must necessarily have had the notion of a First Principle, an innate idea of God. Upon reflection, it was seen that these "people miserable as beggars but absolutely superb" (Ragueneau) nourished a "secret sentiment." 

As will become evident my conclusion is inspired by Paul Radin, who for many years studied the Amerindian religions, concerning himself particularly with the question of whether or not the Indians were polytheists. Radin (1915, 1924, 1937, 1954) does not draw his conclusions from the chroniclers but from ethnographic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, including his own. Although I doubt he ever found a definitive answer to his quest, he proposed nonetheless a tertium quid. the Indians could be monolatrist or henotheist, a kind of middle path between monotheism and polytheism which borrows characteristics from both. 

In order to concentrate on the historiography of ideas during the 17th century, I have purposely excluded all ethnographic analysis from my study. Indeed, borrowing from modern ethnological discourse could have led to the danger of overshadowing the chroniclers' thinking by replying on their behalf After all, studies on this subject do exist. I have also excluded 18th century writings. Likewise, I could not retain certain late 17th century chronicles concerning the expeditions of La Salle, Jolliet, Marquette and Hennepin in the valley of the Mississippi, simply because I had to reduce the scope of my research. One last word : the 17th century chronicles do not necessarily reveal a constant evolution of one or several ideas. From Biard, Champlain and Lescarbot, from Sagard, Le jeune and Lalemant to Le Clercq, Allouez and Ragueneau - three groups of authors who represent different moments in the century - the same ideas appear frequently. However, an attentive reading permits one to discern several key concepts and to follow their evolution [1].