to the rank of divinities, the first thing to be observed is that all
such deifications must, if our theory is correct, be inferences drawn
from experience of some sort; they must be hypotheses devised to explain
the unperceived causes of certain phenomena, whether of the human mind
or of external nature. All of them imply, as I have said, a belief that
the conscious human personality, call it the soul, the spirit, or what
you please, can survive the body and continue to exist in a disembodied
state with unabated or even greatly increased powers for good or evil.
This faith in the survival of personality after death may for the sake
of brevity be called a faith in immortality, though the term immortality
is not strictly correct, since it seems to imply eternal duration,
whereas the idea of eternity is hardly intelligible to many primitive
peoples, who nevertheless firmly believe in the continued existence, for
a longer or shorter time, of the human spirit after the dissolution of
the body. Now the faith in the immortality of the soul or, to speak more
correctly, in the continued existence of conscious human personality
after death, is, as I remarked before, exceedingly common among men at
all levels of intellectual evolution from the lowest upwards; certainly
it is not peculiar to adherents of the higher religions, but is held as
an unquestionable truth by at least the great majority of savage and
barbarous peoples as to whose ideas we possess accurate information;
indeed it might be hard to point to any single tribe of men, however
savage, of whom we could say with certainty that the faith is totally
wanting among them.
[Sidenote: The question of immortality is a fundamental problem of
natural theology in the wider sense.]
Hence if we are to explain the deification of dead men, we must first
explain the widespread belief in immortality; we must answer the
question, how does it happen that men in all countries and at all stages
of ignorance or knowledge so commonly suppose that when they die their
consciousness will still persist for an indefinite time after the decay
of the body? To answer that question is one of the fundamental problems
of natural theology, not indeed in the full sense of the word theology,
if we confine the term strictly to a reasoned knowledge of a God; for
the example of Buddhism proves that a belief in the existence of the
human soul after death is quite compatible with disbelief in a deity.
But if we may use, as I think we may, the phrase natural theology in an
extended sense to cover theories which, though they do not in themselves
affirm the existence of a God, nevertheless appear to be one of the
deepest and most fruitful sources of the belief in his reality, then we
may legitimately say that the doctrine of human immortality does fall
within the scope of natural theology. What then is its origin? How is it
that men so commonly believe themselves to be immortal?
[Sidenote: If there is any natural knowledge of immortality, it must be
acquired either by intuition or experience; it is apparently not given
by intuition; hence it must be acquired, if at all, by experience.]
If there is any natural knowledge of human immortality, it must be
acquired either by intuition or by experience; there is no other way.
Now whether other men from a simple contemplation of their own nature,
quite apart from reasoning, know or believe themselves intuitively to be
immortal, I cannot say; but I can say with some confidence that for
myself I have no such intuition whatever of my own immortality, and that
if I am left to the resources of my natural faculties alone, I can as
little affirm the certain or probable existence of my personality after
death as I can affirm the certain or probable existence of a personal
God. And I am bold enough to suspect that if men could analyse their own
ideas, they would generally find themselves to be in a similar
predicament as to both these profound topics. Hence I incline to lay it
down as a probable proposition that men as a rule have no intuitive
knowledge of their own immortality, and that if there is any natural
knowledge of such a thing it can only be acquired by a process of
reasoning from experience.[4]
[Sidenote: The idea of immortality seems to have been suggested to man
both by his inward and his outward experience, notably by dreams, which
are a case of inward experience.]
What then is the kind of experience from which the theory of human
immortality is deduced? Is it our experience of the operations of our
own minds? or is it our experience of external nature? As a matter of
historical fact--and you will remember that I am treating the question
purely from the historical standpoint--men seem to have inferred the
persistence of their personality after death both from the one kind of
experience and from the other, that is, both from the phenomena of their
inner life and from the phenomena of what we call the external world.
Thus the savage, with whose beliefs we are chiefly concerned in these
lectures, finds a very strong argument for immortality in the phenomena
of dreams, which are strictly a part of his inner life, though in his
ignorance he commonly fails to discriminate them from what we popularly
call waking realities. Hence when the images of persons whom he knows to
be dead appear to him in a dream, he naturally infers that these persons
still exist somewhere and somehow apart from their bodies, of the decay
or destruction of which he may have had ocular demonstration. How could
he see dead people, he asks, if they did not exist? To argue that they
have perished like their bodies is to contradict the plain evidence of
his senses; for to the savage still more than to the civilised man
seeing is believing; that he sees the dead only in dreams does not shake
his belief, since he thinks the appearances of dreams just as real as
the appearances of his waking hours. And once he has in this way gained
a conviction that the dead survive and can help or harm him, as they
seem to do in dreams, it is natural or necessary for him to extend the
theory to the occurrences of daily life, which, as I have said, he does
not sharply distinguish from the visions of slumber. He now explains
many of these occurrences and many of the processes of nature by the
direct interposition of the spirits of the departed; he traces their
invisible hand in many of the misfortunes and in some of the blessings
which befall him; for it is a common feature of the faith in ghosts, at
least among savages, that they are usually spiteful and mischievous, or
at least testy and petulant, more apt to injure than to benefit the
survivors. In that they resemble the personified spirits of nature,
which in the opinion of most savages appear to be generally tricky and
malignant beings, whose anger is dangerous and whose favour is courted
with fear and trembling. Thus even without the additional assurance
afforded by tales of apparitions and spectres, primitive man may come in
time to imagine the world around him to be more or less thickly peopled,
influenced, and even dominated by a countless multitude of spirits,
among whom the shades of past generations of men and women hold a very
prominent, often apparently the leading place. These spirits, powerful
to help or harm, he seeks either simply to avert, when he deems them
purely mischievous, or to appease and conciliate, when he supposes them
sufficiently good-natured to respond to his advances. In some such way
as this, arguing from the real but, as we think, misinterpreted
phenomena of dreams, the savage may arrive at a doctrine of human
immortality and from that at a worship of the dead.
[Sidenote: It has also been suggested by the resemblance of the living
to the dead, which is a case of outward experience.]
This explanation of the savage faith in immortality is neither novel nor
original: on the contrary it is perhaps the commonest and most familiar
that has yet been propounded. If it does not account for all the facts,
it probably accounts for many of them. At the same time I do not doubt
that many other inferences drawn from experiences of different kinds
have confirmed, even if they did not originally suggest, man's confident
belief in his own immortality. To take a single example of outward
experience, the resemblances which children often bear to deceased
kinsfolk appear to have prompted in the minds of many savages the notion
that the souls of these dead kinsfolk have been born again in their
descendants.[5] From a few cases of resemblances so explained it would
be easy to arrive at a general theory that all living persons are
animated by the souls of the dead; in other words, that the human spirit
survives death for an indefinite period, if not for eternity, during
which it undergoes a series of rebirths or reincarnations. However it
has been arrived at, this doctrine of the transmigration or
reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages; and
from what we know on the subject we seem to be justified in conjecturing
that at certain stages of mental and social evolution the belief in
metempsychosis has been far commoner and has exercised a far deeper
influence on the life and institutions of primitive man than the actual
evidence before us at present allows us positively to affirm.
[Sidenote: The aim of these lectures is to collect a number of facts
illustrative of the belief in immortality and of the customs based on it
among some of the lower races.]
Be that as it may--and I have no wish to dogmatise on so obscure a
topic--it is certain that a belief in the survival of the human
personality after death and the practice of a propitiation or worship of
the dead have prevailed very widely among mankind and have played a very
important part in the development of natural religion. While many
writers have duly recognised the high importance both of the belief and
of the worship, no one, so far as I know, has attempted systematically
to collect and arrange the facts which illustrate the prevalence of this
particular type of religion among the various races of mankind. A large
body of evidence lies to hand in the voluminous and rapidly increasing
literature of ethnology; but it is dispersed over an enormous number of
printed books and papers, to say nothing of the materials which still
remain buried either in manuscript or in the minds of men who possess
the requisite knowledge but have not yet committed it to writing. To
draw all those stores of information together and digest them into a
single treatise would be a herculean labour, from which even the most
industrious researcher into the dusty annals of the human past might
shrink dismayed. Certainly I shall make no attempt to perform such a
feat within the narrow compass of these lectures. But it seems to me
that I may make a useful, if a humble, contribution to the history of
religion by selecting a portion of the evidence and submitting it to my
hearers. For that purpose, instead of accumulating a mass of facts from
all the various races of mankind and then comparing them together, I
prefer to limit myself to a few races and to deal with each of them
separately, beginning with the lowest savages, about whom we possess
accurate information, and gradually ascending to peoples who stand
higher in the scale of culture. In short the method of treatment which I
shall adopt will be the descriptive rather than the comparative. I shall
not absolutely refrain from instituting comparisons between the customs
and beliefs of different races, but for the most part I shall content
myself with describing the customs and beliefs of each race separately
without reference to those of others. Each of the two methods, the
comparative and the descriptive, has its peculiar advantages and
disadvantages, and in my published writings I have followed now the one
method and now the other. The comparative method is unquestionably the
more attractive and stimulating, but it cannot be adopted without a good
deal of more or less conscious theorising, since every comparison
implicitly involves a theory. If we desire to exclude theories and
merely accumulate facts for the use of science, the descriptive method
is undoubtedly the better adapted for the arrangement of our materials:
it may not stimulate enquiry so powerfully, but it lays a more solid
foundation on which future enquirers may build. It is as a collection of
facts illustrative of the belief in immortality and of all the momentous
consequences which have flowed from that belief, that I desire the
following lectures to be regarded. They are intended to serve simply as
a document of religious history; they make no pretence to discuss
philosophically the truth of the beliefs and the morality of the
practices which will be passed under review. If any inferences can
indeed be drawn from the facts to the truth or falsehood of the beliefs
and to the moral worth or worthlessness of the practices, I prefer to
leave it to others more competent than myself to draw them. My sight is
not keen enough, my hand is not steady enough to load the scales and
hold the balance in so difficult and delicate an enquiry.
[Footnote 1: Matthew Arnold, _Literature and Dogma_, ch. i., p. 31
(Popular Edition, London, 1893).]
[Footnote 2: For a single instance see L. Sternberg, "Die Religion der
Giljaken," _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, viii. (1905) pp. 462
_sqq._, where the writer tells us that the Gilyaks have boundless faith
in the supernatural power of their shamans, and that the shamans are
nearly always persons who suffer from hysteria in one form or another.]
[Footnote 3: As to the widespread belief that flint weapons are
thunderbolts see Sir E. B. Tylor, _Researches into the Early History of
Mankind_, Third Edition (London, 1878), pp. 223-227; Chr. Blinkenberg,
_The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore_ (Cambridge, 1911); W. W.
Skeat "Snakestones and Thunderbolts," _Folk-lore_, xxiii. (1912) pp. 60
_sqq._; and the references in _The Magic Art and the Evolution of
Kings_, ii. 374.]
[Footnote 4: Wordsworth, who argues strongly, almost passionately, for
"the consciousness of a principle of Immortality in the human soul,"
admits that "the sense of Immortality, if not a coexistent and twin
birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring." See his
_Essay upon Epitaphs_, appended to _The Excursion_ (_Poetical Works_,
London, 1832, vol. iv. pp. 336, 338). This somewhat hesitating admission
of the inferential nature of the belief in immortality carries all the
more weight because it is made by so warm an advocate of human
immortality.]
[Footnote 5: For instance, the Kagoro of Northern Nigeria believe that
"a spirit may transmigrate into the body of a descendant born
afterwards, male or female; in fact, this is common, as is proved by the
likeness of children to their parents or grand-parents, and it is lucky,
for the ghost has returned, and has no longer any power to frighten the
relatives until the new body dies, and it is free again" (Major A. J. N.
Tremearne, "Notes on some Nigerian Head-hunters," _Journal of the R.
Anthropological Institute_, xlii. (1912) p. 159). Compare _Taboo and the
Perils of the Soul_, pp. 88 _sq._; _The Dying God_, p. 287 (p. 288,
Second Impression).]
LECTURE II
THE SAVAGE CONCEPTION OF DEATH
[Sidenote: The subject of these lectures is the belief in immortality
and the worship of the dead.]
Last day I explained the subject of which I propose to treat and the
method which I intend to follow in these lectures. I shall describe the
belief in immortality, or rather in the continued existence of the human
soul after death, as that belief is found among certain of the lower
races, and I shall give some account of the religion which has been
based upon it. That religion is in brief a propitiation or worship of
the human dead, who according to the degree of power ascribed to them by
the living are supposed to vary in dignity from the humble rank of a
mere common ghost up to the proud position of deity. The elements of
such a worship appear to exist among all races of men, though in some
they have been much more highly developed than in others.
[Sidenote: Preliminary account of savage beliefs concerning the nature
and origin of death.]
But before I address myself to the description of particular races, I
wish in this and the following lecture to give you some general account
of the beliefs of savages concerning the nature and origin of death. The
problem of death has very naturally exercised the minds of men in all
ages. Unlike so many problems which interest only a few solitary
thinkers this one concerns us all alike, since simpletons as well as
sages must die, and even the most heedless and feather-brained can
hardly help sometimes asking themselves what comes after death. The
question is therefore thrust in a practical, indeed importunate form on
our attention; and we need not wonder that in the long history of human
speculation some of the highest intellects should have occupied
themselves with it and sought to find an answer to the riddle. Some of
their solutions of the problem, though dressed out in all the beauty of
exquisite language and poetic imagery, singularly resemble the rude
guesses of savages. So little, it would seem, do the natural powers even
of the greatest minds avail to pierce the thick veil that hides the end
of life.
[Sidenote: The problem of death is one of universal interest.]
In saying that the problem is thrust home upon us all, I do not mean to
imply that all men are constantly or even often engaged in meditating on
the nature and origin of death. Far from it. Few people trouble
themselves about that or any other purely abstract question: the common
man would probably not give a straw for an answer to it. What he wants
to know, what we all want to know, is whether death is the end of all
things for the individual, whether our conscious personality perishes
with the body or survives it for a time or for eternity. That is the
enigma propounded to every human being who has been born into the world:
that is the door at which so many enquirers have knocked in vain. Stated
in this limited form the problem has indeed been of universal interest:
there is no race of men known to us which has not pondered the mystery
and arrived at some conclusions to which it more or less confidently
adheres. Not that all races have paid an equal attention to it. On some
it has weighed much more heavily than on others. While some races, like
some individuals, take death almost lightly, and are too busy with the
certainties of the present world to pay much heed to the uncertainties
of a world to come, the minds of others have dwelt on the prospect of a
life beyond the grave till the thought of it has risen with them to a
passion, almost to an obsession, and has begotten a contempt for the
fleeting joys of this ephemeral existence by comparison with the
hoped-for bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic,
examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such
peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the
shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like the dog in the fable
who dropped the real leg of mutton, from his mouth in order to snap at
its reflection in the water. Be that as it may, where such beliefs and
hopes are entertained in full force, the whole activity of the mind and
the whole energy of the body are apt to be devoted to a preparation for
a blissful or at all events an untroubled eternity, and life becomes, in
the language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This
excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful
source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals.
In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been
frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in
torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful
serenity of reason has been exchanged for the melancholy gloom of
madness.
"Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain--_This_ Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies."
[Sidenote: The belief in immortality general among mankind.]
The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has
been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative. On this
point sceptical or agnostic peoples are nearly, if not wholly, unknown.
Accordingly if abstract truth could be determined, like the gravest
issues of national policy, by a show of hands or a counting of heads,
the doctrine of human immortality, or at least of a life after death,
would deserve to rank among the most firmly established of truths; for
were the question put to the vote of the whole of mankind, there can be
no doubt that the ayes would have it by an overwhelming majority. The
few dissenters would be overborne; their voices would be drowned in the
general roar. For dissenters there have been even among savages. The
Tongans, for example, thought that only the souls of noblemen are saved,
the rest perish with their bodies.[6] However, this aristocratic view
has never been popular, and is not likely to find favour in our
democratic age.
[Sidenote: Belief of many savages that they would never die if their
lives were not cut short by sorcery. Belief of the Abipones.]
But many savage races not only believe in a life after death; they are
even of opinion that they would never die at all if it were not for the
maleficent arts of sorcerers who cut the vital thread prematurely short.
In other words, they disbelieve in what we call a natural death; they
think that all men are naturally immortal in this life, and that every
death which takes place is in fact a violent death inflicted by the hand
of a human enemy, though in many cases the foe is invisible and works
his fell purpose not by a sword or a spear but by magic. Thus the
Abipones, a now extinct tribe of horse Indians in Paraguay, used to
allege that they would be immortal and that none of them would ever die
if only the Spaniards and the sorcerers could be banished from America;
for they were in the habit of attributing every death, whatever its
cause, either to the baleful arts of sorcerers or to the firearms of the
Spaniards. Even if a man died riddled with wounds, with his bones
smashed, or through the exhaustion of old age, these Indians would all
deny that the wounds or old age was the cause of his death; they firmly
believed that the death was brought about by magic, and they would make
careful enquiries to discover the sorcerer who had cast the fatal spell
on their comrade. The relations of the deceased would move every stone
to detect and punish the culprit; and they imagined that they could do
this by cutting out the heart and tongue of the dead man and throwing
them to a dog to be devoured. They thought that this in some way killed
the wicked magician who had killed their friend. For example, it
happened that in a squabble between two men about a horse a third man
who tried to make peace between the disputants was mortally wounded by
their spears and died in a few days. To us it might seem obvious that
the peacemaker was killed by the spear-wounds which he had received, but
none of the Abipones would admit such a thing for a moment. They stoutly
affirmed that their comrade had been done to death by the magical arts
of some person unknown, and their suspicions fell on a certain old
woman, known to be a witch, to whom the deceased had lately refused to
give a water-melon, and who out of spite had killed him by her spells,
though he appeared to the European eye to have died of a spear-wound.[7]
[Sidenote: Belief of the Araucanians.]
Similarly the warlike Araucanians of Chili are said to disbelieve in
natural death. Even if a man dies peaceably at the age of a hundred,
they still think that he has been bewitched by an enemy. A diviner or
medicine-man is consulted in order to discover the culprit. Some of
these wizards enjoy a great reputation and the Indians will send a
hundred miles or more to get the opinion of an eminent member of the
profession. In such cases they submit to him some of the remains of the
dead man, for example, his eyebrows, his nails, his tongue, or the soles
of his feet, and from an examination of these relics the man of skill
pronounces on the author of the death. The person whom he accuses is
hunted down and killed, sometimes by fire, amid the yells of an enraged
crowd.[8]
[Sidenote: Belief of the Bakaïri.]
When the eminent German anthropologist was questioning a Bakaïri Indian
of Brazil as to the language of his tribe, he gave the sentence, "Every
man must die" to be translated into the Bakaïri language. To his
astonishment, the Indian remained long silent. The same long pause
always occurred when an abstract proposition, with which he was
unfamiliar, was put before the Indian for translation into his native
tongue. On the present occasion the enquirer learned that the Indian has
no idea of necessity in the abstract, and in particular he has no
conception at all of the necessity of death. The cause of death, in his
opinion, is invariably an ill turn done by somebody to the deceased. If
there were only good men in the world, he thinks that there would be
neither sickness nor death. He knows nothing about a natural end of the
vital process; he believes that all sickness and disease are the effects
of witchcraft.[9]
[Sidenote: Belief of the Indians of Guiana in sorcery as the cause of
sickness and death.]