manitou

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"Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?" Zophar the Naamathite asks Job in the New International Version of the Hebrew Bible. And the Psalmist says, in the King James version, "Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable." Whatever the version, even the most deeply religious, perhaps especially the most deeply religious, acknowledge God to be ultimately unknowable.

And the God of the Bible has been an intimate acquaintance of English speakers ever since the first Christian missionaries converted the pagan Anglo-Saxons some 1400 years ago. If that God is beyond understanding, how much more so must be the supernatural beings that have not been part of English-speaking cultures. So this untheological book will not undertake a definitive explanation of the manitou. It can be said, however, that manitou is not the "Great Spirit," an Indian equivalent of the Christian God, as some ecumenical Christians once believed. Instead, the manitou in various American Indian cultures is said to be either a spiritual essence that pervades all creatures or else to be particular creatures that are divine or partly divine.

And we can definitively say this: manitou is an Ojibwa word. A present-day source explains of the Ojibwa, "Their religion is based on the idea that each person possesses two souls and that all is controlled by supernatural beings known as manito." The English language learned a similar word from a different Indian language, Montoac from Virginia Algonquian, as early as 1588. But the reason English speakers are inclined to use the Ojibwa form of the word is that a famous American poem of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha (1855), does so, telling stories based on Ojibwa legend as accurately as contemporary research allowed. Chapter I of Longfellow's poem begins:

The setting of Hiawatha is the south shore of Lake Superior, where many Ojibwa still live. All told, there are about 20,000 speakers of Ojibwa in the United States and even more in Canada, about 30,000 around Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and north and west. Ojibwa comes in eastern, northern, and western varieties. It belongs to the central branch of the Algonquian-Ritwan language family. Ojibwa has given about a dozen words to English, including pecan (1712), totem (1776), and chipmunk (1832).

• Mythological and Folkloric Beings - manitou: spirit that controls nature and is source of natural and supernatural power (Algonquian Indians)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - god/ond ånd, ting eller person med overnaturlig kraft

Nederlands (Dutch)
manitoe (Indiaanse geest/natuurkracht), (Grote Geest)

Français (French)
n. - manitou

Deutsch (German)
n. - (bei nordam. Indianern) Manitu (übernatürliche Kraft)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μανιτού, πνεύμα

Italiano (Italian)
manitù

Português (Portuguese)
n. - manitu (m)

Русский (Russian)
божество, фетиш

Español (Spanish)
n. - manitú, deidad de los indios de Norte América

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - (naturens) ande, gud, fetisch

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
神灵

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 神靈

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 초자연력, 영

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 神, 霊

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الروح المقدسه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הרוח הגדולה השולטת על הטבע (אינדיאנים), משהו הנחשב לבעל כוחות על-טבעיים‬

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