The opening remarks in the section dealing with sympathetic magic were
largely borrowed from Dr. Frazer, and I again have recourse to that
author for the following sketch of the incipient religion of primitive
folk.
The savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over
nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is
supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call
supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is
somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged.
The conception of gods as supernatural beings entirely distinct from
and superior to man, and wielding powers to which he possesses nothing
comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved
in the course of history.
At first the world is regarded as a great democracy; but with the
growth of his knowledge man realises more clearly the vastness of
nature and his own feebleness; this, however, enhances his conception
of the power of those supernatural beings with which his imagination
peoples the universe. If he feels himself to be so frail and slight,
how vast and powerful must he deem the beings who control the gigantic
machinery of nature!
Thus, as his old sense of equality with gods slowly vanishes, he
resigns at the same time the hope of directing the course of nature by
his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks more and more
to the gods as the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which
he once claimed to share with them.
With the first advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice
assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic, which once
ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the
background, and sinks to the level of a black art. It is now regarded
as an encroachment, at once vain and impious, on the domain of the
gods, and as such encounters the steady opposition of the priests,
whose reputation and influence gain or lose with those of their gods.
Hence, when at a late period the distinction between religion and
superstition has emerged, we find that sacrifice and prayer are the
resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while
magic is the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant.
Throughout the whole of this slow evolution ornamental art has
attempted to visualise the religious conceptions of the period. It
would probably be more correct to regard the pictorial representations
of religion as usually illustrating a past rather than a present
aspect of belief. For a drawing, like a creed, fixes a type, and the
form has a tendency to be repeated unconscious of the fact that the
spirit may have burst its bonds and soared into a higher region.
Not only does the motive of religious art vary according to the stage
of evolution of the religion which it illustrates, but the art itself
is subject to modification as it enters into new phases of what I have
termed its life-history.
Totemism is one phase of religion, but owing to its great importance in
the economy of primitive peoples I have treated it in an independent
section. As totemism gradually shades off into god-worship so its
artistic symbolism is merged into that of divinities, but it often
persists to an unexpected extent.
It is only possible for me to touch lightly on a few of the aspects of
religious art from the anthropologist’s point of view.
As the gods were being evolved it was very important for men to retain
the remembrance of those family ties between them and mankind which
were in danger of being snapped through the length to which they were
drawn and the degree of attenuation which consequently ensued.
The statements of tradition as to the descent of mortals from gods are
re-enforced by the representations of artists of the unlettered races,
just as they are enshrined in the written cosmogonies of more cultured
folk; the main difference being that any one may understand the one if
he knows the written characters, whereas the other is practically a
pictograph, and requires the interpretation of the natives who have the
traditional knowledge of the symbols.
We are probably justified in assuming that very early in time (and
it is still widely spread among backward peoples) was the custom of
carving or painting the pedigree of the man from the god—of the human
from the divine. As the god is lost down the ages in the totem so too
his eikon is merged into the resemblance of some animal-form. In the
intermediary stage we have those monstrous forms which the enlightened
pagans endeavoured to rationalise and even to spiritualise. “Yet half a
beast is the great god Pan.”
The beautiful wood-carving formerly executed by the natives of the
Hervey Group in the South Pacific affords an excellent example of the
relation of religion to decorative art.
The Rev. Dr. W. Wyatt Gill states that a significance is “invariably
attached to ancient Polynesian carving,” and he and a few other
missionaries have given suggestive hints, but without reference to the
actual designs.
Dr. H. Stolpe, of Stockholm, was the first ethnographer to study
Polynesian art from a scientific point of view, and his paper[161]
on Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savages is a model of this
particular kind of research. He asserts “That the carved ornament in
Polynesia _always_ had a meaning.... Polynesians cling tenaciously to
ancient customs, though often they are no longer capable of accounting
for their original meaning.... If one asks the reason of a device or
a custom, one usually gets no satisfactory information.... Should any
one, therefore, to-day, ask a native of these islands whether the
ornamentation here delineated has any significance, and the reply
should be ‘no,’ I could not recognise in it any decisive evidence. Our
previous investigations suffice of themselves to prove that the forms
of development of the old primitive images, highly conventionalised,
_must_ have a symbolic significance. They symbolise, they stand in
place of, the primitive image. They are to be considered as a sort of
cryptograph. By means of perpetual reiteration of certain ornamental
elements, they suggest the divinity to whose service the decorated
implement was in some way dedicated.” A dozen years ago Dr. Stolpe
stated that the linear ornaments on the carved Mangaian adzes were for
the most part to be regarded as transformed figures of human beings, or
especially as divine beings. (Fig. 124.)
[161] H. Stolpe, _Utvecklingsföreteelser i Naturfolkens
Ornamentik_. Ymer, 1890. Translated into English by Mrs. March,
“Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savage People,” _Trans.
Rochdale Lit. and Sci. Soc._, 1892; and into German, _Mittheil.
Anth. Gesell._ Wien, 1892, xxii. p. 43.
[Illustration: FIG. 124.—Stretching-cleat of a drum from Mangaia, in
the Berlin Museum; from March, after Stolpe. Two-thirds natural size.]
[Illustration: FIG. 125.—Rubbings from the handles of symbolic adzes
from the Hervey Islands. A, Free Library Museum, Belfast; B, C, Belfast
Nat. Hist. Mus. One-third natural size.]
Mr. C. H. Read, of the British Museum, independently[162] arrived
at a similar conclusion to Dr. Stolpe’s, and Dr. March[163] has
carried the argument a step further. Dr. Stolpe proved that a design
generally known as the =K= pattern, but which it is better to call the
_tiki-tiki_ pattern, sometimes interrupted, but generally continuous,
is in reality a string of human figures, the two horizontal zigzags
being limbs, and the vertical bars that join them being the headless
bodies. (Fig. 125, A.)
[162] C. H. Read, “On the Origin and Sacred Character of
certain Ornaments of the S.E. Pacific,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._,
xxi., 1891, p. 139.
[163] H. Colley March, “Polynesian Ornament a Mythography; or a
Symbolism of Origin and Descent,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._, xxii.,
1893, p. 307.
These figures, which almost cover the handle of a Mangaian paddle or
adze, are obviously related to the female forms that are carved on the
terminal of its shaft (Figs. 127, 128), and are morphologically derived
from them by a process of evolution.
[Illustration: FIG. 126.—Rubbing of part of the decoration of a
Mangaian symbolic paddle, Norwich Museum. Natural size.]
The headless figures are quite recognisable in Fig. 125, A, but the
fore-arms and shanks of each of them are absent, their places being
taken by the upper arms and thighs of the contiguous figures. In B the
serial individuals are separated by narrow vertical clefts; the latter
persist in C, but the two boundary lines between the rows of figures
are fused into a single line.
In Fig. 126 we have a large area (the blade of a paddle) divided into a
number of parallel lines between which are diamonds, which may or may
not be connected by horizontal lines. A careful inspection will show
that the vertical lines are continuous body-lines; the horizontal lines
are the same as those in Fig. 125, A, but the two lines are fused into
one; the zigzags are clearly limbs. The absence of the horizontal lines
simplifies the pattern, and so each diamond consists in its upper part
of the leg, and in its lower part of the arms of human figures whose
bodies are represented by the vertical lines.
The pattern in the lower half of Fig. 127 can be derived from the last
by the introduction of an intermediate series of vertical lines.
Curvilinear patterns, as in the lower part of Fig. 128, are common on
objects from these islands; they are evidently derived from the thighs
of serial human forms, as in Fig. 127, and Plate VI., Fig. 13.
[Illustration: FIG. 127.—Rubbing of part of the carving of the handle
of a symbolic paddle from the Hervey Islands, in the Natural History
Museum, Belfast. One-half natural size.]
[Illustration: FIG. 128.—Rubbing of “part of the terminal of a
paddle-shaped implement in the Vienna Museum”; from March, after
Stolpe. Two-thirds natural size.]
“It is abundantly certain,” adds Dr. March, “that the forms that crown
the shaft are those of women, for they are invariably distinguished by
pendant-pointed breasts. The solitary exception that Dr. Stolpe has
been able to find is one in appearance only, for in his Fig. 23 the
breasts are really fused into a single cone, exactly as are the legs in
his Fig. 24” (p. 322).
Dr. March’s contribution is that these carved shafts of sacred paddles
and adzes were pedigree-sticks. Descent is traced through the male line
as a rule among the Polynesians, but it is certain that some tribes
traced their descent through the female line. Dr. Gill states that this
was in some places simply a matter of arrangement. Dr. Gill tells us
that the designs on these shafts were called “_tiki-tiki-tangata_;”
_tangata_ means a man, or in this combination connotes human, for in
a Polynesian word compounded of two nouns, that which comes last has
a secondary, explanatory, or adjectival force. _Tiki_ was the first
man, and when he died, ruled the entrance of the under-world. The name
signifies a “fetched” soul; the spirit of a dead man the frequentative
or plural _tiki-tiki_ must mean spirits in succession, or “ancestors.”
“The conclusion now drawn is that _tiki-tiki-tangata_ were the
multitudinous human links between the divine ancestor and the chief of
the living tribe. But to what ancestry did these pedigrees of female
lineage assert a claim? From what goddess was it the pride of Mangaians
to be descended, unless from the mother, the wife and the daughter-wife
of Rongo—from Tu-metua, Taka, and Tavake.
“In Mangaia all the gods were called the children of Vatea, and of
these Tane was one. His name indicates the generative principle in
Nature. In Mangaia he was especially the drum-god and the axe[164]-god;
he presided over the erotic dance as well as over the war-dances. Gill
observes[165] that ‘_Tane mata ariki_,’ Tane with the royal face, was
enshrined in a sacred triple axe,[164] which symbolised the three
priestly families on the island of Mangaia. This axe was buried in a
cave, and has disappeared. The =K= pattern which covers the shafts of
the sacred Mangaian axe,[164] is an assertion of a Tane pedigree, the
_tiki-tiki-tangata_ of the clan. ‘Awake Tane!’ was the invocation,[166]
‘Awake unnumbered progeny of Tane!’” (March, p. 331).
[164] Probably an _adze_, not an _axe_.
[165] W. Wyatt Gill, _Jottings from the Pacific_, 1885, p. 224.
[166] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, 1840, i. p. 343.