infrequently at that time his tutelary divinity was ascertained by the
priests and assigned him, as among the Mayas, and the Africans of the
Congo River. With the latter, it was also customary to lay upon the
new-born babe a series of “vows,” or resolutions touching his conduct in
life. These were impressed on the mother, who adopted it as a sacred duty
to bring up her child in obedience to them. A similar habit prevailed in
the Andaman Islands and elsewhere.[238]
With these vows was often associated the rite of baptism, by sprinkling
or by immersion in water. Even among the rude Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego
we find that the child, when born, was promptly dipped in water, not for
sanitary but for religious reasons.
The ancient inhabitants of Teneriffe considered it necessary to have
a child formally asperged by a priestess before acknowledging it as a
member of the family,[239] and some such rite was prevalent in many
tribes. It was in one sense an initiation, as it was with the neophytes
of the mysteries of Mithras, who, according to Tertullian, were baptised
upon entering the novitiate. In another, it would seem to have been a
purification from inherited sin, in which sense it was practised by the
Nahuas of Mexico and the Quichuas of Peru. With the Mayas of Yucatan, it
was in common usage and was known by the significant name, “the second
birth.”[240]
_2. Relating to the Name_.—The Name, as we have already seen, was
looked upon as a part of the person, one of his forms or modes of life.
Very generally, its selection was a matter of religious moment, and
accompanied with solemn ceremonies. A person might have many names, but
there was one which was taken from or referred to his or her tutelary
spirit, and this was holy and not to be lightly used.
Among the Nahuas this was generally announced by the priest on the
seventh day after birth, but as it would be profane to speak it
constantly, another was employed for ordinary conversation. The Algonquin
children, says one who lived among them long, are taught by their mothers
not to divulge their real names, lest by so doing they should offend the
personal god who has taken them under his protection.[241]
When a babe, among the Seminoles of Florida, was about a fortnight old,
the mother took it in her arms and walked three times around the public
square of the village, calling aloud the name given it; but this name
was not that by which it was later known; and “they were always averse
to telling it.”[242] With some tribes, as the Choctaws, the idea of
profanity existed only if the person himself spoke his name; so that, “it
is impossible to get it from him unless he has an acquaintance present,
whom he will request to tell it for him.”[243] Analogous customs abound
in early religions and many of them survive in modern folk-lore.[244]
In some instances the American Indian would exchange his name for that
of a friend, or extend to him his name; a rare and high sign of amity,
as it signified that the receiver was thus placed under the guardianship
of the same tutelar deity. This custom extended widely throughout the
island world of the Pacific and among many primitive peoples. It has
often been noted, but its peculiarly religious meaning has generally been
misunderstood.
That certain names are auspicious and others inauspicious is a belief
that belongs everywhere to mankind in the primitive stage of thought.
But it is curious to note that while generally the auspicious names are
those of sweet sound and favourable sense, in Tonkin, Siam, and some
other regions ugly and unpleasant names are preferred, because these will
frighten away the evil spirits.[245]
_3. Rites Relating to Puberty._—On the momentous crisis in the personal
life when the boy enters into manhood and the girl becomes a woman, in
nearly all primitive tribes a solemn rite is prescribed, the object of
which is to prepare the child for the duties of the wider life, which it
is about to begin.
No better example for such a ceremony could be selected than that which
prevails among the southern tribes of Australia. It is their principal
public act of worship. The name by which it is known is the _Bora_,[246]
a word derived from the belt or girdle which the men wear, and which is
at that time conferred on the youth. Its celebration involves extensive
preparations and occupies a number of days. The youths are submitted to
severe tests and sometimes to dreadful mutilations. They are taught the
holy names and sacred traditions; and when they have satisfied their
elders of their endurance and fidelity, they are admitted to the manhood
of the tribe.
The _Bora_ is a distinctly religious ceremony. It is said to have been
instituted by their chief god Turamulun himself, and remains under
his spiritual charge. Its rites “involve the idea of a dedication to
supernatural powers,” and the figure of the god, moulded in high relief
on the earth in the costume and attitude of the sacred dance, is intended
to represent his personal presence. The aim is the education of the
individual to fill his place properly in the tribal life; and one of the
most intelligent of English observers expresses his conviction that
“every rule of conduct under which the novice is placed is directly
intended to some end beneficent to the community or believed to be.”
Throughout most of America, a similar initiation was required of the
youth before he was entitled to the privileges of manhood. It was
frequently accompanied by the most painful tests of his courage and
endurance. His naked back was lacerated with rods, his strength was tried
by prolonged hunger, thongs were inserted into his flesh and torn out by
the bystanders.
More frequently the boy was sent alone into the woods, and there,
exposed to inclement weather, cold, hunger and thirst, self-torture and
meditation, awaited the divine revelation which entitled him to call
himself a man!
“Could it be possible,” exclaims an intelligent traveller, “to hear
anything stranger, more wonderful, than these stories of unheard-of
castigations and torments to which boys of thirteen or fourteen subject
themselves, merely for the sake of an idea, a dream, the fulfilment of a
religious duty? More surprising is it that not merely some extraordinary
youth is capable of this, but that every young Indian, without exception,
displays such heroism.”[247]
The same rule applied to the girl. As it became evident that the period
had arrived in her life-history when she was capable of the sacred duties
of motherhood, she either retired into the forest, there to commune alone
with her guardian spirit, or, as among the Sioux Indians, the fact was
made known to the village, and a solemn feast announced by her parents.
At this, some venerable priest addressed the guests, “calling attention
to the sacred and mysterious manner in which nature had announced the
fact that she was ready to embrace the duties of matrimony!”[248]
In these ceremonies, which may be said to belong to primitive religions
in all times, we recognise again the one idea which more than any other
permeated all their myths and rites,—the idea of Life. It was because
the boy and girl, passing to riper years, indicated the acquisition of
the power to perpetuate and transmit Life, that at this age it was held
necessary for them to mark the epoch by rites of the most sacred import.
_4. Rites Relating to Marriage._—If the notion of life was thus the
inspiration of the rites of puberty, still more potently did it control
those relating to marriage.
Much has been written by special students concerning the forms of
primitive marriage, and much of what has been written is theory only, not
supported by actual and intimate knowledge of facts.
The assertion is common in works of the kind that the earliest form of
marriage was no marriage at all,—mere promiscuity,—and that, later, a
modified form of the same, known as “communal” marriage, prevailed.
Not a single example of either of these has been known in history or
in ethnology, and it is a gratuitous hypothesis only that either ever
prevailed in a permanent community.
What we first discern is the family, generally centred around the mother,
and tracing descent through the maternal ancestors only. This is the
“matriarchal” as distinguished from the “patriarchal” system, the latter
being that in which the father is the centre and head of the family, and
the genealogy is traced in his line. Both these forms, however, have
existed, so far as we know, in wholly primitive conditions. The selection
of one or the other was a matter of local accident or incident.
The primitive family, held together by one or other of these ties of
blood-relationship, was a close corporation. It might adopt outsiders,
but after admission they were considered of the same blood and lineage.
Its property was in common, its laws were laid on all, its very gods
were its own. Especially, the rules relating to marriage were prescribed
with rigid formality.
The general practice was that the youth must seek his bride from another
recognised family (gens or totem) of the tribe. To choose her from his
own immediate family was a crime of such deep dye that even an Australian
savage “could not consider such a thing possible”; although, in later
conditions, this artificial barrier was often weakened.[249]
In matriarchal systems, the husband usually went to live with the gens
of the wife, but did not become a member of it. He was looked upon as a
stranger and an interloper. Among some Australian and American tribes,
he never spoke directly to his wife’s mother, or even looked at her.
His children did not acknowledge him as a blood-relation, and when he
grew old and useless, he had to look to his own family, not to his own
offspring, for his maintenance.
The origin of these strange usages was strictly religious. They have been
analysed as they existed in many nations by one of the ablest of German
ethnologists, and their source has been shown to be that the gods of
the one gens never willingly accept the introduction of a stranger into
the household except by the regular formulas of adoption, which would
prevent marriage; hence, the husband is, and ever remains, a foreigner
and an interloper in the matriarchal household. His wife’s god is not his
god, nor are her people his people.[250]
The actual ceremony of marriage itself often indicates this. Much has
been said by writers on ethnology of “marriage by capture,” and it is
often asserted to be that most usual among primitive peoples, and to
continue in survivals in higher conditions of culture.
There is, indeed, very frequently a ceremony which presents the
appearance of violently seizing and carrying away by main force the
bride-elect. But it is not to be understood as the reminiscence of a
time when the man went forth and snatched a girl from some neighbouring
tribe to become his slave and his wife. I doubt if in the true totemic
marriage, considered as distinct from concubinage, any such method was
practised. It is not so to-day, even among the Australian Blacks. If they
steal a woman, they first inquire as to her kinship, and if she belongs
to a class into which her captor cannot marry, according to the laws of
his clan, he sets her free.[251]
The so-called “marriage by capture” was either a recognised tribute
to maidenly coyness, by which her real or feigned resistance was to
be overcome in a manner creditable to herself,—a sentiment constantly
witnessed in the lower animals as well as in modern life; or it was a
method of conciliating her household gods, the deities of the gens, by
giving the appearance of constraint and succumbing to force on the part
of the girl. Some of the northern tribes of America carried these notions
to the extent of a pretended concealment of the marriage long after it
had been performed. The husband was obliged to enter the home of his wife
by night and secretly. To approach it in daytime or to be seen in her
company would have been a grave impropriety.[252]
The second primitive form of marriage is by purchase. This also is
far less usual than many writers have assumed. There is indeed, very
commonly, as in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with or
previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it is not regarded as a
purchase and sale when an American girl’s father gives his daughter and a
million to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title conferred on the
bride. It may in reality be a mere commercial transaction, but in theory
it is not so.
Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among most of the aboriginal
tribes, where we find it in vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form
of compensation to the household gods for the privilege of remaining
a member of the clan, or for the permission to enter its ranks as an
authorised resident.
Of course, women were bought and sold as any other commodity; they were
part of the booty of victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for
enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the examination of the
strictly totemic marriage we find even among the wildest tribes that it
was generally founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted under the
sanction of the recognised family laws, and that its ritual was that
of a religious ceremony.[253] The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the
laws relating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by the sacred
ant-eater, and that their infraction will be severely punished.[254]
The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the nature of offerings.
Ceremonies of lustration and purification, in which the sacred
elements, fire and water, took a prominent part, were general, and
the relationship established was in its essence one of religious
significance, and not one of mere secular import.
_5. Relating to Death._—An attractive writer, Professor Frank Granger,
remarks in a recent volume: “The first attitude of primitive man to his
dead seems to have been one of almost unmixed terror.”[255] Would that we
could give primitive man so much credit! But we cannot. The evidence is
mountain-high that in the earliest and rudest period of human history the
corpse inspired so little terror that it was nearly always eaten by the
surviving friends![256]
We can look back clearly through the corridors of time to that stage of
development when death and the dead inspired no more terror or aversion
in man than they do to-day among the carnivorous brutes.
Throughout the whole of the palæolithic period of culture we discover
extremely faint traces of any mode of sepulture, any respect for the dead.
The oldest cemeteries or funeral monuments of any sort date from the
neolithic period. Then the full meaning of Death seems to have broken
suddenly on man, and his whole life became little more than a _meditatio
mortis_, a preparation for the world beyond the tomb. What Professor
Granger says of the ancient Romans applies to very many primitive tribes:
“In the belief of the Romans, the right to live was not estimated more
highly than the right to receive proper burial.”[257]
The funeral or mortuary ceremonies, which are often so elaborate, and
so punctiliously performed in savage tribes, have a twofold purpose.
They are equally for the benefit of the individual and for that of the
community. If they are neglected or inadequately conducted, the restless
spirit of the departed cannot reach the realm of joyous peace, and
therefore he returns to lurk about his former home and to plague the
survivors for their carelessness.
It was therefore to lay the ghost, to avoid the anger of the disembodied
spirit, that the living instituted and performed the burial ceremonies;
while it became to the interest of the individual to provide for it that
those rites should be carried out which would conduct his own soul to the
abode of the blessed.
These were as various as were the myths of the after-world and the
fancies as to the number and destiny of the personal souls.
Most common of them all was some sort of funeral feast. The disagreeable
suggestion is close, that this was a survival of the habit of eating
the corpse itself. Up to a very recent date that habit prevailed among
the Bolivian Indians; and so desirable an end was it esteemed that the
traveller D’Orbigny tells of an old man he met there whose only regret at
embracing Christianity was that his body would be eaten by worms instead
of by his relations!
The later theory, however, was that then the soul itself was supplied
with food. It partook spiritually of the viands and thus, well fortified
for its long journey, departed in good humour with those it left behind.
The same notion led to the world-wide custom of providing it with many
articles by placing them in the tomb or burning them on the funeral pyre.
This extended not only to weapons, utensils, ornaments, and clothing,
but not infrequently to companions. On the coast of Peru the wives of
a man were burned alive with his dead body, and among the Natchez they
were knocked on the head and interred under the same mounds.[258] I have
seen the mummy of a woman from the Cliff Dwellers of Arizona, holding
in her arms the body of her babe which had been strangled with a cord,
still tightly stretched around its little neck. Plainly the sympathetic
survivors had reflected how lonely the poor mother would be in the next
world without her babe, and had determined that its soul should accompany
hers. Elsewhere, slaves or companions in arms were slain or slew
themselves that they might accompany some famous chieftain to his long
home.
In these funeral rites the disposal of the corpse depended upon ethnic
traits, ancestral usage, or the instructions of the priests.
Perhaps the earliest was simple exposure. The body was left in the forest
for the beasts and birds to consume, as among the Caddo Indians and
others; or it was sunk in the waters that the fish should perform the
same office; the usual object being to obtain the bones with the least
trouble. The oldest of all burials yet discovered, those in the caves in
the south of France, were of this character, simple “seposition” as it
is called. The body was merely laid in a posture of repose on the cave
floor, with the weapons and ornaments it had used during life.[259]
Next in point of time doubtless came inhumation, the interment of the
body in the ground or covering it, laid on the surface, with stones and
earth,—the burial mound. Homeric Greeks, American Indians, and tribes of
all continents practised this method in different ages, and the barrows
or tumuli thus erected remain in thousands to this day to attest the
religious earnestness of those early peoples. The vast monuments which
at times they constructed for their dead, the pyramids, dolmens, and
teocalli, have never since been equalled in magnitude or cubical contents.
Another and significant funeral rite of high antiquity is that of
cremation or incineration. It was symbolic in character, the body being
given to the flames in order that the spirit, by their purifying agency,
should promptly be set free and united with the gods. This method
also prevailed extensively among the American race, and was quite in
consonance with their opinions of the after-life. “It is the one passion
of his superstition,” writes Mr. Powers of the Californian Indian, “to
think of the soul of his departed friend as set free, and purified by the
flames; not bound to the mouldering body, but borne up on the soft clouds
of the smoke toward the beautiful sun.”[260]
Other peoples entertained the opinion that the body as it is, in all
its parts, must be preserved in order that it might be again habitable
for the soul, when this ethereal essence should return to earth from
its celestial wanderings. Therefore, with utmost care they sought for
means to preserve the fleshly tenement. In Virginia, in some parts of
South America, on the Madeira Islands, the aboriginal population dried
the corpse over a slow fire into a condition that resisted decay;
while elsewhere, the nitrous soil of caves offered a natural means of
embalming. The Alaskan and Peruvian mummies, like those of ancient
Egypt, were artificially prepared and swathed in numerous cerecloths.
In all, the same faith in the literal resurrection of the flesh was the
prevailing motive.
More generally, the belief was held that the soul remained attached in
some way to the bones. These were carefully cleaned and either preserved
in the house, or stored in ossuaries. Frequently they were kept as
amulets or mascots, in the notion that the friendly spirit which animated
the living person would continue to hover around his skeleton or skull,
and exert its amicable power. The Peruvians held that the bones of
their deceased priests were oracular, speaking good counsel, and the
missionaries were obliged to break them into small fragments to dispel
this superstition[261]; though they themselves continued to hold it
heretical to doubt the efficacy of the bones of the saints! A tribe on
the Orinoco was wont to beat the bones of their dead into powder and mix
it with their cassava bread, holding that thus their friends and parents
lived again in the bodies of the eaters!
After cremation, the ashes were left upon the altar, and the whole
covered with earth; or they were preserved in urns with the fragments of
the bones; or, as with a tribe of the Amazon, they were cast upon the
waters of the great river and floated down to the limitless ocean.
Thus closed the last scene in the existence of the primitive man. From
birth to death he had been surrounded and governed by the ceremonies of
his religion; and on his passage out of this life, he confidently looked
to another in which he should find a compensation and a consolation for
the woes of his present condition.
Following these funerary functions came the customs of mourning. They
were often excessively protracted and severe, involving self-mutilation,
as the lopping of a finger or an ear, scarification, flagellation,
fasting, and cutting the hair. These were shared by the friends and
relatives of the deceased, and at the death of some famous chief “the
whole tribe will prostrate themselves to their woe.”
The psychic explanation of these demonstrations is not wholly clear. By
some they have been interpreted as a commutation for cannibalism, and
by others as an excuse for not accompanying the corpse into the other
world. One writer says: “Barbarism, abandoned to sorrow, finds physical
suffering a relief from mental agony.”[262] On the other hand, a recent
student of the subject claims that in these rites we perceive “the oldest
evidence of active conscience in the human race; the individual laid
hands on himself in order to restore the moral equilibrium.”[263] Need
we go farther than to see in them merely exaggerated forms of the same
emotional outbursts which lead nervous temperaments everywhere to wring
the hands and tear the hair in moments of violent grief?
LECTURE VI.
The Lines of Development of Primitive Religions.
CONTENTS:—Pagan Religions not wholly Bad—Their Lines of
Development as Connected with: 1. The Primitive Social Bond—The
Totem, the Priesthood, and the Law; 2. The Family and the
Position of Woman; 3. The Growth of Jurisprudence—The Ordeal,
Trial by Battle, Oaths, and the Right of Sanctuary—Religion is
Anarchic; 4. The Development of Ethics—Dualism of Primitive
Ethics—Opposition of Religion to Ethics; 5. The Advance in
Positive Knowledge—Religion _versus_ Science; 6. The Fostering
of the Arts—The Aim for Beauty and Perfection—Colour-Symbolism,
Sculpture, Metre, Music, Oratory, Graphic Methods—Useful Arts,
Architecture; 7. The Independent Life of the Individual—His
Freedom and Happiness—Inner Stadia of Progress: 1. From the
Object to the Symbol; 2. From the Ceremonial Law to the
Personal Ideal; 3. From the Tribal to the National Conception
of Religion—Conclusion.
It has always been, and is now, the prevailing belief in Christendom that
pagan or heathen religions cannot exert and never have exerted any good
influence on their votaries.
This opinion has also been defended by some modern and eminent
authorities in the science of ethnology, as, for example, the late
Professor Waitz.[264] It is a favourite teaching in missionary societies
and in works of travellers who are keen observers of the shortcomings of
others’ faiths.