other object to dwell in, a feather, a bag, a bush, for instance. The
Tyrolese object to using grass for toothpicks because of the demons that
may have taken up their abode in the straws. The Bulgarians hold it a
great sin not to fumigate the flour when it is brought from the mill
(particularly if the mill be kept by a Turk) in order to prevent the
devil from entering into it.[338] Amulets are still carried in the most
civilized countries of the world, by the ignorant and superstitious with
real savage faith in their mysterious virtues, by the more enlightened
in quaint survival from the past. The mental and physical phenomena of
what is now called ‘table-turning’ belong to a class of proceedings
which have here been shown to be familiar to the lower races, and
accounted for by them on a theory of extra-human influence which is in
the most extreme sense spiritualistic.
In giving its place in the history of mental development to the doctrine
of the lower races as to embodiment in or penetration of an object by a
spirit or an influence, there is no slight interest in comparing it with
theories familiar to the philosophy of cultured nations. Thus Bishop
Berkeley remarks on the obscure expressions of those who have described
the relation of power to the objects which exert it. He cites Torricelli
as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle
of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts
and refined quintessences, that they cannot be enclosed in any other
vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; also Leibnitz as
comparing active primitive power to soul or substantial form. Thus, says
Berkeley, must even the greatest men, when they give way to abstraction,
have recourse to words having no certain signification, and indeed mere
scholastic shadows.[339] We may fairly add that such passages show the
civilized metaphysician falling back on such primitive conceptions as
still occupy the minds of the rude natives of Siberia and Guinea. To go
yet farther, I will venture to assert that the scientific conceptions
current in my own schoolboy days, of heat and electricity as invisible
fluids passing in and out of solid bodies, are ideas which reproduce
with extreme closeness the special doctrine of Fetishism.
Under the general heading of Fetishism, but for convenience’ sake
separately, may be considered the worship of ‘stocks and stones.’ Such
objects, if merely used as altars, are not of the nature of fetishes,
and it is first necessary to ascertain that worship is actually
addressed to them. Then arises the difficult question, are the stocks
and stones set up as mere ideal representatives of deities, or are these
deities considered as physically connected with them, embodied in them,
hovering about them, acting through them? In other words, are they only
symbols, or have they passed in the minds of their votaries into real
fetishes? The conceptions of the worshippers are sometimes in this
respect explicitly stated, may sometimes be fairly inferred from the
circumstances, and are often doubtful.
Among the lower races of America, the Dacotas would pick up a round
boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make
offerings to it and pray to it to deliver them from danger;[340] in the
West India Islands, mention is made of three stones to which the natives
paid great devotion—one was profitable for the crops, another for women
to be delivered without pain, the third for sunshine and rain when they
were wanted;[341] and we hear of Brazilian tribes setting up stakes in
the ground, and making offerings before them to appease their deities or
demons.[342] Stone-worship held an important place in the midst of the
comparatively high culture of Peru, where not only was reverence given
to especial curious pebbles and the like, but stones were placed to
represent the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages.
It is related by Montesinos that when the worship of a certain sacred
stone was given up, a parrot flew from it into another stone, to which
adoration was paid: and though this author is not of good credit, he can
hardly have invented a story which, as we shall see, so curiously
coincides with the Polynesian idea of a bird conveying to and from an
idol the spirit which embodies itself in it.[343]
In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the Damaras of the
South, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by
stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the
meat is first offered;[344] among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where
the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her
food and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground, that
the demon might not hurt her;[345] among the Gallas of Abyssinia, a
people with a well-marked doctrine of deities, and who are known to
worship stones and logs, but not idols.[346] In the island of Sambawa,
the Orang Dongo attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to
the sun, moon, trees, &c., but especially to stones, and when troubled
by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones to
implore the favour of their genius or dewa.[347] Similar ideas are to be
traced through the Pacific islands, both among the lighter and the
darker races. Thus in the Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of
basalt columns, clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received
adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the atua or
deity which had filled them.[348] So in the New Hebrides worship was
given to water-worn pebbles,[349] while Fijian gods and goddesses had
their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones,
and there received their offerings of food.[350] The curiously
anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having
children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the Peruvians and the
Lapps.
The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-stone worship in
full sense and vigour. Not only were stones, especially curious ones and
such as were like men or animals, objects of veneration, but we learn
that they were venerated because mighty spirits dwelt in them. The
Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, with its two deities, one with a stone
head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red
lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood, may serve as a type of
stone-worship. And as for the Ostyaks, had the famous King Log presented
himself among them, they would without more ado have wrapped his sacred
person in rags, and set him up for worship on a mountain-top or in the
forest.[351] The frequent stock-and-stone worship of modern India
belongs especially to races non-Hindu or part-Hindu in race and culture.
Among such may serve as examples the bamboo which stands for the Bodo
goddess Mainou, and for her receives the annual hog, and the monthly
eggs offered by the women;[352] the stone under the great cotton-tree of
every Khond village, shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity;[353] the
clod or stone under a tree, which in Behar will represent the deified
soul of some dead personage who receives worship and inspires oracles
there;[354] the stone kept in every house by the Bakadâra and Betadâra,
which represents their god Bûta, whom they induce by sacrifice to
restrain the demon-souls of the dead from troubling them;[355] the two
rude stones placed under a shed among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, by the
medium of which the great god and goddess receive sacrifice, but which
are thrown away or neglected when done with.[356] The remarkable groups
of standing-stones in India are, in many cases at least, set up for each
stone to represent or embody a deity. Mr. Hislop remarks that in every
part of Southern India, four or five stones may often be seen in the
ryot’s field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which they
consider as guardians of the field and call the five Pândus; he
reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient
native appellations. In the Indian groups it is a usual practice to daub
each stone with red paint, forming as it were a great blood-spot where
the face would be if it were a shaped idol.[357] In India, moreover, the
rites of stone-worship are not unexampled among the Hindus proper.
Shashtî, protectress of children, receives worship, vows, and offerings,
especially from women; yet they provide her with no idol or temple, but
her proper representative is a rough stone as big as a man’s head,
smeared with red paint and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree. Even
Siva is worshipped as a stone, especially that Siva who will afflict a
child with epileptic fits, and then, speaking by its voice, will
announce that he is Panchânana the Five-faced, and is punishing the
child for insulting his image; to this Siva, in the form of a clay idol
or of a stone beneath a sacred tree, there are offered not only flowers
and fruits, but also bloody sacrifices.[358]
This stone-worship among the Hindus seems a survival of a rite belonging
originally to a low civilization, probably a rite of the rude indigenes
of the land, whose religion, largely incorporated into the religion of
the Aryan invaders, has contributed so much to form the Hinduism of
to-day. It is especially interesting to survey the stock-and-stone
worship of the lower culture, for it enables us to explain by the theory
of survival the appearance in the Old World, in the very midst of
classic doctrine and classic art, of the worship of the same rude
objects, whose veneration no doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity.
As Mr. Grote says, speaking of Greek worship, ‘The primitive memorial
erected to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often
nothing more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone or a post,
receiving care and decoration from the neighbourhood, as well as
worship.’ Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Eubœa, the stake
that represented Pallas Athene, ‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe
lignum,’ the unwrought stone (λίθος ἀργός) at Hyettos which ‘after the
ancient manner’ represented Herakles, the thirty such stones which the
Pharæans in like archaic fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one
which received such honour in Bœotian festivals as representing the
Thespian Eros. Theophrastus, in the 4th century B.C., depicts the
superstitious Greek passing the anointed stones in the streets, taking
out his phial and pouring oil on them, falling on his knees to adore,
and going his way. Six centuries later, Arnobius could describe from his
own heathen life the state of mind of the stock-and-stone worshipper,
telling how when he saw one of the stones anointed with oil, he accosted
it in flattering words, and asked benefits from the senseless thing as
though it contained a present power.[359] The ancient and graphic
passage in the book of Isaiah well marks stone-worship within the range
of the Semitic race:
‘Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion:
They, they are thy lot:
Even to them hast thou poured a drink-offering,
Hast thou offered a meat-offering.’[360]
Long afterwards, among the local deities which Mohammed found in Arabia,
and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even acknowledged as divine during a
moment when he well-nigh broke down in his career, were Manah and Lât,
the one a rock, the other a stone or a stone idol; while the veneration
of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton thinks an
aërolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted
into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.[361] The curious
passage in Sanchoniathon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the
‘bætyls, animated stones’ (θεὸς Οὐρανὸς Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους,
μηχανησάμενος) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed thunderbolts
fallen from the clouds. To the old Phœnician religion, which made so
deep a contact with the Jewish world on the one side and the Greek and
Roman on the other, there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the
wooden ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character of
altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.[362] We may still say with
Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood instead of an image
to represent the Paphian Venus—‘et ratio in obscuro.’
There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of stone-worship in
France and England, reaching on into the early middle ages,[363] which
show this barbaric cultus as then distinctly lingering in popular
religion. Coupling this fact with the accounts of the groups of
standing-stones set up to represent deities in South India, a
corresponding explanation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs,
cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, worshipped by
remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments
of their gods? The question at least deserves consideration, although
the ideas with which stone-worship is carried on by different races are
multifarious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remarkable to
what late times full and genuine stone-worship has survived in Europe.
In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last
century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every
Thursday evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor),
smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of
honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in
ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.[364] In an
account dating from 1851, the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are
declared to have a stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought
out and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises it is
supplicated to send a wreck on the coast.[365] No savage ever showed
more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a
personal being, than did these Norwegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic
argument from the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many
nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great weight as
bearing on religious development among mankind. To imagine that peoples
skilled in carving wood and stone, and using these arts habitually in
making idols, should have gone out of their way to invent a practice of
worshipping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the other
hand, when it is considered how such a rude object serves to uncultured
men as a divine image or receptacle, there is nothing strange in its
being a relic of early barbarism holding its place against more artistic
models through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the
traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote antiquity.
By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry. A few chips
or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert the rude post or stone
into an idol. Difficulties which complicate the study of stock-and-stone
worship disappear in the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal
images, which can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least
be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a remarkable district
in the history of religion. It hardly belongs to the lowest savagery,
which simply seems not to have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to
the highest civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is
intermediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first clearly
appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches its extreme
development, and thenceforward its continuance is in dwindling survival
and sometimes expanding revival. The position thus outlined is, however,
very difficult to map exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in
uniformly among the higher savages; it belongs, for instance, fully to
the Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians. Among higher
nations, its presence or absence does not necessarily agree with
particular national affinities or levels of culture—compare the
idol-worshipping Hindu with his ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or
the idolatrous Phœnician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among
whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed image-worship
was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its tendency to revive is
ethnographically embarrassing. The ancient Vedic religion seems not to
recognize idolatry, yet the modern Brahmans, professed followers of
Vedic doctrine, are among the greatest idolators of the world. Early
Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against image-worship,
yet image-worship became and still remains widely spread and deeply
rooted in Christendom.
Of Idolatry, so far as its nature is symbolic or representative, I have
given some account elsewhere.[366] The old and greatest difficulty in
investigating the general subject is this, that an image may be, even to
two votaries kneeling side by side before it, two utterly different
things; to the one it may be only a symbol, a portrait, a memento; while
to the other it is an intelligent and active being, by virtue of a life
or spirit dwelling in it or acting through it. In both cases
Image-worship is connected with the belief in spiritual beings, and is
in fact a subordinate development of animism. But it is only so far as
the image approximates to the nature of a material body provided for a
spirit, that Idolatry comes properly into connexion with Fetishism. It
is from this point of view that it is proposed to examine here its
purpose and its place in history. An idol, so far as it belongs to the
theory of spirit-embodiment, must combine the characters of portrait and
fetish. Bearing this in mind, and noticing how far the idol is looked on
as in some way itself an energetic object, or as the very receptacle
enshrining a spiritual god, let us proceed to judge how far, along the
course of civilization, the idea of the image itself exerting power or
being personally animate has prevailed in the mind of the idolater.
As to the actual origin of idolatry, it need not be supposed that the
earliest idols made by man seemed to their maker living or even active
things. It is quite likely that the primary intention of the image was
simply to serve as a sign or representative of some soul or deity, and
certainly this original character is more or less maintained in the
world through the long history of image-worship. At a stage succeeding
this original condition, it may be argued, the tendency to identify the
symbol and the symbolized, a tendency so strong among children and the
ignorant everywhere, led to the idol being treated as a living powerful
being, and thence even to explicit doctrines as to the manner of its
energy or animation. It is, then, in this secondary stage, where the
once merely representative image is passing into the active
image-fetish, that we are particularly concerned to understand it. Here
it is reasonable to judge the idolater by his distinct actions and
beliefs. A line of illustrative examples will carry the personality of
the idol through grade after grade of civilization. Among the lower
races, such thoughts are displayed by the Kurile islander throwing his
idol into the sea to calm the storm; by the negro who feeds ancestral
images and brings them a share of his trade profits, but will beat an
idol or fling it into the fire if it cannot give him luck or preserve
him from sickness; by famous idols of Madagascar, of which one goes
about of himself or guides his bearers, and another answers when spoken
to—at least, they did this till they were ignominiously found out a few
years ago. Among Tatar peoples of North Asia and Europe, conceptions of
this class are illustrated by the Ostyak, who clothes his puppet and
feeds it with broth, but if it brings him no sport will try the effect
of a good thrashing on it, after which he will clothe and feed it again;
by the Lapps, who fancied their uncouth images could go about at will;
or the Esths, who wondered that their idols did not bleed when Dieterich
the Christian priest hewed them down. Among high Asiatic nations, what
could be more anthropomorphic than the rites of modern Hinduism, the
dances of the nautch-girls before the idols, the taking out of Jagannath
in procession to pay visits, the spinning of tops before Krishna to
amuse him? Buddhism is a religion in its principles little favourable to
idolatry. Yet, from setting up portrait-statues of Gautama and other
saints, there developed itself the full worship of images, and even of
images with hidden joints and cavities, which moved and spoke as in our
own middle ages. In China, we read stories of worshippers abusing some
idol that has failed in its duty. ‘How now,’ they say, ‘you dog of a
spirit; we have given you an abode in a splendid temple, we gild you and
feed you and fumigate you with incense, and yet you are so ungrateful
that you won’t listen to our prayers!’ So they drag him in the dirt, and
then, if they get what they want, it is but to clean him and set him up
again, with apologies and promises of a new coat of gilding. There is
what appears a genuine story of a Chinaman who had paid an idol priest
to cure his daughter, but she died; whereupon the swindled worshipper
brought an action at law against the god, who for his fraud was banished
from the province. The classic instances, again, are perfect—the
dressing and anointing of statues, feeding them with delicacies and
diverting them with raree-shows, summoning them as witnesses; the story
of the Arkadian youths coming back from a bad day’s hunting and
revenging themselves by scourging and pricking Pan’s statue, and the
companion tale of the image which fell upon the man who ill-treated it;
the Tyrians chaining the statue of the Sun-god that he might not abandon
their city; Augustus chastising in effigy the ill-behaved Neptune;
Apollo’s statue that moved when it would give an oracle; and the rest of
the images which brandished weapons, or wept, or sweated, to prove their
supernatural powers. Such ideas continued to hold their place in
Christendom, as was natural, considering how directly the holy image or
picture took the place of the household god or the mightier idol of the
temple. The Russian boor covering up the saint’s picture that it may not
see him do wrong; the Mingrelian borrowing a successful neighbour’s
saint when his own crop fails, or when about to perjure himself choosing
for the witness of his deceitful oath a saint of mild countenance and
merciful repute; the peasant of Southern Europe, alternately coaxing and
trampling on his special saint-fetish, and ducking the Virgin or St.
Peter for rain; the winking and weeping images that are worked, even at
this day, to the greater glory of God, or rather to the greater shame of
Man—these are but the extreme instances of the worshipper’s endowment of
the sacred image with a life and personality modelled on his own.[367]
The appearance of idolatry at a grade above the lowest of known human
culture, and its development in extent and elaborateness under higher
conditions of civilization, are well displayed among the native races of
America. ‘Conspicuous by its absence’ among many of the lower tribes,
image-worship comes plainly into view toward the upper levels of
savagery, as where, for instance, Brazilian native tribes set up in
their huts, or in the recesses of the forest, their pygmy
heaven-descended figures of wax or wood;[368] or where the Mandans,
howling and whining, made their prayers before puppets of grass and
skins; or where the spiritual beings of the Algonquins (manitu) or the
Hurons (oki) were represented by, and in language identified with, the
carved wooden heads or more complete images to which worship and
sacrifice were offered. Among the Virginians and other of the more
cultured Southern tribes, these idols even had temples to dwell in.[369]
The discoverers of the New World found idolatry an accepted institution
among the islanders of the West Indies. These strong animists are
recorded to have carved their little images in the shapes in which they
believed the spirits themselves to have appeared to them; and some human
figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them. The images of
such ‘cemi’ or spirits, some animal, but most of human type, were found
by thousands; and it is even declared that an island near Hayti had a
population of idol-makers, who especially made images of nocturnal
spectres. The spirit could be conveyed with the image, both were called
‘cemi,’ and in the local accounts of sacrifices, oracles, and miracles,
the deity and the idol are mixed together in a way which at least shows
the extreme closeness of their connexion in the native mind.[370] If we
pass to the far higher culture of Peru, we find idols in full reverence,
some of them complete figures, but the great deities of Sun and Moon
figured by discs with human countenances, like those which to this day
represent them in symbol among ourselves. As for the conquered
neighbouring tribes brought under the dominion of the Incas, their idols
were carried, half trophies and half hostages, to Cuzco, to rank among
the inferior deities of the Peruvian Pantheon.[371] In Mexico, idolatry
had attained to its full barbaric development. As in the Aztec mind the
world swarmed with spiritual deities, so their material representatives,
the idols, stood in the houses at the corners of the streets, on every
hill and rock, to receive from passers-by some little offering—a
nosegay, a whiff of incense, a drop or two of blood; while in the
temples more huge and elaborate images enjoyed the dances and
processions in their honour, were fed by the bloody sacrifice of men and
beasts, and received the tribute and reverence paid to the great
national gods.[372] Up to a certain point, such evidence bears upon the
present question. We learn that the native races of the New World had
idols, that those idols in some sort represented ancestral souls and
other deities, and for them received adoration and sacrifice. But
whether the native ideas of the connexion of spirit and image were
obscure, or whether the foreign observers did not get at these ideas, or
partly for both reasons, there is a general want of express statement
how far the idols of America remained mere symbols or portraits, or how
far they had come to be considered the animated bodies of the gods.
It is not always thus, however. In the island regions of the Southern
Hemisphere, while image-worship scarcely appears among the Andaman
islanders, Tasmanians, or Australians, and is absent or rare in various
Papuan and Polynesian districts, it prevails among the majority of the
island tribes who have attained to middle and high savage levels. In
Polynesian islands, where the meaning of the native idolatry has been
carefully examined, it is found to rest on the most absolute theory of
spirit-embodiment. Thus, New-Zealanders set up memorial idols of
deceased persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them
as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they passed by,
also they preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each
dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor. It is distinctly held that such
an atua or ancestral deity enters into the substance of an image in
order to hold converse with the living. A priest can by repeating charms
cause the spirit to enter into the idol, which he will even jerk by a
string round its neck to arrest its attention; it is the same atua or
spirit which will at times enter not the image but the priest himself,
throw him into convulsions, and deliver oracles through him; while it is
quite understood that the images themselves are not objects of worship,
nor do they possess in themselves any virtue, but derive their
sacredness from being the temporary abodes of spirits.[373] In the
Society Islands, it was noticed in Captain Cook’s exploration that the
carved wooden images at burial-places were not considered mere
memorials, but abodes into which the souls of the departed retired. In
Mr. Ellis’s account of the Polynesian idolatry, relating as it seems
especially to this group, the sacred objects might be either mere stocks
and stones, or carved wooden images, from six or eight feet long down to
as many inches. Some of these were to represent ‘tii,’ divine manes or
spirits of the dead, while others were to represent ‘tu,’ or deities of
higher rank and power. At certain seasons, or in answer to the prayers
of the priests, these spiritual beings entered into the idols, which
then became very powerful, but when the spirit departed, the idol
remained only a sacred object. A god often came to and passed from an
image in the body of a bird, and spiritual influence could be
transmitted from an idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued
kinds of feathers, which could be carried away in this ‘inhabited’
state, and thus exert power elsewhere, and transfer it to new idols.
Here then we have the similarity of souls to other spirits shown by the
similar way in which both become embodied in images, just as these same
people consider both to enter into human bodies. And we have the pure
fetish, which here is a feather or a log or stone, brought together with
the more elaborate carved idol, all under one common principle of
spirit-embodiment.[374] In Borneo, notwithstanding the Moslem
prohibition of idolatry, not only do images remain in use, but the
doctrine of spirit-embodiment is distinctly applied to them. Among the
tribes of Western Sarawak the priestesses have made for them rude
figures of birds, which none but they may touch. These are supposed to
become inhabited by spirits, and at the great harvest feasts are hung up
in bunches of ten or twenty in the long common room, carefully veiled
with coloured handkerchiefs. Again, among some Dayak tribes, they will
make rude figures of a naked man and woman, and place these opposite to
one another on the path to the farms. On their heads are head-dresses of
bark, by their sides is the betel-nut basket, and in their hands a short
wooden spear. These figures are said to be inhabited each by a spirit
who prevents inimical influences from passing on to the farms, and
likewise from the farms to the village, and evil betide the profane
wretch who lifts his hand against them—violent fever and sickness would
be sure to follow.[375]
West Africa naturally applies its familiar fetish-doctrine of
spirit-embodiment to images or idols. How an image may be considered a
receptacle for a spirit, is well shown here by the straw and rag figures
of men and beasts made in Calabar at the great triennial purification,
for the expelled spirits to take refuge in, whereupon they are got rid
of over the border.[376] As to positive idols, nothing could be more
explicit than the Gold-Coast account of certain wooden figures called
‘amagai,’ which are specially treated by a ‘wong-man’ or priest, and
have a ‘wong’ or deity in connexion with them; so close is the connexion
conceived between spirit and image, that the idol is itself called
‘wong.’[377] So in the Ewe district, the same ‘edro’ or deity who
inspires the priest is also present in the idol, and ‘edro’ signifies
both god and idol.[378] Waitz sums up the principles of West African
idolatry in a distinct theory of embodiment, as follows: ‘The god
himself is invisible, but the devotional feeling and especially the
lively fancy of the negro demands a visible object to which worship may
be directed. He wishes really and sensibly to behold the god, and seeks
to shape in wood or clay the conception he has formed of him. Now if the
priest, whom the god himself at times inspires and takes possession of,
consecrates this figure to him, the idea has only to follow that the god
may in consequence be pleased to take up his abode in the figure, to
which he may be specially invited by the consecration, and thus
image-worship is seen to be comprehensible enough. Denham found that
even to take a man’s portrait was dangerous and caused mistrust, from
the fear that a part of the living man’s soul might be conveyed by magic
into the artificial figure. The idols are not, as Bosman thinks,
deputies of the gods, but merely objects in which the god loves to place
himself, and which at the same time display him in sensible presence to
his adorers. The god is also by no means bound fast to his dwelling in
the image, he goes out and in, or rather is present in it sometimes with
more and sometimes with less intensity.’[379]
Castrén’s wide and careful researches among the rude Turanian tribes of
North Asia led him to form a similar conception of the origin and nature
of their idolatry. The idols of these people are uncouth objects, often
mere stones or logs with some sort of human countenance, or sometimes
more finished images, even of metal; some are large, some mere dolls;
they belong to individuals, or families, or tribes; they may be kept in
the yurts for private use, or set up in sacred groves or on the steppes
or near the hunting and fishing places they preside over, or they may
even have special temple-houses; some open-air gods are left naked, not
to spoil good clothes, but others under cover are decked out with all an
Ostyak’s or Samoyed’s wealth of scarlet cloths and costly furs,
necklaces and trinkets; and lastly, to the idols are made rich offerings
of food, clothes, furs, kettles, pipes, and the rest of the inventory of
Siberian nomade riches. Now these idols are not to be taken as mere
symbols or portraits of deities, but the worshippers mostly imagine that
the deity dwells in the image or, so to speak, is embodied in it,
whereby the idol becomes a real god capable of giving health and
prosperity to man. On the one hand, the deity becomes serviceable to the
worshipper by being thus contained and kept for his use, and on the
other hand, the god profits by receiving richer offerings, failing which
it would depart from its receptacle. We even hear of numerous spirits
being contained in one image, and flying off at the death of the shaman
who owned it. In Buddhist Tibet, as in West Africa, the practice of
conjuring into puppets the demons which molest men is a recognized rite;
while in Siam the making of clay puppets to be exposed on trees or by
the roadside, or set adrift with food-offerings in baskets, is a
recognized manner of expelling disease-spirits.[380] In the
image-worship of modern India, there crop up traces of the
embodiment-theory. It is possible for the intelligent Hindu to attach as
little real personality to a divine image, as to the man of straw which
he makes in order to celebrate the funeral rites of a relative whose
body cannot be recovered. He can even protest against being treated as
an idolater at all, declaring the images of his gods to be but symbols,
bringing to his mind thoughts of the real deities, as a portrait reminds
one of a friend no longer to be seen in the body. Yet in the popular
religion of his country, what could be more in conformity with the
fetish-theory than the practice of making temporary hollow clay idols by
tens of thousands, which receive no veneration for themselves, and only
become objects of worship when the officiating brahman has invited the
deity to dwell in the image, performing the ceremony of the ‘adhivâsa’
or inhabitation, after which he puts in the eyes and the ‘prâna,’ i.e.,
breath, life, or soul.[381]
Nowhere, perhaps, in the wide history of religion, can we find
definitions more full and absolute of the theory of deities actually
animating their images, than in those passages from early Christian
writers which describe the nature and operation of the heathen idols.
Arnobius introduces the heathen as declaring that it is not the bronze
or gold and silver material they consider to be gods, but they worship
in them those beings which sacred dedication introduces, and causes to
inhabit the artificial images.[382] Augustine cites as follows the
opinions attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. This Egyptian, he tells us,
considers some gods as made by the highest Deity, and some by men; ‘he
asserts the visible and tangible images to be as it were bodies of gods,
for there are within them certain invited spirits, of some avail for
doing harm or for fulfilling certain desires of those who pay them
divine honours and rites of worship. By a certain art to connect these
invisible spirits with visible objects of corporeal matter, that such
may be as it were animated bodies, effigies dedicate and subservient to
the spirits—this is what he calls making gods, and men have received
this great and wondrous power.’ And further, this Trismegistus is made
to speak of ‘statues animated with sense and full of spirit, doing so
great things; statues prescient of the future, and predicting it by
lots, by priests, by dreams, and by many other ways.’[383] This idea, as
accepted by the early Christians themselves, with the qualification that
the spiritual beings inhabiting the idols were not beneficent deities
but devils, is explicitly stated by Minucius Felix, in a passage in the
‘Octavius,’ which gives an instructive account of the animistic
philosophy of Christianity towards the beginning of the third century:
‘Thus these impure spirits or demons, as shown by the magi, by the
philosophers, and by Plato, are concealed by consecration in statues and
images, and by their afflatus obtain the authority as of a present deity
when at times they inspire priests, inhabit temples, occasionally
animate the filaments of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, guide
the falling of lots, give oracles enveloped in many falsehoods ... also
secretly creeping into (men’s) bodies as thin spirits, they feign
diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, in order to compel men to their
worship; that fattening on the steam of altars or their offered victims
from the flocks, they may seem to have cured the ailments which they had
constrained. And these are the madmen whom ye see rush forth into public
places; and the very priests without the temple thus go mad, thus rave,
thus whirl about.... All these things most of you know, how the very
demons confess of themselves, so often as they are expelled by us from
the patients’ bodies with torments of word and fires of prayer. Saturn
himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatsoever demons ye worship,
overcome by pain declare what they are; nor surely do they lie
concerning their iniquity, above all when several of you are present.
Believe these witnesses, confessing the truth of themselves, that they
are demons. For adjured by the true and only God, they shudder reluctant
in the wretched bodies; and either they issue forth at once, or vanish
gradually, according as the faith of the patient aids, or the grace of
the curer favours.’[384]
The strangeness with which such words now fall upon our ears is full of
significance. It is one symptom of that vast quiet change which has come
over animistic philosophy in the modern educated world. Whole orders of
spiritual beings, worshipped in polytheistic religion, and degraded in
early Christendom to real but evil demons, have since passed from
objective to subjective existence, have faded from the Spiritual into
the Ideal. By the operation of similar intellectual changes, the general
theory of spirit-embodiment, having fulfilled the great work it had for
ages to do in religion and philosophy, has now dwindled within the
limits of the educated world to near its vanishing-point. The doctrines
of Disease-possession and Oracle-possession, once integral parts of the
higher philosophy, and still maintaining a vigorous existence in the
lower culture, seem to be dying out within the influence of the higher
into dogmatic survival, conscious metaphor, and popular superstition.
The doctrine of spirit-embodiment in objects, Fetishism, now scarcely
appears outside barbaric regions save in the peasant folklore which
keeps it up amongst us with so many other remnants of barbaric thought.
And the like theory of spiritual influence as applied to Idolatry,
though still to be studied among savages and barbarians, and on record
in past ages of the civilized world, has perished so utterly amongst
ourselves, that few but students are aware of its ever having existed.
To bring home to our minds the vastness of the intellectual tract
which separates modern from savage philosophy, and to enable us to
look back along the path where step by step the mind’s journey was
made, it will serve us to glance over the landmarks which language to
this day keeps standing. Our modern languages reach back through the
middle ages to classic and barbaric times, where in this matter the
transition from the crudest primæval animism is quite manifest. We
keep in daily use, and turn to modern meaning, old words and idioms
which carry us home to the philosophy of ancient days. We talk of
‘genius’ still, but with thought how changed. The genius of Augustus
was a tutelary demon, to be sworn by and to receive offerings on an
altar as a deity. In modern English, Shakspere, Newton, or Wellington,
is said to be led and prompted by his genius, but that genius is a
shrivelled philosophic metaphor. So the word ‘spirit’ and its kindred
terms keep up with wondrous pertinacity the traces which connect the
thought of the savage with its hereditary successor, the thought of
the philosopher. Barbaric philosophy retains as real what civilized
language has reduced to simile. The Siamese is made drunk with the
demon of the arrack that possesses the drinker, while we with so
different sense still extract the ‘spirit of wine.’[385] Look at the
saying ascribed to Pythagoras, and mentioned by Porphyry. ‘The sound
indeed which is given by striking brass, is the voice of a certain
demon contained in that brass.’ These might have been the
representative words of some savage animistic philosopher; but with
the changed meaning brought by centuries of philosophizing, Oken hit
upon a definition almost identical in form, that ‘What sounds,
announces its spirit’ (‘Was tönt, gibt seinen Geist kund’).[386] What
the savage would have meant, or Porphyry after him did mean, was that
the brass was actually animated by a spirit of the brass apart from
its matter, but when a modern philosopher takes up the old phrase, all
he means is the qualities of the brass. As in other animistic phrases
of thought and feeling such as ‘animal spirits,’ or being in ‘good and
bad spirits,’ the term only recalls with an effort the long-past
philosophy which it once expressed. The modern theory of the mind
considers it capable of performing even exalted and unusual functions
without the intervention of prompting or exciting demons; yet the old
recognition of such beings crops up here and there in phrases which
adapt animistic ideas to commonplaces of human disposition, as when a
man is still said to be animated by a patriotic spirit, or possessed
by a spirit of disobedience. In old times the ἐγγαστρίμυθος, or
‘ventriloquus’ was really held to have a spirit rumbling or talking
from inside his body, as when Eurykles the soothsayer was inspired by
such a familiar; or when a certain Patriarch mentioning a demon heard
to speak out of a man’s belly, remarks on the worthy place it had
chosen to dwell in. In the time of Hippokrates, the giving of oracular
responses by such ventriloquism was practised by certain women as a
profession. To this day in China one may get an oracular response from
a spirit apparently talking out of a medium’s stomach, for a fee of
about twopence-halfpenny. How changed a philosophy it marks, that
among ourselves the word ‘ventriloquist’ should have sunk to its
present meaning.[387] Nor is that change less significant which,
starting with the conception of a man being really ἔνθεος, possessed
by a deity within him, carries on a metamorphosed relic of this
thorough animistic thought, from ἐνθουσιασμός to ‘enthusiasm.’ With
all this, let it not be supposed that such change of opinion in the
educated world has come about through wanton incredulity or decay of
the religious temperament. Its source is the alteration in natural
science, assigning new causes for the operations of nature and the
events of life. The theory of the immediate action of personal spirits
has here, as so widely elsewhere, given place to ideas of force and
law. No indwelling deity now regulates the life of the burning sun, no
guardian angels drive the stars across the arching firmament, the
divine Ganges is water flowing down into the sea to evaporate into
cloud and descend again in rain. No deity simmers in the boiling pot,
no presiding spirits dwell in the volcano, no howling demon shrieks
from the mouth of the lunatic. There was a period of human thought
when the whole universe seemed actuated by spiritual life. For our
knowledge of our own history, it is deeply interesting that there
should remain rude races yet living under the philosophy which we have
so far passed from, since Physics, Chemistry, Biology, have seized
whole provinces of the ancient Animism, setting force for life and law
for will.
Footnote 229:
See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 134; J. G. Müller, ‘Amerikanische
Urreligionen,’ p. 171.
Footnote 230:
Philo Jud. de Gigantibus, iv.
Footnote 231:
Rituale Romanum: De Exorcizandis Obsessis a Dæmonio.
Footnote 232:
Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Australia’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 236.
See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 181.
Footnote 233:
Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 104.
Footnote 234:
Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 429.
Footnote 235:
Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 195; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’
p. 72.
Footnote 236:
Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 344; Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p.
xxv.
Footnote 237:
Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116; but cf. Musters, p. 180.
Footnote 238:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122.
Footnote 239:
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 206.
Footnote 240:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. pp. 129, 416; vol. iii. pp. 29, 257,
278; ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 77, 99; Cross, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 316; Elliot
in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 115; Buchanan, ‘Mysore, &c.,’ in
Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 677.
Footnote 241:
Shortt, ‘Tribes of India,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 192;
Tinling, ‘Tour round India,’ p. 19.
Footnote 242:
Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 101.
Footnote 243:
Sir J. Shore in ‘Asiatic Res.’ vol. iv. p. 331.
Footnote 244:
For some collections of details of manes-worship, see Meiners,
‘Geschichte der Religionen,’ vol. i. book 3; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.
ii. pp. 402-11; ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 72-114.
Footnote 245:
J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 73, 173, 209, 261; Schoolcraft,
‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 39, part iii. p. 237; Waitz,
‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. pp. 191, 204.
Footnote 246:
Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 105; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.
Footnote 247:
Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 88.
Footnote 248:
Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 104; S. S. Farmer, p. 126; Shortland,
‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 81; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 108.
Footnote 249:
J. R. Forster, ‘Observations,’ p. 604; Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 258;
‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 234.
Footnote 250:
Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 123, 423. As to the connexion of the
Vazimbas with the Mazimba of East Africa, see Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 360,
426.
Footnote 251:
Callaway, ‘Religious System of Amazulu,’ part ii.; see also Arbousset
and Daumas, p. 469; Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ pp. 248-54; Waitz,
‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. pp. 411, 419; Magyar, ‘Reisen in
Süd-Afrika,’ pp. 21, 335 (Congo); Cavazzi, ‘Congo,’ lib. i.
Footnote 252:
J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388-93. See Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 181,
194.
Footnote 253:
Bailey in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 301. Compare Taylor, ‘New
Zealand,’ p. 153.
Footnote 254:
Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. pp. 674-7. See
Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 95 (Khonds); Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 183
(Santals).
Footnote 255:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90. See
Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 373.
Footnote 256:
Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ vol. i. p. 3, vol. ii. p. 51; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ in
Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 672, 680, 723, 755.
Footnote 257:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 250.
Footnote 258:
Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 65, part ii. p. 89;
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. vi. viii.; vol. ii. p. 373; ‘Journ.
Ind. Archip.’ New Ser. vol. ii. p. 363; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 92.
Footnote 259:
Manu, book iii.
Footnote 260:
Details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘inferi’; Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr.
and Rom. Biog. and Myth.’; Meiners, Hartung, &c.
Footnote 261:
Middleton, ‘Letter from Rome’; Murray’s ‘Handbook of Rome.’
Footnote 262:
L. F. Alfred Maury, ‘Magie, &c.,’ p. 249; ‘Acta Sanctorum,’ 27 Sep.;
Gregor. Turon. De Gloria Martyr, i. 98.
Footnote 263:
J. R. Beste, ‘Nowadays at Home and Abroad,’ London, 1870, vol. ii. p.
44; ‘A New Miracle at Rome; being an Account of a Miraculous Cure,
&c., &c.,’ London (Washbourne), 1870.
Footnote 264:
Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235; see Grey, ‘Australia,’
vol. ii. p. 337. Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ pp. 183, 195.
Footnote 265:
‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.
Footnote 266:
Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 204; ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 73, see p. 125
(Battas); Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 370. See also Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c.
p. 201.
Footnote 267:
‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 110, vol. iv. p. 194; St. John,
‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 71, 87; Beeckman in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p.
133; Meiners, vol. i. p. 278. See also Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i.
p. 159.
Footnote 268:
Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ pp. 97, 114, 125; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’
pp. 48, 137.
Footnote 269:
Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 236.
Footnote 270:
Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 363, 395, &c., vol. ii. pp. 193, 274;
Cook, ‘3rd Voy.’ vol. iii. p. 131. Details of the superhuman character
ascribed to weak or deranged persons among other races, in
Schoolcraft, part iv. p. 49; Martius, vol. i. p. 633; Meiners, vol. i.
p. 323; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 181.
Footnote 271:
Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 250, part ii. pp. 179, 199,
part iii. p. 498; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ pp. xxiii. 34, 41, 72. See
also Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. p. 297 (Comanches);
Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 163; Sproat, p. 174 (Ahts); Egede, ‘Greenland,’
p. 186; Cranz, p. 269.
Footnote 272:
Roman Pane, xix. in ‘Life of Colon’; in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.
Footnote 273:
D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 73, 168; Musters,
‘Patagonians,’ p. 180. See also J. G. Müller, pp. 207, 231 (Caribs);
Spix and Martius, ‘Brasilien,’ vol. i. p. 70; Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’
vol. i. p. 646 (Marcusis).
Footnote 274:
Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 247; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 147, &c.;
Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 21, &c.; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. pp.
320, 354; Steere in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. i. 1871, p. cxlvii.
Footnote 275:
Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missions und
Bibel-Gesellschaften,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 139.
Footnote 276:
J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388.
Footnote 277:
Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 163, 170.
Footnote 278:
Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 103.
Footnote 279:
Mason, ‘Burmah,’ p. 107, &c. Cross, l.c. p. 305.
Footnote 280:
Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 183, &c., 259, &c.
Footnote 281:
Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p.
418 (Caribs).
Footnote 282:
Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. p. 280; Meiners, vol. ii. p.
488.
Footnote 283:
Falkner, l.c.
Footnote 284:
Caldwell, ‘Dravidian Languages,’ App.; Latham, vol. ii. p. 469.
Footnote 285:
Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 172.
Footnote 286:
Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 278.
Footnote 287:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201,
‘Psychologie,’ p. 139. See also Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 59.
Footnote 288:
Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 352, 373; Moerenhout, ‘Voyage,’ vol.
i. p. 479; Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. i. p. 105; Williams, ‘Fiji,’
vol. i. p. 373.
Footnote 289:
Dos Santos, ‘Ethiopia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.
Footnote 290:
Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 57. See also Steinhauser, l.c. pp. 132, 139; J. B.
Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xvi.
Footnote 291:
Details from Tatar races in Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 164, 173, &c.;
Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, ‘Life in
A.,’ ch. xxxiii.
Footnote 292:
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. 110, 320.
Footnote 293:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p.
247, &c. See also Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 139; ‘Journ. Ind.
Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 507, vol. vi. p. 614; Turpin, in Pinkerton, vol.
ix. p. 761; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ _ibid._ vol. vii. pp. 701, 730, &c.
Footnote 294:
Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 155, vol. ii. p. 183; Roberts, ‘Oriental
Illustrations of the Scriptures,’ p. 529; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp.
164, 184-7. Sanskrit paiçâcha-graha = demon-seizure, possession.
Ancient evidence in Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. ch. v.
Footnote 295:
Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64; Plat. Phædr. Tim. &c.; Pausan. iv. 27, 2;
Xen. Mem. I. i. 9; Plutarch. Vit. Alex.; De Orac. Def.; Lucian.
Philopseudes; Petron. Arbiter, Sat.; &c., &c.
Footnote 296:
Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’
part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.
Footnote 297:
Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17; Luke,
iv. 33, 39, vii. 33, viii. 27, ix. 39, xiii. 11; John, x. 20; Acts,
xvi. 16, xix. 13; &c.
Footnote 298:
For general evidence see Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church,’
book iii. ch. iv.; Calmet, ‘Dissertation sur les Esprits’; Maury,
‘Magie,’ &c.; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism.’ Among particular passages
are Tertull. Apolog. 23; De Spectaculis, 26; Chrysostom. Homil.
xxviii. in Matth. iv.; Cyril. Hierosol. Catech. xvi. 16; Minuc. Fel.
Octavius. xxi.; Concil. Carthag. iv.; &c., &c.
Footnote 299:
Details in Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms, &c., of Early England,’ vol. i. p.
365, vol. ii. p. 137, 355; Sprenger, ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ part ii.;
Calmet, ‘Dissertation,’ vol. i. ch. xxiv.; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek’;
Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 557, &c.; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 115, &c.;
Voltaire, ‘Questions sur l’Encyclopédie,’ art., ‘Superstition’;
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ 5th ed. art. ‘Possession.’
Footnote 300:
See Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., part ii. ch. ii.
Footnote 301:
A. Constans, ‘Rel. sur une Epidémie d’Hystéro-Démonopathie, en 1861.’
2nd ed. Paris, 1863. For descriptions of such outbreaks, among the
North American Indians, see Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la
Nouvelle France,’ 1639; Brinton, p. 275; and in Guinea, see J. L.
Wilson, ‘Western Africa,’ p. 217.
Footnote 302:
Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite au Dix-Neuvième Siècle,’ 3rd ed. Paris, 1866, p.
353.
Footnote 303:
West, in ‘Spiritual Telegraph,’ cited by Bastian.
Footnote 304:
(C. de Brosses.) ‘Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de
l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de
Nigritie.’ 1760. (De Brosses supposed the word _fétiche_ connected
with _chose fée, fatum_.)
Footnote 305:
Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 337; Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p.
362; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235, &c.; G. F. Moore,
‘Vocab. of S. W. Austr.’ pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’
p. 195.
Footnote 306:
Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 419, 508; J. G. Müller, pp. 173, 207,
217.
Footnote 307:
Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.
Footnote 308:
St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 211, see 72.
Footnote 309:
Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 314.
Footnote 310:
Steinhauser, l.c. p. 141. See also Steere, ‘East Afr. Tribes,’ in
‘Journ. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. cxlviii.
Footnote 311:
Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 352. See ‘Sindh,’ p. 177.
Footnote 312:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 275.
Footnote 313:
‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. x. See Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p.
116, &c.
Footnote 314:
Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, ‘De Var. Rerum,’ cap. xliii.
Footnote 315:
Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.
Footnote 316:
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 122.
Footnote 317:
Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1118-23; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 155-70;
Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286; Halliwell, ‘Pop.
Rhymes,’ p. 208; R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Romances,’ 2nd Series, p. 211;
Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i. p. 173. It is said,
however, that rags fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by
avoid with horror as having diseases thus banned into them, are only
signs left for the information of fellow vagrants; Liebich, ‘Die
Zigeuner,’ p. 96.
Footnote 318:
Catlin, ‘N. A. Indians,’ vol. i. p. 90.
Footnote 319:
J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ p. 394.
Footnote 320:
Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. p. 305; J. G. Müller, p. 209.
Footnote 321:
Mason, Karens, l.c. p. 231.
Footnote 322:
Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 721-3.
Footnote 323:
Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 418. See Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol.
i. p. 485 (Yumanas swallow ashes of deceased with liquor, that he may
live again in them).
Footnote 324:
Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 73; J.
G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 209, 262, 289, 401, 419.
Footnote 325:
Darwin, ‘Journal,’ p. 458.
Footnote 326:
Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 320.
Footnote 327:
‘Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee,’ Nagpore, 1868, part i.
p. 5.
Footnote 328:
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. 151, 207, 214, vol. ii. p. 401; see
Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 59, part ii. p. 101.
Footnote 329:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 187; Dasent, ‘Norse Tales,’ p. 69; Lane,
‘Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. iii. p. 316; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1033.
See also Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 213. Eisenmenger, ‘Judenthum,’
part ii. p. 39.
Footnote 330:
Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 72.
Footnote 331:
Herrera, ‘Hist. de las Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. i. ix. 3.
Footnote 332:
Lery, Brésil, p. 249; J. G. Müller, pp. 210, 262.
Footnote 333:
Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes’; Waitz, vol. iii.; Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’
vol. i. p. 36; Keating, ‘Narrative,’ vol. i. p. 421; J. G. Müller, p.
74, &c. See Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 274.
Footnote 334:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 162, 221, 230; Meiners, vol. i. p. 170.
Footnote 335:
Bell, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 357.
Footnote 336:
H. Rowley, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa,’ p. 217.
Footnote 337:
Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 174; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 56, &c.;
J. L. Wilson, ‘West Africa,’ pp. 135, 211-6, 275, 338; Burton, ‘Wit
and Wisdom from W. Afr.’ pp. 174, 455; Steinhauser, l.c. p. 134;
Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 397; Meiners, ‘Gesch. der
Relig.’ vol. i. p. 173. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 396;
Flacourt, ‘Madag.’ p. 191.
Footnote 338:
Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. iii. p. 255, &c. Bastian,
‘Psychologie,’ p. 171. Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 75-95,
225, &c. St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 46.
Footnote 339:
Berkeley, ‘Concerning Motion,’ in ‘Works,’ vol. ii. p. 86.
Footnote 340:
Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 196, part iii. p. 229.
Footnote 341:
Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ dec. i. iii. 3.
Footnote 342:
De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.
Footnote 343:
Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 9; J. G. Müller, pp.
263, 311, 371, 387; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 454; see below, p. 175.
Footnote 344:
Hahn, ‘Gramm. des Hereró,’ s.v. ‘omu-makisina.’
Footnote 345:
Kaufmann, ‘Central-Afrika,’ (White Nile), p. 131.
Footnote 346:
Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 523.
Footnote 347:
Zollinger in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 692.
Footnote 348:
Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’
vol. i. p. 399.
Footnote 349:
Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 347, 526.
Footnote 350:
Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 220; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ pp. 66, 89.
Footnote 351:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, &c., 204, &c.; ‘Voyages au Nord,’ vol.
viii. pp. 103, 410; Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 120. See also Steller,
‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 276.
Footnote 352:
Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 174. See also Macrae in ‘As. Res.’ vol.
vii. p. 196; Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 33.
Footnote 353:
Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 103, 358.
Footnote 354:
Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 177. See also Shortt, ‘Tribes of
Neilgherries,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 281.
Footnote 355:
Elliot in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. 1869, p. 115.
Footnote 356:
Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 739.
Footnote 357:
Elliot in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. pp. 96, 115, 125. Lubbock,
‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 222. Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of
Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 462, &c. Prof. Liebrecht, in ‘Ztschr. für
Ethnologie,’ vol. v. p. 100, compares the field-protecting
Priapos-hermes of ancient Italy, daubed with minium.
Footnote 358:
Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 142, 182, &c., see 221. See also Latham,
‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 239. (Siah-push, stone offered to the
representative of deity.)
Footnote 359:
Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. iv. p. 132; Welcker, ‘Griechische
Götterlehre,’ vol. i. p. 220. Meiners, vol. i. p. 150, &c. Details
esp. in Pausanias; Theophrast. Charact. xvi.; Tacit. Hist. ii. 3;
Arnobius, Adv. Gent.; Tertullianus; Clemens Alexandr.
Footnote 360:
Is. lvii. 6. The first line, ‘behhalkey-nahhal hhêlkech,’ turns on the
pun on hhlk = smooth (stone), and also lot or portion; a double sense
probably connected with the use of smooth pebbles for casting lots.
Footnote 361:
Sprenger, ‘Mohammad,’ vol. ii. p. 7, &c. Burton, ‘El Medinah,’ &c.,
vol. ii. p. 157.
Footnote 362:
Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 10. Deut. xii. 3; Micah v. 13, &c. Movers,
‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, ‘Säule,’ &c. See De
Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 135 (considers bætyl = beth-el, &c.).
Footnote 363:
For references see Ducange s.v. ‘petra’; Leslie, ‘Early Races of
Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 256.
Footnote 364:
Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 241. See also
Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, &c.).
Footnote 365:
Earl of Roden, ‘Progress of Reformation in Ireland,’ London, 1851, p.
51. Sir J. E. Tennent in ‘Notes and Queries,’ Feb. 7, 1852. See
Borlase, ‘Antiquities of Cornwall,’ Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.
Footnote 366:
‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ chap. vi.
Footnote 367:
For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners,
‘Geschichte der Religionen,’ vol. i. books i. and v.; Bastian,
‘Mensch,’ vol. ii.; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie;’ De Brosses, ‘Dieux
Fétiches,’ &c. Particular details in J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 393;
Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 395; Castrén, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’
p. 193, &c.; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii.; Köppen, ‘Rel. des Buddha,’
vol. i. p. 493, &c.; Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece.’
Footnote 368:
J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 263; Meiners, vol. i. p. 163.
Footnote 369:
Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ vol. i. p. 39; Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in
Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 14; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 203; J. G. Müller,
pp. 95-8, 128.
Footnote 370:
Fernando Colombo, ‘Vita del Amm. Cristoforo Colombo,’ Venice, 1571, p.
127, &c.; and ‘Life of Colon,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84. Herrera,
dec. i. iii. 3. Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 421-4. Waitz, vol.
iii. p. 384; J. G. Müller, pp. 171-6, 182, 210, 232.
Footnote 371:
Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. pp. 71, 89; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 458; J. G.
Müller, pp. 322, 371.
Footnote 372:
Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 486; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 148; J. G.
Müller, p. 642.
Footnote 373:
Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ &c., p. 83; Taylor, pp. 171, 183, 212.
Footnote 374:
J. R. Forster, ‘Obs. during Voyage,’ London, 1778, p. 534, &c.; Ellis,
‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 281, &c., 323, &c. See also Earl, ‘Papuans,’
p. 84; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 78 (Nias).
Footnote 375:
St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 198.
Footnote 376:
Hutchinson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 336; see Bastian,
‘Psychologie,’ p. 172.
Footnote 377:
Steinhauser, in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missionen,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p.
131.
Footnote 378:
Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xvi.
Footnote 379:
Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 183; Denham, ‘Travels,’ vol. i. p.
113; Römer, ‘Guinea’; Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. See
also Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 282 (Balonda).
Footnote 380:
Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, &c.; Bastian, ‘Psych.’ p. 34, 208,
‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 293, 486. See ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol.
ii. p. 350 (Chinese).
Footnote 381:
Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. xvii.; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p.
198, vol. ii. pp. xxxv, 164, 234, 292, 485.
Footnote 382:
Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, vi. 17-19.
Footnote 383:
Augustinus ‘De Civ. Dei,’ viii. 23: ‘at ille visibilia et
contrectabilia simulacra, velut corpora deorum esse asserit; inesse
autem his quosdam spiritus invitatos, &c.... Hos ergo spiritus
invisibiles per artem quandam visibilibus rebus corporalis materiæ
copulare, ut sint quasi animata corpora, illis spiritibus dicata et
subdita simulacra, &c.’ See also Tertullianus De Spectaculis, xii.:
‘In mortuorum autem idolis dæmonia consistunt, &c.’
Footnote 384:
Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius, cap. xxvii.: ‘Isti igitur impuri
spiritus, dæmones, ut ostensum a magis, a philosophis, et a Platone
sub statuis et imaginibus consecrati delitescunt, &c.’
Footnote 385:
Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 455. See Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol.
ii. p. 54.
Footnote 386:
Porphyr. de Vita Pythagoræ. Oken, ‘Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,’
2753.
Footnote 387:
Suidas, s.v. ἐγγαστρίμυθος; Isidor. Gloss. s.v. ‘præcantatores’;
Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 578. Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c. p. 269.
Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 115.