=MORGAN’S ANCIENT SOCIETY=; or, Researches on the Lines of Human Progress
through Savagery and Barbarism to Civilization. By LEWIS H. MORGAN, LL.D.
8vo. $4.
=SIR HENRY SUMNER MAINE’S WORKS=:
=Ancient Law=: Its Connection with the Early History of
Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas. By HENRY SUMNER
MAINE, Member of the Supreme Council of India, and Regius
Professor of the Civil Law in the University of Cambridge. With
an Introduction by Theodore W. Dwight, LL.D. 8vo. $3.50.
=Lectures on the Early History of Institutions.= A Sequel to
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=Village Communities in the East and West.= Six Lectures
delivered at Oxford: to which are added other Lectures,
Addresses, and Essays. 8vo. $3.50.
=E. B. TYLOR’S WORKS=:
=Primitive Culture=: Researches into the Development of
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=Researches into the Early History of Mankind=, and the
Development of Civilization. 8vo. $3.50.
PRIMITIVE MANNERS
AND CUSTOMS
BY
JAMES A. FARRER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1879
_INTRODUCTION._
From the myths characteristic of savage tribes, from their beliefs,
their proverbs, their political and social regulations, it is here
sought to gain some general estimate of their powers of intelligence and
imagination, their moral ideas, and their religion; subjects naturally
of much interest and inevitably of some dispute. For the reason that in
savagery as in civilisation there are heights and depths, with more of
light here, more of darkness there, it is quite impossible to bring the
whole of savage life into focus at once, so that every general conclusion
can only be taken as true within limits. The field to be studied is also
so large and diversified, that no two minds can expect to derive from
it the same impressions, nor to attain to more than partial truth about
it. But since the savage can never hope to be heard in court himself,
it is only fair to start with certain considerations which he would
be entitled to urge, and which deserve to weigh in any judgment made
regarding him.
Statements of very low powers of numeration have been perhaps too hastily
taken as indicative of a low state of intelligence; for not only have
similar assertions concerning American and Tasmanian tribes by the
earliest voyagers proved on subsequent investigation to be erroneous,
but many savages have substitutes for our arithmetic which serve them
perfectly well, the Loangese, for instance, expressing numbers in
narration not by words but by gestures; and the Koossa Kaffirs—very few
of whom are said to be able to count above ten—possessing the peculiar
faculty of detecting almost at a glance any loss in a herd of cattle
which may amount to half a thousand. In the same way the want of a
written language is often supplied by symbolism. Puzzle as it might a
person of education to read a letter, expressed by a bundle containing a
stone, a piece of charcoal, a rag, a pepper-pod, and a grain of parched
corn, this would be the way of saying in Yoruba, that, though the
sender was as strong and firm as a stone, his prospects were as dark as
charcoal; that his clothes were in rags; that he was so feverish with
anxiety that his skin burned like pepper, even enough to cause corn to
wither. The Niam-Niam, again, who declare war by hanging on a tree an
ear of maize, a fowl’s feather, and an arrow, thereby giving contingent
enemies to understand that arrows will avenge any injury done to a single
fowl or a single ear of maize, convey their meaning quite as clearly as
the most politely framed ultimata of any Foreign Office in Europe.
Many of the beliefs attributed to savages are no fair test of their
general reasoning capabilities; for there are degrees of credulity in
savage as in civilised life, and reason everywhere struggles to exist.
When Pelopidas, on the eve of the battle of Leuctra, received commands
in a dream to sacrifice to certain shades a virgin with chestnut hair,
there were not wanting soldiers, even in that army of Bœotians, who had
the shrewdness to think and the courage to say, that it was absurd to
suppose any divine powers could delight in the slaughter and sacrifice of
human beings, and that, if there were such, they deserved no reverence.
All stages of culture thus have their dissenters, their wicked reasoners.
Among the Ahts only the most superstitious now burn the house of a dead
man, with all its contents, for fear of offending his ghost. The Zulus,
whose sole religion consists in ancestor-worship, exhibited often in
the most ridiculous ceremonies, begin to doubt the power and even the
existence of their Amatongo, or dead ancestors, if, when they are sick,
their prayers and sacrifices fail to effect a cure.
The Tongan king, Finow, often stated to Mariner his doubts about the
existence of the gods, and expressed the opinion, that men were fools for
believing all they were told by the priests; whilst his saying, that the
gods always favoured that side in war on which there were the greatest
chiefs and warriors, recalls the opinion of a far more famous potentate
than Finow. The disrespect, indeed, that Finow showed to the Tongan
religion was such, that his subjects explained violent thunderstorms as
the dissensions of the gods in Bolotu about his punishment. On the other
hand, savages are also subject to relapses of superstition, such as with
us are dignified by the name of ‘movements;’ an American tribe who traced
their origin to a dog were so firmly impressed by a fanatic with the sin
of attaching their canine relatives to their sledges, that they resolved
to use dogs no more, but women instead, for dragging their possessions.
Savage ideas of morality and of government seem to agree fundamentally
with those of more advanced populations, the ideas of the latter
differing, indeed, from the barbaric much as a finished photograph
differs from its earlier stage; that is to say, not as essentially
different, but as having become ‘fixed’ after a process of development.
The idea of the wrongfulness of certain acts starts with the fear of
their consequences, that of murder, for instance, from the fear of
revenge; nor are such ideas ever separable from the lowest levels of
savage life. The sense of the sanctity of property begins with what an
individual can make or catch for himself apart from tribal claims; nor
is any state of tribal communism so strong as to recognise no private
rights in the people or things a man takes in war, the game he kills, or
the weapons he fashions. Respect for the aged is one of the best traits
of savage life, for the tribes of whom it is asserted seem to outnumber
those of whom it is denied. In Equatorial Africa young men never appear
before old ones without curtseying nor pass them by without stooping;
should they sit in their presence, it is ‘at a humble distance.’ Nor are
cases of the abandonment of the aged and infirm conclusive proof of a
deficiency of natural affection; one tribe who were accused of so acting
are also known to have carried about with them for years a palsied man
with great tenderness and attention. Truthfulness, again, is recognised
as a virtue outside the pale of the higher religions, for Mungo Park
found it one of the first lessons taught by Mandingo women to their
children, and he mentions the case of one mother, whose only consolation
on the murder of her son ‘was the reflection that the poor boy in the
course of his life had never told an untruth.’
Strange contradictions abound in savage life, extremes of barbarity
sometimes co-existing with habits of some refinement. The Ahts, who
occasionally sacrifice one of their number to the gods, and till lately
deserted their sick and aged, without the excuse of scarcity of food,
keep small mats of bark strips for strangers to wipe their feet with, and
after meals offer them water and cedar-bark for washing their hands and
mouths. They have also a strict etiquette regulating their reception of
guests; they observe public ceremonies with extreme formality; their men
of rank vie with one another in politeness. The Niam-Niam are generally
cannibals, but when several of them drink together ‘they may each be
observed to wipe the rim of the drinking-vessel before passing it on.’
The Bachapins, among whom it is said that a murderer incurs no disgrace,
yet measure a man’s merit by his industry, and despise a man who does
not work, that is, hunt, for his living. The Aztecs, with their constant
and frightful human sacrifices, were so afraid of incurring divine wrath
for the blood they spilled in the chase, that they would always preface
a hunt by burning incense to their idols, and conclude it by smearing
the faces of their divinities with the blood of their game. To turn back
from the procession which accompanied the sacrifice of young children
to the gods of rain and water rendered a man infamous and incapable of
public office; yet death was the penalty for drunkenness in either sex,
and ‘it was considered degrading for a person of quality to touch wine at
all, even in seasons of festival.’ Similar inconsistencies are common in
social regulations, especially in those relating to marriage, stringent
laws of prohibited degrees and the strictest etiquette often affording
no further evidence of purity of manners. The most barbarous marriage
ceremonies are frequently attended with absurd forms of prudery, which
it is perhaps impossible to trace to their origin. The instance of the
Aleutian islanders, who with the grossest vices connect such notions
of propriety as that either a husband or a wife would blush to address
the other in the presence of a stranger, is one among many similar
illustrations of a side of savage life which but for parallels in our
own social usages might present itself as an inexplicable anomaly.
Better experience has in so many cases dissipated original assertions of
an absolute want of religious ideas among savages, that the strongest
doubts must be felt of all similar negative propositions. Theology in one
of three grades seems rather to be the universal property of mankind,
appearing either harmless, as at the beginning or end of its historical
career, or in its second and middle stage as identical with all that is
abominable and cruel. The classification of mankind on such a basis of
division, though it could never aspire to scientific exactness, would
afford at least a standard of practical discrimination, by which the
relations between Christian and non-Christian communities might to some
extent be adjusted; for, by considering any people under one of these
three aspects, it would be possible to form some estimate of their
aptitude for, or need of, our theology, and of the advisability of our
seeking to force it upon them.[1] Should the principle ever meet with
the acceptance it deserves, that missions, like charities, ought to be
discriminate, it is not difficult to perceive the direction in which such
a truth will be likely some day to receive practical recognition.
For wherever native theology takes the form of cannibalism, sutteeism,
human sacrifices, or other rites directly destructive of earthly
happiness, there the teaching of missionaries affords the only hope of
a speedy reform, the only acquaintance possible for savage tribes with
a culture higher than their own, save that which is likely to come to
them through the medium of the brandy-bottle or the bayonet. But to send
missions to countries like Russia or China, where there exist established
systems of religion undefiled by cruelty, violates the first principle
of the faith so conveyed, disturbing the peace of families and nations
with the curse of religious animosity. When the Jesuits entreated the
Chinese Emperor, Young-tching, to reconsider his resolution to proscribe
Christianity, there was some reason in the imperial answer: ‘What should
you say if I sent a troop of lamas and bonzes to your country, to preach
their law there?’ The Taeping rebellion, or civil war, which devastated
China for about fifteen years, desolating hundreds of miles of fair
towns and fertile fields, and fought out among massacres, sieges, and
famines, of quite indescribable cruelty and horror, owed its impulse
distinctly to the working of Christian tracts among the more ignorant
classes, followed by a fanatical endeavour to substitute a travesty of
Christianity for the older religions; yet the seeds of all this misery
are still sown in China, in the name and by the ministers of a religion
of Peace, a religion that has for its first and final rule of life the
duty of so dealing with others as we should wish them to deal with
ourselves.
Cases of the third class, where the state of religious belief is so
rudimentary as to be innocuous, are unhappily few; but where such belief
has not advanced to the detriment of the general welfare, it would seem
the kindest policy not to inspire men, whose lives are spent in the
constant perils of the woods or waves, with fears of more malignant
spirits than those their own fancy has created for them, nor to teach
them the doctrine that, hard and black as this world often proves to
them, there is a yet harder and blacker one beyond. There is also
some charm in that variety of belief and custom against which we wage
unremitting war; and only a tasteless fanaticism can think with pure joy
of the time, when sectarian chapels shall stand on every island of the
seas, and Tartarus be taught wherever the sun shines. Rites and beliefs
lose the interest which cling to them in their native home as soon as
it is sought to transplant them elsewhere, just as flowers lose their
fragrance and beauty when once they have been separated from the plant on
which they grew. For this reason Puritanism has but little charm out of
England; and though it should please our love of uniformity to read (as
we may) of a Tahitian chief carrying his Sabbatarian scruples so far as
to ask whether, if he saw ripe plantains by his garden-path on Sunday, he
might pick and eat them; or of another abstaining from turning a pig out
of his garden on Sunday, preferring to let his sugar-canes be devoured;
such facts are yet no proof that we make Christians of savages; they only
prove that, with some trouble, we may make them imbeciles.
It would be difficult, indeed, to pay too high a tribute to the unselfish
efforts of missionaries, now and in past times, directly for the benefit
of mankind and indirectly for that of science; yet the question, besides
its speculative interest, derives some justification from the general
results of missions over the world, and from the melancholy disproportion
between their actual and their merited successes: Whether the welfare
and improvement of savage tribes would not be best left to themselves
and to time? That they are not incapable of independent improvement
there is abundant evidence to show. Sometimes it arises in a tribe from
imitation of some neighbouring tribe, more powerful but less barbarous
than itself; sometimes from the initiative of some reforming chief of its
own. Thus the Comanche Indians of Texas, among whom ‘Christianity had
never been introduced,’ abolished, in consequence of their intercourse
with tribes less savage than themselves, the inhuman custom of killing a
favourite wife at her husband’s funeral. Mariner was himself a witness of
the abolition on the Tongan Islands of the custom of strangling the wife
of the great Tooitonga chief at his death. It is said, again, to be an
indisputable fact, that the Monbuttoos of Africa, whose ‘cannibalism is
the most pronounced of all the known nations of Africa,’ have, ‘without
any influence from the Mahometan or Christian world, attained to no
contemptible degree of external culture.’ Finow, the Tongan king, was
a genuine reformer; and there have even been kings of Dahome who have
wished the abolition of human sacrifices. Bianswah, the great Chippewya
chief, put a stop, by a treaty of peace with the Sioux, to the horrible
practice of burning prisoners alive; and, though the peace between
the tribes was often broken, their compact in this respect was never
violated. In other instances the modification of older usages points
to the operation of reformative tendencies. Thus the Nootka Indians,
who used to conclude their hunting festivals with a human sacrifice,
subsequently changed the custom into the more lenient one of sticking a
boy with knives in various parts of his body. The Zulus abolished the
custom of killing slaves with a chief, to prepare food and other things
for him in the next world; so that now it is only a tradition with them
that formerly when a chief died he did not die alone: ‘when the fire was
kindled the chief was put in, and then his servants were chosen and put
in after the chief; the great men followed—they were taken one by one.’
It is moreover certain that in some instances savages have arrived
spontaneously at no contemptible notions of morality, and that they have
often lost their native virtues by their very contact with a higher form
of faith. The African Bakwains declared that nothing described by the
missionaries as sin had ever appeared to them otherwise, except polygamy;
and the Tongan chiefs (if Mariner may be trusted), when asked what
motives they had, beyond their fear of misfortunes in this life, for
virtuous conduct, replied, ‘_as if they wondered such a question should
be asked_:’ ‘The agreeable and happy feelings which a man experiences
within himself when he does any good action and conducts himself nobly
and generously, as a man ought to do.’ The natural virtues attributed
to the same people include honour, justice, patriotism, friendship,
meekness, modesty, conjugal fidelity, parental and filial love, patience
in suffering, forbearance of temper, respect for rank and for age.
The Khonds of India, much more savage than the Tongans (their chief
virtues consisting in killing an enemy, dying as a warrior, or living
as a priest), yet account as sinful acts the refusal of hospitality,
the breach of an oath or promise, a lie, or the violation of a pledge
of friendship. The virtues the Maoris now possess they are said to have
possessed before we came among them, namely honesty, self-respect,
truthfulness; and the belief that these virtues are even ‘fading under
their assumed Christianity’ recalls the tradition of certain American
tribes, that their lives and manners were originally less barbarous,
the Odjibwas, for instance, actually tracing the increase of murders,
thefts, falsehood, and disobedience to parents, to the advent of the
Christian whites.
It is also remarkable that in several instances savages have of
themselves hit upon those very helps to the maintenance of virtue which
all Christian Churches have found so efficacious. For we find existing
among them as religious and moral observances not only Fasting and
Confession, but occasionally even Sermons. In the Tongan Islands _fonos_,
or public assemblies, were held, at which the king would address his
subjects, not only on agriculture but on morals and politics; and the
lower chiefs had _fonos_ also for the similar benefit of their feudal
subordinates. In America, also, some tribes observed feasts at which
the young were addressed on their moral duties, being admonished to be
attentive and respectful to the old, to obey their parents, never to
scoff at the decrepit or deformed, to be charitable and hospitable. Not
only were such precepts dwelt on at great length, but enforced by the
examples of good and bad individuals, just as they might be in London or
Rome. Such considerations, indeed, prove nothing against the additional
good that missionaries may do; but they add some force to the thought
that had a tithe of the energy, the devotion, the suffering, the money,
that has been lavished on coaxing savages to be baptized, been spent on
promoting international peace in Europe, wars might by this time be as
extinct, belong as purely to a past state of things, as judicial combats,
the thumbscrew, or the knout.
The vexed question, whether savage life represents a primitive or a
decadent condition, whether it represents what man at first everywhere
was, or only what he may become, has throughout the following chapters
been avoided, that controversy being regarded as ‘laid’ by the exhaustive
researches of Mr. Tylor and other writers. But whilst the state of the
lowest modern savages is taken as the nearest approximation we have of
the primitive state from which mankind has risen, it is not pretended
that the state of any particular tribe may not be one to which it has
fallen. As the low position of many Bushmen tribes is quite explicable by
their long border-warfare with the Dutch, and the consequent cruelties
they were exposed to, or as the state of many Brazilian savages may be
traced to similar contact with the Portuguese, so any case of extreme
savagery may be the result of causes, whose operation has no historical
or written proof to attest them. The gigantic stone images on Easter
Island, or the great earthworks in America, are among the proofs, that
but for such material traces of its existence it is possible for a whole
civilisation to vanish, and to leave only the veriest savages on the
soil where it flourished.[2] As we know that Europe was once as purely
savage as parts of Africa are still, and can conceive the cycle of
events restoring it to barbarism, so in the depths of time it may have
happened in places where no suspicion of such a history is possible. As
the surface of the earth seems subjected to processes of elevation and
subsidence, land and sea constantly alternating their dominion, so it may
be with civilisation, destined to no permanent home on the earth, but
subsiding here to reappear there, and varying its level as it varies its
latitude.
As the practical infinity of past time makes it impossible to calculate
the influence exercised in different parts of the world by migrations,
by conquests, or by commerce, except within a very limited period, so it
precludes any definite belief in ethnological divisions, and relegates
the question of the unity of the human race, like that of its origin, to
the limbo of profitless discussion. No characteristic has yet been found
by which mankind can be classified distinctly into races; and with all
the differences of colour, hair, skull, or language, which now suffice
for purposes of nomenclature, it remains true that there is nothing to
choose between the hypothesis that we constitute only one species and the
hypothesis that we constitute several. The world is so old as to admit of
divergences from a single original type quite as wide as any that exist;
whilst, on the other hand, similarity of customs (such, for instance, as
that Tartars in Asia, Sioux Indians in America, and Kamschadals should
all regard it as a sin to touch a fire with a knife), fail us as a
proof of a unity of origin, in the face of our ignorance of prehistoric
antiquity.
That the works which have treated before, and better, of the subjects
included in the following chapters should have exercised no deterrent
effect in treating of them again, must find its excuse in the general
interest which those works have produced for the studies in question,
and of which the present work is but a sign and consequence. The reader
has only himself to blame, if, having read the works on the same or
similar subjects by Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, and Sir John Lubbock, or
those in German by Peschel, Wuttke, or Waitz, he troubles himself with
yet another book which seeks rather to illustrate than to exhaust the
many interesting problems connected with savage life; but the present
writer, whilst under the deepest obligations to the labours of his
predecessors—without which his own would have been impossible—has not
studied simply to recapitulate their conclusions, but has sought rather
to arrive at such results as the evidence forced upon him, independently
as far as possible of existing theories or of the authority upon which
they rest. Should he have succeeded in making anyone think better than
before, with more interest and sympathy, of those outcasts of the world
whom we designate as savage, something at least will have been done
to claim for them a kindlier treatment and respect than in popular
estimation they either deserve or obtain.
_CONTENTS._
CHAPTER I.
SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS.
The universality of religion—Nature and tests of the evidence
relating to the subject—Savage ideas of creation: ideas of a
first man confused with ideas of a first cause—Illustrative
examples of primitive cosmogony—Origin of the myth of the
Two Contending Brothers—Prevalence of the belief in a Golden
Age—Deluge-myths—Their possible origin in recollections of
local floods, in the changes of the land-level, or in fancies
about the skies—Absence in most of them of any connection
with human crime—Vivid belief in futurity among the lower
races—Gradual growth of the idea of the future life as affected
by the present one—Difficulties in the attainment of future
happiness—The great difference between savage and civilised
beliefs regarding the Unknown illustrated by the savage
belief in a future life for animals or things as well as for
men—Compensations in the savage’s creed: no terror of death nor
of the future pages 1-40