introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate. But we
may observe, in passing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme
beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in
anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion. They appear, somehow,
to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them
is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity,
assuredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory--that of
degeneration in religion--has facts at its basis, which its very
supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev.
Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles's,
that, in the religions 'at the bottom of the religious scale,' 'it is
always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little
conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.' The poor
worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent,
for righteousness.[42]
[Footnote 1: In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; _Prim. Cult_. ii. 342.]
[Footnote 2: See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]
[Footnote 3: _Myths of the New World_, p. 47.]
[Footnote 4: There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including
Smith's remarks, published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work
with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam). This
MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1849, with a
glossary, by Strachey, of the native language. The remarks on religion are
in Chapter VII. The passage on Ahone occurs in Strachey (1612), but _not_
in Smith (1682), in Pinkerton. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse
photographs of the drawings accompanying the MS. Strachey's story of
sacrifice of children (pp. 94, 95) seems to refer to nothing worse than the
initiation into the mysteries.]
[Footnote 5: See Brinton, _Myths of the New World_, for a philological
theory.]
[Footnote 6: Compare 'The Fire Walk' in _Modern Mythology_.]
[Footnote 7: Compare St. Augustine's curious anecdote in _De Cura pro
Mortuis habenda_ about the dead and revived Curio. The founder of the new
Sioux religion, based on hypnotism, 'died' and recovered.]
[Footnote 8: Cf. Demeter.]
[Footnote 9: Major North, for long the U.S. Superintendent of the Pawnees.]
[Footnote 10: Schoolcraft, iii. 237.]
[Footnote 11: As envisaged here, Nà-pi is not a spirit. The question
of spirit or non-spirit has not arisen. So far, Nà-pi answers to
Marrangarrah, the Creative Being of the Larrakeah tribe of Australians.
'A very good Man called Marrangarrah lives in the sky; he made all living
creatures, except black fellows. He made everything.... He never dies, and
likes all black fellows.' He has a demiurge, Dawed (Mr. Foelsche, _apud_
Dr. Stirling, _J.A.I_., Nov. 1894, p. 191). It is curious to observe how
savage creeds often shift the responsibility for evil from the Supreme
Creator, entirely beneficent, on to a subordinate deity.]
[Footnote 12: Grinnell's _Blackfoot Lodge-Tales_ and _Pawnee Hero
Stories_.]
[Footnote 13: Garcilasso, i. 101.]
[Footnote 14: Op. cit. i. 106.]
[Footnote 15: From all this we might conjecture, like Mr. Prescott, that
the Incas borrowed Pachacamac from the Yuncas, and etherealised his
religion. But Mr. Clements Markham points out that 'Pachacamac is a pure
Quichua word.']
[Footnote 16: Garcilasso, ii. 446, 447.]
[Footnote 17: Cieza de Leon. p.253]
[Footnote 18: Markham's translation, p. 253.]
[Footnote 19: _Rites and Laws of the Yncas_, Markham's translation,
p. vii.]
[Footnote 20: _Rites_, p. 6. Garcilasso, i. 109.]
[Footnote 21: _Rites_, p. 11.]
[Footnote 22: Compare _Reports on Discovery of Peru,_ Introduction.]
[Footnote 23: _Rites_, p. xv.]
[Footnote 24: Lord Ailesbury's _Memoirs_.]
[Footnote 25: Garcilasso, ii. 68.]
[Footnote 26: Cieza de Leon, p. 357.]
[Footnote 27: _Rites,_ pp. 28, 29.]
[Footnote 28: Acosta, lib. vi. ch. 21: Garcilasso. ii. 88, 89.]
[Footnote 29: _Rites_, p. 12.]
[Footnote 30: Ibid. p.54.]
[Footnote 31: _Prim. Cult_. ii, 337, 338.]
[Footnote 32: _Rites_, p. 29.]
[Footnote 33: Garcilasso, ii. 69.]
[Footnote 34: _Rites and Laws_, p. 91 _et seq_.]
[Footnote 35: Payne, i. 139.]
[Footnote 36: Op. cit. i. 468. Mr. Payne absolutely rejects
Ixtlilochitl's story of the monotheism of Nezahualcoyotl; 'Torquemada
knows nothing of it,' i. 490.]
[Footnote 37: Cushing, _Report, Ethnol. Bureau_, 1891-92, p. 379.]
[Footnote 38: _J.A.I_. May 1895, pp. 341-344.]
[Footnote 39: ii. 191, 1829.]
[Footnote 40: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 345, 346. Ellis, ii. 193.]
[Footnote 41: Ellis, ii. 221.]
[Footnote 42: _The Faiths of The World_, p. 413.]
XV
THE OLD DEGENERATION THEORY
If any partisan of the anthropological theory has read so far into this
argument, he will often have murmured to himself, 'The old degeneration
theory!' On this Dr. Brinton remarked in 1868:
'The supposition that in ancient times and in very unenlightened
conditions, before mythology had grown, a monotheism prevailed which
afterwards, at various times, was revived by reformers, is a belief that
should have passed away when the delights of savage life and the praises
of a state of nature ceased to be the theme of philosophers[1].'
'The old degeneration theory' practically, and fallaciously, resolved
itself, as Mr. Tylor says, into two assumptions--'first, that the history
of culture began with the appearance on earth of a semi-civilised race of
men; and second, that from this stage culture has proceeded in two
ways--backward to produce savages, and forward to produce civilised
men[2].' That hypothesis is false to all our knowledge of evolution.
The hypothesis here provisionally advocated makes no assumptions
at all. It is a positive fact that among some of the lowest savages
there exists, not a doctrinal and abstract Monotheism, but a belief
in a moral, powerful, kindly, creative Being, while this faith is found
in juxtaposition with belief in unworshipped ghosts, totems, fetishes,
and so on. The powerful creative Being of savage belief sanctions truth,
unselfishness, loyalty, chastity, and other virtues. I have set forth the
difficulties involved in the attempt to derive this Being from ghosts and
other lower forms of belief.
Now, it is mere matter of fact, and not of assumption, that the Supreme
Being of many rather higher savages differs from the Supreme Being of
certain lower savages by the neglect in which he is left, by the epicurean
repose with which he is credited, and by his comparative lack of moral
control over human conduct. In his place a mob of ghosts and spirits,
supposed to be potent and helpful in everyday life, attract men's regard
and adoration, and get paid by sacrifice--even by human sacrifice.
Turning to races yet higher in material culture, we find a crowd of hungry
and cruel gods.
On this point Mr. Jevons remarks, in accordance with my own observation,
that 'human sacrifice appears at a much earlier period in the rites for
the dead than it does in the ritual of the gods.'[3] The dead chief needs
servants and wives in Hades, who are offered to him. The Australians have
some elements of cannibalism, but do not, as a general rule, offer any
human victims. So far, then, ancestor-worship introduced a sadly
'degenerate' rite, compared with the moral faith in unfed gods.
To gods the human sacrifice was probably extended (in some cases) either
by a cannibal civilised race, like the Aztecs, or by way of _piacula_, the
god being conciliated for man's sin by the offering of what man most
prized, the 'jealousy' of the god being appeased in a similar way.
But these are relatively advanced conceptions, not to be found, to my
knowledge, among the lowest and most backward races. Therefore, advance to
the idea of spirit at one point, meant degeneration at another point, to
the extent of human sacrifice.
Thus, on looking at relatively advanced races, we find them worshipping
polytheistic deities and ghosts of the kings just dead, who are often
propitiated by terrible massacres of human victims, while, as in the case
of Taa-roa, the blood spurts back even on the uncreated Creator, who was
before earth was, or sea, sun, or sky.
Undeniably the hungry, cruel gods are degenerate from the Australian
Father in Heaven, who receives no sacrifice but that of men's lusts and
selfishness; who desires obedience, not the fat of kangaroos; who needs
nothing of ours; is unfed and unbribed. Thus, in this particular respect
the degeneration of religion from the Australian or Andamanese to the
Dinka standard--and infinitely more to the Polynesian, or Aztec, or
popular Greek standard--is as undeniable as any fact in human history.
Anthropology has only escaped the knowledge of this circumstance by laying
down the rule, demonstrably unbased on facts, that 'the divine sanction of
ethical laws ... belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage
level, not to the earlier and lower creeds;' that 'savage Animism is
almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is
the very mainspring of practical religion.'[4]
I have argued, indeed, that the God of low savages who imparts the divine
sanction of ethical laws is _not_ of animistic origin. But even where Mr.
Im Thurn finds, in Guiana, nothing but Animism of the lowest conceivable
type, he also finds in that Animism the only or most potent moral
restraint on the conduct of men.
While Anthropology holds the certainly erroneous idea that the religion of
the most backward races is always non-moral, of course she cannot know
that there has, in fact, been great degeneration in religion (if religion
began on the Australian and Andamanese level, or even higher) wherever
religion is non-moral or immoral.
Again, Anthropology, while fixing her gaze on totems, on worshipped
mummies, adored ghosts, and treasured fetishes, has not, to my knowledge,
made a comparative study of the higher and purer religious ideas of
savages. These have been passed by, with a word about credulous
missionaries and Christian influences, except in the brief summary for
which Mr. Tylor found room. In this work I only take a handful of cases of
the higher religious opinions of savages, and set them side by side for
purposes of comparison. Much more remains to be done in this field. But
the area covered is wide, the evidence is the best attainable, and it
seems proved beyond doubt that savages have 'felt after' a conception of a
Creator much higher than that for which they commonly get credit. Now, if
that conception is original, or is very early (and nothing in it suggests
lateness of development), then the other elements of their faith and
practice are degenerate.
'How,' it has been asked, 'could all mankind forget a pure religion?'[5]
That is what I now try to explain. That degeneration I would account for
by the attractions which animism, when once developed, possessed for the
naughty natural man, 'the old Adam.' A moral creator in need of no gifts,
and opposed to lust and mischief, will not help a man with love-spells, or
with malevolent 'sendings' of disease by witchcraft; will not favour one
man above his neighbour, or one tribe above its rivals, as a reward for
sacrifice which he does not accept, or as constrained by charms which do
not touch his omnipotence. Ghosts and ghost-gods, on the other hand, in
need of food and blood, afraid of spells and binding charms,[6] are a
corrupt, but, to man, a useful constituency. Man being what he is, man was
certain to 'go a-whoring' after practically useful ghosts, ghost-gods, and
fetishes which he could keep in his wallet or medicine bag. For these he
was sure, in the long run, first to neglect his idea of his Creator; next,
perhaps, to reckon Him as only one, if the highest, of the venal rabble of
spirits or deities, and to sacrifice to Him, as to them. And this is
exactly what happened! If we are not to call it 'degeneration,' what are
we to call it? It may be an old theory, but facts 'winna ding,' and are on
the side of an old theory. Meanwhile, on the material plane, culture
kept advancing, the crafts and arts arose; departments arose, each needing
a god; thought grew clearer; such admirable ethics as those of the Aztecs
were developed, and while bleeding human hearts smoked on every altar,
Nezahuatl conceived and erected a bloodless fane to 'The Unknown God,
Cause of Causes,' without altar or idol; and the Inca, Yupanqui, or
another, declared that 'Our Father and Master, the Sun, must have a
Lord.'[7]
But, at this stage of culture, the luck of the state, and the interests of
a rich and powerful clergy, were involved in the maintenance of the old,
animistic, relatively non-moral system, as in Cuzco, Greece, and Rome.
That popular and political regard for the luck of the state, that
priestly self-interest (quite natural), could only be swept away by the
moral monotheism of Christianity or of Islam. Nothing else could do it. In
the case of Christianity, the central and most potent of many combined
influences, apart from the Life and Death of Our Lord, was the moral
Monotheism of the Hebrew religion of Jehovah.
Now, it is undeniable that Jehovah, at a certain period of Hebrew history,
had become degraded and anthropomorphized, far below Darumulun, and
Puluga, and Pachacamac, and Ahone, as conceived of in their purest form,
and in the high mood of savage mysteries which yet contain so much that is
grotesque. Even the Big Black Man of the Fuegians is on a higher level (as
_we_ reckon morals), when he forbids the slaying of a robber enemy, than
certain examples of early Hebrew conduct. But our knowledge of the
Fuegians is lamentably scanty.
Again, traces of human sacrifice appear in the ritual of Israel, and it is
only relatively late that the great prophets, justly declaring Jehovah to
be indifferent to the blood of bulls and rams, try to bring back his
service to that of the unpropitiated, unbought Dendid, or Ahone, or
Pundjel. Here is degeneration, even in Israel. How the conception of
Jehovah arose in Israel, whether it was a revival of a half-obliterated
idea, such as we find among low savages; or whether it was borrowed from
some foreign creed; or was the result of meditation on the philosophical
Supreme Being of high Egyptian theology, is another question. The Biblical
statement leans to the first alternative. Jehovah, not by that name, had
been the God of Israel's fathers. The question will be discussed later;
but, unless new facts are discovered, we must accept the version of the
Pentateuch, or take refuge in conjecture.
Not only is there degeneration from the Australian conception of
Mungan-gnaur, at its best, to the conception of the Semitic gods in
general, but, 'humanly speaking,' if religion began in a pure form among
low savages, degeneration was inevitable. Advancing social conditions
compelled men into degeneration. Mungan-ngaur is, so far, in line with
our own ideas of divinity because he is not localised. He dwelleth not in
temples made with hands; it is not likely that he should, when his
worshippers have neither house, tent, nor tabernacle. As Mr. Robertson
Smith says, 'where the God had a house or a temple, we recognise the work
of men who were no longer pure nomads, but had begun to form fixed homes.'
By the nature of Australian society, a deity could not be tied to a
temple, and temple-ritual, and consequent myths to explain that ritual,
could not arise. Nor could Darumulun be attached to a district, just as
'the nomad Arabs could not assimilate the conception of a god as a
land-owner, and apply it to their own tribal deities, for the simple
reason that in the desert private property in land was unknown.'[8]
Darumulun is thus not capable of degenerating into 'a local god, as
_Baal_, or lord of the land,' because this 'involves a series of ideas
unknown to the primitive life of the savage huntsman,' like the widely
spread Murring tribes.[9]
Nor could Darumulun be tied down to a place in Semitic fashion, first by
manifesting himself there, therefore by receiving an altar of sacrifice
there, and in the end a sanctuary, for Darumulun receives no sacrifice
at all.
Again, the scene of the Bora could not become a permanent home of
Darumulun, because, when the rites are over, the effigy of the god is
scrupulously destroyed. Thus Darumulun, in his own abode 'beyond the sky,'
can 'go everywhere and do everything' (is omnipresent and omnipotent),
dwells in no earthly places, has no temple, nor tabernacle, nor sacred
mount, nor, like Jehovah, any limit of land.[10]
The early Hebrew conception of Jehovah, then, is infinitely more
conditioned, practically, by space, than the Supreme Being, 'The Master,'
in the conception of some Australian blacks.
'By a prophet like Isaiah the residence of Jehovah in Zion is almost
wholly dematerialised.... Conceiving Jehovah as the King of Israel, he
necessarily conceives His kingly activity as going forth from the capital
of the nation.'[11]
But nomad hunter tribes, with no ancestor-worship, no king and no capital,
cannot lower their deity by the conditions, or limit him by the
limitations, of an earthly monarchy.
In precisely the same way, Major Ellis proves the degeneration of deity in
Africa, so far as being localised in place of being the Universal God,
implies degeneration, as it certainly does to our minds. By being attached
to a given hill or river 'the gods, instead of being regarded as being
interested in the whole of mankind, would eventually come to be regarded
as being interested in separate tribes or nations alone.'
To us Milton seems nobly Chauvinistic when he talks of what God has done
by 'His English.' But this localised and essentially degenerate conception
was inevitable, as soon as, in advancing civilisation, the god who had
been 'interested in the whole of [known] mankind' was settled on a hill,
river, or lagoon, amidst a nation of worshippers.
In the course of the education of mankind, this form of degeneration
(abstractly so considered) was to work, as nothing else could have worked,
towards the lofty conception of universal Deity. For that conception
was only brought into practical religion (as apart from philosophic
speculation) by the union between Israel and the God of Sinai and Zion.
The Prophets, recognising in the God of Sinai, their nation's God--One
to whom righteousness was infinitely dearer than even his Chosen
People--freed the conception of God from local ties, and made it
overspread the world.
Mr. Robertson Smith has pointed out, again, the manner in which the
different political development of East and West affected the religion of
Greece and of the Semites. In Greece, monarchy fell, at an early period,
before the aristocratic houses. The result was 'a divine aristocracy of
many gods, only modified by a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the
not very effective sovereignty' (or _prytany_) 'of Zeus. In the East the
national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway.'[12] Australia
escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia,
where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism. Ghosts
and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor
departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art. The savage had no
agriculture, and his social condition was not departmental. In yet another
way, political advance produces religious degeneration, if polytheism be
degeneration from the conception of one relatively supreme moral being.
To make a nation, several tribes must unite. Each has its god, and the
nation is apt to receive them all, equally, into its Pantheon. Thus, if
worshippers of Baiame, Pundjel, and Darumulun coalesced into a nation,
we might find all three gods living together in a new polytheism. In fact,
granting a relatively pure starting-point, degeneration from it must
accompany every step of civilisation, to a certain distance.
Unlike Semitic gods, Darumulun receives no sacrifice. As we have said, he
has no kin with ghosts, and their sacrifices could not be carried on into
his cult, if Waitz-Gerland (vi. 811) are right in saying that the
Australians have no ancestor-worship. The Kurnai ghosts 'were believed to
live upon plants,'[13] which are not offered to them. Chill ghosts, unfed
by men, would come to waning camp-fires and batten on the broken meats.
The Ngarego and Wolgal held, more handsomely, that Tharamulun (Darumulun)
met the just departed spirit 'and conducted it to its future home beyond
the sky.'[14] Ghosts might also accompany relics of the body, such as the
dead hand, carried about by the family, who would wave the black fragment
at the dreaded Aurora Borealis, crying, 'Send it away!' I am unacquainted
with any sacrifices to ancestral ghosts among this people who cannot long
remember their ancestors, consequently the practice has not been refracted
on their supreme Master's cult. In the cult of Darumulun, and of other
highest gods of lowest savages, nothing answers to the Hebrew technical
priestly word for sacrifice, 'food of the deity.'[15] Nobody feeds Puluga,
nobody fed Ahone. We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices. Mr. Robertson Smith
says: 'In all religions in which the gods have been developed out of
totems [worshipped animals and other things regarded as akin to human
stocks] the ritual act of laying food before the deity is perfectly
intelligible.' Pundjel, an Australian Supreme Being, is mixed up with
animals in some myths, but it is not easy to see how such Supreme Beings
as he could be 'developed out of totems'! I am not aware, again, that any
Australian tribe feeds the animals who are its totems, so Darumulun could
not, and did not inherit sacrifice through them. Mr. Robertson Smith had
a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while
sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.[16] Men
and gods dined together.[17] 'The god himself was conceived of as a being
of the same stock as his comrades.' Beasts were also of the same stock,
one beast, say a lobster, was of the same blood as a lobster kin, and its
god.[18] Occasionally the sacred beast of the kin, usually not to be slain
or tasted, is 'eaten as a kind of mystic sacrament a most dubious
fact.'[19]
Now, there is, I believe, some evidence, lately collected if not
published, which makes in favour of the eating of totems by Australians,
at a certain very rare and solemn mystery. It would not even surprise me
('from information received') if a very deeply initiated person were
occasionally slain, as the highest degree of initiation, on certain most
unusual occasions. This remains uncertain, but I have at present no
evidence that, either by one road or another, either from ghost-feeding or
totem-feeding, or feeding on totems, any Australian Supreme Being receives
any sacrifice at all. Much less, as among Pawnees and Semitic peoples (to
judge from certain traces), is the Australian Supreme Being a cause of and
partaker in human sacrifice.[20] The horrible idea of the Man who is the
God, and is eaten in the God's honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs,
on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese,
Bushmen, or Fuegians.[21]