CHAPTER IX.

COMPARATIVE FOLK-LORE.

Interest of folk-lore due to the wide range of similar

superstitions—Three ways of accounting for such

resemblances—Great extent of superstition in civilised

life—Savage incomplete distinction of things—Motion and life

identified—Analogy of bee superstitions with superstitions

about inanimate things—Fear of offending animals by a

light use of their names—Spiritualistic character of

witchcraft—Illustrations—Relics of object-worship—Sacred trees,

animals, birds—Reverence for red things—Chinese analogues

to Aryan folk-lore—Mythology probably founded on folk-lore,

not folk-lore on mythology—Traces of fire-worship—Beltane

fires, formerly perhaps connected with human sacrifices—Scotch

needfires for cattle—Similar customs among the Mayas of America

and the Hottentots—Ideas about the purity of new fire—Recent

examples of the sacrifice of living things to appease

spirits—Moon superstitions like those about the tides—Remnants

of water-worship—Folk-lore a link between civilisation and

barbarism—Influence of Christianity on folk-lore—The history

of mankind that of a rise, not of a fall 276-315

I.

_SOME SAVAGE MYTHS AND BELIEFS._

The question of the universality of religion, of its presence in some

form or another in every part of the world, seems to be one of those

which lie beyond the bounds of a dogmatic answer. For the accounts

of missionaries and travellers, which furnish the only data for its

solution, have been so largely vitiated, if not by a consciousness of the

interests supposed to be at stake, at least by so strong an intolerance

for the tenets of native savage religions, that it seems impossible to

make sufficient allowance either for the bias of individual writers or

for the extent to which they may have misunderstood, or been purposely

misled by, their informants.

Although, however, on the subject of native religions we can never

hope for more than approximate truth, the reports of missionaries and

others, written at different periods of time about the same place or

contemporaneously about widely remote places, as they must be free from

all possible suspicion of collusion, so they supply a kind of measure

of probability by which the credibility of any given belief may be

tested. Thus an idea, too inconceivable to be credited, if only reported

of one tribe of the human race, may be safely accepted as seriously

held, if reported of several tribes in different parts of the world. An

Englishman, for instance, however much winds and storms may mentally vex

him, would scarcely think of testifying his repugnance to them by the

physical remonstrance of his fists and lungs, nor would he easily believe

that any people of the earth should seriously treat the wind in this way

as a material agent. If he were told that the Namaquas shot poisoned

arrows at storms to drive them away, he would show no unreasonable

scepticism in disbelieving the fact; but if he learnt on independent

authority that the Payaguan Indians of North America rush with firebrands

and clenched fists against the wind that threatens to blow down their

huts; that in Russia the Esthonians throw stones and knives against

a whirlwind of dust, pursuing it with cries; that the Kalmucks fire

their guns to drive the storm-demons away; that Zulu rain-doctors or

heaven-herds whistle to lightning to leave the skies just as they whistle

to cattle to leave their pens; and that also in the Aleutian Islands a

whole village will unite to shriek and strike against the raging wind,

he would have to acknowledge that the statement about the Namaquas

contained in itself nothing intrinsically improbable. And besides

this test of genuine savage thought, a test which obviously admits of

almost infinite application, there is another one no less serviceable

in ethnological criticism, namely, where the reality of a belief is

supported by customs, widely spread and otherwise unintelligible.

No better illustration can be given of this than the belief, which,

asserted by itself, would be universally disbelieved, in a second life

not only for men but for material things; but which, supported as it is

by the practice, common alike in the old world and the new, of burying

objects with their owner to live again with him in another state, is

certified beyond all possibility of doubt. If to us there seems a no

more self-evident truth than that a man can take nothing with him out of

the world, a vast mass of evidence proves, that the discovery of this

truth is one of comparatively modern date and of still quite partial

distribution over the globe.

So much, then, being premised as to the nature of the evidence on which

our knowledge of the lower races depends, and as to the limits within

which such evidence may be received and its veracity tested, let us

proceed to examine some of the higher beliefs of savages, which, as they

bear some analogy to the beliefs on similar subjects of more advanced

societies, are in a sense religious, and, so far at least as the

collected information justifies us in judging, seem of indigenous and

independent growth.

Few results of ethnology are more interesting than the wide-spread belief

among savages, arrived at purely by their own reasoning faculties, in a

creator of things. The recorded instances of such a belief are, indeed,

so numerous as to make it doubtful whether instances to the contrary may

not have been based on too scant information. The difficulty of obtaining

sound evidence on such subjects is well illustrated by the experience of

Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, who spent seven years among the

Abipones of South America. For when he asked them whether the wonderful

course of the stars and heavenly bodies had never raised in their minds

the thought of an invisible being who had made and who guided them, he

got for answer that of what happened in heaven, or of the maker or ruler

of the stars, the ancestors of the Abipones had never cared to think,

finding ample occupation for their thoughts in the providing of grass

and water for their horses. Yet the Abipones really believed that they

had been created by an Indian like themselves, whose name they mentioned

with great reverence and whom they spoke of as their ‘grandfather,’

because he had lived so long ago. He was still, they fancied, to be seen

in the Pleiades; and when that constellation disappeared for some months

from the sky they would bewail the illness of their grandfather, and

congratulate him on his recovery when he returned in May. Still, the

creator of savage reasoning is not necessarily a creator of all things,

but only of some, like Caliban’s Setebos, who made the moon and the sun,

and the isle and all things on it—

But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.

So that it is possible the creator of the Abipones was merely their

deified First Ancestor. For on nothing is savage thought more confused

than on the connection between the first man who lived on the world and

the actual Creator of the world, as if in the logical need of a first

cause they had been unable to divest it of human personality, or as

if the natural idea of a first man had led to the idea of his having

created the world. Thus Greenlanders are divided as to whether Kaliak

was really the creator of all things or only the first man who sprang

from the earth. The Minnetarrees of North America believed that at first

everything was water and there was no earth at all, till the First Man,

the never-dying one, the Lord of Life, sent down the great red-eyed bird

to bring up the earth. The Mingo tribes also ‘revere and make offerings

to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a powerful

deity under the Master of Life, or _even as identified with him_;’ whilst

among the Dog-ribs the First Man, Chapewee, was also creator of the

sun and moon. The Zulus of Africa likewise merge the ideas of the First

Man and the Creator, the great Unkulunkulu; as also do the Caribs, who

believe that Louquo, the uncreate first Carib, descended from heaven

to make the earth and also to become the father of men.[3] So again in

the Aht belief Quawteaht is not only ‘the first Indian who ever lived,’

their forefather, but the maker of most things visible, of the earth and

all animals, yet not of the sun and moon.[4] It seems, therefore, not

improbable that savage speculation, being more naturally impelled to

assume a cause for men than a cause for other things, postulated a First

Man as primeval ancestor, and then applying an hypothesis, which served

so well to account for their own existence, to account for that of the

world in general, made the Father of Men the creator of all things; in

other words, that the idea of a First Man preceded and prepared the way

for the idea of a first cause.

However this may be, and admitting the possible existence of tribes

absolutely devoid of any idea of creation at all, the following savage

fancies about it are not without their interest as typical examples of

primitive cosmogony.

In one of the Dog-rib Indian sagas an important part in the creation

is played by a great bird, as among several other tribes who loved to

trace their origin to a bird, as some would trace theirs to a toad or a

rattlesnake. Originally, the saga runs, the world was nothing but a wide,

waste sea, without any living thing upon it save a gigantic bird, who

with the glance of its fiery eyes produced the lightning, and with the

flapping of its wings the thunder. This bird, by diving into the sea,

caused the earth to appear above it, and proceeded to call all animals to

its surface (except, indeed, the Chippewya Indians, who were descended

from a dog). When its work was complete it made a great arrow, which it

bade the Indians keep with great care; and when this was lost, owing to

the stupidity of the Chippewyas, it was so angry that it left the earth,

never afterwards to revisit it; and men now live no longer, as they did

in those days, till their throats are worn through with eating and their

feet with walking the earth.[5]

Many thousands of miles separate the Tongan Islands from North America,

yet there too we find the idea of the earth having come from the waters.

In the beginning nothing was to be seen above the waste of waters but the

Island of Bolotu, which is as everlasting as the gods who dwell there or

as the stars and the sea. One day the god Tangaloa went to fish in the

sea, when, feeling something heavy at the end of his line, he drew it in,

and there perceived the tops of rocks, which continued to increase in

size and number till they formed a large continent, and his line broke,

and only the Tongan Islands remained above the surface. These Tangaloa,

with the help of the other gods, filled with trees and herbs and animals

from Bolotu, only of a smaller size and not immortal. Then he bade his

two sons take their wives and go to dwell in Tonga, dividing the land

and dwelling apart. The younger brother was steady and industrious, and

made many discoveries; but the elder was idle and slept away his time,

and envied the works of his brother, till at last his envy grew so strong

that one day he murdered him. Then came Tangaloa in wrath from Bolotu, to

ask him why he had slain his brother, and he bade him bring his brother’s

family to him. They were told to take their boats and sail eastward till

they came to a great land to dwell in. ‘Your skin’ (to this effect ran

Tangaloa’s blessing) ‘shall be white as your souls, for your souls are

pure; you shall be wise, make axes, have all other riches, and great

boats. I myself will command the wind to blow from your land to Tonga,

but the people of Tonga will not be able with their bad boats to reach

you.’ To the others he said: ‘You shall be black, because your souls are

black, and you shall remain poor. You shall not be able to prepare useful

things, nor to go to the land of your brothers. But your brothers shall

come to Tonga and trade with you as they please.’[6]

This Tongan creation-myth is especially striking, not only from its

resemblance to the well-known stories of Cain and Abel or of Romulus

and Remus, but from the wonderful extension of a similar story over the

world. It has been found among the Esquimaux, among the Hervey Islanders,

among the Hindoos, among the Iroquois of America. Its origin perhaps lies

in early and rude attempts to account for the more obvious dualisms in

nature, as those, for instance, between the sun and the moon, or between

warm and cold winds. In the Iroquois version the elder brother who

killed the younger is said to have been identical with the sun, though

his mother, not the brother he killed, was the moon.[7] A curious Indian

drawing has been preserved in which the god of the north wind, or of cold

weather, contends with the god of the south, or of warmth. The former

is figured in a snowstorm, the latter in rain; wolves fight on the side

of the one, the crow and plover on that of the other. The conflict is

terrible; the southern god is worsted, cold weather prevails, and the

earth is frozen up. But in spring he sends forth his crow and plover,

who defeat the wolves, and the northern god is drowned in a flood of

spray which arises from the melting of the snow and ice. And in this

contention for cold and warm weather it is believed they will battle as

long as the world shall endure.[8]

The Kamchadal belief is instructive, as showing that by the creation of

the world the savage only means that small portion of it which he knows,

and that, so far from it being any proof of his intelligence to suppose a

cause for the hills or island which limit his energies, it is rather his

want of logical thought which impels him to the belief. For seeing, as

he does, a spirit in everything, whether it be moving animal, or rushing

wind, or standing stone, and accounting, as he does, for everything by

a spirit which is at once its cause and controlling principle, it is

only natural that he should draw from his unlimited spirit-world one

who made and governs all things. Thus the Kamchadals believe that after

their supreme deity, of whom they predicate nothing but existence, the

greatest god is Kutka. Kutka created the heavens and the earth, making

both eternal, like the men and creatures he placed on the earth. But the

Kamchadals openly avow that they think themselves much cleverer than

Kutka, who in their eyes is so stupid as to be quite undeserving of

prayers or gratitude. Had he been cleverer, they say, he would have made

the world much better, without so many mountains and inaccessible cliffs,

without streams of such rapidity, or such tempests of wind and rain. In

winter, if they are climbing a mountain, or in summer, if their canoes

come to rapids, they will vent loud curses on Kutka for having made the

streams too strong for their canoes, or the mountains so wearisome for

their feet.

The Tamanaks of the Orinoco manifested a not much higher conception of a

creator than the Kamchadals. For they ascribed the creation of the world

to Amalivacca, who in the course of his work discussed long with his

brother about the Orinoco, having the kind wish so to make it that ships

might as easily go up its stream as down, but being compelled to abandon

a task which so far transcended his powers. The Tamanaks recently showed

a cave where Amalivacca dwelt when he lived among them, before he took a

boat and sailed to the other side of the sea.[9]

Not only, however, is the idea of a creation of things quite common

among untutored savages, but there is often a belief closely connected

therewith that in the beginning death and sickness were unknown in the

world, but came into it in consequence of some fault committed by its

hitherto immortal occupants. Such a belief, reported as it is from places

so widely sundered as Ceylon, North America, and the Tongan Islands,

seems effectually to discountenance the suspicion which might otherwise

attach to it of collusion or mistake on the part of our informants.

It is the fancy of the Cingalese cosmogony that, in the fifth period

of creative energy, the immortal beings who then inhabited the earth

ate of certain plants, and thereby involved themselves in darkness and

mortality. ‘It was then that they were formed male and female, and lost

the power of returning to the heavenly mansions.’ Liable as they had

theretofore been to mental passions, such as envy, covetousness, and

ambition, they were thenceforward subjected to corporeal passions as

well, and the race now inhabiting the earth became subject to all the

evils that afflict them.[10] According to the saga of the Dog-rib Indians

the first man who lived upon the earth, when food and other good things

abounded, was Chapewee, who afterwards, giving his children two kinds of

food, black and white, forbade them to eat of the former. When he went

away for a long journey to bring the sun into the world, his children

were obedient and ate only of the white fruit, but ate it all. But when

he went away a second time to bring the moon into the world, in their

hunger his children forgot his prohibition and ate of the black fruit. So

when Chapewee returned he was very wroth, and declared that thenceforth

the earth should only produce bad fruit and that men should be subject

to sickness and death. Afterwards, indeed, when his family lamented that

men should have been made mortal for eating the black fruit, Chapewee

granted that those who dreamt certain dreams should have the power of

curing sickness and so of prolonging human life; but that was the extent

to which Chapewee relented.[11] The Caribs, Waraues, and Arawaks are

said to believe in two distinct creators of men and women; the creator

of the former being superior and doing neither good nor harm. After he

had created men he came on the earth to see what they were doing; but

finding them so bad that they even attempted his own life, he took from

them their immortality and gave it to skin-casting creatures instead.

The Aleutian Islanders believe that the god who made their islands

completed his work by making men to inhabit them; but these men were

immortal beings, for when age came over them they had but to climb a

lofty mountain and plunge from thence into a lake, in order to come forth

young again and vigorous. Then it happened that a mortal woman, who had

the misfortune to draw upon herself celestial love, remonstrated one day

with her lover for having, in his creation of the Aleutian Islands, made

so many mountains and forgotten to supply the land with forests. This

imprudent criticism caused her brother to be slain by the angry god, and

all men after him to be subject to death. A similar idea is contained in

one of the Tongan traditions of creation; for when the islands were made,

but before they were inhabited by reasonable beings, some two hundred of

the lower gods, male and female alike, took a great boat to go to see

the new land fished up by Tangaloa. So delighted were they with it that

they immediately broke up their big boat, intending to make some smaller

ones out of it. But after a few days some of them died; and one of

them, inspired by God, told them that since they had come to Tonga, and

breathed its air and eaten its fruits, they should be mortal and fill the

world with mortals. Then were they sorry that they had broken their big

boat, and they set to work to make another, and went to sea, hoping again

to reach Bolotu, the heaven they had left; but being unable to find it,

they returned regretfully to Tonga.

Thus it would seem that wherever men have so far advanced in power of

thought as to realise the conception of antiquity, the troubles of their

actual lot have always tempted them to idealise the past, and the glories

of the age of gold have been sung by the poets of no particular land

nor literature. The Shawnee Indians believed there was a time when they

could walk on the ocean or restore life to the dead, till they lost

these privileges when the nation by its carelessness became divided into

two.[12] The Ashantees trace all their calamities to the folly of their

ancestors, for when the first created black men were given their choice

between a large box and a piece of sealed-up paper they elected to take

the box, but found therein only some gold, iron, and other metals, whilst

the white men on opening the paper found all that was needful to make

them wise, and have ever since treated the blacks as their slaves.[13]

It is remarkable that a similar fancy is ascribed to the Navajoes of

New Mexico. For their ancestors, after creating the sun and moon, made

two water-jars, both covered at the top, but one gorgeously painted,

containing only rubbish, the other of plain earthenware, unpainted, but

containing flocks and herds and other valuables. The Navajoes, allowed

to choose before the Pueblos, took the beautiful but worthless jar;

whereupon the old men said: ‘Thus it will always be with the two nations.

You, Navajoes, will be a poor and wandering race; destitute of the

comforts of life and ever greedy for things on account of their outward

show rather than their intrinsic value; while the Pueblos will enjoy an

abundance of the good things of life, will occupy houses, and have plenty

of flocks and herds.’[14] According to the legend in the Zend-Avesta,

when Ormuzd created Meschia and Meschiana, the first man and woman, he

appointed heaven as their dwelling, under the sole condition of humility

and obedience to the law of pure thought, pure speech, and pure action.

For some time they were a blessing to one another and lived happily,

saying that it was from Ormuzd that all things came—the water and earth,

trees and animals, sun, moon, and stars, and all good roots and fruits

on the earth. But at last Ahriman became master over their thoughts,

and they ascribed the creation of all things to him. So they lost their

happiness and their virtue, and their souls were condemned to remain

in Duzakh until the resurrection of their bodies, when Sosiosch should

restore life to the dead.[15]

Among the myths, however, most widely spread over the world and common

to races in all stages of culture, from the most barbarous to the most

civilized, a prominent place is due to the legend of an all-destructive

deluge, a legend which, arising as it probably did in many different

places from exaggerated memories of purely local floods, must, in spite

of its seeming universality, remain a merely local myth, entirely

destitute of all bearing on the question of the unity of the human race,

or of any connection with the story told in Genesis. A local flood like

that which on the occasion of an earthquake in 1819 was caused by the

sea flowing in at the eastern mouth of the Indus and converting in the

space of a few hours a district of 2,000 square miles into a vast lagoon,

would naturally be an event which would remain for ever in the oral

traditions of the district and tend to become magnified when the event

itself was forgotten. In Australia, which is subject at certain epochs

and in certain localities to great inundations, and which bears evidence

of former floods in what are now waterless deserts, flood stories are

said to be ‘exceedingly common’ among all the tribes, one tribe having

a tradition that when they returned to their old hunting-grounds on

the banks of a river, after a great flood, they found the sea flowing

where had stood the other bank, nor any trace left of its former

inhabitants.[16]

Or, again, it is possible that alterations in the level of the sea and

land or the subsidence of a large continent, such as that of which on

geological as well as ethnological grounds it has been supposed that the

Polynesian islands are the remains, may have originated the tradition.

Thus, the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg imagined the submersion of a

large country in the Atlantic to account for the deluge-myths of the

Central American nations.[17] Dr. Brinton, indeed, suggests, that not

physics, but metaphysics is the exciting cause of beliefs in periodical

convulsions of the globe, maintaining that ‘by nothing short of a

miracle’ could savages preserve the remembrance of even the most terrible

catastrophe beyond a few generations. But it is at least as likely

that such remembrance should be possible as that savages, starting, as

he supposes, with an idea of creation as a reconstruction of existing

elements, should have added thereto the myth of a universal catastrophe,

‘to avoid the dilemma of a creation from nothing on the one hand and the

eternity of matter on the other.’[18] Perhaps, however, all such legends

are best regarded as pure nature-myths, to which we may possibly find

the key in the belief of the Esquimaux, that the souls of the dead are

encamped round a large lake in the sky, which when it overflows causes

rain upon earth and would cause a universal deluge if at any time its

floodgates were burst. The belief in a contingency is never far from the

assertion of its actuality, nor are the steps of thought always visible

which separate the possible from the real.

Although many of the deluge-myths of the world have doubtless owed their

origin to the zeal with which they have been sought for in the cause

of orthodox theories, it is improbable that all of them have been

produced in this way. Dr. Brinton, who has examined the evidence with

care, asserts that there are twenty-eight American nations among whom a

distinct and well-authenticated myth of the deluge was found.[19]

It would be tedious to allude to more than a few illustrations of the

belief as it exists in the world, or to try to distinguish the elements

in them of purely native growth from the influences of Christian

teaching. The Kamchadals believe that the earth was once flooded and many

persons drowned, though they tried to save themselves in boats, those

only succeeding who made great rafts of trees and let down stones for

anchors, to prevent themselves from drifting out to sea; when the waters

subsided their rafts rested on the mountain-tops. The Esquimaux appealed

to the bones of whales found on their mountains in support of their

assertion that the world had once been tilted over and all men drowned

but one. The Mandan Indians, according to Catlin, celebrated every year

in pantomime the subsidence of the great waters.[20]

It is noticeable that in most savage legends of a flood (and it may,

perhaps, be taken as some test of their authenticity) there is an entire

absence of the idea, so familiar to ourselves, of the flood having

resulted from any fault committed by the then inhabitants of the earth.

At most such an idea appears in germ, as in the tradition of the Society

Islanders, that a fisherman, catching his hook in the hair of the great

sea-god as he lay asleep in his coral grove, so angered that divinity

that he caused the waters to arise till they flooded the very tops of the

mountains and drowned the inhabitants, the fisherman and his family alone

being suffered to escape, and thereby serving to attest the genuineness

of the tradition. So in Fiji the deluge was caused by two grandsons of a

god killing his favourite bird, and instead of being apologetic acting

with insolence and fortifying the town they lived in for the purpose

of defying their grandfather. The connection of the catastrophe with

human wickedness belongs apparently to a more advanced state of thought,

of which the recently deciphered Chaldæan version may be taken as a

sample. In it Hasisadra, the sage, who with his wife escaped the general

destruction, tells Izdubar, the giant, how he built a vessel according to

the directions of Hea, to save himself and his family from the universal

deluge which the gods sent upon the earth to punish the wickedness of

men; how the deluge lasted six days, and on the seventh, when the storm

ceased, the vessel was stranded for seven days on the mountains of

Nizir; and how on the seventh day, he Hasisadra, sent out first a dove

and then a swallow, both of whom, finding no resting-place, returned to

the vessel, till a raven was sent forth and did not return; and Hasisadra

sent out the animals to the four winds, and poured out a libation in

thanksgiving, and built an altar on the summit of the mountain.

The belief in a future life—a belief perhaps first suggested in that

rude state of culture where the dreaming and waking life are not clearly

distinct but are both equally real—appears to prevail so generally among

the lower races, that it is more difficult to find instances where it is

_not_ found than instances where it is. The dead who visit the living in

their sleep are not thought of as dead, but as simply invisible; and for

this reason all over the globe it is so common to bury material things in

the graves of the departed, to serve them in that other world which is so

vividly conceived as but a continuation of this one. The Red Indian takes

his horses, the Greenlander his reindeer, and both the common requisites

of earthly economy; just as many tribes still take their slaves and

their wives to accompany them on that journey which, as it is imagined

so distinctly, is undertaken without mystery to a fresh existence. Till

lately, in parts of Sweden, a man’s pipe and tobacco-pouch, some money

and lights, were interred with him; and at Reichenbach, in Germany, a

man’s umbrella and goloshes are still placed in his grave.[21] In Russia

formerly a new pair of shoes was put on the feet of the dead for the long

journey before him, a custom also found among the natives of California,

and the Christian priest used to place on a man’s breast, as he lay in

his coffin, a pass, which, besides being inscribed with his Christian

name and the dates of his birth and death, was also a certificate of his

baptism, of the piety of his life, and of his having partaken of the

communion before his death.[22] These are but survivals of savage ideas,

which picture the continuation of consciousness far more vividly than

more advanced religions. The Ahts bury blankets with their dead, that

they may not shiver in the cold ones provided in the land of Chayher. The

Delawar Indian used to make an opening at the head-end of the coffin,

that the soul of the deceased might go in and out till it had thoroughly

settled on its future place of residence. When the Chippewyas killed

their aged relatives who could hunt no more, the medicine-song used

proves the simple faith which made the cruel deed an act of mercy: ‘The

Lord of life gives courage. It is true all Indians know that he loves us,

and we give over to him our father, that he may feel himself young in

another land and able to hunt.’

It is possible, indeed, that in many cases the attention shown by savages

to their dead, by the burial of property which would have been of use to

the survivors, or by the placing of food on their graves at periodical

feasts, arose rather from fear than from any kinder motive, dictated by

the dread always felt by the living of the dead and the wish to satisfy

them, if possible, by some peace-offering. The Samoyed sorcerer, after

a funeral, goes through the ceremony of soothing the departed, that he

may not trouble the survivors nor take their best game; a feeling still

further illustrated by their habit of not taking the dead out to be

buried by the regular hut door, but by a side-opening, that if possible

they may not find their way back—a habit found also in Greenland and in

many other parts of the world. For the fear of the dead is a universal

sentiment, common no less to the Abipones, who thought that sorcerers

could bring the dead from their graves to visit the living, or to the

Kaffirs, who think that bad men alone live a second time and try to kill

the living by night, than it is to the ignorant who still believe in

the blood-sucking vampire, a belief which little more than a century

ago amounted to a kind of epidemic in Hungary, resulting in a general

disinterment and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies. In the

sepulture, therefore, of men with their possessions, it was probably

the original thought that the dead would be less likely to haunt the

dwellings of the living, if they were not compelled to re-seek upon earth

those articles of daily use which they knew were to be found there.

But the savage belief in a future is very variable; nor could we expect

to find it much affected by ideas of earthly morality, when such ideas

themselves hardly appear to exist. At most it is men of rank and courage

who live again, while cowards and the commonalty perish utterly;

generally there is no qualification of any kind. The Bedouins have no

fixed belief at all, some thinking that after death they are changed

into screech-owls, and others that if a camel is slain on their graves

they will return to life riding on it, but otherwise on foot. All North

American Indians are said to believe in the continual life of the soul,

and, because they think themselves the highest beings on earth, postulate

a hereafter where all their earthly longings will be satisfied.[23] But

they trouble themselves little about it, thinking that the god they

recognise as supreme is too good to punish them. Thus the Indians of

Arauco look forward to an eternal life in a beautiful land which lies

to the west, far over the sea, whither souls are taken by the sailor

Tempulazy and where no punishment is expected: for Pillican, their god,

the Lord of the world, would not inflict pain.[24] The Tunguz Lapps look

on the next life as simply a continuation of this one; in it there will

be no punishment, for here everyone is as good as he can be, and the gods

kill men reluctantly, but are thereby satisfied. In the Polynesian future

there is a similar absence of any idea of retribution. There is, for

instance, no moral qualification, but only one of rank, for Bolotu, that

happy land of the dead which lies far away to the north-west of Tonga,

beyond the reach of Tongan boats and greater than all the Tongan islands

put together, wherein abound beautiful and useful trees, whose plucked

fruit instantly grows again; where a delicious fragrance fills the air,

and birds of the loveliest colours sit upon the trees; where the woods

swarm with pigs, which are immortal so long as they are not eaten by the

gods. Nothing, indeed, shows better how independent is imagination of

race than the great similarity of those idealised earths which constitute

the heavens of the most distant savage tribes. The American Indian, who

visits in a dream the unseen world, reports of it, in language recalling

that of Homer, that it is a land where there is neither day nor night,

where the sun never rises nor sets; where rain and tomahawks and arrows

are never seen; where pipes abound everywhere, lying ready to be smoked;

where the earth is ever green, the trees ever in leaf; where there is no

need of bearskin nor of hut; where, if you would travel, the rivers will

take your boat whithersoever you will, without the need of rudder or of

paddle. And just as in the Tongan Bolotu the plucked fruit is replaced,

so there the goat voluntarily offers its shoulder to the hungry man, in

full confidence that it will grow again, and the beaver for the same

reason makes a ready sacrifice of its beautiful tail.[25]

So far there is no idea of a future life as in any way affected by this

one. But such ideas do exist among savages, and are extremely interesting

as indications of the growth of their moral ideas. The quality most

necessary for a savage is pre-eminently courage, and courage, therefore,

appearing as the first recognised virtue, lays first claim, as such, to

consideration hereafter. The Brazilians believed that the souls of the

dead became beautiful birds, whilst cowards were turned into reptiles.

The Minnetarrees held that there were two villages which received the

dead; but that the cowardly and bad went to the small one, whilst the

brave and good occupied the larger. Among the Caribs, who entertain the

strange fancy that they have as many souls as they feel nerves in their

body, but that the chief of these resides in the heart and goes to

heaven at death, whilst the others go to the sea or the woods, we meet

again with the reservation of happiness to the souls of the brave. They

alone will live merrily, dancing, feasting, and talking; they alone will

swim in the great streams, feeling no fatigue; the Arawaks will either

serve them as slaves or wander about in desert mountains. Somewhat

similar was the faith of the old Mexicans, who divided the future world

into three parts: the first, the House of the Sun, where the days were

spent in joyful attendance on that luminary, with songs and games and

dances, by such brave soldiers as had died in battle or as prisoners

had been sacrificed to the gods, and by women who had died in giving

children to the community; the second, the kingdom of Tlalocan, hidden

among the Mexican mountains, not so bright as the former, but cool and

pleasant, and filled with unfailing pumpkins and tomatoes, reserved for

priests and for children sacrificed to Tlaloc and for all persons killed

by lightning, by drowning, or by sickness; the third, the kingdom of

Mictlauteuctli, reserved for all other persons, but with nothing said

of any punishment there awaiting them. One of the beliefs in Greenland

is, that heaven is situate in the sky or the moon, and that the journey

thither is so easy that a soul may reach it the same evening that it

quits the body, and play at ball and dance with those other departed

souls who are encamped round the great lake and shine in heaven as the

northern lights. But others say that it is only witches and bad people

who join the heavenly lights, where they not only enjoy no rest, owing

to the rapid revolutions of the sky, but are so plagued with ravens

that they cannot keep them from settling in their hair. They believe

that heaven lies under the earth or sea, where dwells Torngarsuk, the

Creator, with his mother, in perpetual summer and beautiful sunshine.

There the water is good and there is no night, and there are plenty of

birds, and fish, and seals, and reindeer, all to be caught at pleasure,

or ready cooking in a great kettle; but these delights are reserved for

persons who have done great deeds and worked steadfastly, who have caught

many whales or seals, who have been drowned at sea, or have died in

childbirth. These persons alone may hope to join the great company and

feast on inconsumable seals. Even then they must slide for five days down

the blood-stained precipice; and unhappy they to whom the journey falls

in stormy weather or in winter, for then they may suffer that other death

of total extinction, especially if their survivors disturb them by their

noise or affect them injuriously by the food they eat. The Kamchadal

belief is very curious, as showing how the idea of compensation in the

next world for the evils of this—an idea already apparent in the Mexican

and Greenland beliefs—may have served to bridge over the conception of a

mere continuance of life for the soul, and the conception of an actual

retribution awaiting it. They imagine that the dead come to a place under

the earth, where Haetsch dwells, son of Kutka the Creator, and the first

man who died on earth, now Lord of the under-world and general receiver

of souls. To those who come dressed in fine furs and drive fat dogs

before their sledges, he gives instead old ragged furs and lean dogs; but

to those who have known poverty on earth he gives new furs and beautiful

dogs and also a better place to live in than the others. The dead live

again as on earth; their wives are restored to them, they build ostrogs

again, and catch fish, and dance and sing; there is less storm and snow

than above ground, and more people; indeed, abundance of everything.

It is easy to conceive how, when once the idea had been reached that the

brave deserved compensation in the next world for their earthly courage,

the poor for their earthly wretchedness, or the sick for their earthly

sufferings, and all men for the misfortune of premature death, it should

also be inferred, as soon as any criterion between goodness and badness

more refined than the mere difference between courage and cowardice had

been attained, that the good should have some advantage over the bad, and

from such an inference to a complete theory of retribution and punishment

of the bad the logical steps seem fairly obvious. Few things, indeed, are

more remarkable among the lower races than the general absence of the

ideas we associate with hell.[26] At most the idea of future punishment

is negative, the lives of slaves and cowards terminating in a total

cessation of consciousness, as opposed to its continuance for warriors

and chiefs. Still, the idea of difficulty in attaining the blessed

abodes, such as that above noticed as prevalent in Greenland—an idea,

as Mr. Tylor suggests, probably connected with the sun’s passage across

the sky to the west, where the happy land is so generally figured to

lie—is very common, and from such an idea it is natural to connect the

difficulty of the journey to Paradise with the destruction of those whose

presence in it would mar its blessedness.

The trial of merit, varying with experiences of physical geography,

generally lies either in the passage of a river or gulf by a narrow

bridge, or in the climbing of a steep mountain. The Choctaws, for

instance, believe that the dead have to pass a long and slippery

pine-log, across a deep and rapid river, on the other side of which stand

six persons, who pelt new-comers with stones and cause the bad ones to

fall in.[27] In Khond theology the judge of the dead resides beyond

the sea, on the smooth and slippery Leaping Rock, below which flows a

black unfathomable river; and the souls of men take bold leaps to reach

the rock, those that fail contracting a deformity which is transferred

to the next soul animated on earth. The Blackfoot Indians, on the other

hand, believe that departed souls have to climb a steep mountain, from

the summit of which is seen a great plain, with new tents and swarms of

game; that the dwellers in that happy plain advance to them and welcome

those who have led a good life, but reject the bad—those who have soiled

their hands in the blood of their countrymen—and throw them headlong from

the mountain; whilst women who have been guilty of infanticide never

reach the mountain at all, but hover round the seat of their crimes with

branches of trees tied to their legs. The Fijians think that even the

brave have some difficulty in reaching the judgment-seat of Ndengei, and

they provide the dead with war-clubs to resist Sama and his host, who

will dispute their passage. But celibacy is in their eyes apparently

the only offence which calls for peremptory and hopeless punishment.

Unmarried Fijians are dashed to pieces by Nangananga as in vain attempts

to steal round to a certain reef they are driven ashore by the rising

tide.[28] The Norwegian Lapps consider that abstinence from stealing,

lying, and quarrelling entitles a man to compensation hereafter. Such

receive after death a new body, and live with the higher gods in Saiwo,

and indulge in hunting and magic, brandy-drinking and smoking, to a far

higher degree than was possible on earth. Wicked men, perjurers, and

thieves go to the place of the bad spirits, to Gerre-Mubben-Aimo.[29]

The idea of compensation of the good leads naturally to the idea of

retribution for the bad; and even among the Guinea Coast negroes we

find future inducements to the practice of such moral duties as they

recognise. For they are wont to make for themselves idols, called Sumanes

whose favour they endeavour to secure by abstinence from certain kinds

of foods, believing that after death those who have been constant in

their vows of abstinence and in offerings to the Sumanes will come to a

large inland river, where a god inquires of everyone how he has lived

his days on earth, and those who have not kept their vows are drowned

and destroyed for ever. The inland-dwelling negroes declare that at

this river dwells a powerful god in a beautiful house, which, though

always exposed, is never touched by rain. He knows all past and present

things; he can send any kind of weather, he can heal sicknesses and work

miracles. Before him must all the dead appear; the good to receive a

happy and peaceful life, the bad to be killed for ever by the large

wooden club which hangs before his door. Lastly, it may be noticed

that negro tribes believe that death will take them to the land of the

European and give them the white man’s skin; but, as they generally paint

their devil white, we cannot be sure that such a change is not rather

dreaded as a punishment for the bad than regarded as a change for the

better.

So far it appears that savages have developed from the promptings and

imaginings of their own minds some idea of a Creator and of a soul, as

well as of a future to some extent dependent on earthly antecedents. It

is of course difficult to judge how far the missionaries or travellers,

who have mainly supplied the only evidence we have, may have clearly

understood, or how much they may have unintentionally imported into,

beliefs they represent as purely indigenous. In many cases a remarkable

similarity may lead us to suspect that the belief is not native, but

implanted at some time by Christian or other influence, though traces

of such influence may be absolutely wanting or at least not proved.

There can, for instance, be little doubt whence Sissa, the devil of the

Guinea Coast negroes, derived the pair of horns and long tail with which

he is usually depicted. But, on the other hand, we cannot lay down any

rigid canon for the imaginations of men, nor say that if one belief is

identical with another a thousand miles off it must therefore have been

borrowed and cannot be of independent growth. Indeed, when we reflect on

the limited nature of the mental faculties of savages, on the limited

range of objects for their minds to work upon, on their childlike fear

of the dark and the unseen, and their still more childlike delight in

the indulgence of their fancy, so far from there being anything strange

in the analogies of thought between distant tribes, the strangeness

would rather be if such analogies did not exist. It is probable that

children tell one another much the same stories in London as they do at

the Antipodes, and there is no more reason to be surprised at finding

much the same theologies current in Africa as in Australia or Ceylon. The

same sun, which shines on men’s bodies alike, shines on their minds alike

too; and myths, like dreams, with all the apparent field for variety in

their formation, are really subject to the closest laws of uniformity and

sameness.

We have, however, to be careful, in applying terms of our own religious

phraseology to savage thoughts and fancies, to discriminate between the

higher and lower meaning they bear, and always to employ them in the

lower. The belief, already noticed, of the Kamchadals in Kutka well

illustrates how different is the meaning involved in the Kamchadal theory

of creation from that involved in Genesis or the Zend-Avesta. The same

is true of the belief in a soul and its future life; for the savage,

intensely vivid as is his future beyond the grave, seldom doubts for an

instant but that he will share it with all the rest, not only of the

animate, but of the inanimate world. For that reason he buries axes, and

clothes, and food with the dead, to be of service in the next world. The

Fijians used to show ‘the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of

stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the utensils of this

frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling one over the other,’ as they

were borne by a swift stream at the bottom of a deep hole to the regions

of immortality.[30] So of the animate world. The Kamchadal believes that

the smallest fly that breathes will rise after death to live again in

the under-world.[31] If the Laplander expects that all honest people

will re-meet in Aimo, he as fully expects that bears and wolves will

meet there too. The Greenlander believes that all the heavenly bodies

were once Greenlanders, _or animals_, and that they shine with a pale

or red light according to the food they ate on earth. He also believes

that when all things now living on the earth are dead, and the earth

cleansed from their blood by a great water-flood; when the purified dust

is consolidated again by a great wind, and a fairer earth, all plain and

no cliffs, is substituted for the present one; when Priksoma, he who is

above, breathes on men that they may live again—then animals will also

rise again and be in great abundance. The old inhabitants of Anahuac

and Egypt believed equally that animals would share the next world

with them; and, if the universality of an opinion were any reason for

its credibility, few opinions could claim a better title to acceptance

than this one. So confident were the Swedish Lapps of the future life

of animals, that whenever they killed one in sacrifice they buried the

bones in a box, that the gods might more easily restore it to life.[32]

There is really nothing very unnatural in this idea, when we remember

that in the lower stages of culture man not only admits the equality of

brutes with himself, but even acknowledges their superiority by actual

worship of them. It is not difficult to understand how it is that savages

who see deities in everything, in the motionless mountain or stone no

less than in the rushing river or wind, should see in animals deities of

extraordinary power, whose capacities infinitely transcend their own.

Recognising as they do in the tiger a strength, in the deer a speed, in

the monkey a cunning, all superior to their own, they naturally conceive

of them as deities whom above all others it is expedient to humour by

adoration and sacrifice. Some negro tribes, holding that all animals

enshrine a spirit, which may injure or benefit themselves, will refrain

from eating certain animals, otherwise perfectly edible, and endeavour

to propitiate them by lifelong attention. Thus some regularly offer food

at the earth-houses of termites, or fatten sheep and goats, for a purely

temporary and perfectly spiritual advantage. It is on account of their

divine and immortal nature that the well-known custom of apologising to

animals killed in the chase is so general among savages. It is generally

a deprecation of any post-mortem vindictiveness on the part of the

animal’s ghost. The natives of Greenland refrain from breaking seals’

heads or throwing them into the sea; but they pile them in a heap before

their hut door, that the souls of the seals may not be angry and in their

spite frighten living seals away. The Yuracares of Bolivia were careful

to put small fish-bones carefully aside, lest fish should disappear; and

other Indian tribes would keep the bones of beavers and sables from their

dogs for a year and then bury them, lest the spirits of those animals

should take offence and no more of them be killed or trapped.[33] The

Lapps are so afraid that the soul of the animal whose flesh they have

killed may take its revenge as a disembodied spirit, that before eating

it they not only entreat pardon for its death, but perform the ceremony

of treating it first with nuts or other delicacies, that it may be led

to believe it is present as a guest—not to be eaten, but to eat. Another

Kamchadal fancy indicates how savages, whose theory of cause and effect

appears to be that it is quite sufficient for two things to be connected

contemporaneously for one to be cause and the other effect, are led more

especially to see deities in birds, from the observation that changes

in weather are associated with their arrival and departure. Since to be

associated with a thing is to be caused by it, migratory birds take away

or bring the summer with them. For the reason that the spring and the

wagtails return together the Kamchadal thanks the wagtail for bringing

back the spring, and it is probably from a similar confusion of thought

that he thanks the ravens and crows for fine weather.

Whether, in conclusion, it be true or not that the more civilised nations

of the earth have gone through stages of growth in which their religious

conceptions resembled those of contemporary savage tribes, one result

at least is clear, that the actual standpoint of the savage with regard

to the great mysteries of existence is removed _toto cœlo_ from that of

Christian, or Mahometan, or Parsee. The Creator he believes in is not

so much the cause of all things as the maker of some things, because

seemingly the first father of men needed the wherewithal to exercise his

energies. The savage’s soul is simply his breath or ghost, which indeed

will survive his body, but which may lose its identity in the body of

an animal or thing, destined like himself to live again. He conceives

of himself generally as not mortal, but not therefore as immortal. His

future is but a repetition of his present, with the same base wants

and pursuits, only with a greater possibility of indulgence, and not

necessarily indefinite in duration. It is, perhaps, some compensation

for this, that, if it does not hold out great hopes, its prospect serves

to deprive death of its terror, and brightens the sufferings of the

passing day. To the native American death is said to be rather an event

of gladness than of terror, bringing him rest or enjoyment after his

period of toil; nor does he fear to go to a land ‘which all his life long

he has heard abounds in rewards without punishments.’[34] No thought of

possibly flying from present evils to find immeasurably greater ones

awaiting him after death would ever occur to a savage, and he will even

kill himself or cheerfully submit to be killed by his friends, in order

to realise the sooner the difference imagined between earth and heaven.

The powers of evil which vex him here will be absent hereafter, and the

Spirit he recognises as supreme in his hierarchy of invisible powers is

either conceived as too beneficent to punish, or, if he punishes at all,

as likely to punish at once and for ever.

II.

_SAVAGE MODES OF PRAYER._

In the same way as a child is insensibly educated by the very efforts of

an adult to place himself on its level, so any tribe of savages is to

some extent modified by the time that a stranger has fitted himself, by

long residence among them and the acquisition of their language, to tell

us anything about them. This primary difficulty, amounting theoretically

to insuperability, might alone suffice to invalidate most of the received

evidence which asserts or denies concerning savages anything whatsoever

in broad general terms. But when the evidence concerns religious ideas

another difficulty is superadded, and one which appertains to the subject

of religion alone—the reserve, that is, (attested by too many travellers

to need specific references,) with which savages guard their stock of

fundamental beliefs. The delicacy manifested by the most skilled of the

Iowa Indian tribe as to communicating fully or freely on religious

subjects, lest they should bring on themselves or their nation some

great calamity,[35] indicates the feeling that probably underlies such

religious reticence. If a savage dare not pronounce his own name, much

less the names of his dead, it is a fair matter of wonder that he should

ever have become so free with the names and attributes of his divinities

as to have rendered it possible for such systematic representations of

his theology as are current to appear before the world.

The evidence afforded by ethnology as to the nature of prayer among

savages is slighter than on most subjects relating to them, partly

from the natural disregard paid to such matters by most Christian

missionaries, partly from the secret and hidden character of prayer,

which alone would make its study impossible; but there is abundant

evidence to show that religious supplication of a certain kind enters

more deeply than might be supposed into the daily lives of the lower

races of mankind. Says Ellis of the Society Islanders: ‘Religious rites

were connected with almost every act of their lives. An _ubu_ or prayer

was offered before they ate their food, planted their gardens, built

their houses, launched their canoes, cast their nets, and commenced or

concluded a journey.’[36] In the Fijian Islands business transactions

were commonly terminated by a short wish or prayer; and in the Sandwich

Islands the priest would pray before a battle that the gods he addressed

would prove themselves stronger than the gods of his foes, promising

them hecatombs of victims in the event of victory. But the mere fact of

such prayers is of less interest than the actual formulas used; these,

however, have more rarely been thought worth recording.

According to a recent African traveller it is a daily prayer in some

parts of Guinea: ‘O God, I know thee not, but thou knowest me: thy aid is

necessary to me.’ Or again: ‘O God, help us; we do not know whether we

shall live to-morrow: we are in thy hand.’[37] A Bushman, being asked how

he prayed to Cagn (recognised by his tribe as the first being and creator

of all things), answered, in a low, imploring tone: ‘O Cagn, O Cagn, are

we not your children? do you not see our hunger? Give us food;’ ‘and,’

he added, ‘he gives us both hands full.’[38] It further appears that the

Bushmen address petitions to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars;[39]

and the Kamchadals, who have been made to dispute with them the lowest

rank of humanity, had a rude form of prayer to the Storm-god, which was

uttered by a small child, sent naked round the ostrog with a shell in

its uplifted hand: ‘Gsanlga, sit down and cease to storm; the mussel is

accustomed to salt, not to sweet water; you make me too wet, and from the

wet I must freeze. I have no clothes; see how I freeze.’[40] In a certain

African tribe it is said to be usual for the men to go every morning to a

river, and there, after splashing water in their faces, or throwing sand

over their heads, after clasping and loosing their hands and whispering

softly the words _Eksuvais_, to pray: ‘Give me to-day rice and yams,

gold and aggry-beads, slaves, riches, and health; make me active and

strong.’[41]

The Zulus of Africa and the Khonds of India supply good illustrations

of savage prayer. The head man of a Zulu village, at the sacrifice of

a bullock to the spirits of the dead, thus addresses them in prayer:

‘I pray for cattle that they may fill this pen. I pray for corn that

many people may come to this village of yours and make a noise and

glorify you. I also ask for children, that this village may have a large

population and that your name may never come to an end.’[42] The Khonds,

also, at the sacrifice of a bullock express their wishes with rather more

emphasis: ‘Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let

children so abound that care of them shall overcome their parents, as

shall be seen by their burnt hands.’ Or, again, they will ask that their

swine may so abound that their fields shall require no other ploughs than

their ‘rooting snouts;’ that their poultry may be so numerous as to hide

the thatch of their houses; that neither fish, frog, nor worm shall be

able to live in their drinking ponds beneath the trampling feet of their

multitude of cattle.[43]

These may be taken as fair samples of primitive prayer; but it is only

just, as against the inference that a savage’s prayers have reference

solely to the good and evil things of this world, to notice indications

of higher sentiments. The Yebus of Africa, with faces bowed to the earth,

are said commonly to pray, not only for preservation from sickness and

death, but for the gifts of happiness and _wisdom_.[44] The Tahitian

priest, praying to the god by whom it was supposed that a dead man’s

spirit had been required, that the sins of the latter, especially that

one for which he had lost his life, might be buried in a hole then dug

in the ground and not attach to the survivors, points to the occasional

presence of a moral motive in prayer; though even here the deprecation

of further anger on the part of the gods appears the principal object

of concern.[45] So little indeed do thoughts of morality or of a future

state enter as factors into savage prayer, and so little does any

ethical distinction appear in the savage conception of supernatural

powers, that not unfrequently supplication is directed to the attainment

of ends morally the reverse of desirable. Like the Roman tradesman

praying to Mercury to aid him in cheating, the Nootka warrior would

entreat his god that he might find his foes asleep, and so kill a great

many of them.[46] But perhaps the best illustration of the perverted use

of prayer is one employed by a clan of the Hervey Islanders when engaged

on a thieving and murdering expedition, and uttered as near as possible

to the dwelling of the person about to be robbed. It is apparently

addressed to Rongo, or Oro, the great Polynesian god of war, and is thus

translated in Mr. Gill’s ‘Myths and Songs of the South Pacific’:—[47]

We are on a thieving expedition;

Be close to our left side to give aid.

Let all be wrapped in sleep;

Be as a lofty cocoa-nut tree to support us.

The god is then entreated to cause all things to sleep; the owner of the

house is entreated to sleep on, likewise the threshold of the house, the

insects, beetles, earwigs, and ants that inhabit it, the central post,

the several rafters and beams that support it; and after the thatch of

the house has been asked to sleep on, the prayer thus concludes:—

The first of its inmates unluckily awaking

Put soundly to sleep again.

If the Divinity so please, man’s spirit must yield.

O Rongo, grant thou complete success.

If, however, we may hope to find anywhere indications of a higher purpose

in prayer than the attainment of merely temporary or personal needs, we

must seek it (nor is the search entirely vain) in those rites of religion

which, from the highest to the lowest levels of culture, are customary

upon the entrance of a fresh life on the stage of this world’s trials and

sorrows. The popular saying, that the cries of a child at its christening

are the cries of the devil going out of it, expresses identically the

same belief which still prompts our savage contemporaries to drive

evil spirits from a new-born child by rites of mysterious spiritual

efficacy; and it is probably to the indigenous prevalence of baptism

among many savage tribes that some Catholic missionaries, complacently

identifying conversion with immersion, have owed the success of their

efforts. It would at least be interesting to know whether baptism was

a native African rite at the time that the Capuchin Merolla baptized

with his own hands 13,000 negroes, and Padre Jerom da Montefarchio his

100,000 in the space of twenty years.[48] Mungo Park gives an account of

a purely heathen festival held about a week after the birth of a child,

at which a priest, taking the latter in his arms, would pray, soliciting

repeatedly the blessing of God on the child and all the company. And

Bosman tells of a priest binding ropes, corals, and other things round

the limbs of a new-born child, and exorcising the spirits of sickness and

evil.[49]

It cannot, however, be proved with certainty that such rites are of

native growth wherever they have been found, though similar feelings of

natural impurity, of natural anxiety, may well have contributed to make

them common all the world over. With this reservation, let it suffice

to recall some illustrations drawn from the most distant parts of the

world. The most touching form of the custom is told of a tribe in the

Fiji Islands, where the priest, presented by the relations with food

with which to notify the event to the gods before the birth-festival,

would thus petition the latter: ‘This is the food of the little child:

take knowledge of it, ye gods. Be kind to him. Do not pelt him or spit

upon him, or seize him, but let him live to plant sugar-canes.’[50]

In New Zealand, the tohunga, or priest, dipping a green branch into a

calabash of water, sprinkled the child therewith and made incantations

according to its sex;[51] whilst in the Hervey Islands, where the

child was immersed in a taro leaf filled with water, the ceremony was

intimately connected with their system of tribes and dedication for

future sacrifice.[52] Crossing over to America, we find among the Indian

tribes of Guiana the native priest dancing about an infant and dashing

water over it, finishing the ceremony by passing his hands over its

limbs, muttering all the while incantations and charms.[53] In some North

American tribes, water having been boiled with a certain sweet-scented

root, and some of it having been first thrown into the fire and the rest

distributed to the company by the oldest woman present, the latter would

then offer a short prayer to the Master of Life, on behalf of the child,

that its life might be spared and that it might grow; and if, at the

festival held to commemorate the child’s first slain animal, one of the

chief persons present would entreat the Great Spirit to be kind to the

lad and let him grow to be a great hunter, in war to take many scalps and

not to behave like an old woman, it cannot be said that such a prayer was

purely selfish in its aim or confined solely to present necessities.[54]

Although, however, it is impossible to dissociate baptismal rites so rude

as these from a belief in magic, the idea of water as conferring moral as

well as physical purity appears to have been attained by some of the more

advanced heathen tribes. The rite of baptism, says Dr. Brinton, was of

immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians:

the use of water as symbolical of spiritual cleansing clearly appearing,

for instance, in the prayer of the Peruvian Indian, who after confessing

his guilt would bathe in the river and say: ‘O river, receive the sins

I have this day confessed unto the sun, carry them down to the sea, and

let them never more appear.’[55] It has often been told, on the original

authority of Sahagun, how the Mexican nurse, after bathing the new-born

child, would bid it approach its mother, the goddess of water; praying at

the same time to her that she would receive it and wash it, would take

away its inherited impurity, make it good and clean, and instil into it

good habits and manners.[56]

The mere enunciation of a wish often amounts among savages to a complete

prayer, it being conceived that the expression of desire is of more

moment than the manner of such expression; such a conception still

surviving among ourselves at certain wishing towers, wishing gates, or

on the occurrence of certain natural phenomena. In Fiji it was common

to shout aloud, after drinking a toast, the name of some object of

desire, and this was equivalent to a prayer for whatever it might be—for

food, wealth, a fair wind, or even for the gratification of cannibal

gluttony. Franklin tells how some Indians, disappointed in the chase, set

themselves to beat a large tambourine and sing an address to the Great

Spirit, praying for relief, their prayer consisting solely of three words

constantly repeated;[57] the tambourine probably being employed for the

same purpose that the Sioux Indians kept a whistle in the mouth of one of

their gods, namely, to make their invocation audible. The Ahts, praying

to the moon, sometimes say no more than _teech, teech_, that is, Health

or Life; and it is curious that the rude savages of Brazil exclaim _teh,

teh_, to the same luminary.[58] The Sioux would often say, ‘Spirits of

the dead, have mercy!’ adding thereto a notification of their wishes,

whether for good health, good luck in hunting, or anything else.[59] The

Zulus, however, sometimes carry this principle of brevity furthest, for

sometimes in their prayers to the spirits of their dead they simply say,

‘Ye people of our house,’ ‘the suppliant taking it for granted that the

Amatongo will know what he wants;’ though generally their addresses to

their ancestors are of a much more orthodox length than this.[60] When we

consider how large a place the spirits of the dead fill in the savage’s

spirit-world it appears possible that many of the prayers and sacrifices,

said to be offered to the Great Spirit or unknown divinities, are really

addressed to the all-controlling, ever-present spirits of the departed.

If we may believe the testimony of a great many travellers in all

parts of the world, the case of the Yezidis, who to the recognition

of a supreme being are said to join actual worship of the chief power

of evil, represents no exceptional phase of human thought. Yet even

the Yezidis, according to Dr. Latham, are said to be improperly called

Devil-worshippers, since they only try to conciliate Satan, speak of him

with respect or not at all, avoid his name in all their oaths, and are

pained if they hear people make a light use of it.[61] In Equatorial

Africa it is said that whilst Mburri, the spirit of evil, is worshipped

piously as a tyrant to be appeased, it is not considered necessary to

pray to Njambi, the good spirit.[62] Harmon says distinctly of all the

different Indian tribes east of the Rocky Mountains that they pray and

make frequent and costly sacrifices to the bad spirit for delivery from

evils they feel or fear, but that they seldom pray to the supreme good

spirit, to whom they ascribe every perfection, and whom they consider

too benevolent ever to inflict evil on his creatures.[63] There is,

indeed, little doubt that, if a certain amount of evidence suffices

the requirements of proof, we must yield consent to the fact, in

itself neither incredible nor unintelligible, that many savage tribes,

recognising and believing in a good and powerful spirit, make that very

goodness a reason for their neglect of him, and address their petitions

instead to the mercy of that other spirit to whose power for evil they

conceive the world to lie subject.[64] There is, however, much to be

said in favour of the view, that the mind in its primitive state is

unconscious of this moral dualism in the spirit-world, attributing

rather (in perfect accordance with the analogy of human relationships)

good and bad things alike to the agency of the same beings, according as

transitory impulses affect them.

Thus, according to Castren, an antagonism between absolute good and

absolute evil finds no place among the Samoyeds. They have no extreme

divinities corresponding in their attributes to Ahriman and Ormuzd. ‘The

human temper is the divine temper also, good and bad mixed.’[65] Mburri,

who, according to one writer, is the evil spirit in Equatorial Africa,

is, according to another, the good spirit, or at least the less wicked

of the two, both the good and bad receiving worship, and being endowed

with much the same powers.[66] The Beetjuans, venerating Morimo as the

source of all good and evil that happened to them, were not agreed as to

whether he was entirely a beneficent or a malevolent being; and, if they

thanked him for benefits, they never hesitated to curse him for ills or

for wishes unfulfilled.[67] ‘To the very same image,’ says Bosman of the

negroes, ‘they at one time make offerings to God and at another to the

devil, so that one image serves them in the capacity of god and devil.’

It was untrue, he declares, that the negroes prayed and made offerings to

the devil, though some of them would try to appease a devil by leaving

thousands of pots of victuals standing ever ready for his gratification;

on the contrary, the devil was annually banished from their towns with

great ceremony, being hunted away with dismal cries, and his spirit

pelted with wood and stones.[68]

The evidence, again, in this respect concerning the aborigines of

America is important. The Winnebagoes are said to have had a tradition

that soon after the creation a bad spirit appeared on the scene, whose

attempts to vie with the products of the Good Spirit resulted in making

a negro in failure of an Indian, a grizzly bear in failure of a black

one, and snakes which were endowed with venom; he also it was who made

all the worthless trees, thistles, and weeds, who tempted Indians to

lie, murder, and steal, and who receives bad Indians when they die. The

suspicion, however, of Christian influence among this tribe makes the

tradition of little value to the argument. Turning to other evidence,

amid Schoolcraft’s reiterated statements of the original dualism of

Indian theology, whereby the Indian was careful ‘to guard his good and

merciful God from all evil acts and intentions, by attributing the whole

catalogue of evil deeds among the sons of men to the Great Bad Spirit

of his theology,’ we yet find this admission, that ‘it is impossible to

witness closely the rites and ceremonies which the tribes practise in

their sacred and ceremonial societies without perceiving that _there is

no very accurate or uniform discrimination between the powers of the

two antagonistical deities_.’[69] Mr. Pond, who resided with the Sioux

Indians for eighteen years and had every opportunity to become acquainted

with such matters, declares that it was ‘next to impossible to penetrate’

into the subject of their divinities; but he was never able to discover

‘the least degree of evidence that they divide the gods into classes of

good and evil,’ nor did he believe that they ever distinguished the Great

Spirit from other divinities ‘till they learnt to do so from intercourse

with the whites;’ for they had no chants, feasts, dances, nor sacrificial

rites which had any reference to such a being, or which, if they had,

were not of recent origin.[70] Of the same people says Mr. Prescott, a

man related to and resident among them many years: ‘As to their belief in

evil spirits, they do not understand the difference between a great good

spirit and a great evil spirit, as we do. _The idea the Indians have is

that a spirit can be good if necessary, and do evil if it thinks fit._’

They ‘know very little about whether the Great Spirit has anything to do

with their affairs, present or future.’ Their idea of the Great Spirit

is of the vaguest possible kind, since they lack entirely any conception

of his power, or of the mode of, or of a reason for, man’s creation.

The Great Spirit they believe made everything but the wild rice and the

thunder; and they have been known to accuse their deity of badness in

sending storms to cause them misery.[71] In the same way the Comanches

of Texas neither worship the evil spirit nor are aware of his existence,

‘_attributing everything to arise from the Great Spirit, whether of good

or evil_.’[72] Had the ancient Jews been described by Greek travellers

instead of by themselves, we may fairly suspect that they would have

been introduced to posterity as a people, consciously theistic indeed,

but at the same time as addicted, in most of their rites, to demonolatry

and the propitiation of imaginary evil beings. The true view would

seem to be that the theology of the lower races does not admit of that

preciseness of terminology, of that clear distinction of qualities, of

that systematic marshalling of powers, which has been so often predicated

of it, but that in its growth it undergoes a period of flux and change

similar to that which may be seen to occur in the evolution of the lowest

forms of physical life into more determinate types of being.

The Sioux Indians, abusing their Great Spirit for sending them storms,

or the Kamschadals cursing Kutka for having created their mountains so

high and their streams so rapid, expose a state of thought relating to

the gods which is most difficult to reconcile with the savage’s habitual

dread of them, still more with a high conception of them, but which is

too well authenticated to admit of doubt. Franklin saw a Cree hunter

tie offerings (a cotton handkerchief, looking-glass, tin pin, some

ribbon and tobacco) to the value of twenty skins round an image of the

god Kepoochikan, at the same time praying to him in a rapid monotonous

tone to be propitious, explaining to him the value of his presents, and

strongly cautioning him against ingratitude.[73] If all the prayers and

presents made to their god by the Tahitians to save their chiefs from

dying proved in vain, his image was inexorably banished from the temple

and destroyed.[74] The Ostiaks of Siberia, if things went badly with

them, would pull down from their place of honour in the hut and in every

way maltreat the idols they generally honoured so exceedingly; the idols

whose mouths were always so diligently smeared with fish-fat, and within

whose reach a supply of snuff ever lay ready.[75] The Chinese are said

to do the same by their household gods, if for a long time they are deaf

to their prayers, and so do the Cinghalese;[76] so that the practice

is more than an impulsive manifestation of merely local feeling. That

such feelings occasionally crop out in civilised Catholic countries is

matter of more surprise; but it is an authentic historical fact that the

good people of Castelbranco, in Portugal, were once so angry with St.

Anthony for letting the Spaniards plunder their town, contrary to his

agreement, that they broke many of his statues in pieces, and, taking the

head off one they specially revered, substituted for it the head of St.

Francis.[77] Neapolitan fishermen are said to this day to throw their

saints overboard if they do not help them in a storm; and the images of

the Virgin or of St. Januarius, worn in Neapolitan caps, are in danger

of being trodden under foot and destroyed, if adverse contingencies

arise. The latter saint, indeed, once received during a famine very clear

intimation, that, unless corn came by a certain time, he would forfeit

his saintship.[78]

It is perhaps a refinement of thought when a present becomes an advisable

accompaniment to a simple petition; but the principle of exchange once

entered into, the relations between man and the supernatural lead

logically from the offering of fruits and flowers to the sacrifice of

animals and of men. Some Algonkin Indians, mistaking once a missionary

for a god, and petitioning his mercy, begged him to let the earth yield

them corn, the rivers fish, and to prevent sickness from slaying or

hunger from tormenting them. Their request they backed with the offer of

a pipe;[79] and in this ridiculous incident the whole of the savage’s

philosophy of sacrifice is contained. Prescott, coming with some Indians

to a lake they were to cross, saw his companions light their pipes

and smoke by way of invoking the winds to be calm.[80] And the Hurons

offered a similar prayer with tobacco to a local god, saying: ‘Oki,

thou who livest on this spot, we offer thee tobacco. Help us, save us

from shipwreck. Defend us from our enemies. Give us good trade, and

bring us safe back to our villages.’[81] In the island of Tanna, the

village priest, addressing the spirits of departed chiefs (thought to

preside over the growth of yams and fruits), after the firstfruits of

vegetation had been deposited on a stone, on the branch of a tree, or

on a rude altar of sticks, would pray: ‘Compassionate father, here is

some food; eat it, be kind to us on account of it;’ and in Samoa, too,

a libation of ava at the evening meal was the offering, in return for

which the father of a family would beg of the gods health and prosperity,

productiveness for his plantations, and for his tribe generally a strong

and large population for war.[82] In Fiji, again, when the chief priests

and leading men assembled to discuss public affairs in the yaquona or

kava circle, the chief herald, as the water was poured into the kava,

after naming the gods for whom the libation was prepared, would say:

‘Be gracious, ye lords, the gods, that the rain may cease, and the sun

shine forth;’ and again when the potion was ready: ‘Let the gods be of a

gracious mind, and send a wind from the east.’[83]

It is a somewhat obvious inference, if presents like these fail to obtain

corresponding results, that the spirit addressed is not satisfied,

and that he requires a greater value in exchange for the blessings at

his disposal. The crowning petition, therefore, of disappointed and

despairing humanity is, by an irrefragable chain of reasoning, the

sacrifice of a human life, or, if this fails, of many lives. Long and

frequent were the prayers of the Tahitians to the gods when their chiefs

were ill, for, under the idea that ‘the gods were always influenced by

the same motives as themselves, they imagined that the efficacy of their

prayers would be in exact proportion to the value of the offerings with

which they were accompanied.’ Hence, if the disease grew violent, the

fruits of whole plantain fields or more than a hundred pigs would be

hurried to the marae; nay, not unfrequently a number of men with ropes

round their necks would be led to the altar and presented to the idol,

with prayers that the mere sight of them might satisfy his wrath.[84]

It does not appear that on such occasions they were actually slain, but

we seem here rather to see the first step towards human sacrifice than

merely a survival of it, for the obtaining of this particular wish. The

process is naturally from the sacrifice of the least possible to the

sacrifice of the greatest possible, though after that point has been

reached there may well be a tendency, varying with the character of a

tribe, to fall back upon make-believe, curtailed losses. The Mandan

Indians, Catlin repeats, always sacrificed the best of its kind to the

Great Spirit, the favourite horse, the best arrow, or the best piece of

buffalo;[85] so that the sacrifice of their fingers was more probably

a form of incipient human sacrifice than, as it sometimes is, a relic

of a more complete self-surrender. Both the Aztecs and the Mayas, with

all the cruel forms of sacrifice that disgraced their civilization,

retained traditions of a time when the gods were contented with the

milder offerings of fruits and flowers; and in Yucatan, where hundreds of

young girls were sacrificed in the dark but sacred pit of Chichen, there

were recollections of a time when one victim sufficed the demands of

the spirit-world. And in this instance may be seen how human sacrifice,

besides being the highest gift man could offer to his god or gods, was in

yet another sense a mode of prayer; for whilst the victims stood round

the pit, whilst the incense burnt on the altar and in the braziers, the

officiating priest explained to the messengers from earth ‘the things

for which they were to implore the gods into whose presence they were

about to be introduced.’[86] So also the priests of Mexico would exhort

the deputation of eighteen souls they sent to the sun to remember the

mission for which they were sent, the people’s wants they were to make

known, the favours they were to ask for their countrymen.[87]

Less obviously connected with prayer than sacrifice is dancing, a custom

which the civilized world has long since ceased to regard as in any

sense connected with religion, but which among savages, besides being a

natural expression of joy in life, of thankfulness for sun or shower, is

not unfrequently a mode of prayer, a means employed for the attainment

of desire. This at least seems the case with those imitative dances or

pantomimes in which with marvellous exactitude the savage all the world

over acts the part of the animals he pursues in the chase. The national

dance of the Kamschadals consists in the imitation of the manners and

motions of seals and bears, varying from the gentlest movement of

their bodies to the most violent agitation of their thighs and knees,

accompanied with singing and stamping in time;[88] and it is remarkable

that in Vancouver’s Island also there is a seal dance, for which the

natives, stripping themselves naked, enter the water, regardless of the

cold of the night, and emerge ‘dragging their bodies along the sand like

seals,’ then enter the houses and crawl about the fires, and finally

jump up and dance about.[89]

But although it is intelligible that such facility and perfection of

beast-acting as, for instance, enabled the Dog-rib Indians to approach

and kill the reindeer, acquired originally by the necessities of the

chase, should be perpetuated as a religious ceremony to keep up a

habit of actual importance to existence, there are cases to which this

explanation would hardly apply, as, for example, to the African gorilla

dance, which has been so vividly described by a recent eye-witness,

and which, he says, ‘was a religious festival held on the eve of an

enterprise,’ the eve, namely, of a gorilla hunt. An African dancing to

a drum and harp imitated closely all the attitudes and movements of the

gorilla, being joined in the chorus by all the rest present. ‘Now he

would be seated on the ground, his legs apart, his hands resting on his

knees, his head drooping, and in his face the vacant expression of the

brute. Sometimes he folded his arms on his forehead. Suddenly he would

raise his head with prone ears and flaming eyes,’ till in the last act

he represented the gorilla attacked and killed.[90] But, unless gorillas

are ever killed by so clever an imitation of themselves that they really

mistake their African neighbours for their own brothers, the gorilla

dance must, by a phenomenon of thought not without analogy, be a mode

of prayer for obtaining a desired result; the same fetishistic law of

thought prevailing that is traceable in the idea that by pouring water

on a stone you can bring rain on the earth, or that you can injure your

enemy by an injury to his effigy.

It may be, however, that pantomimic dances were employed originally as a

clearer expression than mere words of the suppliant’s wishes, the acting

of a hunt or battle being equivalent to a petition for favour and success

in the same, and the unseen deities addressed being not unnaturally

conceived as more likely to see the bodily movements than to hear the

feeble voice of the petitioner. The analogy of the various tongues,

prevalent among birds, beasts, and men, might well suggest to a savage

the possibility of the spiritual world being unavoidably deaf to his

utterances from mere inability to comprehend them; whilst dealings with

the nearest tribe might make it natural for him to resort to the use of

signs and symbols as the least mistakable vehicle for his meaning. The

Ahts, retiring to the solitude of the woods, and there standing naked

with outstretched arms before the moon, employ set words and gestures

according to the nature of the object they desire. Thus in praying for

salmon the suppliant rubs the back of his hands, and, looking upwards,

says, ‘Many salmon, many salmon;’ in asking for deer he carefully rubs

both his eyes, for geese the back of his shoulders, for bears his sides

and legs, uttering in a sing-song way the usual formula. The meaning of

all these rubbings is obscure; but it has been suggested that the rubbing

of the hands indicates a wish that the hand may have the requisite

steadiness for throwing the salmon spear; the rubbing of the eyes, a

prayer, that they may be opened to discern deer in the forest.[91]

Among a Californian tribe it was usual, preparatory to the chase, to

resort to a certain stake-inclosure and there to pray to the god’s image

for success, by mimicry of the actions of the hunt, as by leaping and

twanging of the bow.[92] In the Society Islands, if the land had been in

any way defiled by an enemy, a mode of religious purification consisted

in offering pieces of coral, collected expressly, on the altar to the

gods, to induce them ‘to cleanse the land from pollution, that it might

be pure as the coral fresh from the sea.’[93]

The Voguls, whose most frequent prayers are for success in hunting, are

said to promote their fulfilment by ‘_images in the shape of the beast

more especially sought for, rudely shaped out of wood or stone_.’[94]

But to dance like the animal would naturally serve the purpose as well;

and so the interpretation of some dances as symbolised prayers explains

several American customs which are strikingly analogous to the African

gorilla dance already described. Every Mandan Indian was compelled by

social law to keep his buffalo’s mask, consisting of the skin and horns

of a buffalo’s head, in his lodge, ready to put on and wear in the

buffalo dance, whenever the protracted absence of that animal from the

prairie rendered it expedient to resort to this means for the purpose

of inducing the herds to change the direction of their wanderings and

bend their course towards the Mandan villages. And a principal part in

the annual celebration of the subsidence of the great waters consisted

in the buffalo dance, wherein eight men dressed in entire buffalo skins,

so as to imitate closely the appearance and motions of buffaloes, were

the chief actors, and four old men chanted prayers to the Great Spirit

for the continuation of his favours in sending them good supplies of

buffaloes for the coming year.[95] In this instance the close relation

between dance and prayer, the dance being either supplementary or

explicative, clearly appears; as it also does in a very similar buffalo

dance performed by a neighbouring tribe of the Mandans, the Minnatarees.

In their ceremony six elderly men acted the animals, imitating with

great perfection even the peculiar sound of their voice.[96] Behind them

came a man, who represented the driving of the beasts forward, and who,

at a certain point, placing his hands before his face, sang, and made a

long speech in the nature of a prayer, containing good wishes for the

buffalo hunt and for war, as also an appeal to the heavenly powers to be

propitious to the huntsmen and their arms. So again the Sioux Indians

for several days before starting on a bear hunt would hold a bear dance,

which was regarded as ‘a most important and indispensable form,’ and in

which the whole tribe joined in a song to the Bear Spirit, to conciliate

as well as to consult him. ‘All with the motions of their hands closely

imitated the movements of that animal; some representing its motion in

running, and others the peculiar attitude and hanging of the paws when

it is sitting up on its hind feet and looking out for the approach of an

enemy.’[97] And the same tribe, whenever they had bad luck in hunting,

would institute a dance to invoke the aid of one of their gods.[98]

To the African gorilla dance, the Mandan buffalo dance, the Sioux

bear dance, may be added the custom of the Koossa Kafirs, who, before

they start on a hunt, perform a wonderful game, which is considered

absolutely necessary to the success of the undertaking.[99] One of them,

representing some kind of game, takes a handful of grass in his mouth

and runs about on all fours; whilst the rest make-believe to transfix

him with their spears, till at last he throws himself on the ground as

if he were killed.[100] On the occasion of a Sioux Indian dreaming of

the fish-eating cormorant, a fish dance was instituted, to ward off any

danger portended, in which the most elaborate imitation of the cormorant

was observed. The medicine-men, dancing up to a fish, affixed to a pole,

began quacking, flapping their arms like wings, biting at the fish, and

pretending to hide a piece in their nests away from the wolves.[101] The

Ahts, again, Sproat observed, spent the eve of a deer hunt ‘in dancing

and singing and in various ceremonies intended to secure good luck on the

morrow.’[102] And in South Australia it is remarkable that, when boys of

a certain age undergo the ceremony of losing their front teeth, power is

conferred on them of killing the kangaroo by a kind of kangaroo dance.

First of all, a kangaroo of grass is deposited at their feet; and then

the actors, the adults of the tribe, having fitted themselves with long

tails of grass, set off ‘as a herd of kangaroos, now jumping along, then

lying down and scratching themselves, as those animals do when basking in

the sun,’ two armed men following them meanwhile, as it were to steal on

them unmolested and spear them.[103]

The same thought occurs in prayers for rain. Modern Servian peasants,

pouring water over a girl covered with grass and flowers, employ a mode

of petition for rain very similar to that in vogue near Lake Nyanza.

There, after a wild dance, a jar of water is placed before the village

chief: the woman who acts as priestess of the ceremonies washes her

hands, arms, and face with the water; then a large quantity of it is

poured over her, and finally all the women present rush to dip their

calabashes in the jar and to toss the water in the air with loud cries

and wild gesticulations.[104]

Again, the common savage war dance may be taken to have a religious

significance in addition to its secular motive of sustaining martial

feelings and habits. In the war dance of the Navajoes of New Mexico the

most important part of the war dance was the arrow dance, when a young

virgin, beautifully dressed, represented in gesture ‘the war path.’ An

eye-witness has described it as a really beautiful performance. Slowly

and steadily she would pursue her imaginary foe; suddenly her step would

quicken as she came in sight of the enemy; she would dance faster

and faster, and, seizing an arrow, demonstrate by the rapidity of her

movements that the fight had begun; she would point with the arrow, show

how it wings its course, how the scalp is taken, how the victory is

won.[105] Among the Winnebagoe Indians also it was part of the war dance

for a warrior to go through the pantomime of the discovery of the enemy,

of the ambuscade, the attack, the slaughter, and the scalping.[106] And

in this reference may be noted the curious proceeding of the women of

Accra, on the Guinea Coast, who, whilst the male population were engaged

in war with a neighbouring people, endeavoured every day to bring it to

a happy issue by dancing fetish; that is, by fighting sham battles with

wooden swords, flying to the boats on the beach and pretending to row,

throwing some one into the sea, taking a trowel and making believe to

build a wall—all actions literally symbolical of corresponding ones to

be performed by the men in the course of defeating their enemy.[107] In

Madagascar, too, when the men are absent in war, the custom of the women

to dance, in order to inspire their husbands with courage, has been

thought not to be destitute of a religious meaning.

That a dance may be in reality a form of prayer, a petition acted

instead of spoken, as more likely so to be understood, makes it possible

that prayers may be hidden under customs which are generally only cited

to illustrate the absurdity of primitive metaphysics. May it not be that

the Indian, when he thinks to ensure a successful chase by drawing a

figure of his game with a line leading to its heart from its mouth, and

by so subjecting its movements to himself, or when he thinks to cure a

man of sickness by shooting the bark-effigy of the animal supposed to

possess him—may it not be that he thereby hopes to influence known or

unknown natural forces in his favour by a clear representation of his

wants? The control of natural phenomena by witchcraft may thus have

been in its origin a direction to natural phenomena, or rather to the

spirits ruling them; an address perhaps to those spirits of the dead

which to a savage are his earliest and for long his only gods; and thus

the absurdities of fetishism might become intelligible as lifeless

prayers, with more or less of their primal meaning, descended from such

a philosophy of nature. The Kamschadal child sent out naked to make the

rain stop, clear as the meaning of the custom is with the prayer joined

to it, would without it appear in the light of ordinary fetishism. So

the Khond, carrying a branch cut from hostile soil to his god of war,

and there, after he has dressed it like one of the enemy, throwing it

down, with certain incantations, on the shrine of the divinity, urges

his petition in a way which even the god of war can scarcely fail to

understand. And the Basuto woman, who in her wish for children, prays

to her tutelary divinity for the accomplishment of her desires by

making dolls of clay and treating them as infants, affords yet another

illustration of the operation of the same law of thought.[108]

It remains to show how, in primitive theology, prayer attaches itself as

well to the material as the spiritual world, for it is here especially

that it finds its counterpart in the folk-lore of our own day. As,

however, there is scarcely an object in nature which in a state of

ignorance may not with reason be worshipped, a few illustrations must be

taken for thousands on a subject it were less easy to exhaust than the

patience of the reader.

‘As for animals having reasoning powers,’ says an exceptionally credible

witness, ‘I have heard Indians talk and reason with a horse the same

as with a person.’[109] Our fairy tales of talking animals would be

commonplace facts to a savage. Hence it can be no matter of surprise to

find that it is a common Indian custom to converse with rattlesnakes,

and to endeavour to propitiate them with presents of tobacco. On one

occasion, the Iowas having begun to build a village, the presence of

a rattlesnake on a neighbouring hill was suddenly announced, when

forthwith started the great snake doctor with tobacco and other presents:

when he had offered these, and had had a long talk with the snake, he

returned to his village, with the satisfactory news that his tribesmen

might now travel in safety, as peace had been made between them and the

snakes.[110]

But perhaps of all natural objects that have attracted human worship,

and been regarded as a supreme source of human woe or welfare, none can

compare with the moon. For the moon’s changes of aspect being far more

remarkable than any of the sun’s, and more calculated to inspire dread

by the nocturnal darkness they contend with, are held in popular fancy

nearly everywhere to cause, portend, or accord with changes in the lot of

mortals and all things terrestrial. In the Hervey Islands cocoa-nuts are

invariably planted at the full of the moon, the size of the latter being

held symbolical of the future fulness of the fruit;[111] and in South

Africa it is unlucky to begin a journey or any work of importance in the

last quarter of the moon.[112] The moon’s wane makes things on earth wane

too; when it is new or full, it is everywhere the proper season for new

crops to be sown, new households to be formed, new weather to begin.

The feeling of the Congo Africans, who at the sight of the new moon fall

on their knees or stand and clap their hands, praying that their lives

may be renewed like that of the moon, corresponds exactly with the idea

of English folk-lore that crops are more likely to be plentiful if sown

when the moon is young, or with the idea of German folk-lore that the new

moon is the season for counting money which it is desired may increase.

‘On the first appearance of the new moon, which,’ says Mungo Park,

‘the Kafirs look upon as newly created, the pagan natives, as well as

Mahomedans, say a short prayer,’ seemingly the only adoration they offer

to the Supreme Being;[113] so that the sentiment of the Congo prayer may

be guessed to underlie, consciously or not, the salutations by which the

new moon is greeted generally throughout Africa, from the salutations of

the Hottentots to the prayers of the Makololos, for the success of their

journeys or the destruction of their enemies.[114]

More difficult to understand than the worship of either animals or the

heavenly bodies is that of such inanimate things as stones, trees, or

rivers. Yet the state of thought is not so far remote from our own but

that we can still listen with pleasure, in stories like ‘Undine,’ to

the voices of the forest or the river. To a savage, however, it is not

only the motion or the sound of natural objects which suggests their

divinity, but the danger that is ever latent in them; and it is rather

to prevent the river from drowning him or the tree from falling on him

than from any perception of their beauty that he makes offerings to

them and pays them homage. Such feelings as that of the Cree Indians,

who believed that a deer, found dead within a few yards of a willow

bush which they worshipped and of which it had eaten, had fallen a

victim to the sin of its sacrilege, are not confined to savage lands nor

times.[115] As savages have been known to apologize to a slain elephant

or bear, assuring it that its death was accidental, so it is said that

in parts of Germany a woodcutter will still (or would recently) beg

the pardon of a fine healthy tree before cutting it down.[116] In our

own midland counties there is a feeling to this day against binding up

elder-wood with other faggots; and in Suffolk it is believed misfortune

will ensue if ever it is burnt. In Germany formerly an elder-tree might

not be cut down entirely; and Grimm was himself an eye-witness of a

peasant praying with bare head and folded hands before venturing to cut

its branches. That trees are still popularly endowed with a conscious

personality is further proved by the custom, not yet extinct, of trying

to secure the future favours of fruit trees by presents and prayers. The

placing of money in a hole dug at the foot of them, the presenting them

with money on New Year’s Day, the shaking under them of the remainder of

the Christmas dinner, the beating of them with rods on Holy Innocents’

Day—all German methods to incite fruit trees to further fertility—answer

closely to the English custom of apple-howling or wassailing, when at

Christmas or Epiphany the inhabitants of a parish, walking in procession

to the principal orchards, and there singling out the principal tree,

sprinkle it with cider, or place cider-soaked cakes of toast and sugar

in its branches, saluting it at the same time with set words in the form

of a prayer to the trees to be fruitful for the ensuing year, as the

doggerel verses following show plainly enough:—

Here’s to thee, old apple tree,

Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow,

And whence thou mayst bear apples enow,

Hats full, caps full,

Bushel, bushel, sacks full,

And my pocket full too.[117]

And similar prayers, as lifeless now as the fossil shells on the shore of

some ancient coral sea, lie scattered abundantly in many an English rhyme

and ballad, serving to show how the philosophy of one age passes into the

nonsense of a later one, and how ideas which constituted a religion for

one time may only survive as an amusement for another.

III.

_SOME SAVAGE PROVERBS._

The German proverb, ‘Speak, that I may see thee,’ may be applied as

truly to a whole community as to an individual. For proverbs—or, roughly

defining, popular sayings—reflect conspicuously the general character of

a nation, constituting its actual code of social, political, and moral

philosophy. Besides the beauty and wisdom, from which alone many of

them derive an imperishable charm, they serve as a kind of literature

in miniature, in which the inner life of a nation is more clearly

legible than in its more voluminous writings. And in spite of the

general resemblance which seems to pervade the proverbial lore of the

world, arising partly from the direct interchange of thought inseparable

from international commerce of any kind, partly from a uniformity

of experience—such, for example, as has impressed on all people the

wisdom of caution and truth—there are yet well-marked differences in

the proverbs of nations, which as clearly retain the records of their

several histories as do their different laws and customs. Remarkable,

therefore, as is the substantial similarity of proverbial codes, of

which the general characteristic is a high sense of right coupled with

a mournful consciousness of human infirmity, they betray often in the

very expression of the same idea the individuality of their national

birthplace. It is obvious, for instance, that, largely as all modern

nations are indebted to a writer like Æsop for the thoughts they

share in common, each nation severally will owe more of its wisdom to

writers of its own, who, like Shakespeare or Cervantes, have, from

greater familiarity with the manners, been more competent to express

the feelings, of their different countries. But the way in which good

proverbs, like good gold, find acceptance everywhere, and pass readily

into the current coinage of different realms, may be illustrated by the

fact of the existence, in countries so widely remote as Spain, Arabia,

Persia, Afghanistan, and India, of a saying, second to none in all the

essentials of a good proverb, to the effect that ‘when God wills the

destruction of an ant, he supplies it with wings.’[118]

An instructive instance of the light thrown on national character by

proverbs may be supplied from a comparison of Italian, German, and

Persian teaching on the subject of vindictiveness. In communities

destitute of social organisation, the ‘vendetta,’ or duty of

blood-revenge, probably preceded and led the way to the practice of

legal punishment. Originally it was a kind of lynch-law, supplying

the default of any legal protection of life; and all nations bear

traces in their history of having passed through a stage of growth in

which the sacred duty of vengeance was the germ of any idea of a more

judicial retribution. Confucius made it a duty for a son to slay his

father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly retaliatory

penalty for bloodshed. The duty of revenge, which if it is yet extinct

in Corsica survives with so much interest in the play of ‘The Corsican

Brothers,’ to this day, in places like Fiji, still passes from father

to son, and from the son to the nearest relation. The longer survival

of such feelings in Italy, consequent on the different circumstances of

her history, is clearly impressed on the proverbial philosophy of her

people, constituting a remarkable contrast to the sentiments of other

countries. For the Italian, extolling the sweetness of revenge, declares

it a morsel fit for God; and, expressing pity or contempt for the man

who either cannot or will not carry out his revenge, counsels patience

and the waiting of time and place for its successful execution. In a

proverb so terribly expressive that you seem to hear in it the assassin’s

gnashing teeth, he will tell you that ‘revenge, though a hundred years

old, still has its milk teeth,’ a maxim which stands on no higher a level

than the pagan African saying, ‘Hate hath no medicine,’ or than that of

Afghanistan, ‘Speak good words to an enemy very softly, gradually destroy

him root and branch;’ and which may be fitly compared with the Fijian

expression of malice: ‘Let the shell of the oyster perish by reason of

years, and to these add a thousand more, still my hatred shall be hot.’

How much purer than the Italian is the German teaching, which declares

revenge to be fresh wrong, the conversion of a little right into a great

injustice, and sure in its turn to draw revenge after it; or how far

nobler still is the more positive sentiment of Persia, that to take

revenge for an injury is the sign of a mean spirit; that it is easy to

return evil for evil, but that the manly thing is to return good for it!

The contrast conveyed in these proverbs is the more striking, in that

Italy might pre-eminently call herself the Catholic, as against Germany

the heretical, or Persia the infidel, land. It has been said that

every tenth proverb in an Italian collection contains a selfish or

cynical maxim; and though the beauty and purity of many Italian sayings

counterbalance the baseness of others—those, for instance, on love being

as refined as those on revenge are barbarous—it may not be uninteresting

to compare generally the proverbs of Italy with those of a land like

Persia where the religious history has been so different.

The noblest Italian proverb is to the effect that a hundred years cannot

repair a moment’s loss of honour; the basest, perhaps, that bad as it

is to be a knave, it is worse to be known as one. To love a friend with

all his faults; to associate with the good in order to be good; to

work in order to rest; to do right in spite of consequences, and good

irrespectively of persons; to do evil never, whatever the benefit—these

are among the highest lessons of Italian proverb-lore. That among men of

honour a word is a bond, and that conscience is as good as a thousand

witnesses; that the best sermon is a good life, and that the gains of

begging are dearly bought, are maxims of the same upright tendency.

Yet, over against these, are proverbs pervaded by the saddest spirit

of universal mistrust, instilling utter disbelief of any sincerity in

friendship, and even counselling to selfish or downright wicked conduct.

What more melancholy evidence of this than is afforded by the following

common sayings?—

He who suspects is seldom to blame.

Trust was a good man, Trust-not a better.

From those I trust God guard me; from those I mistrust I will

guard myself.

Who would have many friends let him test but few.

Tell your secret to your friend, and he will set his foot on

your neck.

Or, again, what can be thought of such maxims as, that it is expedient

to peel a fig for your friend but a peach for your enemy; that the man

who esteems none but himself is happy as a king; that public money, like

holy water, is the property of all men; or that with art and knavery men

may live through half the year, and with knavery and art through the

other?

The Persian proverbs seem to breathe a different moral atmosphere from

these, being as generous in character as the Italian are cynical, and

displaying a free spirit of liberality, trust, independence, above all,

of truthfulness, which is unsurpassed in any country of Europe. If in

Italy it is common to say that a man who cannot flatter knows not how

to talk, in Persia the sentiment prevails that to flatter is worse than

to abuse. The Persian, true to the character given of him by Herodotus,

holds boldly, that the man who speaks truth is always at ease; that men

never suffer from speaking the truth; that it behoves them to speak their

minds unreservedly, for that there is no hill in front of the tongue.

Add to this the popular sayings, that the accounts of friends are in the

heart, and that it is better to be in chains with friends than in the

garden with strangers. That it should have become proverbial in Persia,

that a man lowers himself by vexing the poor, and loses all claim to

greatness by finding fault with his inferiors, proves the purity of a

religion which has instilled such thoughts into the ethics of a nation;

nor could any language in Europe produce proverbs characterised by a

higher spirit of morality than is revealed in the following selection:—

A high name is better than a high house.

The cure for anger is silence.

A man must cut out his own garments of reputation.

Heaven is at the feet of mothers (_i.e._ lies in dutiful

obedience).

It is better to die of want than to beg.

The liberal man is the friend of God.

Practise liberality, but lay no stress on the obligation.

As another illustration of the way in which a few proverbs may condense

centuries of history, may be instanced the recorded experiences of

mankind touching priests and priestcraft. With no other evidence than

that of proverbs before him, a future historian of Europe might easily

detect a marked difference of feeling on this matter between Protestant

Germany and the Catholic countries of Europe. Not that the latter are

wanting in sayings to the prejudice of the priestly class, but they are

not so numerous as in Germany. The French have two proverbs, marked with

all the wit and boldness of their genius, one charging anyone who values

a clean house not to let into it either a priest or a pigeon; the other

declaring that it is human ignorance alone which causes the pot to boil

for priests. The Spanish experience also is, that it is best neither to

have a good friar for a friend nor a bad one for an enemy, and that

it is well to keep awake in a land thickly tenanted by monks. But the

Germans go much farther than this. In German estimation the priest is a

being who, in company with a woman, may be found at the bottom of all the

mischief that goes on in the world, and is as little likely as a woman

to forgive you an injury. Like the bites of wolves, those of priests are

hard to heal, so that it is best, if you fight with them at all, to beat

them to death. If they are ever hot, it is from eating, not from work;

for they always take care to bless themselves first, nor do they ever pay

any tithes to one another.

The above comparisons suffice to show how differences of national

character, and even how the operation of different forms of faith, may

reveal themselves in proverbs. Yet such estimates must be formed with

caution, in consideration of the wide possibilities of error which

are inseparable from so inexhaustible a subject. For not only may

the proverb-collector easily attribute to one country alone a saying

which belongs equally to, or may even have originated in, another,

but his canon of selection is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on his

preconceptions of what a proverb really is. ‘To take the ball on the

hop,’ for instance, is as genuine an English proverb as ‘to make hay

whilst the sun shines,’ which contains the same idea; yet whilst the one

might be heard every day, the other might not be heard once a year, so

that it might easily escape notice altogether, or if found be rejected

as obsolete. We can consequently, as in other branches of human study,

only make use, _on trust_, of such data as lie at hand, and, whilst

fully acknowledging the imperfection of the evidence, strive after an

approximation to truth, without hope for its actual attainment.

If now we extend the limits of our comparison, to take in some proverbs

of the lower races as well as of the higher, we shall find therein a

strong corroboration of the lesson already learnt in any comparison

of the superstitions, myths, and manners of different societies;

namely, that differences of race, colour, and even structure, sink into

insignificance when compared with the intellectual affinities which unite

the families of mankind, and that there is, perhaps, no phase of thought

nor shade of feeling belonging to the higher culture of the world to

which we may not find an antitype or even an equivalent in the lower. If

we take some of the proverbs collected from tribes confessedly low in

civilisation—those, for instance, of West Africa—and compare them with

proverbs still prevalent in Europe, we cannot fail to be struck with the

strong likeness between them, as well as impressed with the idea, that

many actually existent common sayings may have had their birth in days

of the most remote and savage antiquity. The immense number of modern

proverbs, drawn from the observation of the natural, and especially

of the animal, world (a number which must be nearly one out of five),

coupled with the coincidence that the same fact is perhaps the most

striking one in the proverbs collected from West Africa, seems to lend

some support to such a theory.

As an introductory instance let us take savage and civilised sentiments

about poverty, a belief in the misfortune of which is written clearly in

every language of Europe. Italian experience says that poverty has no

kin, and that poor men do penance for rich men’s sins; in Germany the

poor have to dance as the rich pipe; whilst in Spain and Denmark the evil

is expressed more graphically still, it being a matter of observation

in the one country that the poor man’s crop is destroyed by hail every

year; in the other, that the poor man’s corn always grows thin. And, in

the Oji dialect, spoken by about two millions of people, including the

Ashantees, Fantees, and others, it is also proverbial that the poor man

has no friend, that poverty makes a man a slave, and that hard words are

fit for the poor. And as the Dutch have learnt, that ‘poor folks’ wisdom

goes for little,’ or the Italians, that ‘the words of the poor go many to

the sackful,’ so in Oji exactly the same idea is conveyed in the saying,

that ‘when a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread’; in Yoruba, in

the saying, that ‘poverty destroys a man’s reputation;’ and in Accra in

the still cleverer proverb, that ‘a poor man’s pipe does not sound.’[119]

The proverbs of savages are moral and immoral, elevated and base,

precisely as are those of more civilised nations. The proverbs of the

Yorubas, justly observes the missionary, Mr. Bowen,[120] ‘are among the

most remarkable of the world;’ and indeed the intellectual powers and

moral ideas displayed in West African proverbs generally ought largely

to modify our conceptions of their originators, and make us sceptical

of that extreme dearth of mental wealth which has so frequently been

declared to attend a low standard of material advancement. Their wit,

terseness, vividness of illustration, and insight into life, are all

alike surprising; and acquaintance with them must suggest caution in

any estimate of the mental capacities of savages whose languages may

have been less investigated and consequently remain less known. ‘It has

always been passing travellers who have drawn the most doleful pictures

of so-called savages, and especially have asserted the poverty of their

language.’[121] It may well prove that better acquaintance with the

languages of tribes, classed at present for various reasons almost

outside the human family, may show them to combine, as Humboldt found

was the case with the once depreciated Carib language, ‘wealth, grace,

strength, and gentleness.’ It was said of the Veddahs once that they were

utterly destitute of either religion or _language_; and the Samojeds were

reported to shriek and chatter like apes.

The Basutos of South Africa are savages, yet the following proverbs are

current among them:—

A good name makes one sleep well.

Stolen goods do not make one grow.

Famine dwells in the house of the quarrelsome.

The thief catches himself.

A lent knife does not come back alone. (_i.e._ a good deed is

never thrown away.)[122]

Compare, for elevation of mind, these Yoruban proverbs with those already

noticed as current in Italy:—

He that forgives gains the victory.

He who injures another injures himself.

Anger benefits no one.

We should not treat others with contempt.[123]

On the other hand, ‘If a great man should wrong you, smile on him,’

may be compared with the Arabic advice about dangerous friends, ‘If a

serpent love thee, wear him as a necklace;’ or with the Pashto proverb

of the same intention, ‘Though your enemy be a rope of reeds, call him a

serpent.’

Here are some more proverbs with whose European equivalents everyone will

be familiar:—

ON FAULTFINDING.

If you can pull out, pull out your own grey hairs. (Oji.)

Before healing others, heal yourself. (Wolof.)

With which we may compare the Chinese:—

Sweep the snow from your own doors without troubling about the

frost on your neighbour’s tiles.

ON THE VALUE OF EXPERIENCE.

Nobody is twice a fool. (Accra.)

Nobody is twice ashamed. (Accra.)

He is a fool whose sheep run away twice. (Oji.)

He dreads a slowworm who has been bitten by a serpent. (Oji.)

With which we may compare our own—

It’s a silly fish that’s caught twice with the same bait.

Or the German—

An old fox is not caught twice in the same trap.

To which both Italy and Holland have exactly similar proverbs.

ON PERSEVERANCE.

Perseverance always triumphs. (Basuto.)

The moon does not grow full in a day. (Oji.)

Perseverance is everything.

Who has patience has all things. (Yoruba.)

By going and coming a bird builds its nest. (Oji.)

Which latter may be compared with the Dutch proverb—

By slow degrees a bird builds its nest.

And all of them with the Chinese—

A mulberry-leaf becomes satin with time.

ON THE FORCE OF HABIT.

The thread follows the needle.

Its shell follows the snail wherever it goes. (Yoruba.)

As is the sword so is the scabbard. (Oji.)