(M137) “ ‘I tell you it _cannot_ die; it will only change houses

to-morrow, and go back to the home of its brothers. Ah, well! How should

_you_ know?’ he mused. Turning to the blinded turtle again: ‘Ah! my poor

dear lost child or parent, my sister or brother to have been! Who knows

which? Maybe my own great-grandfather or mother!’ And with this he fell to

weeping most pathetically, and, tremulous with sobs, which were echoed by

the women and children, he buried his face in his hands. Filled with

sympathy for his grief, however mistaken, I raised the turtle to my lips

and kissed its cold shell; then depositing it on the floor, hastily left

the grief-stricken family to their sorrows. Next day, with prayers and

tender beseechings, plumes, and offerings, the poor turtle was killed, and

its flesh and bones were removed and deposited in the little river, that

it might ‘return once more to eternal life among its comrades in the dark

waters of the lake of the dead.’ The shell, carefully scraped and dried,

was made into a dance-rattle, and, covered by a piece of buckskin, it

still hangs from the smoke-stained rafters of my brother’s house. Once a

Navajo tried to buy it for a ladle; loaded with indignant reproaches, he

was turned out of the house. Were any one to venture the suggestion that

the turtle no longer lived, his remark would cause a flood of tears, and

he would be reminded that it had only ‘changed houses and gone to live for

ever in the home of “our lost others.” ’ ”(539)

(M138) In this custom we find expressed in the clearest way a belief in

the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of turtles.(540) The

theory of transmigration is held by the Moqui Indians, who belong to the

same race as the Zunis. The Moquis are divided into totem clans—the Bear

clan, Deer clan, Wolf clan, Hare clan, and so on; they believe that the

ancestors of the clans were bears, deer, wolves, hares, and so forth; and

that at death the members of each clan become bears, deer, and so on

according to the particular clan to which they belonged.(541) The Zuni are

also divided into clans, the totems of which agree closely with those of

the Moquis, and one of their totems is the turtle.(542) Thus their belief

in transmigration into the turtle is probably one of the regular articles

of their totem faith.(543) What then is the meaning of killing a turtle in

which the soul of a kinsman is believed to be present? Apparently the

object is to keep up a communication with the other world in which the

souls of the departed are believed to be assembled in the form of turtles.

It is a common belief that the spirits of the dead return occasionally to

their old homes; and accordingly the unseen visitors are welcomed and

feasted by the living, and then sent upon their way.(544) In the Zuni

ceremony the dead are fetched home in the form of turtles, and the killing

of the turtles is the way of sending back the souls to the spirit-land.

Thus the general explanation given above of the custom of killing a god

seems inapplicable to the Zuni custom, the true meaning of which is

somewhat obscure. Nor is the obscurity which hangs over the subject

entirely dissipated by a later and fuller account which we possess of the

ceremony. From it we learn that the ceremony forms part of the elaborate

ritual which these Indians observe at the midsummer solstice for the

purpose of ensuring an abundant supply of rain for the crops. Envoys are

despatched to bring “their otherselves, the tortoises,” from the sacred

lake Kothluwalawa, to which the souls of the dead are believed to repair.

When the creatures have thus been solemnly brought to Zuni, they are

placed in a bowl of water and dances are performed beside them by men in

costume, who personate gods and goddesses. “After the ceremonial the

tortoises are taken home by those who caught them and are hung by their

necks to the rafters till morning, when they are thrown into pots of

boiling water. The eggs are considered a great delicacy. The meat is

seldom touched except as a medicine, which is curative for cutaneous

diseases. Part of the meat is deposited in the river with _kóhakwa_ (white

shell beads) and turquoise beads as offerings to Council of the

Gods.”(545) This account at all events confirms the inference that the

tortoises are supposed to be reincarnations of the human dead, for they

are called the “otherselves” of the Zuni; indeed, what else should they be

than the souls of the dead in the bodies of tortoises seeing that they

come from the haunted lake? As the principal object of the prayers uttered

and of the dances performed at these midsummer ceremonies appears to be to

procure rain for the crops, it may be that the intention of bringing the

tortoises to Zuni and dancing before them is to intercede with the

ancestral spirits, incarnate in the animals, that they may be pleased to

exert their power over the waters of heaven for the benefit of their

living descendants.

§ 5. Killing the Sacred Bear.

(M139) Doubt also hangs at first sight over the meaning of the

bear-sacrifice offered by the Aino or Ainu, a primitive people who are

found in the Japanese island of Yezo or Yesso, as well as in Saghalien and

the southern of the Kurile Islands. It is not quite easy to define the

attitude of the Aino towards the bear. On the one hand they give it the

name of _kamui_ or “god”; but as they apply the same word to

strangers,(546) it may mean no more than a being supposed to be endowed

with superhuman, or at all events extraordinary, powers.(547) Again, it is

said that “the bear is their chief divinity”;(548) “in the religion of the

Aino the bear plays a chief part”;(549) “amongst the animals it is

especially the bear which receives an idolatrous veneration”;(550) “they

worship it after their fashion”; “there is no doubt that this wild beast

inspires more of the feeling which prompts worship than the inanimate

forces of nature, and the Aino may be distinguished as

bear-worshippers.”(551) Yet, on the other hand, they kill the bear

whenever they can;(552) “in bygone years the Ainu considered bear-hunting

the most manly and useful way in which a person could possibly spend his

time”;(553) “the men spend the autumn, winter, and spring in hunting deer

and bears. Part of their tribute or taxes is paid in skins, and they

subsist on the dried meat”;(554) bear’s flesh is indeed one of their

staple foods; they eat it both fresh and salted;(555) and the skins of

bears furnish them with clothing.(556) In fact, the worship of which

writers on this subject speak appears to be paid chiefly to the dead

animal. Thus, although they kill a bear whenever they can, “in the process

of dissecting the carcass they endeavour to conciliate the deity, whose

representative they have slain, by making elaborate obeisances and

deprecatory salutations”;(557) “when a bear has been killed the Ainu sit

down and admire it, make their salaams to it, worship it, and offer

presents of _inao_”;(558) “when a bear is trapped or wounded by an arrow,

the hunters go through an apologetic or propitiatory ceremony.”(559) The

skulls of slain bears receive a place of honour in their huts, or are set

up on sacred posts outside the huts, and are treated with much respect:

libations of millet beer, and of _sake_, an intoxicating liquor, are

offered to them; and they are addressed as “divine preservers”

(_akoshiratki kamui_), or “precious divinities.”(560) The skulls of foxes

are also fastened to the sacred posts outside the huts; they are regarded

as charms against evil spirits, and are consulted as oracles.(561) Yet it

is expressly said, “The live fox is revered just as little as the bear;

rather they avoid it as much as possible, considering it a wily

animal.”(562) The bear can hardly, therefore, be described as a sacred

animal of the Aino, nor yet as a totem; for they do not call themselves

bears, and they kill and eat the animal freely. However, they have a

legend of a woman who had a son by a bear; and many of them who dwell in

the mountains pride themselves on being descended from a bear. Such people

are called “Descendants of the bear” (_Kimun Kamui sanikiri_), and in the

pride of their heart they will say, “As for me, I am a child of the god of

the mountains; I am descended from the divine one who rules in the

mountains,” meaning by “the god of the mountains” no other than the

bear.(563) It is therefore possible that, as our principal authority, the

Rev. J. Batchelor, believes, the bear may have been the totem of an Aino

clan; but even if that were so it would not explain the respect shewn for

the animal by the whole Aino people.

(M140) But it is the bear-festival of the Aino which concerns us here.

Towards the end of winter a bear cub is caught and brought into the

village. If it is very small, it is suckled by an Aino woman, but should

there be no woman able to suckle it, the little animal is fed from the

hand or the mouth. If it cries loudly and long for its mother, as it is

apt to do, its owner will take it to his bosom and let it sleep with him

for a few nights, thus dispelling its fears and sense of loneliness.

During the day it plays about in the hut with the children and is treated

with great affection. But when the cub grows big enough to pain people by

hugging or scratching them, he is shut up in a strong wooden cage, where

he stays generally for two or three years, fed on fish and millet

porridge, till it is time for him to be killed and eaten.(564) But “it is

a peculiarly striking fact that the young bear is not kept merely to

furnish a good meal; rather he is regarded and honoured as a fetish, or

even as a sort of higher being.”(565) In Yezo the festival is generally

celebrated in September or October. Before it takes place the Aino

apologise to their gods, alleging that they have treated the bear kindly

as long as they could, now they can feed him no longer, and are obliged to

kill him. A man who gives a bear-feast invites his relations and friends;

in a small village nearly the whole community takes part in the feast;

indeed, guests from distant villages are invited and generally come,

allured by the prospect of getting drunk for nothing. The form of

invitation runs somewhat as follows: “I, so and so, am about to sacrifice

the dear little divine thing who resides among the mountains. My friends

and masters, come ye to the feast; we will then unite in the great

pleasure of sending the god away. Come.”(566) When all the people are

assembled in front of the cage, an orator chosen for the purpose addresses

the bear and tells it that they are about to send it forth to its

ancestors. He craves pardon for what they are about to do to it, hopes it

will not be angry, and comforts it by assuring the animal that many of the

sacred whittled sticks (_inao_) and plenty of cakes and wine will be sent

with it on the long journey. One speech of this sort which Mr. Batchelor

heard ran as follows: “O thou divine one, thou wast sent into the world

for us to hunt. O thou precious little divinity, we worship thee; pray

hear our prayer. We have nourished thee and brought thee up with a deal of

pains and trouble, all because we love thee so. Now, as thou hast grown

big, we are about to send thee to thy father and mother. When thou comest

to them please speak well of us, and tell them how kind we have been;

please come to us again and we will sacrifice thee.” Having been secured

with ropes, the bear is then let out of the cage and assailed with a

shower of blunt arrows in order to rouse it to fury. When it has spent

itself in vain struggles, it is tied up to a stake, gagged and strangled,

its neck being placed between two poles, which are then violently

compressed, all the people eagerly helping to squeeze the animal to death.

An arrow is also discharged into the beast’s heart by a good marksman, but

so as not to shed blood, for they think that it would be very unlucky if

any of the blood were to drip on the ground. However, the men sometimes

drink the warm blood of the bear "that the courage and other virtues it

possesses may pass into them"; and sometimes they besmear themselves and

their clothes with the blood in order to ensure success in hunting. When

the animal has been strangled to death, it is skinned and its head is cut

off and set in the east window of the house, where a piece of its own

flesh is placed under its snout, together with a cup of its own meat

boiled, some millet dumplings, and dried fish. Prayers are then addressed

to the dead animal; amongst other things it is sometimes invited, after

going away to its father and mother, to return into the world in order

that it may again be reared for sacrifice. When the bear is supposed to

have finished eating its own flesh, the man who presides at the feast

takes the cup containing the boiled meat, salutes it, and divides the

contents between all the company present: every person, young and old

alike, must taste a little. The cup is called “the cup of offering”

because it has just been offered to the dead bear. When the rest of the

flesh has been cooked, it is shared out in like manner among all the

people, everybody partaking of at least a morsel; not to partake of the

feast would be equivalent to excommunication, it would be to place the

recreant outside the pale of Aino fellowship. Formerly every particle of

the bear, except the bones, had to be eaten up at the banquet, but this

rule is now relaxed. The head, on being detached from the skin, is set up

on a long pole beside the sacred wands (_inao_) outside of the house,

where it remains till nothing but the bare white skull is left. Skulls so

set up are worshipped not only at the time of the festival, but very often

as long as they last. The Aino assured Mr. Batchelor that they really do

believe the spirits of the worshipful animals to reside in the skulls;

that is why they address them as “divine preservers” and “precious

divinities.”(567)

(M141) The ceremony of killing the bear was witnessed by Dr. B. Scheube on

the tenth of August at Kunnui, which is a village on Volcano Bay in the

island of Yezo or Yesso. As his description of the rite contains some

interesting particulars not mentioned in the foregoing account, it may be

worth while to summarise it.(568)

On entering the hut he found about thirty Aino present, men, women, and

children, all dressed in their best. The master of the house first offered

a libation on the fireplace to the god of the fire, and the guests

followed his example. Then a libation was offered to the house-god in his

sacred corner of the hut. Meanwhile the housewife, who had nursed the

bear, sat by herself, silent and sad, bursting now and then into tears.

Her grief was obviously unaffected, and it deepened as the festival went

on. Next, the master of the house and some of the guests went out of the

hut and offered libations before the bear’s cage. A few drops were

presented to the bear in a saucer, which he at once upset. Then the women

and girls danced round the cage, their faces turned towards it, their

knees slightly bent, rising and hopping on their toes. As they danced they

clapped their hands and sang a monotonous song. The housewife and a few

old women, who might have nursed many bears, danced tearfully, stretching

out their arms to the bear, and addressing it in terms of endearment. The

young folks were less affected; they laughed as well as sang. Disturbed by

the noise, the bear began to rush about his cage and howl lamentably. Next

libations were offered at the _inao (inabos)_ or sacred wands which stand

outside of an Aino hut. These wands are about a couple of feet high, and

are whittled at the top into spiral shavings.(569) Five new wands with

bamboo leaves attached to them had been set up for the festival. This is

regularly done when a bear is killed; the leaves mean that the animal may

come to life again. Then the bear was let out of his cage, a rope was

thrown round his neck, and he was led about in the neighbourhood of the

hut. While this was being done the men, headed by a chief, shot at the

beast with arrows tipped with wooden buttons. Dr. Scheube had to do so

also. Then the bear was taken before the sacred wands, a stick was put in

his mouth, nine men knelt on him and pressed his neck against a beam. In

five minutes the animal had expired without uttering a sound. Meantime the

women and girls had taken post behind the men, where they danced,

lamenting, and beating the men who were killing the bear. The bear’s

carcase was next placed on the mat before the sacred wands; and a sword

and quiver, taken from the wands, were hung round the beast’s neck. Being

a she-bear, it was also adorned with a necklace and ear-rings. Then food

and drink were offered to it, in the shape of millet-broth, millet-cakes,

and a pot of _sake_. The men now sat down on mats before the dead bear,

offered libations to it, and drank deep. Meanwhile the women and girls had

laid aside all marks of sorrow, and danced merrily, none more merrily than

the old women. When the mirth was at its height two young Aino, who had

let the bear out of his cage, mounted the roof of the hut and threw cakes

of millet among the company, who all scrambled for them without

distinction of age or sex. The bear was next skinned and disembowelled,

and the trunk severed from the head, to which the skin was left hanging.

The blood, caught in cups, was eagerly swallowed by the men. None of the

women or children appeared to drink the blood, though custom did not

forbid them to do so. The liver was cut in small pieces and eaten raw,

with salt, the women and children getting their share. The flesh and the

rest of the vitals were taken into the house to be kept till the next day

but one, and then to be divided among the persons who had been present at

the feast. Blood and liver were offered to Dr. Scheube. While the bear was

being disembowelled, the women and girls danced the same dance which they

had danced at the beginning—not, however, round the cage, but in front of

the sacred wands. At this dance the old women, who had been merry a moment

before, again shed tears freely. After the brain had been extracted from

the bear’s head and swallowed with salt, the skull, detached from the

skin, was hung on a pole beside the sacred wands. The stick with which the

bear had been gagged was also fastened to the pole, and so were the sword

and quiver which had been hung on the carcase. The latter were removed in

about an hour, but the rest remained standing. The whole company, men and

women, danced noisily before the pole; and another drinking-bout, in which

the women joined, closed the festival.

(M142) Perhaps the first published account of the bear-feast of the Aino

is one which was given to the world by a Japanese writer in 1652. It has

been translated into French and runs thus: “When they find a young bear,

they bring it home, and the wife suckles it. When it is grown they feed it

with fish and fowl and kill it in winter for the sake of the liver, which

they esteem an antidote to poison, the worms, colic, and disorders of the

stomach. It is of a very bitter taste, and is good for nothing if the bear

has been killed in summer. This butchery begins in the first Japanese

month. For this purpose they put the animal’s head between two long poles,

which are squeezed together by fifty or sixty people, both men and women.

When the bear is dead they eat his flesh, keep the liver as a medicine,

and sell the skin, which is black and commonly six feet long, but the

longest measure twelve feet. As soon as he is skinned, the persons who

nourished the beast begin to bewail him; afterwards they make little cakes

to regale those who helped them.”(570)

(M143) The Aino of Saghalien rear bear cubs and kill them with similar

ceremonies. We are told that they do not look upon the bear as a god but

only as a messenger whom they despatch with various commissions to the god

of the forest. The animal is kept for about two years in a cage, and then

killed at a festival, which always takes place in winter and at night. The

day before the sacrifice is devoted to lamentation, old women relieving

each other in the duty of weeping and groaning in front of the bear’s

cage. Then about the middle of the night or very early in the morning an

orator makes a long speech to the beast, reminding him how they have taken

care of him, and fed him well, and bathed him in the river, and made him

warm and comfortable. “Now,” he proceeds, “we are holding a great festival

in your honour. Be not afraid. We will not hurt you. We will only kill you

and send you to the god of the forest who loves you. We are about to offer

you a good dinner, the best you have ever eaten among us, and we will all

weep for you together. The Aino who will kill you is the best shot among

us. There he is, he weeps and asks your forgiveness; you will feel almost

nothing, it will be done so quickly. We cannot feed you always, as you

will understand. We have done enough for you; it is now your turn to

sacrifice yourself for us. You will ask God to send us, for the winter,

plenty of otters and sables, and for the summer, seals and fish in

abundance. Do not forget our messages, we love you much, and our children

will never forget you.” When the bear has partaken of his last meal amid

the general emotion of the spectators, the old women weeping afresh and

the men uttering stifled cries, he is strapped, not without difficulty and

danger, and being let out of the cage is led on leash or dragged,

according to the state of his temper, thrice round his cage, then round

his master’s house, and lastly round the house of the orator. Thereupon he

is tied up to a tree, which is decked with sacred whittled sticks (_inao_)

of the usual sort; and the orator again addresses him in a long harangue,

which sometimes lasts till the day is beginning to break. “Remember,” he

cries, “remember! I remind you of your whole life and of the services we

have rendered you. It is now for you to do your duty. Do not forget what I

have asked of you. You will tell the gods to give us riches, that our

hunters may return from the forest laden with rare furs and animals good

to eat; that our fishers may find troops of seals on the shore and in the

sea, and that their nets may crack under the weight of the fish. We have

no hope but in you. The evil spirits laugh at us, and too often they are

unfavourable and malignant to us, but they will bow before you. We have

given you food and joy and health; now we kill you in order that you may

in return send riches to us and to our children.” To this discourse the

bear, more and more surly and agitated, listens without conviction; round

and round the tree he paces and howls lamentably, till, just as the first

beams of the rising sun light up the scene, an archer speeds an arrow to

his heart. No sooner has he done so, than the marksman throws away his bow

and flings himself on the ground, and the old men and women do the same,

weeping and sobbing. Then they offer the dead beast a repast of rice and

wild potatoes, and having spoken to him in terms of pity and thanked him

for what he has done and suffered, they cut off his head and paws and keep

them as sacred things. A banquet on the flesh and blood of the bear

follows. Women were formerly excluded from it, but now they share with the

men. The blood is drunk warm by all present; the flesh is boiled, custom

forbids it to be roasted. And as the relics of the bear may not enter the

house by the door, and Aino houses in Saghalien have no windows, a man

gets up on the roof and lets the flesh, the head, and the skin down

through the smoke-hole. Rice and wild potatoes are then offered to the

head, and a pipe, tobacco, and matches are considerately placed beside it.

Custom requires that the guests should eat up the whole animal before they

depart: the use of salt and pepper at the meal is forbidden; and no morsel

of the flesh may be given to the dogs. When the banquet is over, the head

is carried away into the depth of the forest and deposited on a heap of

bears’ skulls, the bleached and mouldering relics of similar festivals in

the past.(571)

(M144) The Gilyaks, a Tunguzian people of Eastern Siberia,(572) hold a

bear-festival of the same sort once a year in January. “The bear is the

object of the most refined solicitude of an entire village and plays the

chief part in their religious ceremonies.”(573) An old she-bear is shot

and her cub is reared, but not suckled, in the village. When the bear is

big enough he is taken from his cage and dragged through the village. But

first they lead him to the bank of the river, for this is believed to

ensure abundance of fish to each family. He is then taken into every house

in the village, where fish, brandy, and so forth are offered to him. Some

people prostrate themselves before the beast. His entrance into a house is

supposed to bring a blessing; and if he snuffs at the food offered to him,

this also is a blessing. Nevertheless they tease and worry, poke and

tickle the animal continually, so that he is surly and snappish.(574)

After being thus taken to every house, he is tied to a peg and shot dead

with arrows. His head is then cut off, decked with shavings, and placed on

the table where the feast is set out. Here they beg pardon of the beast

and worship him. Then his flesh is roasted and eaten in special vessels of

wood finely carved. They do not eat the flesh raw nor drink the blood, as

the Aino do. The brain and entrails are eaten last; and the skull, still

decked with shavings, is placed on a tree near the house. Then the people

sing and both sexes dance in ranks, as bears.(575)

(M145) One of these bear-festivals was witnessed by the Russian traveller

L. von Schrenck and his companions at the Gilyak village of Tebach in

January 1856. From his detailed report of the ceremony we may gather some

particulars which are not noticed in the briefer accounts which I have

just summarised. The bear, he tells us, plays a great part in the life of

all the peoples inhabiting the region of the Amoor and Siberia as far as

Kamtchatka, but among none of them is his importance greater than among

the Gilyaks. The immense size which the animal attains in the valley of

the Amoor, his ferocity whetted by hunger, and the frequency of his

appearance, all combine to make him the most dreaded beast of prey in the

country. No wonder, therefore, that the fancy of the Gilyaks is busied

with him and surrounds him, both in life and in death, with a sort of halo

of superstitious fear. Thus, for example, it is thought that if a Gilyak

falls in combat with a bear, his soul transmigrates into the body of the

beast. Nevertheless his flesh has an irresistible attraction for the

Gilyak palate, especially when the animal has been kept in captivity for

some time and fattened on fish, which gives the flesh, in the opinion of

the Gilyaks, a peculiarly delicious flavour. But in order to enjoy this

dainty with impunity they deem it needful to perform a long series of

ceremonies, of which the intention is to delude the living bear by a show

of respect, and to appease the anger of the dead animal by the homage paid

to his departed spirit. The marks of respect begin as soon as the beast is

captured. He is brought home in triumph and kept in a cage, where all the

villagers take it in turns to feed him. For although he may have been

captured or purchased by one man, he belongs in a manner to the whole

village. His flesh will furnish a common feast, and hence all must

contribute to support him in his life. His diet consists exclusively of

raw or dried fish, water, and a sort of porridge compounded of powdered

fish-skins, train-oil, and whortle-berries. The length of time he is kept

in captivity depends on his age. Old bears are kept only a few months;

cubs are kept till they are full-grown. A thick layer of fat on the

captive bear gives the signal for the festival, which is always held in

winter, generally in December but sometimes in January or February. At the

festival witnessed by the Russian travellers, which lasted a good many

days, three bears were killed and eaten. More than once the animals were

led about in procession and compelled to enter every house in the village,

where they were fed as a mark of honour, and to shew that they were

welcome guests. But before the beasts set out on this round of visits, the

Gilyaks played at skipping-rope in presence, and perhaps, as L. von

Schrenck inclined to believe, in honour of the animals. The night before

they were killed, the three bears were led by moonlight a long way on the

ice of the frozen river. That night no one in the village might sleep.

Next day, after the animals had been again led down the steep bank to the

river, and conducted thrice round the hole in the ice from which the women

of the village drew their water, they were taken to an appointed place not

far from the village, and shot to death with arrows. The place of

sacrifice or execution was marked as holy by being surrounded with

whittled sticks, from the tops of which shavings hung in curls. Such

sticks are with the Gilyaks, as with the Aino, the regular symbols that

accompany all religious ceremonies. Before the bears received the fatal

shafts from two young men chosen for the purpose, the boys were allowed to

discharge their small but not always harmless arrows at the beasts. As

soon as the carcases had been cut up, the skins with the heads attached to

them were set up in a wooden cage in such a way as to make it appear that

the animals had entered the cage and were looking out of it. The blood

which flowed from the bears on the spot where they were killed was

immediately covered up with snow, to prevent any one from accidentally

treading on it, a thing which was strictly tabooed.

(M146) When the house has been arranged and decorated for their reception,

the skins of the bears, with their heads attached to them, are brought

into it, not however by the door, but through a window, and then hung on a

sort of scaffold opposite the hearth on which the flesh is to be cooked.

This ceremony of bringing the bears’ skins into the house by the window

was not witnessed by the Russian travellers, who only learned of it at

second hand. They were told that when the thin disc of fish-skin, which is

the substitute for a pane of glass in the window, has been replaced after

the passage of the bear-skins, a figure of a toad made of birch bark is

affixed to it on the outside, while inside the house a figure of a bear

dressed in Gilyak costume is set on the bench of honour. The meaning of

this part of the ceremony, as it is conjecturally interpreted by Von

Schrenck, may be as follows. The toad is a creature that has a very evil

reputation with the Gilyaks, and accordingly they attempt to lay upon it,

as on a scapegoat, the guilt of the slaughter of the worshipful bear.

Hence its effigy is excluded from the house and has to remain outside at

the window, a witness of its own misdeeds; whereas the bear is brought

into the house and treated as an honoured guest, for fish and flesh are

laid before it, and its effigy, dressed in Gilyak costume, is seated on

the bench of honour.

(M147) The boiling of the bears’ flesh among the Gilyaks is done only by

the oldest men, whose high privilege it is; women and children, young men

and boys have no part in it. The task is performed slowly and

deliberately, with a certain solemnity. On the occasion described by the

Russian travellers the kettle was first of all surrounded with a thick

wreath of shavings, and then filled with snow, for the use of water to

cook bear’s flesh is forbidden. Meanwhile a large wooden trough, richly

adorned with arabesques and carvings of all sorts, was hung immediately

under the snouts of the bears; on one side of the trough was carved in

relief a bear, on the other side a toad. When the carcases were being cut

up, each leg was laid on the ground in front of the bears, as if to ask

their leave, before being placed in the kettle; and the boiled flesh was

fished out of the kettle with an iron hook, and set in the trough before

the bears, in order that they might be the first to taste of their own

flesh. As fast, too, as the fat was cut in strips it was hung up in front

of the bears, and afterwards laid in a small wooden trough on the ground

before them. Last of all the inner organs of the beasts were cut up and

placed in small vessels. At the same time the women made bandages out of

parti-coloured rags, and after sunset these bandages were tied round the

bears’ snouts just below the eyes “in order to dry the tears that flowed

from them.” To each bandage, just below the eyes, was attached a figure of

a toad cut out of birch bark. The meaning of this appears to be, as Von

Schrenck conjectured, as follows. With the carving of his inner organs,

the heart, liver, and so forth, the bear sees that his fate is sealed, and

sheds some natural tears at his hard lot. These tears trickle down his

snout over the figure of the toad, which the poor deluded bear accordingly

regards as the author of all the mischief. For he cannot blame the

Gilyaks, who have treated him so kindly. Have they not received him as a

guest in their house, set him on the seat of honour, given him of their

best, and done nothing but with his knowledge and permission? Finally,

have not their women shewn him the last delicate mark of attention by

drying the tears that flow from his eyes and trickle down his nose? Surely

then he cannot think that these kindly folk have done him any harm; it was

all the fault of the unprincipled toad.

(M148) Whatever may be thought of this explanation, as soon as the

ceremony of wiping away poor bruin’s tears had been performed, the

assembled Gilyaks set to work in earnest to devour his flesh. The broth

obtained by boiling the meat had already been partaken of. The wooden

bowls, platters, and spoons out of which the Gilyaks eat the broth and

flesh of the bears on these occasions are always made specially for the

purpose at the festival and only then; they are elaborately ornamented

with carved figures of bears and other devices that refer to the animal or

the festival, and the people have a strong superstitious scruple against

parting with them. While the festival lasts, no salt may be used in

cooking the bear’s flesh or indeed any other food; and no flesh of any

kind may be roasted, for the bear would hear the hissing and sputtering of

the roasting flesh, and would be very angry. After the bones had been

picked clean they were put back in the kettle in which the flesh had been

boiled. And when the festal meal was over, an old man took his stand at

the door of the house with a branch of fir in his hand, with which, as the

people passed out, he gave a light blow to every one who had eaten of the

bear’s flesh or fat, perhaps as a punishment for their treatment of the

worshipful animal. In the afternoon of the same day the women performed a

strange dance. Only one woman danced at a time, throwing the upper part of

her body into the oddest postures, while she held in her hands a branch of

fir or a kind of wooden castanets. The other women meanwhile played an

accompaniment in a peculiar rhythm by drumming on the beams of the house

with clubs. The dance reminded one of the Russian travellers of the

bear-dance which he had seen danced by the women of Kamtchatka. Von

Schrenck believes, though he has not positive evidence, that after the fat

and flesh of the bear have been consumed, his skull is cleft with an axe,

and the brain taken out and eaten. Then the bones and the skull are

solemnly carried out by the oldest people to a place in the forest not far

from the village. There all the bones except the skull are buried. After

that a young tree is felled a few inches above the ground, its stump

cleft, and the skull wedged into the cleft. When the grass grows over the

spot, the skull disappears from view, and that is the end of the

bear.(576)

(M149) Another description of the bear-festivals of the Gilyaks has been

given us by Mr. Leo Sternberg.(577) It agrees substantially with the

foregoing accounts, but a few particulars in it may be noted. According to

Mr. Sternberg, the festival is usually held in honour of a deceased

relation: the next of kin either buys or catches a bear cub and nurtures

it for two or three years till it is ready for the sacrifice. Only certain

distinguished guests (_Narch-en_) are privileged to partake of the bear’s

flesh, but the host and members of his clan eat a broth made from the

flesh; great quantities of this broth are prepared and consumed on the

occasion. The guests of honour (_Narch-en_) must belong to the clan into

which the host’s daughters and the other women of his clan are married:

one of these guests, usually the host’s son-in-law, is entrusted with the

duty of shooting the bear dead with an arrow. The skin, head, and flesh of

the slain bear are brought into the house not through the door but through

the smoke-hole; a quiver full of arrows is laid under the head and beside

it are deposited tobacco, sugar, and other food. The soul of the bear is

supposed to carry off the souls of these things with it on the far

journey. A special vessel is used for cooking the bear’s flesh, and the

fire must be kindled by a sacred apparatus of flint and steel, which

belongs to the clan and is handed down from generation to generation, but

which is never used to light fires except on these solemn occasions. Of

all the many viands cooked for the consumption of the assembled people a

portion is placed in a special vessel and set before the bear’s head: this

is called “feeding the head.” After the bear has been killed, dogs are

sacrificed in couples of male and female. Before being throttled, they are

fed and invited to go to their lord on the highest mountain, to change

their skins, and to return next year in the form of bears. The soul of the

dead bear departs to the same lord, who is also lord of the primaeval

forest; it goes away laden with the offerings that have been made to it,

and attended by the souls of the dogs and also by the souls of the sacred

whittled sticks, which figure prominently at the festival.

(M150) The Goldi, neighbours of the Gilyaks, treat the bear in much the

same way. They hunt and kill it; but sometimes they capture a live bear

and keep him in a cage, feeding him well and calling him their son and

brother. Then at a great festival he is taken from his cage, paraded about

with marked consideration, and afterwards killed and eaten. “The skull,

jaw-bones, and ears are then suspended on a tree, as an antidote against

evil spirits; but the flesh is eaten and much relished, for they believe

that all who partake of it acquire a zest for the chase, and become

courageous.”(578)

(M151) The Orotchis, another Tunguzian people of the region of the Amoor,

hold bear-festivals of the same general character. Any one who catches a

bear cub considers it his bounden duty to rear it in a cage for about

three years, in order at the end of that time to kill it publicly and eat

the flesh with his friends. The feasts being public, though organised by

individuals, the people try to have one in each Orotchi village every year

in turn. When the bear is taken out of his cage, he is led about by means

of ropes to all the huts, accompanied by people armed with lances, bows,

and arrows. At each hut the bear and bear-leaders are treated to something

good to eat and drink. This goes on for several days until all the huts,

not only in that village but also in the next, have been visited. The days

are given up to sport and noisy jollity. Then the bear is tied to a tree

or wooden pillar and shot to death by the arrows of the crowd, after which

its flesh is roasted and eaten. Among the Orotchis of the Tundja River

women take part in the bear-feasts, while among the Orotchis of the River

Vi the women will not even touch bear’s flesh.(579)

(M152) In the treatment of the captive bear by these tribes there are

features which can hardly be distinguished from worship. Such, for

example, are the prayers offered to it both alive and dead; the offerings

of food, including portions of its own flesh, laid before the animal’s

skull; and the Gilyak custom of leading the living beast on to the ice of

the river in order to ensure a supply of fish, and of conducting him from

house to house in order that every family may receive his blessing, just

as in Europe a May-tree or a personal representative of the tree-spirit

used to be taken from door to door in spring for the sake of diffusing

among all and sundry the fresh energies of reviving nature.(580) Again,

the solemn participation in his flesh and blood, and particularly the Aino

custom of sharing the contents of the cup which had been consecrated by

being set before the dead beast, are strongly suggestive of a sacrament,

and the suggestion is confirmed by the Gilyak practice of reserving

special vessels to hold the flesh and cooking it on a fire kindled by a

sacred apparatus which is never employed except on these religious

occasions. Indeed our principal authority on Aino religion, the Rev. John

Batchelor, frankly describes as worship the ceremonious respect which the

Aino pay to the bear,(581) and he affirms that the animal is undoubtedly

one of their gods.(582) Certainly the Aino appear to apply their name for

god (_kamui_) freely to the bear; but, as Mr. Batchelor himself points

out,(583) that word is used with many different shades of meaning and is

applied to a great variety of objects, so that from its application to the

bear we cannot safely argue that the animal is actually regarded as a

deity. Indeed we are expressly told that the Aino of Saghalien do not

consider the bear to be a god but only a messenger to the gods, and the

message with which they charge the animal at its death bears out the

statement.(584) Apparently the Gilyaks also look on the bear in the light

of an envoy despatched with presents to the Lord of the Mountain, on whom

the welfare of the people depends. At the same time they treat the animal

as a being of a higher order than man, in fact as a minor deity, whose

presence in the village, so long as he is kept and fed, diffuses

blessings, especially by keeping at bay the swarms of evil spirits who are

constantly lying in wait for people, stealing their goods and destroying

their bodies by sickness and disease. Moreover, by partaking of the flesh,

blood, or broth of the bear, the Gilyaks, the Aino, and the Goldi are all

of opinion that they acquire some portion of the animal’s mighty powers,

particularly his courage and strength. No wonder, therefore, that they

should treat so great a benefactor with marks of the highest respect and

affection.(585)

(M153) Some light may be thrown on the ambiguous attitude of the Aino to

bears by comparing the similar treatment which they accord to other

creatures. For example, they regard the eagle-owl as a good deity who by

his hooting warns men of threatened evil and defends them against it;

hence he is loved, trusted, and devoutly worshipped as a divine mediator

between men and the Creator. The various names applied to him are

significant both of his divinity and of his mediatorship. Whenever an

opportunity offers, one of these divine birds is captured and kept in a

cage, where he is greeted with the endearing titles of “Beloved god” and

“Dear little divinity.” Nevertheless the time comes when the dear little

divinity is throttled and sent away in his capacity of mediator to take a

message to the superior gods or to the Creator himself. The following is

the form of prayer addressed to the eagle-owl when it is about to be

sacrificed: “Beloved deity, we have brought you up because we loved you,

and now we are about to send you to your father. We herewith offer you

food, _inao_, wine, and cakes; take them to your parent, and he will be

very pleased. When you come to him say, ‘I have lived a long time among

the Ainu, where an Ainu father and an Ainu mother reared me. I now come to

thee. I have brought a variety of good things. I saw while living in

Ainu-land a great deal of distress. I observed that some of the people

were possessed by demons, some were wounded by wild animals, some were

hurt by landslides, others suffered shipwreck, and many were attacked by

disease. The people are in great straits. My father, hear me, and hasten

to look upon the Ainu and help them.’ If you do this, your father will

help us.”(586)

(M154) Again, the Aino keep eagles in cages, worship them as divinities,

and ask them to defend the people from evil. Yet they offer the bird in

sacrifice, and when they are about to do so they pray to him, saying: “O

precious divinity, O thou divine bird, pray listen to my words. Thou dost

not belong to this world, for thy home is with the Creator and his golden

eagles. This being so, I present thee with these _inao_ and cakes and

other precious things. Do thou ride upon the _inao_ and ascend to thy home

in the glorious heavens. When thou arrivest, assemble the deities of thy

own kind together and thank them for us for having governed the world. Do

thou come again, I beseech thee, and rule over us. O my precious one, go

thou quietly.”(587) Once more, the Aino revere hawks, keep them in cages,

and offer them in sacrifice. At the time of killing one of them the

following prayer should be addressed to the bird: “O divine hawk, thou art

an expert hunter, please cause thy cleverness to descend on me.” If a hawk

is well treated in captivity and prayed to after this fashion when he is

about to be killed, he will surely send help to the hunter.(588)

(M155) Thus the Aino hopes to profit in various ways by slaughtering the

creatures, which, nevertheless, he treats as divine. He expects them to

carry messages for him to their kindred or to the gods in the upper world;

he hopes to partake of their virtues by imbibing parts of their bodies or

in other ways; and apparently he looks forward to their bodily

resurrection in this world, which will enable him again to catch and kill

them, and again to reap all the benefits which he has already derived from

their slaughter. For in the prayers addressed to the worshipful bear and

the worshipful eagle before they are knocked on the head the creatures are

invited to come again,(589) which seems clearly to point to a faith in

their future resurrection. If any doubt could exist on this head, it would

be dispelled by the evidence of Mr. Batchelor, who tells us that the Aino

“are firmly convinced that the spirits of birds and animals killed in

hunting or offered in sacrifice come and live again upon the earth clothed

with a body; and they believe, further, that they appear here for the

special benefit of men, particularly Ainu hunters.”(590) The Aino, Mr.

Batchelor tells us, “confessedly slays and eats the beast that another may

come in its place and be treated in like manner”; and at the time of

sacrificing the creatures “prayers are said to them which form a request

that they will come again and furnish viands for another feast, as if it

were an honour to them to be thus killed and eaten, and a pleasure as

well. Indeed such is the people’s idea.”(591) These last observations, as

the context shews, refer especially to the sacrifice of bears.

(M156) Thus among the benefits which the Aino anticipates from the

slaughter of the worshipful animals not the least substantial is that of

gorging himself on their flesh and blood, both on the present and on many

a similar occasion hereafter; and that pleasing prospect again is derived

from his firm faith in the spiritual immortality and bodily resurrection

of the dead animals. A like faith is shared by many savage hunters in many

parts of the world and has given rise to a variety of quaint customs, some

of which will be described presently. Meantime it is not unimportant to

observe that the solemn festivals at which the Aino, the Gilyaks, and

other tribes slaughter the tame caged bears with demonstrations of respect

and sorrow, are probably nothing but an extension or glorification of

similar rites which the hunter performs over any wild bear which he

chances to kill in the forest. Indeed with regard to the Gilyaks we are

expressly informed that this is the case. If we would understand the

meaning of the Gilyak ritual, says Mr. Sternberg, “we must above all

remember that the bear-festivals are not, as is usually but falsely

assumed, celebrated only at the killing of a house-bear but are held on

every occasion when a Gilyak succeeds in slaughtering a bear in the chase.

It is true that in such cases the festival assumes less imposing

dimensions, but in its essence it remains the same. When the head and skin

of a bear killed in the forest are brought into the village, they are

accorded a triumphal reception with music and solemn ceremonial. The head

is laid on a consecrated scaffold, fed, and treated with offerings, just

as at the killing of a house-bear; and the guests of honour (_Narch-en_)

are also assembled. So, too, dogs are sacrificed, and the bones of the

bear are preserved in the same place and with the same marks of respect as

the bones of a house-bear. Hence the great winter festival is only an

extension of the rite which is observed at the slaughter of every

bear.”(592)

(M157) Thus the apparent contradiction in the practice of these tribes,

who venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt,

kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to us: the

people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for acting as they

do. For the savage is by no means so illogical and unpractical as to

superficial observers he is apt to seem; he has thought deeply on the

questions which immediately concern him, he reasons about them, and though

his conclusions often diverge very widely from ours, we ought not to deny

him the credit of patient and prolonged meditation on some fundamental

problems of human existence. In the present case, if he treats bears in

general as creatures wholly subservient to human needs and yet singles out

certain individuals of the species for homage which almost amounts to

deification, we must not hastily set him down as irrational and

inconsistent, but must endeavour to place ourselves at his point of view,

to see things as he sees them, and to divest ourselves of the

prepossessions which tinge so deeply our own views of the world. If we do

so, we shall probably discover that, however absurd his conduct may appear

to us, the savage nevertheless generally acts on a train of reasoning

which seems to him in harmony with the facts of his limited experience.

This I propose to illustrate in the following chapter, where I shall

attempt to shew that the solemn ceremonial of the bear-festival among the

Ainos and other tribes of north-eastern Asia is only a particularly

striking example of the respect which on the principles of his rude

philosophy the savage habitually pays to the animals which he kills and

eats.

CHAPTER XIV. THE PROPITIATION OF WILD ANIMALS BY HUNTERS.

(M158) The explanation of life by the theory of an indwelling and

practically immortal soul is one which the savage does not confine to

human beings but extends to the animate creation in general. In so doing

he is more liberal and perhaps more logical than the civilised man, who

commonly denies to animals that privilege of immortality which he claims

for himself. The savage is not so proud; he commonly believes that animals

are endowed with feelings and intelligence like those of men, and that,

like men, they possess souls which survive the death of their bodies

either to wander about as disembodied spirits or to be born again in

animal form. Thus, for example, we are told that the Indian of Guiana does

not see “any sharp line of distinction, such as we see, between man and

other animals, between one kind of animal and another, or between

animals—man included—and inanimate objects. On the contrary, to the

Indian, all objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same

nature except that they differ in the accident of bodily form. Every

object in the whole world is a being, consisting of a body and spirit, and

differs from every other object in no respect except that of bodily form,

and in the greater or less degree of brute power and brute cunning

consequent on the difference of bodily form and bodily habits.”(593)

Similarly we read that “in Cherokee mythology, as in that of Indian tribes

generally, there is no essential difference between men and animals. In

the primal genesis period they seem to be completely undifferentiated, and

we find all creatures alike living and working together in harmony and

mutual helpfulness until man, by his aggressiveness and disregard for the

rights of the others, provokes their hostility, when insects, birds,

fishes, reptiles, and fourfooted beasts join forces against him.

Henceforth their lives are apart, but the difference is always one of

degree only. The animals, like the people, are organized into tribes and

have like them their chiefs and townhouses, their councils and ballplays,

and the same hereafter in the Darkening land of Usunhiyi. Man is still the

paramount power, and hunts and slaughters the others as his own

necessities compel, but is obliged to satisfy the animal tribes in every

instance, very much as a murder is compounded for, according to the Indian

system, by ‘covering the bones of the dead’ with presents for the bereaved

relatives.”(594) To the same effect another observer of the North American

Indians writes: “I have often reflected on the curious connexion which

appears to subsist in the mind of an Indian between man and the brute

creation, and found much matter in it for curious observation. Although

they consider themselves superior to all other animals and are very proud

of that superiority; although they believe that the beasts of the forest,

the birds of the air, and the fishes of the waters, were created by the

Almighty Being for the use of man; yet it seems as if they ascribe the

difference between themselves and the brute kind, and the dominion which

they have over them, more to their superior bodily strength and dexterity

than to their immortal souls. All beings endowed by the Creator with the

power of volition and self-motion, they view in a manner as a great

society of which they are the head, whom they are appointed, indeed, to

govern, but between whom and themselves intimate ties of connexion and

relationship may exist, or at least did exist in the beginning of time.

They are, in fact, according to their opinions, only the first among

equals, the legitimate hereditary sovereigns of the whole animated race,

of which they are themselves a constituent part. Hence, in their

languages, those inflections of their nouns which we call _genders_, are

not, as with us, descriptive of the _masculine_ and _feminine_ species,

but of the _animate_ and _inanimate_ kinds. Indeed, they go so far as to

include trees and plants within the first of these descriptions. All

animated nature, in whatever degree, is in their eyes a great whole, from

which they have not yet ventured to separate themselves. They do not

exclude other animals from their world of spirits, the place to which they

expect to go after death.”(595) Even Chinese authors “have roundly avowed

themselves altogether unable to discover any real difference between men

and animals,” and they have drawn out the parallelism between the two in

some detail.(596)

(M159) But it is not merely between the mental and spiritual nature of man

and the animals that the savage traces a close resemblance; even the

distinction of their bodily form appears sometimes to elude his dull

apprehension. An unusually intelligent Bushman questioned by a missionary

“could not state any difference between a man and a brute—he did not know

but a buffalo might shoot with bows and arrows as well as a man, if it had

them.”(597) In the opinion of the Gilyak, “the form and size of an animal

are merely a sort of appearance. Every animal is in point of fact a real

being like man, nay a Gilyak such as himself, but endowed with reason and

strength which often surpass those of mere men.”(598) Nor is it merely

that in the mental fog the savage takes beasts for men; he seems to be

nearly as ready to take himself and his fellows for beasts. When the

Russians first landed on one of the Alaskan islands the people took them

for cuttle-fish, “on account of the buttons on their clothes.”(599) We

have seen how some savages identify themselves with animals of various

sorts by eating the maggots bred in the rotting carcases of the beasts,

and how thereafter, when occasion serves, they behave in their adopted

characters by wriggling, roaring, barking, or grunting, according as they

happen to be boa-constrictors, lions, jackals, or hippopotamuses.(600) In

the island of Mabuiag men of the Sam, that is, the Cassowary, totem think

that cassowaries are men or nearly so. “Sam he all same as relation, he

belong same family,” is the account they give of their kinship with the

creature. Conversely they hold that they themselves are cassowaries, or at

all events that they possess some of the qualities of the long-legged

bird. When a Cassowary man went forth to reap laurels on the field of

battle, he used to reflect with satisfaction on the length of his lower

limbs: “My leg is long and thin, I can run and not feel tired; my legs

will go quickly and the grass will not entangle them.”(601) Omaha Indians

believe that between a man and the creature which is his guardian spirit

there subsists so close a bond that the man acquires the powers and

qualities, the virtues and defects of the animal. Thus if a man has seen a

bear in that vision at puberty which determines an Indian’s guardian

spirit, he will be apt to be wounded in battle, because the bear is a slow

and clumsy animal and easily trapped. If he has dreamed of an eagle, he

will be able to see into the future and foretell coming events, because

the eagle’s vision is keen and piercing.(602) Similarly, the Thompson

Indians of British Columbia imagined that every man partook of the nature

of the animal which was his guardian spirit; for example, a man who had

the grisly bear for his protector would prove a much fiercer warrior than

one who had only a crow, a coyote, or a fox for his guardian spirit. And

before they set out on the war-path these Indians used to perform a mimic

battle, in which each man, tricked out with paint and feathers, imitated

the sounds of the animal that was his guardian spirit, grunting and

whooping in character.(603) The Bororos, a tribe of Indians in the heart

of Brazil, will have it that they are parrots of a gorgeous red plumage

which live in the Brazilian forest. It is not merely that their souls will

pass into these birds at death, but they themselves are actually identical

with them in their life, and accordingly they treat the parrots as they

might treat their fellow-tribesmen, keeping them in captivity, refusing to

eat their flesh, and mourning for them when they die. However, they kill

the wild birds for their feathers, and, though they will not kill, they

pluck the tame ones to deck their own naked brown bodies with the gaudy

plumage of their feathered brethren.(604)

(M160) Thus to the savage, who regards all living creatures as practically

on a footing of equality with man, the act of killing and eating an animal

must wear a very different aspect from that which the same act presents to

us, who regard the intelligence of animals as far inferior to our own and

deny them the possession of immortal souls. Hence on the principles of his

rude philosophy the primitive hunter who slays an animal believes himself

exposed to the vengeance either of its disembodied spirit or of all the

other animals of the same species, whom he considers as knit together,

like men, by the ties of kin and the obligations of the blood feud, and

therefore as bound to resent the injury done to one of their number.

Accordingly the savage makes it a rule to spare the life of those animals

which he has no pressing motive for killing, at least such fierce and

dangerous animals as are likely to exact a bloody vengeance for the

slaughter of one of their kind. Crocodiles are animals of this sort. They

are only found in hot countries, where, as a rule, food is abundant and

primitive man has therefore little reason to kill them for the sake of

their tough and unpalatable flesh.(605) Hence it is a custom with some

savages to spare crocodiles, or rather only to kill them in obedience to

the law of blood feud, that is, as a retaliation for the slaughter of men

by crocodiles. For example, the Dyaks of Borneo will not kill a crocodile

unless a crocodile has first killed a man. “For why, say they, should they

commit an act of aggression, when he and his kindred can so easily repay

them? But should the alligator take a human life, revenge becomes a sacred

duty of the living relatives, who will trap the man-eater in the spirit of

an officer of justice pursuing a criminal. Others, even then, hang back,

reluctant to embroil themselves in a quarrel which does not concern them.

The man-eating alligator is supposed to be pursued by a righteous Nemesis;

and whenever one is caught they have a profound conviction that it must be

the guilty one, or his accomplice.”(606)

(M161) When a Dyak has made up his mind to take vengeance on the

crocodiles for the death of a kinsman, he calls in the help of a

Pangareran, a man whose business it is to charm and catch crocodiles and

to make them do his will. While he is engaged in the discharge of his

professional duties the crocodile-catcher has to observe a number of odd

rules. He may not go to anybody and may not even pass in front of a

window, because he is unclean. He may not himself cook anything nor come

near a fire. If he would eat fruit, he may not peel or husk it himself,

but must get others to do it for him. He may not even chew his food, but

is obliged to swallow it unchewed. A little hut is made for him on the

bank of the river, where he uses divination by means of the figure of a

crocodile drawn on a piece of bamboo for the purpose of determining

whether his undertaking will prosper. The boat in which he embarks to

catch the wicked man-eating crocodile must be painted yellow and red, and

in the middle of it lances are erected with the points upward. Then the

man of skill casts lots to discover whether the hook is to be baited with

pork, or venison, or the flesh of a dog or an ass. In throwing the baited

hook into the water he calls out: “Ye crocodiles who are up stream, come

down; and ye crocodiles who are down stream, come up; for I will give you

all good food, as sweet as sugar and as fat as coco-nut. I will give you a

pretty and beautiful necklace. When you have got it, keep it in your neck

and body, for this food is very _pahuni_,” which means that it would be

sinful not to eat it. If a crocodile bites at the hook, the

crocodile-catcher bawls out, “Choose a place for yourself where you will

lie; for many men are come to see you. They are come joyfully and

exultingly, and they give you a knife, a lance, and a shroud.” If the

crocodile is a female, he addresses her as “Princess”; if it is a male, he

calls it “Prince.” The enchanter, who is generally a cunning Malay, must

continue his operations till he catches a crocodile in which traces are to

be found shewing that the animal has indeed devoured a human being. Then

the death of the man is atoned for, and in order not to offend the

water-spirits a cat is sacrificed to the crocodiles. The heads of the dead

crocodiles are fastened on stakes beside the river, where in time they

bleach white and stand out sharply against the green background of the

forest.(607) While the captured crocodile is being hauled in to the bank,

the subtle Dyaks speak softly to him and beguile him into offering no

resistance; but once they have him fast, with arms and legs securely

pinioned, they howl at him and deride him for his credulity, while they

rip up the belly of the infuriated and struggling brute to find the

evidence of his guilt in the shape of human remains. On one occasion Rajah

Brooke of Sarawak was present at a discussion among a party of Dyaks as to

how they ought to treat a captured crocodile. One side maintained that it

was proper to bestow all praise and honour on the kingly beast, since he

was himself a rajah among animals and was now brought there to meet the

rajah; in short, they held that praise and flattery were agreeable to him

and would put him on his best behaviour. The other side fully admitted

that on this occasion rajah met rajah; yet with prudent foresight they

pointed to the dangerous consequences which might flow from establishing a

precedent such as their adversaries contended for. If once a captured

crocodile, said they, were praised and honoured, the other crocodiles, on

hearing of it, would be puffed up with pride and ambition, and being

seized with a desire to emulate the glory of their fellow would enter on a

career of man-eating as the road likely to lead them by the shortest cut

to the temple of fame.(608)

(M162) The Minangkabauers of Sumatra have also a great respect for

crocodiles. Their celebrated law-giver Katoemanggoengan was indeed born

again in the form of a crocodile; and thus his descendants, including the

rajah of Indrapoera and his family, are more or less distant cousins of

the crocodiles, and enjoy the help and protection of the creatures in many

ways, for example when they go on a journey. The respect entertained for

the animals is also attested by the ceremonies observed in some places

when a crocodile has been caught. A crowd of women then performs certain

dances which closely resemble the dances performed when somebody has died.

Moreover, it is a rule with the Minangkabauers that no cooking-pot may be

washed in a river; to do so would be like offering the crocodiles the

leavings of your food, and they would very naturally resent it. For the

same reason in washing up the dinner or supper plates you must be careful

not to make a splashing, or the crocodiles would hear it and take

umbrage.(609)

(M163) Among the Malays of Patani Bay, in Siam, there is a family whose

members may not kill a crocodile nor even be present when one of these

ferocious reptiles is captured. The reason alleged for this forbearance is

that the family claim kindred with a woman named Betimor, who was drowned

in the river and afterwards turned into a crocodile. After her

transformation she appeared to her father in a dream and told him what had

become of her; so he went down to the river and made offerings to her of

rice and wax tapers. There is a shrine on the spot where the woman was

transformed into a crocodile, and any one may dedicate offerings there and

pray to Toh Sri Lam; for so she has been called ever since her

metamorphosis. Members of the crocodile family call on her for help in

sickness and other misfortunes, and they will do so on behalf of other

people for a proper consideration. Rice and wax tapers are the usual

offerings.(610) In many islands of the Indian Archipelago, including Java,

Sumatra, Celebes, Timor, and Ceram, this belief in a kinship of men with

crocodiles assumes a peculiar form. The people imagine that women are

often delivered of a child and a crocodile at the same birth, and that

when this happens, the midwife carries the crocodile twin carefully down

to the river and places it in the water. The family in which such a birth

is thought to have happened, constantly put victuals into the river for

their amphibious relation; and in particular the human twin, so long as he

lives, goes down to the river at stated seasons to do his duty by his

crocodile brother or sister; and if he were to fail to do so, it is the

universal opinion that he would be visited with sickness or death for his

unnatural conduct. Large parties of these crocodile people periodically go

out in a boat furnished with great plenty of provisions and all kinds of

music, and they row backwards and forwards, with the music playing, in

places where crocodiles do most abound. As they do so they sing and weep

by turns, each of them invoking his animal kinsfolk, till the snout of one

of the brutes bobbs up from the water, whereupon the music stops, and

food, betel, and tobacco are thrown into the river. By these delicate

attentions they hope to recommend themselves to the formidable

creatures.(611)

(M164) The crocodiles about the island of Damba in the Victoria Nyanza

were sacred and might not be molested in any way. Hence they multiplied

and became dangerous; people made offerings to them in the hope of being

spared by the monsters when they crossed in the ferries. From time to time

batches of men were brought down to the beach and sacrificed to the

crocodiles. Their arms and legs were broken so that they could not stir

from the spot; then they were laid out in a row on the shore, and the

crocodiles came and dragged them into the water. On the island there was a

temple dedicated to the crocodiles, and here an inspired medium resided

who gave oracular responses. Under the influence of the spirit he wagged

his head from side to side, opening his jaws and snapping them together,

just as a crocodile does.(612) No doubt the spirit which possessed him in

these moments of fine frenzy was supposed to be that of a crocodile.

Similarly in other parts of Uganda men were inspired by the ghosts or

spirits of lions, leopards, and serpents, and in that state of exaltation

they uttered oracles, roaring like a lion, growling like a leopard, or

grovelling and wriggling like a serpent, according to the nature of the

spirit by which they were possessed.(613) Crocodiles abound in the Albert

Nyanza Lake and its tributaries. In many places they are extremely

dangerous, but the Alur tribe of that region only hunt them when they have

dragged away a man; and they think that any one who has taken away a

crocodile’s eggs must be on his guard when he walks near the bank of the

river, for the crocodiles will try to avenge the injury by seizing

him.(614) In general the Foulahs of Senegambia dare not kill a crocodile

from fear of provoking the vengeance of the relations and friends of the

murdered reptile; but if the sorcerer gives his consent and passes his

word that he will guarantee them against the vengeance of the family of

the deceased, they will pluck up courage to attack one of the brutes.(615)

(M165) Like the Dyaks, the natives of Madagascar never kill a crocodile

“except in retaliation for one of their friends who has been destroyed by

a crocodile. They believe that the wanton destruction of one of these

reptiles will be followed by the loss of human life, in accordance with

the principle of _lex talionis_.” The people who live near the lake Itasy

in Madagascar make a yearly proclamation to the crocodiles, announcing

that they will revenge the death of some of their friends by killing as

many crocodiles in return, and warning all well-disposed crocodiles to

keep out of the way, as they have no quarrel with them, but only with

their evil-minded relations who have taken human life.(616) Various tribes

of Madagascar believe themselves to be descended from crocodiles, and

accordingly they view the scaly reptile as, to all intents and purposes, a

man and a brother. If one of the animals should so far forget himself as

to devour one of his human kinsfolk, the chief of the tribe, or in his

absence an old man familiar with the tribal customs, repairs at the head

of the people to the edge of the water, and summons the family of the

culprit to deliver him up to the arm of justice. A hook is then baited and

cast into the river or lake. Next day the guilty brother, or one of his

family, is dragged ashore, and after his crime has been clearly brought

home to him by a strict interrogation, he is sentenced to death and

executed. The claims of justice being thus satisfied and the majesty of

the law fully vindicated, the deceased crocodile is lamented and buried

like a kinsman; a mound is raised over his relics and a stone marks the

place of his head.(617) The Malagasy, indeed, regard the crocodile with

superstitious veneration as the king of the waters and supreme in his own

element. When they are about to cross a river they pronounce a solemn

oath, or enter into an engagement to acknowledge his sovereignty over the

waters. An aged native has been known to covenant with the crocodiles for

nearly half an hour before plunging into the stream. After that he lifted

up his voice and addressed the animal, urging him to do him no harm, since

he had never hurt the crocodile; assuring him that he had never made war

on any of his fellows, but on the contrary had always entertained the

highest veneration for him; and adding that if he wantonly attacked him,

vengeance would follow sooner or later; while if the crocodile devoured

him, his relations and all his race would declare war against the beast.

This harangue occupied another quarter of an hour, after which the orator

dashed fearlessly into the stream.(618)

(M166) Again, the tiger is another of those dangerous beasts whom the

savage prefers to leave alone, lest by killing one of the species he

should excite the hostility of the rest. No consideration will induce a

Sumatran to catch or wound a tiger except in self-defence or immediately

after a tiger has destroyed a friend or relation. When a European has set

traps for tigers, the people of the neighbourhood have been known to go by

night to the place and explain to the animals that the traps are not set

by them nor with their consent.(619) If it is necessary to kill a tiger

which has wrought much harm in the village, the Minangkabauers of Sumatra

try to catch him alive in order to beg for his forgiveness before

despatching him, and in ordinary life they will not speak evil of him or

do anything that might displease him. For example, they will not use a

path that has been untrodden for more than a year, because the tiger has

chosen that path for himself, and would deem it a mark of disrespect were

any one else to use it. Again, persons journeying by night will not walk

one behind the other, nor keep looking about them, for the tiger would

think that this betrayed fear of him, and his feelings would be hurt by

the suspicion. Neither will they travel bareheaded, for that also would be

disrespectful to the tiger; nor will they knock off the glowing end of a

firebrand, for the flying sparks are like the tiger’s glistering eyes, and

he would treat this as an attempt to mimic him.(620) The population of

Mandeling, a district on the west coast of Sumatra, is divided into clans,

one of which claims to be descended from a tiger. It is believed that the

animal will not attack or rend the members of this clan, because they are

his kinsmen. When members of the clan come upon the tracks of a tiger,

they enclose them with three little sticks as a mark of homage; and when a

tiger has been shot, the women of the clan are bound to offer betel to the

dead beast.(621) The Battas of Sumatra seldom kill a tiger except from

motives of revenge, observing the rule an eye for an eye and a tooth for a

tooth, or, as they express it, “He who owes gold must pay in gold; he who

owes breath (that is, life) must pay with breath.” Nor can the beast be

attacked without some ceremony; only weapons that have proved themselves

able to kill may be used for the purpose. When the tiger has been killed,

they bring the carcase to the village, set offerings before it, and burn

incense over it, praying the spirit of the tiger to quit its material

envelope and enter the incense pot. As soon as the soul may be supposed to

have complied with this request, a speaker explains to the spirits in

general the reasons for killing the tiger, and begs them to set forth

these reasons to the departed soul of the beast, lest the latter should be

angry and the people should suffer in consequence. Then they dance round

the dead body of the tiger till they can dance no longer, after which they

skin the carcase and bury it.(622) The inhabitants of the hills near

Rajamahall, in Bengal, believe that if any man kills a tiger without

divine orders, either he or one of his relations will be devoured by a

tiger. Hence they are very averse to killing a tiger, unless one of their

kinsfolk has been carried off by one of the beasts. In that case they go

out for the purpose of hunting and slaying a tiger; and when they have

succeeded they lay their bows and arrows on the carcase and invoke God,

declaring that they slew the animal in retaliation for the loss of a

kinsman. Vengeance having been thus taken, they swear not to attack

another tiger except under similar provocation.(623) The natives of Cochin

China have a great respect for the tiger, whom they regard as a terrible

divinity. Yet they set traps for him and leave no stone unturned to catch

him. Once he is ensnared, they offer him their excuses and condolences for

the painful position in which he finds himself.(624)

(M167) The Indians of Carolina would not molest snakes when they came upon

them, but would pass by on the other side of the path, believing that if

they were to kill a serpent, the reptile’s kindred would destroy some of

their brethren, friends, or relations in return.(625) So the Seminole

Indians spared the rattlesnake, because they feared that the soul of the

dead rattlesnake would incite its kinsfolk to take vengeance. Once when a

rattlesnake appeared in their camp they entreated an English traveller to

rid them of the creature. When he had killed it, they were glad but tried

to scratch him as a means of appeasing the spirit of the dead snake.(626)

Soon after the Iowas began to build their village near the mouth of Wolf

River, a lad came into the village and reported that he had seen a

rattlesnake on a hill not far off. A medicine-man immediately repaired to

the spot, and finding the snake made it presents of tobacco and other

things which he had brought with him for the purpose. He also had a long

talk with the animal, and on returning to his people told them that now

they might travel about in safety, for peace had been made with the

snakes.(627) The Delaware Indians also paid great respect to the

rattlesnake, whom they called their grandfather, and they would on no

account destroy one of the reptiles. They said that the rattlesnake

guarded them and gave them notice of impending danger by his rattle, and

that if they were to kill a rattlesnake, the rest of the species would

soon hear of it and bite the Indians in revenge.(628) The Potawatomi

Indians highly venerated the rattlesnake for a similar reason, being

grateful to it for the timely warning which it often gave of the approach

of an enemy. Yet a young man who desired to obtain a rattle would have no

hesitation in killing one of the snakes for the purpose; but he apologised

profusely to the creature for the liberty he took with it, explaining that

he required the rattle for the adornment of his person, and that no

disrespect was intended to the snake; and in proof of his good will he

would leave a piece of tobacco beside the carcase.(629) The Cherokee

regard the rattlesnake as the chief of the snake tribe and fear and

respect him accordingly. Few Cherokee will venture to kill a rattlesnake,

unless they cannot help it, and even then they must atone for the crime by

craving pardon of the snake’s ghost either in their own person or through

the mediation of a priest, according to a set formula. If these

precautions are neglected, the kinsfolk of the dead snake will send one of

their number as an avenger of blood, who will track down the murderer and

sting him to death. It is absolutely necessary to cut off the snake’s head

and bury it deep in the earth and to hide the body in a hollow log; for if

the remains were exposed to the weather, the other snakes would be so

angry that they would send torrents of rain and all the streams would

overflow their banks. If a Cherokee dreams of being bitten by a snake, he

must be treated in exactly the same way as if he had been really bitten;

for they think that he has actually been bitten by the ghost of a snake,

and that if the proper remedies were not applied to the hurt, the place

would swell and ulcerate, though possibly not for years afterwards.(630)

Once when an Englishman attempted to kill a rattlesnake, a party of

Ojibway Indians, with whom he was travelling, begged him to desist, and

endeavoured to appease the snake, addressing it in turns as grandfather,

smoking over it, and beseeching it to take care of their families in their

absence, and to open the heart of the British Agent so that he should fill

their canoe with rum. A storm which overtook them next day on Lake Huron

was attributed by them to the wrath of the insulted rattlesnake, and they

sought to mollify him by throwing dogs as sacrifices to him into the

waves.(631) The Kekchi Indians of Guatemala will not throw serpents or

scorpions into the fire, lest the other creatures of the same species

should punish them for the outrage.(632)

(M168) In Kiziba, a district of Central Africa, to the west of Lake

Victoria Nyanza, if a woman accidentally kills a snake with her hoe while

she is working in the field, she hastens in great agitation to the

snake-priest and hands him over the hoe, together with two strings of

cowries and an ox-hide, begging him to appease the angry spirit of the

slain serpent. In this application she is accompanied and supported by all

the villagers, who share her fears and anxiety. Accordingly the priest

beats his drum as a sign that no woman of the village is to work in the

fields till further notice. Next he wraps the dead serpent in a piece of

the ox-hide and buries it solemnly. On the following day he performs a

ceremony of purification for the slaughter of the reptile. He compounds a

medicine out of the guts of a leopard or hyaena and earth or mud dissolved

in water, and with this mixture he disinfects all the houses in the

village, beginning with the house of the woman who killed the serpent.

Next he proceeds to the fields, where all the women of the village have

collected their hoes. These he purifies by dipping them in the fluid and

then twirling them about so as to make the drops of water fly off. From

that moment the danger incurred by the slaughter of the reptile is

averted. The spirit of the serpent is appeased, and the women may resume

their usual labours in the fields.(633)

(M169) When the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia have slain a wolf

they lay the carcase on a blanket and take out the heart, of which every

person who helped to kill the beast must eat four morsels. Then they wail

over the body, saying, “Woe! our great friend!” After that they cover the

carcase with a blanket and bury it. A bow or gun that killed a wolf is

regarded as unlucky, and the owner gives it away. These Indians believe

that the slaying of a wolf produces a scarcity of game.(634) When the

Tinneh Indians of Central Alaska have killed a wolf or a wolverine, the

carcase is brought into the camp or village with great pomp. The people go

forth to meet it, saying, “The chief is coming.” Then the body is carried

into a hut and propped up in a sitting posture; and the medicine-man

spreads before it a copious banquet, to which every family in the village

has contributed of its best. When the dead animal is supposed to have

satisfied his hunger, the men consume the remains of the feast, but no

woman is allowed to participate in what has been thus offered to the wolf

or the wolverine.(635) No ordinary Cherokee dares to kill a wolf, if he

can possibly help it; for he believes that the kindred of the slain beast

would surely avenge its death, and that the weapon with which the deed had

been done would be quite useless for the future, unless it were cleaned

and exorcised by a medicine-man. However, certain persons who know the

proper rites of atonement for such a crime can kill wolves with impunity,

and they are sometimes hired to do so by people who have suffered from the

raids of the wolves on their cattle or fish-traps. The professional

wolf-killer prays to the animal whom he has bereaved of life, and seeks to

avert the vengeance of the other wolves by laying the blame of the

slaughter on the people of another settlement. To purify the gun which has

perpetrated the murder, he unscrews the barrel, inserts into it seven

small sour-wood rods which have been heated in the fire, and then allows

the barrel and its contents to lie in a running stream till morning.(636)

When the Chuckchees of north-eastern Siberia have killed a wolf, they hold

a festival, at which they cry, “Wolf, be not angry with us. It was not we

who killed you, it was the Russians who destroyed you.”(637) In ancient

Athens any man who killed a wolf had to bury it by subscription.(638)

(M170) In Jebel-Nuba, a district of the eastern Sudan, it is forbidden to

touch the nests or remove the young of a species of black birds,

resembling our blackbirds, because the people believe that the parent

birds would avenge the wrong by causing a stormy wind to blow, which would

destroy the harvest.(639) Some of the Sudanese negroes of Upper Egypt

regard the great black raven (_Corvus umbrinus_) as their uncle and exact

pecuniary compensation or blood-money from any one who has been so rash as

to slay their sable relative. Having satisfied their scruples on that

head, they give the bird a solemn burial, carrying the corpse to the

graveyard on a bier with flags and shouts of _la ill Allah_, just as if

they were interring one of their kinsfolk.(640) The Palenques of South

America are very careful to spare harmless animals which are not good for

food; because they believe that any injury inflicted on such creatures

would entail the sickness or death of their own children.(641)

(M171) But the savage clearly cannot afford to spare all animals. He must

either eat some of them or starve, and when the question thus comes to be

whether he or the animal must perish, he is forced to overcome his

superstitious scruples and take the life of the beast. At the same time he

does all he can to appease his victims and their kinsfolk. Even in the act

of killing them he testifies his respect for them, endeavours to excuse or

even conceal his share in procuring their death, and promises that their

remains will be honourably treated. By thus robbing death of its terrors

he hopes to reconcile his victims to their fate and to induce their

fellows to come and be killed also. For example, it was a principle with

the Kamtchatkans never to kill a land or sea animal without first making

excuses to it and begging that the animal would not take it ill. Also they

offered it cedar-nuts and so forth, to make it think that it was not a

victim but a guest at a feast. They believed that this hindered other

animals of the same species from growing shy. For instance, after they had

killed a bear and feasted on its flesh, the host would bring the bear’s

head before the company, wrap it in grass, and present it with a variety

of trifles. Then he would lay the blame of the bear’s death on the

Russians, and bid the beast wreak his wrath upon them. Also he would ask

the bear to inform the other bears how well he had been treated, that they

too might come without fear. Seals, sea-lions, and other animals were

treated by the Kamtchatkans with the same ceremonious respect. Moreover,

they used to insert sprigs of a plant resembling bear’s wort in the mouths

of the animals they killed; after which they would exhort the grinning

skulls to have no fear but to go and tell it to their fellows, that they

also might come and be caught and so partake of this splendid

hospitality.(642) When the Ostiaks have hunted and killed a bear, they cut

off its head and hang it on a tree. Then they gather round in a circle and

pay it divine honours. Next they run towards the carcase uttering

lamentations and saying, “Who killed you? It was the Russians. Who cut off

your head? It was a Russian axe. Who skinned you? It was a knife made by a

Russian.” They explain, too, that the feathers which sped the arrow on its

flight came from the wing of a strange bird, and that they did nothing but

let the arrow go. They do all this because they believe that the wandering

ghost of the slain bear would attack them on the first opportunity, if

they did not thus appease it.(643) Or they stuff the skin of the slain

bear with hay; and after celebrating their victory with songs of mockery

and insult, after spitting on and kicking it, they set it up on its hind

legs, “and then, for a considerable time, they bestow on it all the

veneration due to a guardian god.”(644) When a party of Koryak have killed

a bear or a wolf, they skin the beast and dress one of themselves in the

skin. Then they dance round the skin-clad man, saying that it was not they

who killed the animal, but some one else, generally a Russian. When they

kill a fox they skin it, wrap the body in grass, and bid him go tell his

companions how hospitably he has been received, and how he has received a

new cloak instead of his old one.(645) A fuller account of the Koryak

ceremonies is given by a more recent writer. He tells us that when a dead

bear is brought to the house, the women come out to meet it dancing with

firebrands. The bear-skin is taken off along with the head; and one of the

women puts on the skin, dances in it, and entreats the bear not to be

angry, but to be kind to the people. At the same time they offer meat on a

wooden platter to the dead beast, saying, “Eat, friend.” Afterwards a

ceremony is performed for the purpose of sending the dead bear, or rather

his spirit, away back to his home. He is provided with provisions for the

journey in the shape of puddings or reindeer-flesh packed in a grass bag.

His skin is stuffed with grass and carried round the house, after which he

is supposed to depart towards the rising sun. The intention of the

ceremonies is to protect the people from the wrath of the slain bear and

his kinsfolk, and so to ensure success in future bear-hunts.(646) The

Finns used to try to persuade a slain bear that he had not been killed by

them, but had fallen from a tree, or met his death in some other way;(647)

moreover, they held a funeral festival in his honour, at the close of

which bards expatiated on the homage that had been paid to him, urging him

to report to the other bears the high consideration with which he had been

treated, in order that they also, following his example, might come and be

slain.(648) When the Lapps had succeeded in killing a bear with impunity,

they thanked him for not hurting them and for not breaking the clubs and

spears which had given him his death wounds; and they prayed that he would

not visit his death upon them by sending storms or in any other way. His

flesh then furnished a feast.(649)

(M172) The reverence of hunters for the bear whom they regularly kill and

eat may thus be traced all along the northern region of the Old World,

from Bering’s Straits to Lappland. It reappears in similar forms in North

America. With the American Indians a bear hunt was an important event for

which they prepared by long fasts and purgations. Before setting out they

offered expiatory sacrifices to the souls of bears slain in previous

hunts, and besought them to be favourable to the hunters. When a bear was

killed the hunter lit his pipe, and putting the mouth of it between the

bear’s lips, blew into the bowl, filling the beast’s mouth with smoke.

Then he begged the bear not to be angry at having been killed, and not to

thwart him afterwards in the chase. The carcase was roasted whole and

eaten; not a morsel of the flesh might be left over. The head, painted red

and blue, was hung on a post and addressed by orators, who heaped praise

on the dead beast.(650) When men of the Bear clan in the Otawa tribe

killed a bear, they made him a feast of his own flesh, and addressed him

thus: “Cherish us no grudge because we have killed you. You have sense;

you see that our children are hungry. They love you and wish to take you

into their bodies. Is it not glorious to be eaten by the children of a

chief?”(651) Amongst the Nootka Indians of British Columbia, when a bear

had been killed, it was brought in and seated before the head chief in an

upright posture, with a chief’s bonnet, wrought in figures, on its head,

and its fur powdered over with white down. A tray of provisions was then

set before it, and it was invited by words and gestures to eat. After that

the animal was skinned, boiled, and eaten.(652) The Assiniboins pray to

the bear and offer sacrifices to it of tobacco, belts, and other valuable

objects. Moreover, they hold feasts in its honour, that they may win the

beast’s favour and live safe and sound. The bear’s head is often kept in

camp for several days mounted in some suitable position and decked with

scraps of scarlet cloth, necklaces, collars, and coloured feathers. They

offer the pipe to it, and pray that they may be able to kill all the bears

they meet, without harm to themselves, for the purpose of anointing

themselves with his fine grease and banqueting on his tender flesh.(653)

The Ojibways will not suffer dogs to eat the flesh or gnaw the bones of a

bear, and they throw all the waste portions into the fire. They think that

if the flesh were desecrated, they would have no luck in hunting bears

thereafter.(654) A trader of the eighteenth century has described the

endearments which a party of Ojibways lavished on a she-bear which he had

just killed. They took her head in their hands, stroked it and kissed it,

and begged a thousand pardons for her violent death; they called her their

relation and grandmother, and begged her not to lay the fault at their

door, for indeed it was an Englishman who had killed her. Having severed

the head from the body, they adorned it with all the trinkets they could

muster and set it up on a scaffold in the lodge. Next day pipes were lit

and tobacco smoke blown into the nostrils of the dead bear, and the trader

was invited to pay this mark of respect to the animal as an atonement for

having taken her life. Before they feasted on the bear’s flesh, an orator

made a speech in which he deplored the sad necessity under which they

laboured of destroying their friends the bears; for how otherwise could

they subsist?(655) Some of the Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off

the north-western coast of America, used to mark the skins of bears,

otters, and other animals with four red crosses in a line, by way of

propitiating the spirit of the beast they had killed.(656) When the

Thompson Indians of British Columbia were about to hunt bears, they would

sometimes address the animal and ask it to come and be shot. They prayed

the grisly bear not to be angry with the hunter, nor to fight him, but

rather to have pity on him and to deliver himself up to his mercies. The

man who intended to hunt the grisly bear had to be chaste for some time

before he set out on his dangerous adventure. When he had killed a bear,

he and his companions painted their faces in alternate perpendicular

stripes of black and red, and sang the bear song. Sometimes the hunter

also prayed, thanking the beast for letting itself be killed so easily,

and begging that its mate might share the same fate. After they had eaten

the flesh of the bear’s head, they tied the skull to the top of a small

tree, as high as they could reach, and left it there. Having done so, they

painted their faces with alternate stripes of red and black as before; for

if they failed to observe this ceremony, the bears would be offended, and

the hunters would not be able to kill any more. To place the heads of

bears or any large beasts on trees or stones was a mark of respect to the

animals.(657) The Lillooet and Shuswap Indians of the same region used to

observe similar ceremonies at the killing of a bear.(658)

(M173) A like respect is testified for other dangerous creatures by the

hunters who regularly trap and kill them. When Caffre hunters are in the

act of showering spears on an elephant, they call out, “Don’t kill us,

great captain; don’t strike or tread upon us, mighty chief.”(659) When he

is dead they make their excuses to him, pretending that his death was a

pure accident. As a mark of respect they bury his trunk with much solemn

ceremony; for they say that “the elephant is a great lord; his trunk is

his hand.”(660) Before the Amaxosa Caffres attack an elephant they shout

to the animal and beg him to pardon them for the slaughter they are about

to perpetrate, professing great submission to his person and explaining

clearly the need they have of his tusks to enable them to procure beads

and supply their wants. When they have killed him they bury in the ground,

along with the end of his trunk, a few of the articles they have obtained

for the ivory, thus hoping to avert some mishap that would otherwise

befall them.(661) Among the Wanyamwezi of Central Africa, when hunters

have killed an elephant, they bury his legs on the spot where he fell and

then cover the place with stones. The burial is supposed to appease the

spirit of the dead elephant and to ensure the success of the hunters in

future undertakings.(662) When the Baganda have killed an elephant, they

extract the nerve from the tusk and bury it, taking care to mark the place

of the burial. For they think that the ghost of the dead elephant attaches

itself to the nerve, and that if a hunter were to step over the nerve, the

elephant’s ghost would cause him to be killed by an elephant the next time

he went forth to hunt the beasts.(663)

(M174) In Latuka, a district of the Upper Nile, lions are much respected,

and are only killed when they prove very troublesome and dangerous. There

used to be in this region a Lion-chief, as he was called, who professed to

have all lions under his control, and who actually kept several tame lions

about his house. Whenever a lion was accidentally caught in a trap near

the station of the Egyptian Government, this man would regularly present

himself and demand the release of the noble animal. The favour was always

granted, and planks were let down into the pit to enable the imprisoned

lion to clamber up and escape.(664) Amongst some tribes of Eastern Africa,

when a lion is killed, the carcase is brought before the king, who does

homage to it by prostrating himself on the ground and rubbing his face on

the muzzle of the beast.(665)

(M175) In some parts of Western Africa if a negro kills a leopard he is

bound fast and brought before the chiefs for having killed one of their

peers. The man defends himself on the plea that the leopard is chief of

the forest and therefore a stranger. He is then set at liberty and

rewarded. But the dead leopard, adorned with a chief’s bonnet, is set up

in the village, where nightly dances are held in its honour.(666) The

leopard is held in great veneration by the Igaras of the Niger. They call

it “father” (_atta_), though they do not object to kill the animal in the

chase. When a dead leopard is brought into Idah, the capital, it is

dressed up in white and borne on the heads of four men from house to

house, amidst singing and beating of drums. Each householder gives a

present of cowries or cloth to the owner of the leopard, and at last the

carcase is buried with great ceremony and firing of guns. Should these

rites be neglected, the people imagine that the spirit of the dead leopard

will punish them.(667) Among the Ewe negroes of Togoland “hunters who had

killed buffaloes, leopards, or wild black swine observed in Agome for nine

days the same, or very similar, ceremonies as are customary at the death

of a woman, in order to prevent the soul of the slain beasts from avenging

itself on them, a custom which is the less surprising because the mourning

customs themselves are based on the fear of spirits, namely the spirits of

the dead. The natives ascribe to the souls of these dangerous animals the

power of killing the man who shot them, or of so blinding and enchanting

him that in the chase he confuses animals and men and so incurs serious

mishaps.”(668) The quaint ceremonies which these negroes observe for the

purpose of avoiding the imaginary perils have been described by a German

missionary. The leopard and the wild buffalo, he tells us, are believed to

be animated by malignant souls which not only do the hunter a mischief

while they still occupy the bodies of the living creatures, but even after

death, in their disembodied state, continue to haunt and plague their

slayer, sometimes egging on a serpent or a leopard to sting or bite him,

sometimes blinding him so that he shoots a man for an animal, or cannot

find his way home and goes groping about in the wilderness till he

perishes miserably. If a man thus blinded and crazed should make his way

back to the town, he is banished for life and sold into slavery; his house

and plantation are razed to the ground; and his nearest relations are

often given as bail into the hands of strangers. It is therefore a very

serious matter indeed for a hunter to incur the wrath of a leopard’s

ghost, and it is quite natural that he should take all reasonable measures

to guard himself against so threatening a calamity. Hence as soon as he

has killed a leopard, he hurries back to the town and brings word of it to

the other men who have slain leopards on former occasions, and who now

assist him with their advice and experience. The first thing they do is to

put a stalk of grass in his mouth as a sign that he may not speak. Then

they repair to the place where the leopard lies dead in the forest, and

inform the animal of the reasons why he has been shot, namely, because he

has stolen sheep, fowls, and pigs, and has killed men. Next the drums are

beaten and the people assemble in the open square of the town. The dead

leopard meanwhile has been fastened to a pole, and with his eyes bandaged

and his face upturned to heaven, is solemnly carried about the town and

set down before the houses of the principal folk, who reward the hero and

his comrades with presents. After the procession has gone the round, the

leopard is tied to a tree, and the hunters paint the slayer with red and

white so as to make him look like a leopard, except that the leopard’s

spots are only painted on the left side of his body; a basket painted in

the same colours is clapped on his head, and magical strings of cowries

are tied round his hands and feet. Thus attired, he and the other heroes

who have killed leopards crawl about on all fours and roar like leopards

when anybody comes near them. In his left hand every man grasps a bow for

the slaughter of innocent cocks and hens, and with his right he grabbles

about in the earth like an animal seeking what it may devour. None of them

may speak, they may only roar, but they do that in a masterly manner. At

the head of this imposing procession go two men armed with a thick cudgel

and a spear respectively; and the rear is brought up by a third man, who

is privileged to walk upright on his hind legs. This favoured person is

the cook, whose office it is to dress the fowls which the human leopards;

purloin in the course of their pilgrimage; indeed for nineteen days they

are privileged, no doubt in their character of leopards, to rob the

hen-roosts with impunity. In the afternoon the carcase of the leopard is

taken down, skinned, and cut up. The titbits are sent to the chief and the

other dignitaries, who eat them; and the remainder of the flesh is

consumed by the common folk. The skin, the teeth, the head, and the claws

belong to the hunter who killed the beast. But for nineteen days

thereafter the slayer of the leopard must retain his peculiar costume: he

may eat only warm-blooded animals and food seasoned with salt: he may not

eat anything seasoned with pepper; and on no account may he taste fish,

because they are cold-blooded creatures. A general feast, of which all the

male inhabitants of the town partake, winds up the proceedings at the

close of the nineteen days. A feature of the festivities is a dramatic

representation of a leopard-hunt, which is carried out in every detail

amid great excitement. If only all these ceremonies are strictly observed,

the hunter need have no fear at all of being plagued by the leopard’s

ghost.(669)

(M176) The Baganda greatly fear the ghosts of buffaloes which they have

killed, and they always appease these dangerous spirits. On no account

will they bring the head of a slain buffalo into a village or into a

garden of plantains: they always eat the flesh of the head in the open

country. Afterwards they place the skull in a small hut built for the

purpose, where they pour out beer as an offering and pray to the ghost to

stay where he is and not to harm them.(670) Oddly enough the Baganda also

dread the ghosts of sheep, which they believe would haunt and kill the

butcher if they saw him give the fatal stroke. Hence when a man is about

to slaughter a sheep, he gets another man to divert its attention, and

coming up behind the unsuspecting animal he stuns it with the blow of an

axe-handle; then, before it can recover consciousness, he adroitly cuts

its throat. In this way the ghost of the sheep is bamboozled and will not

haunt the butcher. Moreover, when a sheep dies in a house, the housewife

may not say bluntly to her husband, “The sheep is dead,” or its ghost,

touched to the quick, would certainly make her fall ill and might even

kill her. She must put a finer point on the painful truth by saying, “I am

unable to untie such and such a sheep.” Her husband understands her, but

the ghost of the animal does not, or at all events he does not resent so

delicate an allusion to its melancholy decease.(671) Even the ghost of a

fowl may haunt a Muganda woman and make her ill, if she has accidentally

killed it with her hoe and flung away the body in the long grass instead

of carrying it to her husband and confessing her fault.(672)

(M177) Another formidable beast whose life the savage hunter takes with

joy, yet with fear and trembling, is the whale. After the slaughter of a

whale the maritime Koryak of north-eastern Siberia hold a communal

festival, the essential part of which “is based on the conception that the

whale killed has come on a visit to the village; that it is staying for

some time, during which it is treated with great respect; that it then

returns to the sea to repeat its visit the following year; that it will

induce its relatives to come along, telling them of the hospitable

reception that has been accorded to it. According to the Koryak ideas, the

whales, like all other animals, constitute one tribe, or rather family, of

related individuals, who live in villages like the Koryak. They avenge the

murder of one of their number, and are grateful for kindnesses that they

may have received.”(673) As large whales are now rarely seen in the bays

of the Okhotsk Sea, the Koryak at the present time generally celebrate the

festival for a white whale. One such festival was witnessed by Mr. W.

Jochelson, at the village of Kuel, in October 1900. A white whale had been

caught in the nets, and as the sea was partially frozen, the carcase had

to be brought ashore in a sledge. When it was seen nearing the beach, a

number of women, arrayed in their long embroidered dancing-coats, went

forth to meet and welcome it, carrying lighted fire-brands in their hands.

To carry burning fire-brands from the hearth is the ancient Koryak fashion

of greeting an honoured guest. Strictly speaking, the women who go forth

to welcome a whale to the house should wear masks of sedge-grass on their

faces as well as dancing-coats on their bodies, and should carry

sacrificial alder branches as well as firebrands in their hands, but on

the present occasion the women dispensed with the use of masks. They

danced, shaking their heads, moving their shoulders, and swinging their

whole bodies with arms outstretched, now squatting, now rising and

singing, “Ah! a guest has come.” In spite of the cold and the wind the

sweat dripped from them, so violently did they dance, and they sang and

screamed till they were hoarse. When the sledge with its burden had

reached the shore, one of the women pronounced an incantation over the

whale’s head, and then thrust alder branches and sacrificial grass into

its mouth. Next they muffled its head in a hood, apparently to prevent the

creature from witnessing the painful spectacle of its own dissection.

After that the men cut up the carcase, and the women collected the blood

in pails. Two seals, which had also been killed, were included in the

festivities which followed. The heads of all three animals were cut off

and placed on the roof of the house. Next day the festival began. In the

morning the women plaited travelling bags of grass for the use of the

whale, and made grass masks. In the evening, the people having assembled

in a large underground house, some boiled pieces of the white whale were

placed in a grass bag and set before a wooden image of a white whale, so

that the animal, or its departed spirit, was thus apparently supposed to

be regaled with portions of its own body; for the white whale and the

seals were treated as honoured guests at the banquet. To keep up the

pretence, the people were silent or spoke only in whispers for fear of

wakening the guests before the time. At last the preparations were

complete: fresh faggots piled on the hearth sent up a blaze, illumining

with an unsteady light the smoke-blackened walls of the vast underground

dwelling, which a moment before had been shrouded in darkness; and the

long silence was broken by the joyful cries of the women, “Here dear

guests have come!” “Visit us often!” “When you go back to the sea, tell

your friends to call on us also, we will prepare just as nice food for

them as for you.” With these words they pointed to puddings set out

temptingly on the boards. Next the host took a piece of the fat of the

white whale and threw it into the fire, saying, “We are burning it in the

fire for thee!” Then he went to the domestic shrine, placed lumps of fat

before the rude effigies of the guardian spirits, and smeared fat on their

mouths. The appetites of the higher powers having thus been satisfied, the

people set to and partook of the good things provided for them, including

the flesh of the white whale and the seals. Lastly, two old men practised

divination by means of the shoulder-blade of a seal to discover whether

the white whale would go back to the sea and call his fellows to come and

be caught like himself. In order to extract this information from the bone

burning coals were piled on it, and the resulting cracks were carefully

scrutinised. To the delight of all present the omens proved favourable: a

long transverse crack indicated the sea to which the spirit of the white

whale would soon depart. Four days later the departure actually took

place. It was a bright sunshiny wintry morning: the frost was keen; and

for more than a mile seaward the beach was covered with blocks of ice. In

the great underground dwelling, where the feast had been held, the hearth

had been turned into something like an altar. On it lay the heads of the

white whale and the seals, and beside them travelling-bags of grass filled

with puddings, which the souls of the animals were to take with them on

their long journey. Beside the hearth knelt two women, their faces covered

with grass masks and their heads bent over the bags, mumbling an

incantation. The sunlight streamed down on them through the smoke-hole

overhead, but spread only a dim twilight through the remoter recesses of

the vast subterranean chamber. The masks worn by the women were intended

to guard them against the spirit of the white whale, which was supposed to

be hovering invisible in the air. The incantation over, the women rose

from their knees and doffed their masks. A careful examination of a

pudding, which had been offered in sacrifice to the white whale, now

revealed the joyful intelligence that the spirit of the whale had accepted

the sacrifice and was about to return to the sea. All that remained,

therefore, to do was to speed him on his way. For that purpose two men

ascended the roof, let down thongs through the smoke-hole, and hauled up

the heads of the white whale and of the seals together with the

travelling-bags of provisions. That concluded the despatch of the souls of

the dead animals to their home in the great waters.(674)

(M178) When the inhabitants of the Isle of St. Mary, to the north of

Madagascar, go a-whaling, they single out the young whales for attack and

“humbly beg the mother’s pardon, stating the necessity that drives them to

kill her progeny, and requesting that she will be pleased to go below

while the deed is doing, that her maternal feelings may not be outraged by

witnessing what must cause her so much uneasiness.”(675) An Ajumba hunter

having killed a female hippopotamus on Lake Azyingo in West Africa, the

animal was decapitated and its quarters and bowels removed. Then the

hunter, naked, stepped into the hollow of the ribs, and kneeling down in

the bloody pool washed his whole body with the blood and excretions of the

animal, while he prayed to the soul of the hippopotamus not to bear him a

grudge for having killed her and so blighted her hopes of future

maternity; and he further entreated the ghost not to stir up other

hippopotamuses to avenge her death by butting at and capsizing his

canoe.(676) The ounce, a leopard-like creature, is dreaded for its

depredations by the Indians of Brazil. When they have caught one of these

animals in a snare, they kill it and carry the body home to the village.

There the women deck the carcase with feathers of many colours, put

bracelets on its legs, and weep over it, saying, “I pray thee not to take

vengeance on our little ones for having been caught and killed through

thine own ignorance. For it was not we who deceived thee, it was thyself.

Our husbands only set the trap to catch animals that are good to eat: they

never thought to take thee in it. Therefore, let not thy soul counsel thy

fellows to avenge thy death on our little ones!”(677) When the Yuracares

Indians of Bolivia have killed great apes in their tropical forests, they

bring the bodies home, set them out in a row on palm leaves with their

heads all looking one way, sprinkle them with chicha, and say, “We love

you, since we have brought you home.” They imagine that the performance of

this ceremony is very gratifying to the other apes in the woods.(678)

Before they leave a temporary camp in the forest, where they have killed a

tapir and dried the meat on a babracot, the Indians of Guiana invariably

destroy this babracot, saying that should a tapir passing that way find

traces of the slaughter of one of his kind, he would come by night on the

next occasion when Indians slept at that place, and, taking a man, would

babracot him in revenge.(679)

(M179) When a Blackfoot Indian has caught eagles in a trap and killed

them, he takes them home to a special lodge, called the eagles’ lodge,

which has been prepared for their reception outside of the camp. Here he

sets the birds in a row on the ground, and propping up their heads on a

stick, puts a piece of dried meat in each of their mouths in order that

the spirits of the dead eagles may go and tell the other eagles how well

they are being treated by the Indians.(680) So when Indian hunters of the

Orinoco region have killed an animal, they open its mouth and pour into it

a few drops of the liquor they generally carry with them, in order that

the soul of the dead beast may inform its fellows of the welcome it has

met with, and that they too, cheered by the prospect of the same kind

reception, may come with alacrity to be killed.(681) A Cherokee hunter who

has killed an eagle stands over the dead bird and prays it not to avenge

itself on his tribe, because it is not he but a Spaniard who has done the

cruel deed.(682) When a Teton Indian is on a journey and he meets a grey

spider or a spider with yellow legs, he kills it, because some evil would

befall him if he did not. But he is very careful not to let the spider

know that he kills it, for if the spider knew, his soul would go and tell

the other spiders, and one of them would be sure to avenge the death of

his relation. So in crushing the insect, the Indian says, “O Grandfather

Spider, the Thunder-beings kill you.” And the spider is crushed at once

and believes what is told him. His soul probably runs and tells the other

spiders that the Thunder-beings have killed him; but no harm comes of

that. For what can grey or yellow-legged spiders do to the

Thunder-beings?(683)

(M180) But it is not merely dangerous creatures with whom the savage

desires to keep on good terms. It is true that the respect which he pays

to wild beasts is in some measure proportioned to their strength and

ferocity. Thus the savage Stiens of Cambodia, believing that all animals

have souls which roam about after their death, beg an animal’s pardon when

they kill it, lest its soul should come and torment them. Also they offer

it sacrifices, but these sacrifices are proportioned to the size and

strength of the animal. The ceremonies observed at the death of an

elephant are conducted with much pomp and last seven days.(684) Similar

distinctions are drawn by North American Indians. “The bear, the buffalo,

and the beaver are manidos [divinities] which furnish food. The bear is

formidable, and good to eat. They render ceremonies to him, begging him to

allow himself to be eaten, although they know he has no fancy for it. We

kill you, but you are not annihilated. His head and paws are objects of

homage.... Other animals are treated similarly from similar reasons....

Many of the animal manidos, not being dangerous, are often treated with

contempt—the terrapin, the weasel, polecat, etc.”(685) The distinction is

instructive. Animals which are feared, or are good to eat, or both, are

treated with ceremonious respect; those which are neither formidable nor

good to eat are despised. We have had examples of reverence paid to

animals which are both feared and eaten. It remains to prove that similar

respect is shewn to animals which, without being feared, are either eaten

or valued for their skins.

(M181) When Siberian sable-hunters have caught a sable, no one is allowed

to see it, and they think that if good or evil be spoken of the captured

sable no more sables will be caught. A hunter has been known to express

his belief that the sables could hear what was said of them as far off as

Moscow. He said that the chief reason why the sable hunt was now so

unproductive was that some live sables had been sent to Moscow. There they

had been viewed with astonishment as strange animals, and the sables

cannot abide that. Another, though minor, cause of the diminished take of

sables was, he alleged, that the world is now much worse than it used to

be, so that nowadays a hunter will sometimes hide the sable which he has

got instead of putting it into the common stock. This also, said he, the

sables cannot abide.(686) A Russian traveller happening once to enter a

Gilyak hut in the absence of the owner, observed a freshly killed sable

hanging on the wall. Seeing him look at it, the housewife in consternation

hastened to muffle the animal in a fur cap, after which it was taken down,

wrapt in birch bark, and put away out of sight. Despite the high price he

offered for it, the traveller’s efforts to buy the animal were unavailing.

It was bad enough, they told him, that he, a stranger, had seen the dead

sable in its skin, but far worse consequences for the future catch of

sables would follow if they were to sell him the animal entire.(687)

Alaskan hunters preserve the bones of sables and beavers out of reach of

the dogs for a year and then bury them carefully, “lest the spirits who

look after the beavers and sables should consider that they are regarded

with contempt, and hence no more should be killed or trapped.”(688) The

Shuswap Indians of British Columbia think that if they did not throw

beaver-bones into the river, the beavers would not go into the traps any

more, and that the same thing would happen were a dog to eat the flesh or

gnaw the bone of a beaver.(689) Carrier Indians who have trapped martens

or beavers take care to keep them from the dogs; for if a dog were to

touch these animals the Indians believe that the other martens or beavers

would not suffer themselves to be caught.(690) A missionary who fell in

with an old Carrier Indian asked him what luck he had in the chase. “Oh,

don’t speak to me about it,” replied the Indian; “there are beavers in

plenty. I caught one myself immediately after my arrival here, but

unluckily a dog got hold of it. You know that after that it has been

impossible for me to catch another.” “Nonsense,” said the missionary; “set

your traps as if nothing had happened, and you will see.” “That would be

useless,” answered the Indian in a tone of despair, “quite useless. You

don’t know the ways of the beaver. If a dog merely touches a beaver, all

the other beavers are angry at the owner of the dog and always keep away

from his traps.” It was in vain that the missionary tried to laugh or

argue him out of his persuasion; the man persisted in abandoning his

snares and giving up the hunt, because, as he asserted, the beavers were

angry with him.(691) A French traveller, observing that the Indians of

Louisiana did not give the bones of beavers and otters to their dogs,

enquired the reason. They told him there was a spirit in the woods who

would tell the other beavers and otters, and that after that they would

catch no more animals of these species.(692) The Canadian Indians were

equally particular not to let their dogs gnaw the bones, or at least

certain of the bones, of beavers. They took the greatest pains to collect

and preserve these bones, and, when the beaver had been caught in a net,

they threw them into the river. To a Jesuit who argued that the beavers

could not possibly know what became of their bones, the Indians replied,

“You know nothing about catching beavers and yet you will be prating about

it. Before the beaver is stone dead, his soul takes a turn in the hut of

the man who is killing him and makes a careful note of what is done with

his bones. If the bones are given to the dogs, the other beavers would get

word of it and would not let themselves be caught. Whereas, if their bones

are thrown into the fire or a river, they are quite satisfied; and it is

particularly gratifying to the net which caught them.”(693) Before hunting

the beaver they offered a solemn prayer to the Great Beaver, and presented

him with tobacco; and when the chase was over, an orator pronounced a

funeral oration over the dead beavers. He praised their spirit and wisdom.

“You will hear no more,” said he, “the voice of the chieftains who

commanded you and whom you chose from among all the warrior beavers to

give you laws. Your language, which the medicine-men understand perfectly,

will be heard no more at the bottom of the lake. You will fight no more

battles with the otters, your cruel foes. No, beavers! But your skins

shall serve to buy arms; we will carry your smoked hams to our children;

we will keep the dogs from eating your bones, which are so hard.”(694)

(M182) The elan, deer, and elk were treated by the American Indians with

the same punctilious respect, and for the same reason. Their bones might

not be given to the dogs nor thrown into the fire, nor might their fat be

dropped upon the fire, because the souls of the dead animals were believed

to see what was done to their bodies and to tell it to the other beasts,

living and dead. Hence, if their bodies were ill-used, the animals of that

species would not allow themselves to be taken, neither in this world nor

in the world to come.(695) The houses of the Indians of Honduras were

encumbered with the bones of deer, the Indians believing that if they

threw the bones away, the other deer could not be taken.(696) Among the

Chiquites of Paraguay a sick man would be asked by the medicine-man

whether he had not thrown away some of the flesh of the deer or turtle,

and if he answered yes, the medicine-man would say, “That is what is

killing you. The soul of the deer or turtle has entered into your body to

avenge the wrong you did it.”(697) Before the Tzentales of Southern Mexico

and the Kekchis of Guatemala venture to skin a deer which they have

killed, they lift up its head and burn copal before it as an offering;

otherwise a certain being named Tzultacca would be angry and send them no

more game.(698) Cherokee hunters ask pardon of the deer they kill. If they

failed to do so, they think that the Little Deer, the chief of the deer

tribe, who can never die or be wounded, would track the hunter to his home

by the blood-drops on the ground and would put the spirit of rheumatism

into him. Sometimes the hunter, on starting for home, lights a fire in the

trail behind him to prevent the Little Deer from pursuing him.(699) Before

they went out to hunt for deer, antelope, or elk the Apaches used to

resort to sacred caves, where the medicine-men propitiated with prayer and

sacrifice the animal gods whose progeny they intended to destroy.(700) The

Indians of Louisiana bewailed bitterly the death of the buffaloes which

they were about to kill. More than two hundred of them at a time have been

seen shedding crocodile tears over the approaching slaughter of the

animals, while they marched in solemn procession, headed by an old man who

waved a pocket-handkerchief at the end of a stick as an oriflamme, and by

a woman who strutted proudly along, bearing on her back a large kettle

which had been recently abstracted from the baggage of some French

explorers.(701) The Thompson Indians of British Columbia cherished many

superstitious beliefs and observed many superstitious practices in regard

to deer. When a deer was killed, they said that the rest of the deer would

be well pleased if the hunters butchered the animal nicely and cleanly. To

waste venison displeased the animals, who after that would not allow

themselves to be shot by the hunter. If a hunter was overburdened and had

to leave some of the venison behind, the other deer were better pleased if

he hung it up on a tree than if he let it lie on the ground. The guts were

gathered and put where the blood had been spilt in butchering the beast,

and the whole was covered up with a few fir-boughs. In laying the boughs

on the blood and guts the man told the deer not to grieve for the death of

their friend and not to take it ill that he had left some of the body

behind, for he had done his best to cover it. If he did not cover it, they

thought the deer would be sorry or angry and would spoil his luck in the

chase. When the head of a deer had to be left behind, they commonly placed

it on the branch of a tree, that it might not be contaminated by dogs and

women. For the same reason they burned the bones of the slain deer, lest

they should be touched by women or gnawed by dogs. And venison was never

brought into a hut by the common door, because that door was used by

women; it was taken in through a hole made in the back of the hut. No

hunter would give a deer’s head to a man who was the first or second of a

family, for that would make the rest of the deer very shy and hard to

shoot. And in telling his friends of his bag he would generally call a

buck a doe, and a doe he would call a fawn, and a fawn he would call a

hare. This he did that he might not seem to the deer to brag.(702) The

Lillooet Indians of British Columbia threw the bones of animals,

particularly those of the deer and the beaver, into the water, in order

that the dogs should not defile or eat them and thereby offend the

animals. When the hunter committed the bones to the water he generally

prayed to the dead animal, saying, “See! I treat you respectfully. Nothing

shall defile you. Have pity on me, so I may kill more of you! May I be

successful in hunting and trapping!”(703) The Canadian Indians would not

eat the embryos of the elk, unless at the close of the hunting season;

otherwise the mother-elks would be shy and refuse to be caught.(704)

(M183) Indians of the Lower Fraser River regard the porcupine as their

elder brother. Hence when a hunter kills one of these creatures he asks

his elder brother’s pardon and does not eat of the flesh till the next

day.(705) The Sioux will not stick an awl or needle into a turtle, for

they are sure that, if they were to do so, the turtle would punish them at

some future time.(706) Some of the North American Indians believed that

each sort of animal had its patron or genius who watched over and

preserved it. An Indian girl having once picked up a dead mouse, her

father snatched the little creature from her and tenderly caressed and

fondled it. Being asked why he did so, he said that it was to appease the

genius of mice, in order that he might not torment his daughter for eating

the mouse. With that he handed the mouse to the girl and she ate it.(707)

(M184) When the Koryak have killed a fox, they take the body home and lay

it down near the fire, saying, “Let the guest warm himself. When he feels

warm, we will free him from his overcoat.” So when the frozen carcase is

thawed, they skin it and wrap long strips of grass round about it. Then

the animal’s mouth is filled with fish-roe, and the mistress of the house

gashes the flesh and puts more roe or dried meat into the gashes, making

believe that the gashes are the fox’s pockets, which she thus fills with

provisions. Then the carcase is carried out of the house, and the people

say, “Go and tell your friends that it is good to visit yonder house.

‘Instead of my old coat, they gave me a new one still warmer and with

longer hair. I have eaten my fill, and had my pockets well stored. You,

too, go and visit them.’ ” The natives think that if they neglected to

observe this ceremonial they would have no luck in hunting foxes.(708)

When a Ewe hunter of Togoland has killed an antelope of a particular kind

(_Antilope leucoryx_), he erects an enclosure of branches, within which he

places the lower jawbones of all the animals he has shot. Then he pours

palm-wine and sprinkles meal on the bones, saying, “Ye lower jawbones of

beasts, ye are now come home. Here is food, here is drink. Therefore lead

your comrades (that is, the living beasts of the forest) hither

also.”(709) In the Timor-laut islands of the Indian Archipelago the skulls

of all the turtles which a fisherman has caught are hung up under his

house. Before he goes out to catch another, he addresses himself to the

skull of the last turtle that he killed, and having inserted betel between

its jaws, he prays the spirit of the dead animal to entice its kinsfolk in

the sea to come and be caught.(710) In the Poso district of central

Celebes hunters keep the jawbones of deer and wild pigs which they have

killed and hang them up in their houses near the fire. Then they say to

the jawbones, “Ye cry after your comrades, that your grandfathers, or

nephews, or children may not go away.” Their notion is that the souls of

the dead deer and pigs tarry near their jawbones and attract the souls of

living deer and pigs, which are thus drawn into the toils of the

hunter.(711) Thus in all these cases the wily savage employs dead animals

as decoys to lure living animals to their doom.

(M185) The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco love to hunt the ostrich, but

when they have killed one of these birds and are bringing home the carcase

to the village, they take steps to outwit the resentful ghost of their

victim. They think that when the first natural shock of death is passed,

the ghost of the ostrich pulls himself together and makes after his body.

Acting on this sage calculation, the Indians pluck feathers from the

breast of the bird and strew them at intervals along the track. At every

bunch of feathers the ghost stops to consider, “Is this the whole of my

body or only a part of it?” The doubt gives him pause, and when at last he

has made up his mind fully at all the bunches, and has further wasted

valuable time by the zigzag course which he invariably pursues in going

from one to another, the hunters are safe at home, and the bilked ghost

may stalk in vain round about the village, which he is too timid to

enter.(712)

(M186) The Esquimaux of the Hudson Bay region believe that the reindeer

are controlled by a great spirit who resides in a large cave near the end

of Cape Chidley. The outward form of the spirit is that of a huge white

bear. He obtains and controls the spirit of every reindeer that is slain

or dies, and it depends on his good will whether the people shall have a

supply of reindeer or not. The sorcerer intercedes with this great spirit

and prevails on him to send the deer to the hungry Esquimaux. He informs

the spirit that the people have in no way offended him, since he, the

sorcerer, has taken great care that the whole of the meat was eaten up,

and that last spring, when the does were returning to him to drop their

young, none of the little or embryo fawns were devoured by the dogs. After

long incantations the magician announces that the patron of the deer

condescends to supply the Esquimaux with the spirits of the animals in a

material form, and that soon there will be plenty in the land. He charges

the people to fall on and slay and thereby win the approval of the spirit,

who loves to see good folk enjoying themselves, knowing that so long as

the Esquimaux refrain from feeding their dogs with the unborn young, the

spirits of the dead reindeer will return again to his watchful care. The

dogs are not allowed to taste the flesh, and until the supply is plentiful

they may not gnaw the leg-bones, lest the guardian of the deer should take

offence and send no more of the animals. If, unfortunately, a dog should

get at the meat, a piece of his tail is cut off or his ear is cropped to

let the blood flow.(713) Again, the Central Esquimaux hold that

sea-mammals, particularly whales, ground-seals, and common seals, sprang

from the severed fingers of the goddess Sedna, and that therefore an

Esquimau must make atonement for every such animal that he kills. When a

seal is brought into the hut, the woman must stop working till it has been

cut up. After the capture of a ground seal, walrus, or whale they must

rest for three days. Not all sorts of work, however, are forbidden, for

they may mend articles made of sealskin, but they may not make anything

new. For example, an old tent cover may be enlarged in order to build a

larger hut, but it is not allowed to make a new one. Working on new

deerskins is strictly forbidden. No skins of this kind obtained in summer

may be prepared before the ice has formed and the first seal has been

caught with the harpoon. Later on, as soon as the first walrus has been

taken, the work must again stop until autumn comes round. Hence all

families are eager to finish the work on deerskins as fast as possible,

for until that is done the walrus season may not begin.(714) The

Greenlanders are careful not to fracture the heads of seals or throw them

into the sea, but pile them in a heap before the door, that the souls of

the seals may not be enraged and scare their brethren from the coast.(715)

(M187) The Esquimaux about Bering Strait believe that the souls of dead

sea-beasts, such as seals, walrus, and whales, remain attached to their

bladders, and that by returning the bladders to the sea they can cause the

souls to be reincarnated in fresh bodies and so multiply the game which

the hunters pursue and kill. Acting on this belief every hunter carefully

removes and preserves the bladders of all the sea-beasts that he kills;

and at a solemn festival held once a year in winter these bladders,

containing the souls of all the sea-beasts that have been killed

throughout the year, are honoured with dances and offerings of food in the

public assembly-room, after which they are taken out on the ice and thrust

through holes into the water; for the simple Esquimaux imagine that the

souls of the animals, in high good humour at the kind treatment they have

experienced, will thereafter be born again as seals, walrus, and whales,

and in that form will flock willingly to be again speared, harpooned, or

otherwise done to death by the hunters. The ceremonies observed at these

annual festivals of reincarnation are elaborate. The assembly-room or

dancing-house (_kashim_, _kassigim_, or _kassigit_), in which the festival

is held, consists of a spacious semi-subterranean chamber entered by a

tunnel, which leads down to a large round cellar under the floor of the

house. From the cellar you ascend into the assembly-room through a hole in

the floor. Wooden benches run round the apartment, which is lit by lamps.

An opening in the roof serves at once as a window and a chimney. Unmarried

men sleep in the assembly-room at all times; they have no other home. The

festival is commonly held in December, but it may fall as late as January.

It lasts several days. When the time is come to celebrate it, each hunter

brings into the assembly-room the inflated bladders of all the seals,

walrus, and whales that he has killed during the year. These are tied by

the necks in bunches and hung up on seal spears, which are stuck in a row

in the wall some six or eight feet above the floor. Here food and water

are offered to them, or rather to the spirits of the animals which are

supposed to be present in the bladders; and the spirits signify their

acceptance of the offering by causing the bladders to swing to and fro, a

movement which is really produced by a man sitting in a dark corner, who

pulls a string attached to the bladders. Further, the bladders are

fumigated with torches of wild parsnip stalks, the aromatic smoke and red

flames of which are believed to be well-pleasing to the souls of the

animals dangling in the bladders. Moreover to amuse the souls men execute

curious dances before them to the music of drums. First the dancers move

slowly with a jerky action from side to side; then they gallop obliquely

with arms tossed up and down; and lastly they hop and jump, always keeping

perfect time to the beat of the drums. The dance is supposed to imitate

the movements of seals and walrus; and again the spirits signify their

pleasure by making the bladders swing backwards and forwards. During the

continuance of the festival no loud noises may be made in the

assembly-room for fear of alarming the souls of the animals in the

bladders; if any person makes a noise by accident, all the men present

raise a chorus of cries in imitation of the notes of the eider duck to let

the souls of the animals think that the unseemly disturbance proceeds from

the birds and not from the people. Further, so long as the festival lasts,

no wood may be cut with an iron axe in the village, the men must keep

rigidly apart from the women, and no female above the age of puberty may

come near the bladders suspended in the assembly-room, the reason assigned

being that such women are unclean and might offend the sensitive souls of

the sea-beasts in the bladders. But immature girls, being untainted by the

pollution which attaches to adult women, may go about the bladders freely.

The last and crowning scene of the festival takes place at night or just

at sunrise. The spears with the bladders attached to them are passed out

by the shaman into the open air through the smoke-hole in the roof. When

all are outside, a huge torch of wild parsnip stalks is lighted; the chief

shaman takes it on his shoulder, and runs with it as fast as he can across

the snow and out on the ice. Behind him troop all the men carrying each

his spear with the bladders of the sea-beasts dangling and flapping from

it; and in the rear race the women, children, and old men, howling,

screaming and making a great uproar. In the darkness the lurid flame of

the torch shoots high into the air, casting a red glare over the snowy

landscape and lighting up the swarm of fantastic, fur-clad figures that

stream along in wild excitement. Arrived at a hole, which had been cut on

purpose in the sea-ice, the shaman plants his burning torch beside it in

the snow, and every man as he comes up rips open his bladders and thrusts

them, one after the other, into the water under the ice. This ends the

ceremony. The souls of the dead seals, walrus, and whales, are now ready

to be born again in the depths of the sea. So all the people return

contented to the village. At St. Michael the men who have thrust the

bladders under the ice are obliged on their return to leap through a fire

of wild parsnip stalks, probably as a mode of ceremonial purification; for

after the dance and the offering of food at the festival the chief shaman

passes a lighted torch of parsnip stalks round the assembly-room and the

dancers, for the express purpose of purifying them and averting any evil

influence that might bring sickness or ill luck on the hunters.(716)

(M188) For like reasons, a tribe which depends for its subsistence,

chiefly or in part, upon fishing is careful to treat the fish with every

mark of honour and respect. The Indians of Peru “worshipped the whale for

its monstrous greatness. Besides this ordinary system of worship, which

prevailed throughout the coast, the people of different provinces adored

the fish that they caught in greatest abundance; for they said that the

first fish that was made in the world above (for so they named Heaven)

gave birth to all other fish of that species, and took care to send them

plenty of its children to sustain their tribe. For this reason they

worshipped sardines in one region, where they killed more of them than of

any other fish; in others, the skate; in others, the dogfish; in others,

the golden fish for its beauty; in others, the crawfish; in others, for

want of larger gods, the crabs, where they had no other fish, or where

they knew not how to catch and kill them. In short, they had whatever fish

was most serviceable to them as their gods.”(717) The Kwakiutl Indians of

British Columbia think that when a salmon is killed its soul returns to

the salmon country. Hence they take care to throw the bones and offal into

the sea, in order that the soul may reanimate them at the resurrection of

the salmon. Whereas if they burned the bones the soul would be lost, and

so it would be quite impossible for that salmon to rise from the

dead.(718) In like manner the Otawa Indians of Canada, believing that the

souls of dead fish passed into other bodies of fish, never burned fish

bones, for fear of displeasing the souls of the fish, who would come no

more to the nets.(719) The Hurons also refrained from throwing fish bones

into the fire, lest the souls of the fish should go and warn the other

fish not to let themselves be caught, since the Hurons would burn their

bones. Moreover, they had men who preached to the fish and persuaded them

to come and be caught. A good preacher was much sought after, for they

thought that the exhortations of a clever man had a great effect in

drawing the fish to the nets. In the Huron fishing village where the

French missionary Sagard stayed, the preacher to the fish prided himself

very much on his eloquence, which was of a florid order. Every evening

after supper, having seen that all the people were in their places and

that a strict silence was observed, he preached to the fish. His text was

that the Hurons did not burn fish bones. “Then enlarging on this theme

with extraordinary unction, he exhorted and conjured and invited and

implored the fish to come and be caught and to be of good courage and to

fear nothing, for it was all to serve their friends who honoured them and

did not burn their bones.”(720) At Bogadjim in German New Guinea an

enchanter is employed to lure the fish to their doom. He stands in a canoe

on the beach with a decorated fish-basket beside him, and commands the

fish to come from all quarters to Bogadjim.(721) When the Aino have killed

a sword-fish, they thank the fish for allowing himself to be caught and

invite him to come again.(722) Among the Nootka Indians of British

Columbia it was formerly a rule that any person who had partaken of bear’s

flesh must rigidly abstain from eating any kind of fish for a term of two

months. The motive for the abstinence was not any consideration for the

health of the eater, but “a superstitious belief, that should any of their

people after tasting bear’s flesh, eat of fresh salmon, cod, etc., the

fish, though at ever so great a distance off, would come to the knowledge

of it, and be so much offended thereat, as not to allow themselves to be

taken by any of the inhabitants.”(723) The disappearance of herring from

the sea about Heligoland in 1530 was attributed by the fishermen to the

misconduct of two lads who had whipped a freshly-caught herring and then

flung it back into the sea.(724) A similar disappearance of the herrings

from the Moray Firth, in the reign of Queen Anne, was set down by some

people to a breach of the Sabbath which had been committed by the

fishermen, while others opined that it was due to a quarrel in which blood

had been spilt in the sea.(725) For Scotch fishermen are persuaded that if

blood be drawn in a quarrel on the coast where herring are being caught,

the shoal will at once take its departure and not return for that season

at least. West Highland fishermen believe that every shoal of herring has

its leader which it follows wherever he goes. This leader is twice as big

as an ordinary herring, and the fishermen call it the king of herring.

When they chance to catch it in their nets they put it back carefully into

the sea; for they would esteem it petty treason to destroy the royal

fish.(726) The natives of the Duke of York Island annually decorate a

canoe with flowers and ferns, lade it, or are supposed to lade it, with

shell-money, and set it adrift to compensate the fish for their fellows

who have been caught and eaten.(727) When the Tarahumares of Mexico are

preparing to poison the waters of a river for the purpose of stupefying

and catching the fish, they take the precaution of first making offerings

to the Master of the Fish by way of payment for the fish of which they are

about to bereave him. The offerings consist of axes, hats, blankets,

girdles, pouches, and especially knives and strings of beads, which are

hung to a cross or a horizontal bar set up in the middle of the river.

However, the Master of the Fish, who is thought to be the oldest fish,

does not long enjoy these good things; for next morning the owners of the

various articles remove them from the river and appropriate them to their

usual secular purposes.(728) It is especially necessary to treat the first

fish caught with consideration in order to conciliate the rest of the

fish, whose conduct may be supposed to be influenced by the reception

given to those of their kind which were the first to be taken. Accordingly

the Maoris always put back into the sea the first fish caught, “with a

prayer that it may tempt other fish to come and be caught.”(729) Among the

Baganda “the first fish taken were treated ceremonially: some the

fisherman took to the god Mukasa; the remainder his wife cooked, and he

and she both partook of them, and he afterwards jumped over her.”(730)

(M189) Still more stringent are the precautions taken when the fish are

the first of the season. On salmon rivers, when the fish begin to run up

the stream in spring, they are received with much deference by tribes who,

like the Indians of the Pacific Coast of North America, subsist largely

upon a fish diet. To some of these tribes the salmon is what corn is to

the European, rice to the Chinese, and seals to the Esquimaux. Plenty of

salmon means abundance in the camp and joy at the domestic hearth; failure

of the salmon for a single season means famine and desolation, silence in

the village, and sad hearts about the fire.(731) Accordingly in British

Columbia the Indians used to go out to meet the first fish as they came up

the river: “They paid court to them, and would address them thus: ‘You

fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs.’ ”(732)

Amongst the Thlinkeet or Tlingit of Alaska the first halibut of the season

is carefully handled and addressed as a chief, and a festival is given in

his honour, after which the fishing goes on.(733) Among the tribes of the

Lower Fraser River when the first sockeye-salmon of the season has been

caught, the fisherman carries it to the chief of his tribe, who delivers

it to his wife. She prays, saying to the salmon, “Who has brought you here

to make us happy? We are thankful to your chief for sending you.” When she

has cut and roasted the salmon according to certain prescribed rules, the

whole tribe is invited and partakes of the fish, after they have purified

themselves by drinking a decoction of certain plants which is regarded as

a medicine for cleansing the people. But widowers, widows, menstruous

women, and youths may not eat of this particular salmon. Even later, when

the fish have become plentiful and these ceremonies are dispensed with,

the same classes of persons are not allowed to eat fresh salmon, though

they may partake of the dried fish. The sockeye-salmon must always be

looked after carefully. Its bones have to be thrown into the river, after

which the fish will revive and return to its chief in the west. Whereas if

the fish are not treated with consideration, they will take their revenge,

and the careless fisherman will be unlucky.(734) Among the Songish or

Lkungen tribe of Vancouver Island it is a rule that on the day when the

first salmon have been caught, the children must stand on the beach

waiting for the boats to return. They stretch out their little arms and

the salmon are heaped on them, the heads of the fish being always kept in

the direction in which the salmon are swimming, else they would cease to

run up the river. So the children carry them and lay them on a grassy

place, carefully keeping the heads of the salmon turned in the same

direction. Round the fish are placed four flat stones, on which the plant

hog’s wort (_Peucedanum leiocarpum_, Nutt.), red paint, and bulrushes are

burnt as an offering to the salmon. When the salmon have been roasted each

of the children receives one, which he or she is obliged to eat, leaving

nothing over. But grown people are not allowed to eat the fish for several

days. The bones of the salmon that the children have eaten may not touch

the ground. They are kept in dishes, and on the fourth day an old woman,

who pretends to be lame, gathers them in a huge basket and throws them

into the sea.(735) The Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia observe

certain ceremonies when the first olachen fish of the season are caught.

The fish are roasted on an instrument of elder-berry wood, and the man who

roasts them must wear his travelling dress, mittens, cape, and so forth.

While this is being done the Indians pray that plenty of olachen may come

to their fishing-ground. The fire may not be blown up, and in eating the

fish they may not cool it by blowing nor break a single bone. Everything

must be neat and clean, and the rakes used for catching the fish must be

kept hidden in the house.(736) In spring, when the winds blow soft from

the south and the salmon begin to run up the Klamath river, the Karoks of

California dance for salmon, to ensure a good catch. One of the Indians,

called the Kareya or God-man, retires to the mountains and fasts for ten

days. On his return the people flee, while he goes to the river, takes the

first salmon of the catch, eats some of it, and with the rest kindles the

sacred fire in the sweating-house. “No Indian may take a salmon before

this dance is held, nor for ten days after it, even if his family are

starving.” The Karoks also believe that a fisherman will take no salmon if

the poles of which his spearing-booth is made were gathered on the

river-side, where the salmon might have seen them. The poles must be

brought from the top of the highest mountain. The fisherman will also

labour in vain if he uses the same poles a second year in booths or weirs,

“because the old salmon will have told the young ones about them.”(737)

Among the Indians of the Columbia River, “when the salmon make their first

appearance in the river, they are never allowed to be cut crosswise, nor

boiled, but roasted; nor are they allowed to be sold without the heart

being first taken out, nor to be kept over night, but must be all consumed

or eaten the day they are taken out of the water. All these rules are

observed for about ten days.”(738) They think that if the heart of a fish

were eaten by a stranger at the beginning of the season, they would catch

no more fish. Hence, they roast and eat the hearts themselves.(739) There

is a favourite fish of the Aino which appears in their rivers about May

and June. They prepare for the fishing by observing rules of ceremonial

purity, and when they have gone out to fish, the women at home must keep

strict silence or the fish would hear them and disappear. When the first

fish is caught he is brought home and passed through a small opening at

the end of the hut, but not through the door; for if he were passed

through the door, “the other fish would certainly see him and

disappear.”(740) This may partly explain the custom observed by other

savages of bringing game in certain cases into their huts, not by the

door, but by the window, the smoke-hole, or by a special opening at the

back of the hut.(741)

(M190) With some savages a special reason for respecting the bones of

game, and generally of the animals which they eat, is a belief that, if

the bones are preserved, they will in course of time be reclothed with

flesh, and thus the animal will come to life again. It is, therefore,

clearly for the interest of the hunter to leave the bones intact, since to

destroy them would be to diminish the future supply of game. Many of the

Minnetaree Indians “believe that the bones of those bisons which they have

slain and divested of flesh rise again clothed with renewed flesh, and

quickened with life, and become fat, and fit for slaughter the succeeding

June.”(742) Hence on the western prairies of America, the skulls of

buffaloes may be seen arranged in circles and symmetrical piles, awaiting

the resurrection.(743) After feasting on a dog, the Dacotas carefully

collect the bones, scrape, wash, and bury them, “partly, as it is said, to

testify to the dog-species, that in feasting upon one of their number no

disrespect was meant to the species itself, and partly also from a belief

that the bones of the animal will rise and reproduce another.”(744) Among

the Esquimaux of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay, when a boy has killed his

first seal, his mother gathers all the bones and throws them into a

seal-hole. They think that these bones will become seals which the boy

will catch in later life.(745) The Yuracares Indians of Bolivia are at

great pains to collect all the bones of the beasts, birds, and fishes

which they eat, and to throw them into a stream, bury them in the depths

of the forest, or burn them in the fire, “in order that the animals of the

sort killed may not be angry and may allow themselves to be killed

again.”(746) In sacrificing an animal the Lapps regularly put aside the

bones, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, sexual parts (if the animal was a male),

and a morsel of flesh from each limb. Then, after eating the remainder of

the flesh, they laid the bones and the rest in anatomical order in a

coffin and buried them with the usual rites, believing that the god to

whom the animal was sacrificed would reclothe the bones with flesh and

restore the animal to life in Jabme-Aimo, the subterranean world of the

dead. Sometimes, as after feasting on a bear, they seem to have contented

themselves with thus burying the bones.(747) Thus the Lapps expected the

resurrection of the slain animal to take place in another world,

resembling in this respect the Kamtchatkans, who believed that every

creature, down to the smallest fly, would rise from the dead and live

underground.(748) On the other hand, the North American Indians looked for

the resurrection of the animals in the present world. The habit, observed

especially by Mongolian peoples, of stuffing the skin of a sacrificed

animal, or stretching it on a framework,(749) points rather to a belief in

a resurrection of the latter sort. The objection commonly entertained by

primitive peoples to break the bones of the animals which they have eaten

or sacrificed(750) may be based either on a belief in the resurrection of

the animals, or on a fear of intimidating other creatures of the same

species and offending the ghosts of the slain animals. The reluctance of

North American Indians and Esquimaux to let dogs gnaw the bones of

animals(751) is perhaps only a precaution to prevent the bones from being

broken.

(M191) We have already seen that some rude races believe in a resurrection

of men(752) as well as of beasts, and it is quite natural that people who

entertain such a belief should take care of the bones of their dead in

order that the original owners of the bones may have them to hand at the

critical moment. Hence in the Mexican territories of Guazacualco and

Yluta, where the Indians thought that the dead would rise again, the bones

of the departed were deposited in baskets and hung up on trees, that their

spirits might not be obliged to grub in the earth for them at the

resurrection.(753) On the other hand, the Luritcha tribe of Central

Australia, who eat their enemies, take steps to prevent their coming to

life again, which might prove very inconvenient, by destroying the bones

and especially the skulls of the bodies on which they have banqueted.(754)

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(M192) The preceding review of customs observed by savages for the

conciliation and multiplication of animals which they hunt and kill, is

fitted to impress us with a lively sense of the unquestioning faith which

primitive man reposes in the immortality of the lower creatures. He

appears to assume as an axiom too obvious to be disputed that beasts,

birds, and fishes have souls like his own, which survive the death of

their bodies and can be reborn in other bodies to be again killed and

eaten by the hunter. The whole series of customs described in the

foregoing pages—customs which are apt to strike the civilised reader as

quaint and absurd—rests on this fundamental assumption. A consideration of

them suggests a doubt whether the current explanation of the savage belief

in human immortality is adequate to account for all the facts. That belief

is commonly deduced from a primitive theory of dreams. The savage, it is

said, fails to distinguish the visions of sleep from the realities of

waking life, and accordingly when he has dreamed of his dead friends he

necessarily concludes that they have not wholly perished, but that their

spirits continue to exist in some place and some form, though in the

ordinary course of events they elude the perceptions of his senses. On

this theory the conceptions, whether gross or refined, whether repulsive

or beautiful, which savages and perhaps civilised men have formed of the

state of the departed, would seem to be no more than elaborate hypotheses

constructed to account for appearances in dreams; these towering

structures, for all their radiant or gloomy grandeur, for all the massy

strength and solidity with which they present themselves to the

imagination of many, may turn out on inspection to be mere visionary

castles built of clouds and vapour, which a breath of reason suffices to

melt into air.

(M193) But even if we grant for the sake of argument that this theory

offers a ready explanation of the widespread belief in human immortality,

it is less easy to see how the theory accounts for the corresponding

belief of so many races in the immortality of the lower animals. In his

dreams the savage recognises the images of his departed friends by those

familiar traits of feature, voice, and gesture which characterised them in

life. But can we suppose that he recognises dead beasts, birds, and fishes

in like manner? That their images come before him in sleep with all the

particular features, the minute individual differences, which

distinguished them in life from their fellows, so that when he sees them

he can say to himself, for example, “This is the very tiger that I speared

yesterday; his carcase is dead, but his spirit must be still alive”; or,

“That is the very salmon I caught and ate this morning; I certainly killed

his body but clearly I have not succeeded in destroying his soul”? No

doubt it is possible that the savage has arrived at his theory of animal

immortality by some such process of reasoning, but the supposition seems

at least more far-fetched and improbable than in the case of human

immortality. And if we admit the insufficiency of the explanation in the

one case, we seem bound to admit it, though perhaps in a less degree, in

the other case also. In short, we conclude that the theory of dreams

appears to be hardly enough by itself to account for the widespread belief

in the immortality of men and animals; dreams have probably done much to

confirm that belief, but would they suffice to originate it? We may

reasonably doubt it.

(M194) Accordingly we are driven to cast about for some more adequate

explanation of this prevalent and deeply rooted persuasion. In search of

such an explanation perhaps we need go no further than the sense of life

which every man feels in his own breast.(755) We have seen that to the

savage death presents itself not as a natural necessity but as a

lamentable accident or crime that cuts short an existence which, but for

it, might have lasted for ever.(756) Thus arguing apparently from his own

sensations he conceives of life as an indestructible kind of energy, which

when it disappears in one form must necessarily reappear in another,

though in the new form it need not be immediately perceptible by us; in

other words, he infers that death does not destroy the vital principle nor

even the conscious personality, but that it merely transforms both of them

into other shapes, which are not the less real because they commonly elude

the evidence of our senses. If I am right in thus interpreting the thought

of primitive man, the savage view of the nature of life singularly

resembles the modern scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy.

According to that doctrine, no material energy ever perishes or is even

diminished; when it seems to suffer diminution or extinction, all that

happens is that a portion or the whole of it has been transmuted into

other shapes which, though qualitatively different from, are

quantitatively equivalent to, the energy in its original form. In short,

if we listen to science, nothing in the physical world is ever lost, but

all things are perpetually changing: the sum of energy in the universe is

constant and invariable, though it undergoes ceaseless

transformations.(757) A similar theory of the indestructibility of energy

is implicitly applied by the savage to explain the phenomena of life and

death, and logically enough he does not limit the application to human

beings but extends it to the lower animals. Therein he shews himself a

better reasoner than his civilised brother, who commonly embraces with

avidity the doctrine of human immortality but rejects with scorn, as

derogatory to human dignity, the idea that animals have immortal souls.

And when he attempts to confirm his own cherished belief in a life after

death by appealing to similar beliefs among savages and inferring from

them a natural instinct of immortality, it is well to remind him that, if

he stands by that appeal, he must, like the savage, consistently extend

the privilege of immortality to the despised lower animals; for surely it

is improper for him to pick and choose his evidence so as to suit his

prepossessions, accepting those parts of the savage creed which tally with

his own and rejecting those which do not. On logical and scientific

grounds he seems bound to believe either more or less: he must hold that

men and animals are alike immortal or that neither of them is so.

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(M195) We have seen that many savages look forward to a joyful

resurrection of men and beasts, if only a proper care is taken of their

skeletons; the same old bones, they imagine, will do duty over again in

the next life, when they have been decently clad in a new garment of

flesh. This quaint fancy is reflected in many popular tales; not

uncommonly the animal or man in the story comes to life lame of a limb,

because one of his bones has been eaten, broken, or lost.(758) In a Magyar

tale, the hero is cut in pieces, but the serpent-king lays the bones

together in their proper order, and washes them with water, whereupon the

hero revives. His shoulder-blade, however, has been lost, so the

serpent-king supplies its place with one of gold and ivory.(759) Such

stories, as Mannhardt has seen, explain why Pythagoras, who claimed to

have lived many lives, one after the other, was said to have exhibited his

golden leg as a proof of his supernatural pretensions.(760) Doubtless he

explained that at one of his resurrections a leg had been broken or

mislaid, and that he had replaced it, like Miss Kilmansegg, with one of

gold. Similarly, when the murdered Pelops was restored to life, the

shoulder which Demeter had eaten was made good with one of ivory,(761)

which was publicly exhibited at Elis down to historical times.(762) The

story that one of the members of the mangled Osiris was eaten by fish, and

that, when Isis collected his scattered limbs, she replaced the missing

member with one of wood,(763) may perhaps belong to the same circle of

beliefs.

(M196) There is a certain rule observed by savage hunters and fishers

which, enigmatical at first sight, may possibly be explained by this

savage belief in resurrection. A traveller in America in the early part of

the nineteenth century was told by a half-breed Choctaw that the Indians

“had an obscure story, somewhat resembling that of Jacob wrestling with an

angel; and that the full-blooded Indians always separate the sinew which

shrank, and that it is never seen in the venison exposed for sale; he did

not know what they did with it. His elder brother, whom I afterwards met,

told me that they eat it as a rarity; but I have also heard, though on

less respectable authority, that they refrain from it, like the ancient

Jews. A gentleman, who had lived on the Indian frontier, or in the nation,

for ten or fifteen years, told me that he had often been surprised that

the Indians always detached this sinew; but it had never occurred to him

to inquire the reason.”(764) James Adair, who knew the Indians of the

South-Eastern States intimately, and whose absurd theories appear not to

have distorted his view of the facts, observes that “when in the woods,

the Indians cut a small piece out of the lower part of the thighs of the

deer they kill, lengthways and pretty deep. Among the great number of

venison-hams they bring to our trading-houses, I do not remember to have

observed one without it.... And I have been assured by a gentleman of

character, who is now an inhabitant of South Carolina, and well acquainted

with the customs of the northern Indians, that they also cut a piece out

of the thigh of every deer they kill, and throw it away; and reckon it

such a dangerous pollution to eat it as to occasion sickness and other

misfortunes of sundry kinds, especially by spoiling their guns from

shooting with proper force and direction.”(765)

(M197) In more recent times the statement of Adair’s informant has been

confirmed by a French missionary, who has also published the “obscure

story” to which the English traveller Hodgson refers. The Loucheux and

Hare-skin Indians who roam the bleak steppes and forests that stretch from

Hudson’s Bay to the Rocky Mountains, and northward to the frozen sea, are

forbidden by custom to eat the sinew of the legs of animals. To explain

this custom they tell the following “sacred story.” Once upon a time a man

found a burrow of porcupines, and going down into it after the porcupines

he lost his way in the darkness, till a kind giant called “He who sees

before and behind” released him by cleaving open the earth. So the man,

whose name was “Fireless and Homeless,” lived with the kind giant, and the

giant hunted elans and beavers for him, and carried him about in the

sheath of his flint knife. “But know, my son,” said the giant, “that he

who uses the sky as his head is angry with me, and has sworn my

destruction. If he slays me the clouds will be tinged with my blood; they

will be red with it, probably.” Then he gave the man an axe made of the

tooth of a gigantic beaver, and went forth to meet his foe. But from under

the ice the man heard a dull muffled sound. It was a whale which was

making this noise because it was naked and cold. Warned by the man, the

giant went toward the whale, which took human shape, and rushed upon the

giant. It was the wicked giant, the kind giant’s enemy. The two struggled

together for a long time, till the kind giant cried, “Oh, my son! cut, cut

the sinew of the leg.” The man cut the sinew, and the wicked giant fell

down and was slain. That is why the Indians do not eat the sinew of the

leg. Afterwards, one day the sky suddenly flushed a fiery red, so Fireless

and Homeless knew that the kind giant was no more, and he wept.(766)