CHAPTER XV.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the

World—Pervading Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting

man—Spirits manifest in Dreams and Visions: Nightmares; Incubi and

Succubi; Vampires; Visionary Demons—Demons of darkness repelled by

fire—Demons otherwise manifest: seen by animals; detected by

footprints—Spirits conceived and treated as material—Guardian and

Familiar Spirits—Nature-Spirits; historical course of the

doctrine—Spirits of Volcanoes, Whirlpools, Rocks—Water-Worship:

Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c.—Tree-Worship: Spirits

embodied in or inhabiting Trees; Spirits of Groves and

Forests—Animal-Worship: Animals worshipped, directly, or as

incarnations or representatives of Deities; Totem-Worship;

Serpent-Worship—Species-Deities; their relation to Archetypal

Ideas.

We have now to enter on the final topic of the investigation of Animism,

by completing the classified survey of spiritual beings in general, from

the myriad souls, elves, fairies, genii, conceived as filling their

multifarious offices in man’s life and the world’s, up to the deities

who reign, few and mighty, over the spiritual hierarchy. In spite of

endless diversity of detail, the general principles of this

investigation seem comparatively easy of access to the enquirer, if he

will use the two keys which the foregoing studies supply: first, that

spiritual beings are modelled by man on his primary conception of his

own human soul, and second, that their purpose is to explain nature on

the primitive childlike theory that it is truly and throughout ‘Animated

Nature.’ If, as the poet says, ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere

causas,’ then rude tribes of ancient men had within them this source of

happiness, that they could explain to their own content the causes of

things. For to them spiritual beings, elves and gnomes, ghosts and

manes, demons and deities, were the living personal causes of universal

life. ‘The first men found everything easy, the mysteries of nature were

not so hidden from them as from us,’ said Jacob Böhme the mystic. True,

we may well answer, if these primitive men believed in that animistic

philosophy of nature which even now survives in the savage mind. They

could ascribe to kind or hostile spirits all good and evil of their own

lives, and all striking operations of nature; they lived in familiar

intercourse with the living and powerful souls of their dead ancestors,

with the spirits of the stream and grove, plain and mountain, they knew

well the living mighty Sun pouring his beams of light and heat upon

them, the living mighty Sea dashing her fierce billows on the shore, the

great personal Heaven and Earth protecting and producing all things. For

as the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own

inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be

carried on by the influence of other spirits. And thus Animism, starting

as a philosophy of human life, extended and expanded itself till it

became a philosophy of nature at large.

To the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed,

pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings. In seeking by a few types to

give an idea of this conception of pervading Spirits in its savage and

barbaric stage, it is not indeed possible to draw an absolute line of

separation between spirits occupied in affecting for good and ill the

life of Man, and spirits specially concerned in carrying on the

operations of Nature. In fact these two classes of spiritual beings

blend into one another as inextricably as do the original animistic

doctrines they are based on. As, however, the spirits considered

directly to affect the life and fortune of Man lie closest to the centre

of the animistic scheme, it is well to give them precedence. The

description and function of these beings extend upwards from among the

rudest human tribes. Milligan writes of the Tasmanians: ‘They were

polytheists; that is, they believed in guardian angels or spirits, and

in a plurality of powerful but generally evil-disposed beings,

inhabiting crevices and caverns of rocky mountains, and making temporary

abode in hollow trees and solitary valleys; of these a few were supposed

to be of great power, while to the majority were imputed much of the

nature and attributes of the goblins and elves of our native land.’[388]

Oldfield writes of the aborigines of Australia, ‘The number of

supernatural beings, feared if not loved, that they acknowledge, is

exceedingly great; for not only are the heavens peopled with such, but

the whole face of the country swarms with them; every thicket, most

watering-places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like

manner, every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons,

none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all apparently striving

to do all imaginable mischief to the poor black fellow.’[389] It must be

indeed an unhappy race among whom such a demonology could shape itself,

and it is a relief to find that other people of low culture, while

recognizing the same spiritual world swarming about them, do not hold

its main attribute to be spite against themselves. Among the Algonquin

Indians of North America, Schoolcraft finds the very groundwork of their

religion in the belief ‘that the whole visible and invisible creation is

animated with various orders of malignant or benign spirits, who preside

over the daily affairs and over the final destinies of men.’[390] Among

the Khonds of Orissa, Macpherson describes the greater gods and tribal

manes, and below these the order of minor and local deities: ‘They are

the tutelary gods of every spot on earth, having power over the

functions of nature which operate there, and over everything relating to

human life in it. Their number is unlimited. They fill all nature, in

which no power or object, from the sea to the clods of the field, is

without its deity. They are the guardians of hills, groves, streams,

fountains, paths, and hamlets, and are cognizant of every human action,

want, and interest in the locality, where they preside.’[391] Describing

the animistic mythology of the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe,

Castrén has said that every land, mountain, rock, river, brook, spring,

tree, or whatsoever it may be, has a spirit for an inhabitant; the

spirits of the trees and stones, of the lakes and brooks, hear with

pleasure the wild man’s pious prayers and accept his offerings.[392]

Such are the conceptions of the Guinea negro, who finds the abodes of

his good and evil spirits in great rocks, hollow trees, mountains, deep

rivers, dense groves, echoing caverns, and who passing silently by these

sacred places leaves some offering, if it be but a leaf or a shell

picked up on the beach.[393] Such are examples which not unfairly

picture the belief of the lower races in a world of spirits on earth,

and such descriptions apply to the state of men’s minds along the course

of civilization.

The doctrine of ancient philosophers such as Philo[394] and

Iamblichus,[395] of spiritual beings swarming through the atmosphere we

breathe, was carried on and developed in special directions in the

discussions concerning the nature and functions of the world-pervading

host of angels and devils, in the writings of the early Christian

Fathers.[396] Theologians of modern centuries have for the most part

seen reason to reduce within comparatively narrow limits the action

ascribed to external spiritual beings on mankind; yet there are some who

retain to the full the angelology and demonology of Origen and

Tertullian. These two views may be well contrasted by setting side by

side the judgments of two ecclesiastics of the Roman Church, as to the

belief in pervading demons prevalent in uncivilized countries. The

celebrated commentator, Dom Calmet, lays down in the most explicit terms

the doctrine of angels and demons, as a matter of dogmatic theology. But

he is less inclined to receive unquestioned the narratives of particular

manifestations in the mediæval and modern world. He mentions indeed the

testimony of Louis Vivez, that in the newly discovered countries of

America, nothing is more common than to see spirits which appear at

noon-day, not only in the country but in towns and villages, speaking,

commanding, sometimes even striking men; and the account by Olaus Magnus

of the spectres or spirits seen in Sweden and Norway, Finland and

Lapland, which do wonderful things, some even serving men as domestics

and driving the cattle out to pasture. But what Calmet remarks on these

stories, is that the greater ignorance prevails in a country, the more

superstition reigns there.[397] It seems that in our own day, however,

the tendency is to encourage less sceptical views. Monsignor Gaume’s

book on ‘Holy Water,’ which not long since received the special and

formal approval of Pius IX., appears ‘at an epoch when the millions of

evil angels which surround us are more enterprising than ever;’ and here

Olaus Magnus’ story of the demons infesting Northern Europe is not only

cited but corroborated.[398] On the whole, the survey of the doctrine of

pervading spirits through all the grades of culture is a remarkable

display of intellectual continuity. Most justly does Ellis the

missionary, depicting the South Sea Islanders’ world crowded with its

innumerable pervading spirits, point out the closeness of correspondence

here between doctrines of the savage and the civilized animist,

expressed as both may be in Milton’s familiar lines:—

‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,

Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.’[399]

As with souls, so with other spirits, man’s most distinct and direct

intercourse is had where they become actually present to his senses in

dreams and visions. The belief that such phantoms are real and personal

spirits, suggested and maintained as it is by the direct evidence of the

senses of sight, touch, and hearing, is naturally an opinion usual in

savage philosophy, and indeed elsewhere, long and obstinately resisting

the attacks of the later scientific doctrine. The demon Koin strives to

throttle the dreaming Australian;[400] the evil ‘na’ crouches on the

stomach of the Karen;[401] the North American Indian, gorged with

feasting, is visited by nocturnal spirits;[402] the Caribs, subject to

hideous dreams, often woke declaring that the demon Maboya had beaten

them in their sleep, and they could still feel the pain.[403] These

demons are the very elves and nightmares that to this day in benighted

districts of Europe ride and throttle the snoring peasant, and whose

names, not forgotten among the educated, have only made the transition

from belief to jest.[404] A not less distinct product of the savage

animistic theory of dreams as real visits from personal spiritual

beings, lasted on without a shift or break into the belief of mediæval

Christendom. This is the doctrine of the incubi and succubi, those male

and female nocturnal demons which consort sexually with men and women.

We may set out with their descriptions among the islanders of the

Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when

clutched;[405] in New Zealand, where ancestral deities ‘form attachments

with females and pay them repeated visits,’ while in the Samoan Islands

such intercourse of mischievious inferior gods caused ‘many supernatural

conceptions;’[406] and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme

class have also been placed on record.[407] From these lower grades of

culture the idea may be followed onward. Formal rites are specified in

the Hindu Tantra, which enable a man to obtain a companion-nymph by

worshipping her and repeating her name by night in a cemetery.[408]

Augustine, in an instructive passage, states the popular notions of the

visits of incubi, vouched for, he tells us, by testimony of such

quantity and quality that it may seem impudence to deny it; yet he is

careful not to commit himself to a positive belief in such spirits.[409]

Later theologians were less cautious, and grave argumentation on

nocturnal intercourse with incubi and succubi was carried on till, at

the height of mediæval civilization, it is found accepted in full belief

by ecclesiastics and lawyers. Nor is it to be counted as an ugly but

harmless superstition, when for example it is set forth in the Bull of

Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484, as an accepted accusation against ‘many

persons of both sexes, forgetful of their own salvation, and falling

away from the Catholic faith.’ The practical outcome of this belief is

known to students who have traced the consequence of the Papal Bull in

the legal manual of the witchcraft tribunals, drawn up by the three

appointed Inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum; and have

followed the results of this again into those dreadful records which

relate in their bald matter-of-fact phraseology the confessions of the

crime of diabolic intercourse, wrung from the wretched victims worked on

by threat and persuasion in the intervals of the rack, till enough

evidence was accumulated for clear judgment, and sentence of the

stake.[410] I need not dwell on the mingled obscenity and horror of

these details, which here only have their bearing on the history of

animism. But it will aid the ethnographer to understand the relation of

modern to savage philosophy, if he will read Richard Burton’s seriously

believing account in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ where he concludes

with acquiescence in a declaration lately made by Lipsius, that on the

showing of daily narratives and judicial sentences, in no age had these

lecherous demons appeared in such numbers as in his own time—and this

was about A.D. 1600.[411]

In connexion with the nightmare and the incubus, another variety of

nocturnal demon requires notice, the vampire. Inasmuch as certain

patients are seen becoming day by day, without apparent cause, thin,

weak, and bloodless, savage animism is called upon to produce a

satisfactory explanation, and does so in the doctrine that there exist

certain demons which eat out the souls or hearts or suck the blood of

their victims. The Polynesians said that it was the departed souls (tii)

which quitted the graves and grave-idols to creep by night into the

houses, and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, and these

died.[412] The Karens tell of the ‘kephu,’ which is a wizard’s stomach

going forth in the shape of a head and entrails, to devour the souls of

men, and they die.[413] The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula have their

‘hantu penyadin;’ he is a water-demon, with a dog’s head and an

alligator’s mouth, who sucks blood from men’s thumbs and great toes, and

they die.[414] It is in Slavonia and Hungary that the demon

blood-suckers have their principal abode, and to this district belongs

their special name of _vampire_, Polish _upior_, Russian _upir_. There

is a whole literature of hideous vampire-stories, which the student will

find elaborately discussed in Calmet. The shortest way of treating the

belief is to refer it directly to the principles of savage animism. We

shall see that most of its details fall into their places at once, and

that vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes

conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting

disease. As to their nature and physical action, there are two principal

theories, but both keep close to the original animistic idea of

spiritual beings, and consider these demons to be human souls. The first

theory is that the soul of a living man, often a sorcerer, leaves its

proper body asleep and goes forth, perhaps in the visible form of a

straw or fluff of down, slips through keyholes and attacks its sleeping

victim. If the sleeper should wake in time to clutch this tiny

soul-embodiment, he may through it have his revenge by maltreating or

destroying its bodily owner. Some say these ‘mury’ come by night to men,

sit upon their breasts and suck their blood, while others think it is

only children’s blood they suck, they being to grown people mere

nightmares. Here we have the actual phenomenon of nightmare, adapted to

a particular purpose. The second theory is that the soul of a dead man

goes out from its buried corpse and sucks the blood of living men. The

victim becomes thin, languid, and bloodless, falls into a rapid decline

and dies. Here again is actual experience, but a new fancy is developed

to complete the idea. The corpse thus supplied by its returning soul

with blood, is imagined to remain unnaturally fresh and supple and

ruddy; and accordingly the means of detecting a vampire is to open his

grave, where the reanimated corpse may be found to bleed when cut, and

even to move and shriek. One way to lay a vampire is to stake down the

corpse (as with suicides and with the same intention); but the more

effectual plan is to behead and burn it. This is the substance of the

doctrine of vampires. Still, as one order of demons is apt to blend into

others, the vampire-legends are much mixed with other animistic

folklore. Vampires appear in the character of the poltergeist or

knocker, as causing those disturbances in houses which modern

spiritualism refers in like manner to souls of the departed. Such was

the ghost of a certain surly peasant who came out of his grave in the

island of Mycone in 1700, after he had been buried but two days; he came

into the houses, upset the furniture, put the lamps out, and carried on

his tricks till the whole population went wild with terror. Tournefort

happened to be there and was present at the exhumation; his account is

curious evidence of the way an excited mob could persuade themselves,

without the least foundation of fact, that the body was warm and its

blood red. Again, the blood-sucker is very generally described under the

Slavonic names of werewolf (wilkodlak, brukolaka, &c.); the descriptions

of the two creatures are inextricably mixed up, and a man whose eyebrows

meet, as if his soul were taking flight like a butterfly, to enter some

other body, may be marked by this sign either as a werewolf or a

vampire. A modern account of vampirism in Bulgaria well illustrates the

nature of spirits as conceived in such beliefs as these. A sorcerer

armed with a saint’s picture will hunt a vampire into a bottle

containing some of the filthy food that the demon loves; as soon as he

is fairly inside he is corked down, the bottle is thrown into the fire,

and the vampire disappears for ever.[415]

As to the savage visionary and the phantoms he beholds, the Greenlander

preparing for the profession of sorcerer may stand as type, when, rapt

in contemplation in his desert solitude, emaciated by fasting and

disordered by fits, he sees before him scenes with figures of men and

animals, which he believes to be spirits. Thus it is interesting to read

the descriptions by Zulu converts of the dreadful creatures which they

see in moments of intense religious exaltation, the snake with great

eyes and very fearful, the leopard creeping stealthily, the enemy

approaching with his long assagai in his hand—these coming one after

another to the place where the man has gone to pray in secret, and

striving to frighten him from his knees.[416] Thus the visionary

temptations of the Hindu ascetic and the mediæval saint are happening in

our own day, though their place is now rather in the medical handbook

than in the record of miracle. Like the disease-demons and the

oracle-demons, these spiritual groups have their origin not in fancy,

but in real phenomena interpreted on animistic principles.

In the dark especially, harmful spirits swarm. Round native Australian

encampments, Sir George Grey used to see the bush dotted with little

moving points of fire; these were the firesticks carried by the old

women sent to look after the young ones, but who dared not quit the

firelight without a brand to protect them from the evil spirits.[417] So

South American Indians would carry brands or torches for fear of evil

demons when they ventured into the dark.[418] Tribes of the Malay

Peninsula light fires near a mother at childbirth, to scare away the

evil spirits.[419] Such notions extend to higher levels of civilization.

In Southern India, where for fear of pervading spirits only pressing

need will induce a man to go abroad after sundown, the unlucky wight who

has to venture into the dark will carry a fire-brand to keep off the

spectral foes. Even in broad daylight, the Hindu lights lamps to keep

off the demons,[420] a ceremony which is to be noticed again at a

Chinese wedding.[421] In Europe, the details of the use of fire to drive

off demons and witches are minute and explicit. The ancient Norse

colonists in Iceland carried fire round the lands they intended to

occupy, to expel the evil spirits. Such ideas have brought into

existence a whole group of Scandinavian customs, still remembered in the

country, but dying out in practice. Till a child is baptized, the fire

must never be let out, lest the trolls should be able to steal the

infant; a live coal must be cast after the mother as she goes to be

churched, to prevent the trolls from carrying her off bodily or

bewitching her; a live coal is to be thrown after a troll-wife or witch

as she quits a house, and so forth.[422] Into modern times, the people

of the Hebrides continued to protect the mother and child from evil

spirits, by carrying fire round them.[423] In modern Bulgaria, on the

Feast of St. Demetrius, lighted candles are placed in the stables and

the wood-shed, to prevent evil spirits from entering into the domestic

animals.[424] Nor did this ancient idea remain a mere lingering notion

of peasant folklore. Its adoption by the Church is obvious in the

ceremonial benediction of candles in the Roman Ritual: ‘Ut quibuscumque

locis accensæ, sive positæ fuerint, discedant principes tenebrarum, et

contremiscant, et fugiant pavidi cum omnibus ministris suis ab

habitationibus illis, &c.’ The metrical translation of Naogeorgus shows

perfectly the retention of primitive animistic ideas in the middle

ages:—

‘... a wondrous force and might

Doth in these candels lie, which if at any time they light,

They sure beleve that neyther storm or tempest dare abide,

Nor thunder in the skies be heard, nor any devil’s spide,

Nor fearefull sprightes that walke by night, nor hurts of frost or

haile.’[425]

Animals stare and startle when we see no cause; is it that they see

spirits invisible to man? Thus the Greenlander says that the seals and

wildfowl are scared by spectres, which no human eye but the sorcerer’s

can behold;[426] and thus the Khonds hold that their flitting ethereal

gods, invisible to man, are seen by beasts.[427] The thought holds no

small place in the folklore of the world. Telemachos could not discern

Athene standing near him, for not to all do the gods visibly appear; but

Odysseus saw her, and the dogs, and they did not bark, but with low

whine slunk across the dwelling to the further side.[428] So in old

Scandinavia, the dogs could see Hela the death-goddess move unseen by

men;[429] so Jew and Moslem, hearing the dogs howl, know that they have

seen the Angel of Death come on his awful errand;[430] while the beliefs

that animals see spirits, and that a dog’s melancholy howl means death

somewhere near, are still familiar to our own popular superstition.

Another means by which men may detect the presence of invisible spirits,

is to adopt the thief-catcher’s well-known device of strewing ashes.

According to the ideas of a certain stage of animism, a spirit is

considered substantial enough to leave a footprint. The following

instances relate sometimes to souls, sometimes to other beings. The

Philippine islanders expected the dead to return on the third day to his

dwelling, wherefore they set a vessel of water for him to wash himself

clean from the grave-mould, and strewed ashes to see footprints.[431] A

more elaborate rite forms part of the funeral customs of the Hos of

North-East India. On the evening of a death, the near relatives perform

the ceremony of calling the dead. Boiled rice and a pot of water are

placed in an inner room, and ashes sprinkled from thence to the

threshold. Two relatives go to the place where the body was burnt, and

walk round it beating ploughshares and chanting a plaintive dirge to

call the spirit home; while two others watch the rice and water to see

if they are disturbed, and look for the spirit-footsteps in the ashes.

If a sign appears, it is received with shivering horror and weeping, the

mourners outside coming in to join. Till the survivors are thus

satisfied of the spirit’s return, the rite must be repeated.[432] In

Yucatan there is mention of the custom of leaving a child alone at night

in a place strewn with ashes; if the footprint of an animal were found

next morning, this animal was the guardian deity of the child.[433]

Beside this may be placed the Aztec ceremony at the second festival of

the Sun-god Tezcatlipoca, when they sprinkled maize-flour before his

sanctuary, and his high-priest watched till he beheld the divine

footprints, and then shouted to announce, ‘Our great god is come.’[434]

Among such rites in the Old World, the Talmud contains a salient

instance; there are a great multitude of devils, it is said; and he who

will be aware of them let him take sifted ashes and strew them by his

bed, and in the early morning he shall see as it were marks of cocks’

feet.[435] This is an idea that has widely spread in the modern world,

as where in German folklore the little ‘earth-men’ make footprints like

a duck’s or goose’s in the strewn ashes. Other marks, too, betoken the

passage of spirit-visitors;[436] and as for ghosts, our own superstition

is among the most striking of the series. On St. Mark’s Eve, ashes are

to be sifted over the hearth, and the footprints will be seen of any one

who is to die within the year; many a mischievous wight has made a

superstitious family miserable by slily coming down stairs and marking

the print of some one’s shoe.[437] Such details as these may justify us

in thinking that the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in

general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they

attribute to souls. Explicit statements on the subject are scarce till

we reach the level of early Christian theology. The ideas of Tertullian

and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and

demons, probably represent the conceptions of primitive animism far more

clearly than the doctrine which Calmet lays down with the weight of

theological dogma, that angels, demons, and disembodied souls are pure

immaterial spirit; but that when by divine permission spirits appear,

act, speak, walk, eat, they must produce tangible bodies by either

condensing the air, or substituting other terrestrial solid bodies

capable of performing these functions.[438]

No wonder that men should attack such material beings by material means,

and even sometimes try to rid themselves by a general clearance from the

legion of ethereal beings hovering around them. As the Australians

annually drive from their midst the accumulated ghosts of the last

year’s dead, so the Gold Coast negroes from time to time turn out with

clubs and torches to drive the evil spirits from their towns; rushing

about and beating the air with frantic howling, they drive the demons

into the woods, and then come home and sleep more easily, and for a

while afterwards enjoy better health.[439] When a baby was born in a

Kalmuk horde, the neighbours would rush about crying and brandishing

cudgels about the tents, to drive off the harmful spirits who might hurt

mother and child.[440] Keeping up a closely allied idea in modern

Europe, the Bohemians at Pentecost, and the Tyrolese on Walpurgisnacht,

hunt the witches, invisible and imaginary, out of house and stall.[441]

Closely allied to the doctrine of souls, and almost rivalling it in the

permanence with which it has held its place through all the grades of

animism, is the doctrine of patron, guardian, or familiar spirits. These

are beings specially attached to individual men, soul-like in their

nature, and sometimes considered as actually being human souls. These

beings have, like all others of the spiritual world as originally

conceived, their reason and purpose. The special functions which they

perform are twofold. First, while man’s own proper soul serves him for

the ordinary purposes of life and thought, there are times when powers

and impressions out of the course of the mind’s normal action, and words

that seem spoken to him by a voice from without, messages of mysterious

knowledge, of counsel or warning, seem to indicate the intervention of

as it were a second superior soul, a familiar demon. And as enthusiasts,

seers, sorcerers, are the men whose minds most often show such

conditions, so to these classes more than to others the informing and

controlling patron-spirits are attached. Second, while the common

expected events of daily life pass unnoticed as in the regular course of

things, such events as seem to fall out with especial reference to an

individual, demand an intervening agent; and thus the decisions,

discoveries, and deliverances, which civilized men variously ascribe to

their own judgment, to luck, and to special interposition of Providence,

are accounted for in the lower culture by the action of the

patron-spirit or guardian-genius. Not to crowd examples from all the

districts of animism to which this doctrine belongs, let us follow it by

a few illustrations from the lower grades of savagery upward. Among the

Watchandis of Australia, it is held that when a warrior slays his first

man, the spirit of the dead enters the slayer’s body and becomes his

‘woorie’ or warning spirit; taking up its abode near his liver, it

informs him by a scratching or tickling sensation of the approach of

danger.[442] In Tasmania, Dr. Milligan heard a native ascribe his

deliverance from an accident to the preserving care of his deceased

father’s spirit, his guardian angel.[443] That the most important act of

the North American Indian’s religion is to obtain his individual patron

genius or deity, is well known. Among the Esquimaux, the sorcerer

qualifies for his profession by getting a ‘torngak’ or spirit which will

henceforth be his familiar demon, and this spirit may be the soul of a

deceased parent.[444] In Chili, as to guardian spirits, it has been

remarked that every Araucanian imagines he has one in his service; ‘I

keep my amchi-malghen (guardian nymph) still,’ being a common expression

when they succeed in any undertaking.[445] The Caribs display the

doctrine well in both its general and special forms. On the one hand,

there is a guardian deity for each man, which accompanies his soul to

the next life; on the other hand, each sorcerer has his familiar demon,

which he evokes in mysterious darkness by chants and tobacco-smoke; and

when several sorcerers call up their familiars together, the consequence

is apt to be a quarrel among the demons, and a fight.[446] In Africa,

the negro has his guardian spirit—how far identified with what Europeans

call soul or conscience, it may be hard to determine; but he certainly

looks upon it as a being separate from himself, for he summons it by

sorcery, builds a little fetish-hut for it by the wayside, rewards and

propitiates it by libations of liquor and bits of food.[447] In Asia,

the Mongols, each with his patron genius,[448] and the Laos sorcerers

who can send their familiar spirits into others’ bodies to cause

disease,[449] are examples equally to the purpose.

Among the Aryan nations of Northern Europe,[450] the old doctrine of

man’s guardian spirit may be traced, and in classic Greece and Rome it

renews with philosophic eloquence and cultured custom the ideas of the

Australian and the African. The thought of the spiritual guide and

protector of the individual man is happily defined by Menander, who

calls the attendant genius, which each man has from the hour of birth,

the good mystagogue (i.e. the novice’s guide to the mysteries) of this

life.

Ἄπαντι δαίμον ἀνδρὶ συμπαρίσταται

Εὐθὺς γενομένῳ μυσταγωγὸς τοῦ βίου.

Ἀγαθός; κακὸν γὰρ δαίμον’ οὐ νομιστέον

Εἶναι τὸν βίον βλάπτοντα χρηστόν. Πάντα γὰρ

Δεῖ ἀγαθὸν εἶναι τὸν Θεόν.

The divine warning voice which Sokrates used to hear, is a salient

example of the mental impressions leading to the belief in guardian

spirits.[451] In the Roman world, the doctrine came to be accepted as a

philosophy of human life. Each man had his ‘genius natalis,’ associated

with him from birth to death, influencing his action and his fate,

standing represented by its proper image as a lar among the household

gods; and at weddings and joyous times, and especially on the

anniversary of the birthday when genius and man began their united

career, worship was paid with song and dance to the divine image,

adorned with garlands, and propitiated with incense and libations of

wine. The demon or genius was, as it were, the man’s companion soul, a

second spiritual ego. The Egyptian astrologer warned Antonius to keep

far from the young Octavius, ‘for thy demon,’ said he, ‘is in fear of

his;’ and truly in after years that genius of Augustus had become an

imperial deity, by whom Romans swore solemn oaths, not to be

broken.[452] The doctrine which could thus personify the character and

fate of the individual man, proved capable of a yet further development.

Converting into animistic entities the inmost operations of the human

mind, a dualistic philosophy conceived as attached to every mortal a

good and an evil genius, whose efforts through life drew him backward

and forward toward virtue and vice, happiness and misery. It was the

kakodaimōn of Brutus which appeared to him by night in his tent: ‘I am

thy evil genius,’ it said, ‘we meet again at Philippi.’[453]

As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man

assumed in early and mediæval Christendom, it is plain that the good and

evil angels contending for man from birth to death, the guardian angel

watching and protecting him, the familiar spirit giving occult knowledge

or serving with magic art, continue in principle, and even in detail,

the philosophy of earlier culture. Such beings even take visible form.

St. Francisca had a familiar angel, not merely that domestic one that is

given as a guardian to every man, but this was as it were a boy of nine

years old, with a face more splendid than the sun, clad in a little

white tunic; it was in after years that there came to her a second

angel, with a column of splendour rising to the sky, and three golden

palm-branches in his hands. Or such attendant beings, though invisible,

make their presence evident by their actions, as in Calmet’s account of

that Cistercian monk whose familiar genius waited on him, and used to

get his chamber ready when he was coming back from the country, so that

people knew when to expect him home.[454] There is a pleasant quaintness

in Luther’s remark concerning guardian angels, that a prince must have a

greater, stronger, wiser angel than a count, and a count than a common

man.[455] Bishop Bull, in one of his vigorous sermons, thus sums up a

learned argument: ‘I cannot but judge it highly probable, that every

faithful person at least hath his particular good _Genius_ or _Angel_,

appointed by God over him, as the Guardian and Guide of his Life.’ But

he will not insist on the belief, provided that the general ministry of

angels be accepted.[456] Swedenborg will go beyond this. ‘Every man,’ he

says, ‘is attended by an associate spirit; for without such an

associate, a man would be incapable of thinking analytically,

rationally, and spiritually.’[457] Yet in the modern educated world at

large, this group of beliefs has passed into the stage of survival. The

conception of the good and evil genius contending for man through life,

indeed, perhaps never had much beyond the idealistic meaning which art

and poetry still give it. The traveller in France may hear in our own

day the peasant’s salutation, ‘Bonjour à vous et à votre compagnie!’

(i.e. your guardian angel).[458] But at the birthday festivals of

English children, how few are even aware of the historical sequence,

plain as it is, from the rites of the classic natal genius and the

mediæval natal saint! Among us, the doctrine of guardian angels is to be

found in commentaries, and may be sometimes mentioned in the pulpit; but

the once distant conception of a present guardian spirit, acting on each

individual man and interfering with circumstances on his behalf, has all

but lost its old reality. The familiar demon which gave occult knowledge

and did wicked work for the magician, and sucked blood from miserable

hags by witch-teats, was two centuries ago as real to the popular mind

as the alembic or the black cat with which it was associated. Now, it

has been cast down to the limbo of unhallowed superstitions.

To turn from Man to Nature. General mention has been made already of the

local spirits which belong to mountain and rock and valley, to well and

stream and lake, in brief to those natural objects and places which in

early ages aroused the savage mind to mythological ideas, such as modern

poets in their altered intellectual atmosphere strive to reproduce. In

discussing these imaginary beings, it is above all things needful to

bring our minds into sympathy with the lower philosophy. Here we must

seek to realize to the utmost the definition of the Nature-Spirits, to

understand with what distinct and full conviction savage philosophy

believes in their reality, to discern how, as living causes, they can

fill their places and do their daily work in the natural philosophy of

primæval man. Seeing how the Iroquois at their festivals could thank the

invisible aids or good spirits, and with them the trees, shrubs, and

plants, the springs and streams, the fire and wind, the sun, moon, and

stars—in a word, every object that ministered to their wants—we may

judge what real personality they attached to the myriad spirits which

gave animated life to the world around them.[459] The Gold Coast negro’s

generic name for a fetish-spirit is ‘wong;’ these aerial beings dwell in

temple-huts and consume sacrifices, enter into and inspire their

priests, cause health and sickness among men, and execute the behests of

the mighty Heaven-god. But part or all of them are connected with

material objects, and the negro can say, ‘In this river, or tree, or

amulet, there is a wong.’ But he more usually says, ‘This river, or

tree, or amulet is a wong.’ Thus among the wongs of the land are rivers,

lakes, and springs, districts of land, termite-hills, trees, crocodiles,

apes, snakes, elephants, birds.[460] In a word, his conceptions of

animating souls and presiding spirits as efficient causes of all nature

are two groups of ideas which we may well find it hard to distinguish,

for the sufficient reason that they are but varying developments of the

same fundamental animism.

In the doctrine of nature-spirits among nations which have reached a

higher grade of culture, are found at once traces of such primitive

thought, and of its change under new intellectual conditions. Knowing

the thoughts of rude Turanian tribes of Siberia as to pervading spirits

of nature, we are prepared to look for remodelled ideas of the same

class among a nation whose religion shows plain traces of evolution from

the low Turanian stage. The archaic system of manes-worship and

nature-worship, which survives as the state religion of China, fully

recognizes the worship of the numberless spirits which pervade the

universe. The belief in their personality is vouched for by the

sacrifices offered to them. ‘One must sacrifice to the spirits,’ says

Confucius, ‘as though they were present at the sacrifice.’ At the same

time, spirits were conceived as embodied in material objects. Confucius

says, again: ‘The action of the spirits, how perfect is it! Thou

perceivest it, and yet seest it not! Incorporated or immembered in

things, they cannot quit them. They cause men, clean and pure and better

clothed, to bring them sacrifice. Many, many, are there of them, as the

broad sea, as though they were above and right and left.’ Here are

traces of such a primitive doctrine of personal and embodied

nature-spirits as is still at home in the religion of rude Siberian

hordes. But it was natural that Chinese philosophers should find means

of refining into mere ideality these ruder animistic creations. Spirit

(shin), they tell us, is the fine or tender part in all the ten thousand

things; all that is extraordinary or supernatural is called spirit; the

unsearchable of the male and female principles is called spirit; he who

knows the way of passing away and coming to be, he knows the working of

spirit.[461]

The classic Greeks had inherited from their barbaric ancestors a

doctrine of the universe essentially similar to that of the North

American Indian, the West African, and the Siberian. We know, more

intimately than the heathen religion of our own land, the ancient Greek

scheme of nature-spirits impelling and directing by their personal power

and will the functions of the universe, the ancient Greek religion of

nature, developed by imagination, adorned by poetry, and consecrated by

faith. History records for our instruction, how out of the midst of this

splendid and honoured creed there were evolved the germs of the new

philosophy. Led by minuter insight and stricter reason, thoughtful

Greeks began the piecemeal supersession of the archaic scheme, and set

in movement the transformation of animistic into physical science, which

thence pervaded the whole cultured world. Such, in brief, is the history

of the doctrine of nature-spirits from first to last. Let us endeavour,

by classifying some of its principal special groups, to understand its

place in the history of the human intellect.

What causes volcanos? The Australians account for volcanic rocks by the

tradition that the sulky underground ‘ingna’ or demons made great fires

and threw up red-hot stones.[462] The Kamchadals say that just as they

themselves warm up their winter-houses, so the ‘kamuli’ or

mountain-spirits heat up the mountains in which they dwell, and fling

the brands out of the chimney.[463] The Nicaraguans offered human

sacrifices to Masaya or Popogatepec (Smoking-Mountain), by throwing the

bodies into the crater. It seems as though it were a controlling deity,

not the mountain itself, that they worshipped; for one reads of the

chiefs going to the crater, whence a hideous old naked woman came out

and gave them counsel and oracle; at the edge were placed earthen

vessels of food to please her, or to appease her when there was a storm

or earthquake.[464] Thus animism provided a theory of volcanoes, and so

it was likewise with whirlpools and rocks. In the Vei country in West

Africa, there is a dangerous rock on the Mafa river, which is never

passed without offering a tribute to the spirit of the flood—a leaf of

tobacco, a handful of rice, or a drink of rum.[465] An early missionary

account of a rock-demon worshipped by the Huron Indians will show with

what absolute personality savages can conceive such a being. In the

hollow of a certain sacred rock, it is related, dwells an ‘oki’ or

spirit who can give success to travellers, wherefore they put tobacco

into one of the cracks, and pray thus: ‘Demon who dwellest in this

place, behold tobacco I present to thee; help us, keep us from

shipwreck, defend us against our enemies, and vouchsafe that when we

have made a good trade, we may return safe and sound to our village.’

Father Marquette relates how, travelling on a river in the then little

known region of North America, he was told of a dreadful place to which

the canoe was just drawing near, where dwells a demon waiting to devour

such as dare to approach; this terrific manitu proved on arrival to be

some high rocks in the bend of the river, against which the current runs

violently.[466] Thus the missionary found in living belief among the

savage Indians the very thought which had so long before passed into the

classic tale of Skylla and Charybdis.

In those moments of the civilized man’s life when he casts off hard dull

science, and returns to childhood’s fancy, the world-old book of

animated nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come

back fresh to him, of the stream’s life that is so like his own; once

more he can see the rill leap down the hillside like a child, to wander

playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it

rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to

carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that water does, the poet’s

fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher,

and crops to the husbandman; it swells in fury and lays waste the land;

it grips the bather with chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable

grasp its drowning victim:[467]

“Tweed said to Till,

‘What gars ye rin sae still?’

Till said to Tweed,

‘Though ye rin wi’ speed,

And I rin slaw,

Yet, where ye drown ae man,

I drown twa.’”

What ethnography has to teach of that great element of the religion of

mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply

this—that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man; that to his

mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will; that the

water-spirits of primæval mythology are as souls which cause the water’s

rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that lastly man finds, in

the beings which with such power can work him weal and woe, deities with

a wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to be

prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts.

In Australia, special water-demons infest pools and watering-places. In

the native theory of disease and death, no personage is more prominent

than the water-spirit, which afflicts those who go into unlawful pools

or bathe at unlawful times, the creature which causes women to pine and

die, and whose very presence is death to the beholder, save to the

native doctors, who may visit the water-spirit’s subaqueous abode and

return with bleared eyes and wet clothes to tell the wonders of their

stay.[468] It would seem that creatures with such attributes come

naturally into the category of spiritual beings, but in such stories as

that of the bunyip living in the lakes and rivers and seen floating as

big as a calf, which carries off native women to his retreat below the

waters, there appears that confusion between the spiritual water-demon

and the material water-monster, which runs on into the midst of European

mythology in such conceptions as that of the water-kelpie and the

sea-serpent.[469] America gives cases of other principal animistic ideas

concerning water. The water has its own spirits, writes Cranz, among the

Greenlanders, so when they come to an untried spring, an angekok or the

oldest man must drink first, to free it from a harmful spirit.[470] ‘Who

makes this river flow?’ asks the Algonquin hunter in a medicine-song,

and his answer is, ‘The spirit, he makes this river flow.’ In any great

river, or lake, or cascade, there dwell such spirits, looked upon as

mighty manitus. Thus Carver mentions the habit of the Red Indians, when

they reached the shores of Lake Superior or the banks of the

Mississippi, or any other great body of water, to present to the spirit

who resides there some kind of offering; this he saw done by a Winnebago

chief who went with him to the Falls of St. Anthony. Franklin saw a

similar sacrifice made by an Indian, whose wife had been afflicted with

sickness by the water-spirits, and who accordingly to appease them tied

up in a small bundle a knife and a piece of tobacco and some other

trifling articles, and committed them to the rapids.[471] On the

river-bank, the Peruvians would scoop up a handful of water and drink

it, praying the river-deity to let them cross or to give them fish, and

they threw maize into the stream as a propitiatory offering; even to

this day the Indians of the Cordilleras perform the ceremonial sip

before they will pass a river on foot or horseback.[472] Africa displays

well the rites of water-worship. In the East, among the Wanika, every

spring has its spirit, to which oblations are made; in the West, in the

Akra district, lakes, ponds, and rivers received worship as local

deities. In the South, among the Kafirs, streams are venerated as

personal beings, or the abodes of personal deities, as when a man

crossing a river will ask leave of its spirit, or having crossed will

throw in a stone; or when the dwellers by a stream will sacrifice a

beast to it in time of drought, or, warned by illness in the tribe that

their river is angry, will cast into it a few handfuls of millet or the

entrails of a slaughtered ox.[473] Not less strongly marked are such

ideas among the Tatar races of the North. Thus the Ostyaks venerate the

river Ob, and when fish is scanty will hang a stone about a reindeer’s

neck and cast it in for a sacrifice. Among the Buraets, who are

professing Buddhists, the old worship may still be seen at the

picturesque little mountain lake of Ikeougoun, where they come to the

wooden temple on the shore to offer sacrifices of milk and butter and

the fat of the animals which they burn on the altars. So across in

Northern Europe, almost every Esthonian village has its sacred

sacrificial spring. The Esths could at times even see the churl with

blue and yellow stockings rise from the holy brook Wöhhanda, no doubt

that same spirit of the brook to whom in older days there were

sacrificed beasts and little children; in newer times, when a German

landowner dared to build a mill and dishonour the sacred water, there

came bad seasons that lasted year after year, and the country people

burned down the abominable thing.[474] As for the water-worship

prevailing among non-Aryan indigenes of British India, it seems to reach

its climax among the Bodo and Dhimal of the North-East, tribes to whom

the local rivers are the local deities,[475] so that men worship

according to their water-sheds, and the map is a pantheon.

Nor is such reverence strange to Aryan nations. To the modern Hindu,

looking as he still does on a river as a living personal being to be

adored and sworn by, the Ganges is no solitary water deity, but only the

first and most familiar of the long list of sacred streams.[476] Turn to

the classic world, and we but find the beliefs and rites of a lower

barbaric culture holding their place, consecrated by venerable antiquity

and glorified by new poetry and art. To the great Olympian assembly in

the halls of cloud-compelling Zeus, came the Rivers, all save Ocean, and

thither came the nymphs who dwell in lovely groves and at the springs of

streams, and in the grassy meads; and they sate upon the polished

seats:—

‘Οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην, νόσφ’ Ὠκεανοῖο,

Οὔτ’ ἅρα Νυμφαών ταί τ’ ἄλσεα καλὰ νέμονται,

Καὶ πηγὰς ποταμῶν, καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα.

Ἐλθόντες δ’ ἐς δῶμα Διὸς νεφεληγερέταο,

Ξεστῇς αἰθούσῃσιν ἐφίζανον, ἃσ Διὶ πατρὶ

Ἤφαιστος ποίησεν ἰδυίῃσι πραπίδεσσιν.’

Even against Hephaistos the Fire-god, a River-god dared to stand

opposed, deep-eddying Xanthos, called of men Skamandros. He rushed down

to overwhelm Achilles and bury him in sand and slime, and though

Hephaistos prevailed against him with his flames, and forced him, with

the fish skurrying hither and thither in his boiling waves and the

willows scorched upon his banks, to rush on no more but stand, yet at

the word of white-armed Here, that it was not fit for mortals’ sake to

handle so roughly an immortal god, Hephaistos quenched his furious fire,

and the returning flood sped again along his channel:—

‘Ἤφαιστε, σχέο, τέκνον ἀγακλέες; οὐ γὰρ ἔοικεν

Ἀθάνατον θεὸν ὧδε βροτῶν ἕνεκα στυφελίζειν.

Ὣς ἔφαθ’· Ἥφαιστος δὲ κατέσβεσε θεσπιδαὲς πῦρ·

Ἄψορρον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα κατέσσυτο καλὰ ῥέεθρα.’

To beings thus conceived in personal divinity, full worship was given.

Odysseus invokes the river of Scheria; Skamandros had his priest and

Spercheios his grove; and sacrifice was done to the rival of Herakles,

the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children of

old Okeanos.[477] Through the ages of the classic world, the river-gods

and the water-nymphs held their places, till within the bounds of

Christendom they came to be classed with ideal beings like them in the

mythology of the northern nations, the kindly sprites to whom offerings

were given at springs and lakes, and the treacherous nixes who entice

men to a watery death. In times of transition, the new Christian

authorities made protest against the old worship, passing laws to forbid

adoration and sacrifice to fountains—as when Duke Bretislav forbade the

still half-pagan country folk of Bohemia to offer libations and

sacrifice victims at springs,[478] and in England Ecgbert’s

Poenitentiale proscribed the like rites, ‘if any man vow or bring his

offerings to any well,’ ‘if one hold his vigils at any well.’[479] But

the old veneration was too strong to be put down, and with a varnish of

Christianity and sometimes the substitution of a saint’s name,

water-worship has held its own to our day. The Bohemians will go to pray

on the river-bank where a man has been drowned, and there they will cast

in an offering, a loaf of new bread and a pair of wax-candles. On

Christmas Eve they will put a spoonful of each dish on a plate, and

after supper throw the food into the well, with an appointed formula,

somewhat thus:—

‘House-father gives thee greeting,

Thee by me entreating:

Springlet, share our feast of Yule,

But give us water to the full;

When the land is plagued with drought,

Drive it with thy well-spring out.’[480]

It well shows the unchanged survival of savage thought in modern

peasants’ minds, to find still in Slavonic lands the very same fear of

drinking a harmful spirit in the water, that has been noticed among the

Esquimaux. It is a sin for a Bulgarian not to throw some water out of

every bucket brought from the fountain; some elemental spirit might be

floating on the surface, and if not thrown out, might take up his abode

in the house, or enter into the body of some one drinking from the

vessel.[481] Elsewhere in Europe, the list of still existing water-rites

may be extended. The ancient lake-offerings of the South of France seem

not yet forgotten in La Lozère, the Bretons venerate as of old their

sacred springs, and Scotland and Ireland can show in parish after parish

the sites and even the actual survivals of such observance at the holy

wells. Perhaps Welshmen no longer offer cocks and hens to St. Tecla at

her sacred well and church of Llandegla, but Cornish folk still drop

into the old holy-wells offerings of pins, nails, and rags, expecting

from their waters cure for disease, and omens from their bubbles as to

health and marriage.[482]

The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our study for their

illustrations of man’s primitive animistic theory of nature. This is

remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree

is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives

adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as inhabited,

like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a

fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a

body, is often hard to determine. Shelley’s lines well express a

doubting conception familiar to old barbaric thought—

‘Whether the sensitive plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a spirit sat

Ere its outward form had known decay,

Now felt this change, I cannot say.’

But this vagueness is yet again a proof of the principle which I have

confidently put forward here, that the conceptions of the inherent soul

and of the embodied spirit are but modifications of one and the same

deep-lying animistic thought. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe

in ‘hantu kayu,’ i.e. ‘tree-spirits,’ or ‘tree-demons,’ which frequent

every species of tree, and afflict men with diseases; some trees are

noted for the malignity of their demons.[483] Among the Dayaks of

Borneo, certain trees possessed by spirits must not be cut down; if a

missionary ventured to fell one, any death that happened afterwards

would naturally be set down to this crime.[484] The belief of certain

Malays of Sumatra is expressly stated, that certain venerable trees are

the residence, or rather the material frame, of spirits of the

woods.[485] In the Tonga Islands, we hear of natives laying offerings at

the foot of particular trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by

spirits.[486] So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree

utter its complaint when wantonly cut down.[487] A curious and

suggestive description bearing on this point is given in Friar Roman

Pane’s account of the religion of the Antilles islanders, drawn up by

order of Columbus. Certain trees, he declares, were believed to send for

sorcerers, to whom they gave orders how to shape their trunks into

idols, and these ‘cemi’ being then installed in temple-huts, received

prayer and inspired their priests with oracles.[488] Africa shows as

well-defined examples. The negro woodman cuts down certain trees in fear

of the anger of their inhabiting demons, but he finds his way out of the

difficulty by a sacrifice to his own good genius, or, when he is giving

the first cuts to the great asorin-tree, and its indwelling spirit comes

out to chase him, he cunningly drops palm-oil on the ground, and makes

his escape while the spirit is licking it up.[489] A negro was once

worshipping a tree with an offering of food, when some one pointed out

to him that the tree did not eat; the negro answered, ‘O the tree is not

fetish, the fetish is a spirit and invisible, but he has descended into

this tree. Certainly he cannot devour our bodily food, but he enjoys its

spiritual part and leaves behind the bodily which we see.’[490]

Tree-worship is largely prevalent in Africa, and much of it may be of

this fully animistic kind; as where in Whidah Bosman says that ‘the

trees, which are the gods of the second rank of this country, are only

prayed to and presented with offerings in time of sickness, more

especially fevers, in order to restore the patients to health;’[491] or

where in Abyssinia the Gallas made pilgrimage from all quarters to their

sacred tree Wodanabe on the banks of the Hawash, worshipping it and

praying to it for riches, health, life, and every blessing.[492]

The position of tree-worship in Southern Asia in relation to Buddhism is

of particular interest. To this day there are districts of this region,

Buddhist or under strong Buddhist influence, where tree-worship is still

displayed with absolute clearness of theory and practice. Here in legend

a dryad is a being capable of marriage with a human hero, while in

actual fact a tree-deity is considered human enough to be pleased with

dolls set up to swing in the branches. The Talein of Burmah, before they

cut down a tree, offer prayers to its ‘kaluk’ (_i.q._, ‘kelah’), its

inhabiting spirit or soul. The Siamese offer cakes and rice to the

takhien-tree before they fell it, and believe the inhabiting nymphs or

mothers of trees to pass into guardian-spirits of the boats built of

their wood, so that they actually go on offering sacrifice to them in

this their new condition.[493] These people have indeed little to learn

from any other race, however savage, of the principles of the lower

animism. The question now arises, did such tree-worship belong to the

local religions among which Buddhism established itself? There is strong

evidence that this was the case. Philosophic Buddhism, as known to us by

its theological books, does not include trees among sentient beings

possessing mind, but it goes so far as to acknowledge the existence of

the ‘dewa’ or genius of a tree. Buddha, it is related, told a story of a

tree crying out to the brahman carpenter who was going to cut it down,

‘I have a word to say, hear my word!’ but then the teacher goes on to

explain that it was not really the tree that spoke, but a dewa dwelling

in it. Buddha himself was a tree-genius forty-three times in the course

of his transmigrations. Legend says that during one such existence, a

certain brahman used to pray for protection to the tree which Buddha was

attached to; but the transformed teacher reproved the tree-worshipper

for thus addressing himself to a senseless thing which hears and knows

nothing.[494] As for the famous Bo tree, its miraculous glories are not

confined to the ancient Buddhist annals; for its surviving descendant,

grown from the branch of the parent tree sent by King Asoka from India

to Ceylon in the 3rd century B.C., to this day receives the worship of

the pilgrims who come by thousands to do it honour, and offer prayer

before it. Beyond these hints and relics of the old worship, however,

Mr. Fergusson’s recent investigations, published in his ‘Tree and

Serpent Worship,’ have brought to light an ancient state of things which

the orthodox Buddhist literature gives little idea of. It appears from

the sculptures of the Sanchi tope in Central India, that in the Buddhism

of about the 1st century A.D., sacred trees had no small place as

objects of authorized worship. It is especially notable that the

representatives of indigenous race and religion in India, the Nagas,

characterized by their tutelary snakes issuing from their backs between

their shoulders and curving over their heads, and other tribes actually

drawn as human apes, are seen adoring the divine tree in the midst of

unquestionable Buddhist surroundings.[495] Tree-worship, even now well

marked among the indigenous tribes of India, was obviously not abolished

on the Buddhist conversion. The new philosophic religion seems to have

amalgamated, as new religions ever do, with older native thoughts and

rites. And it is quite consistent with the habits of the Buddhist

theologians and hagiologists, that when tree-worship was suppressed,

they should have slurred over the fact of its former prevalence, and

should even have used the recollection of it as a gibe against the

hostile Brahmans.

Conceptions like those of the lower races in character, and rivalling

them in vivacity, belong to the mythology of Greece and Rome. The

classic thought of the tree inhabited by a deity and uttering oracles,

is like that of other regions. Thus the sacred palm of Negra in Yemen,

whose demon was propitiated by prayer and sacrifice to give oracular

response,[496] or the tall oaks inhabited by the gods, where old

Slavonic people used to ask questions and hear the answers,[497] have

their analogue in the prophetic oak of Dodona, wherein dwelt the deity,

‘ναῖεν δ’ ἐνὶ πυθμένι φηγοῦ.’[498] The Homeric hymn to Aphrodite tells

of the tree-nymphs, long-lived yet not immortal—they grow with their

high-topped leafy pines and oaks upon the mountains, but when the lot of

death draws nigh, and the lovely trees are sapless, and the bark rots

away and the branches fall, then their spirits depart from the light of

the sun:—

‘Νύμφαι μιν θρέψουσιν ὀρεσκῷοι βαθύκολποι,

αἵ τόδε ναιετάυσιν ὄρος μέγα τε ζάθεόν τε·

αἵ ῥ’ οὔτε θνητοῖς οὔτ’ ἀθανάτοισιν ἕπονται·

δηρὸν μὲν ζώουσι καὶ ἄμβροτον εἷδαρ ἔδουσι,

καί τε μετ’ ἀθανάτοισι καλὸν χορὸν ἐρρώσαντο.

τῇσι δὲ Σειληνοί τε καὶ εὔσκοπος Ἀργειφόντης

μίσγοντ’ ἐν φιλότητι μυχῷ σπείων ἐροέντων.

τῇσι δ’ ἅμ’ ἢ ἐλάται ἠὲ δρύς ὑψικάρηνοι

γεινομένῃσιν ἔφυσαν ἐπὶ χθονὶ βωτιανείρῃ,

καλαί, τηλεθάουσαι, ἐν οὔρεσιν ὑψηλοῖσιν·

ἀλλ’ ὅτε κεν δὴ μοῖρα παρεστήκῃ θανάτοιο,

ἀζάνεται μὲν πρῶτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ δένδρεα καλά,

φλοιὸς δ’ ἀμφιπεριφθινύθει, πίπτουσι δ’ ἄπ’ ὄζοι,

τῶν δὲ θ’ ὁμοῦ ψυχὴ λείπει φαός ἠελίοιο.’[499]

The hamadryad’s life is bound to her tree, she is hurt when it is

wounded, she cries when the axe threatens, she dies with the fallen

trunk:—

‘Non sine hamadryadis fato cadit arborea trabs.’[500]

How personal a creature the tree-nymph was to the classic mind, is shown

in legends like that of Paraibios, whose father, regardless of the

hamadryad’s entreaties, cut down her ancient trunk, and in himself and

in his offspring suffered her dire vengeance.[501] The ethnographic

student finds a curious interest in transformation-myths like Ovid’s,

keeping up as they do vestiges of philosophy of archaic type—Daphne

turned into the laurel that Apollo honours for her sake, the sorrowing

sisters of Phaethon changing into trees, yet still dropping blood and

crying for mercy when their shoots are torn.[502] Such episodes mediæval

poetry could still adapt, as in the pathless infernal forest whose

knotted dusk-leaved trees revealed their human animation to the

Florentine when he plucked a twig,

‘Allor porsi la mano un poco avante,

E colsi un ramoscel da un gran pruno:

E’ l tronco suo gridò: Perchè mi schiante?’[503]

or the myrtle to which Ruggiero tied his hippogriff, who tugged at the

poor trunk till it murmured and oped its mouth, and with doleful voice

told that it was Astolfo, enchanted by the wicked Alcina among her other

lovers,

‘D’ entrar o in fera o in fonte o in legno o in sasso.’[504]

If these seem to us now conceits over quaint for beauty, we need not

scruple to say so. They are not of Dante and Ariosto, they are sham

antiques from classic models. And if even the classic originals have

become unpleasing, we need not perhaps reproach ourselves with decline

of poetic taste. We have lost something, and the loss has spoiled our

appreciation of many an old poetic theme, yet it is not always our sense

of the beautiful that has dwindled, but the old animistic philosophy of

nature that is gone from us, dissipating from such fancies their

meaning, and with their meaning their loveliness. Still, if we look for

living men to whom trees are, as they were to our distant forefathers,

the habitations and embodiments of spirits, we shall not look in vain.

The peasant folklore of Europe still knows of willows that bleed and

weep and speak when hewn, of the fairy maiden that sits within the

fir-tree, of that old tree in Rugaard forest that must not be felled,

for an elf dwells within, of that old tree on the Heinzenberg near Zell,

which uttered its complaint when the woodman cut it down, for in it was

Our Lady, whose chapel now stands upon the spot.[505] One may still look

on where Franconian damsels go to a tree on St. Thomas’s Day, knock

thrice solemnly, and listen for the indwelling spirit to give answer by

raps from within, what manner of husbands they are to have.[506]

In the remarkable document of mythic cosmogony, preserved by Eusebius

under the alleged authorship of the Phœnician Sanchoniathon, is the

following passage: ‘But these first men consecrated the plants of the

earth, and judged them gods, and worshipped the things upon which they

themselves lived and their posterity, and all before them, and (to

these) they made libations and sacrifices.’[507] From examples such as

have been here reviewed, it seems that direct and absolute tree-worship

of this kind may indeed lie very wide and deep in the early history of

religion. But the whole tree-cultus of the world must by no means be

thrown indiscriminately into this one category. It is only on such

distinct evidence as has been here put forward, that a sacred tree may

be taken as having a spirit embodied in or attached to it. Beyond this

limit, there is a wider range of animistic conceptions connected with

tree and forest worship. The tree may be the spirit’s perch or shelter

or favourite haunt. Under this definition come the trees hung with

objects which are the receptacles of disease-spirits. As places of

spiritual resort, there is no real distinction between the sacred tree

and the sacred grove. The tree may serve as a scaffold or altar, at once

convenient and conspicuous, where offerings can be set out for some

spiritual being, who may be a tree-spirit, or perhaps the local deity,

living there just as a man might do who had his hut and owned his plot

of land around. The shelter of some single tree, or the solemn seclusion

of a forest grove, is a place of worship set apart by nature, of some

tribes the only temple, of many tribes perhaps the earliest. Lastly, the

tree may be merely a sacred object patronized by or associated with or

symbolizing some divinity, often one of those which we shall presently

notice as presiding over a whole species of trees or other things. How

all these conceptions, from actual embodiment or local residence or

visit of a demon or deity, down to mere ideal association, can blend

together, how hard it often is to distinguish them, and yet how in spite

of this confusion they conform to the animistic theology in which all

have their essential principles, a few examples will show better than

any theoretical comment.[508] Take the groups of malicious wood-fiends

so obviously devised to account for the mysterious influences that beset

the forest wanderer. In the Australian bush, demons whistle in the

branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to

seize the wayfarer; the lame demon leads astray the hunter in the

Brazilian forest; the Karen crossing a fever-haunted jungle shudders in

the grip of the spiteful ‘phi,’ and runs to lay an offering by the tree

he rested under last, from whose boughs the malaria-fiend came down upon

him; the negro of Senegambia seeks to pacify the long-haired tree-demons

that send diseases; the terrific cry of the wood-demon is heard in the

Finland forest; the baleful shapes of terror that glide at night through

our own woodland are familiar still to peasant and poet.[509] The North

American Indians of the Far West, entering the defiles of the Black

Mountains of Nebraska, will often hang offerings on the trees or place

them on the rocks, to propitiate the spirits and procure good weather

and hunting.[510] In South America, Mr. Darwin describes the Indians

offering their adorations by loud shouts when they came in sight of the

sacred tree standing solitary on a high part of the Pampas, a landmark

visible from afar. To this tree were hanging by threads numberless

offerings such as cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth, &c., down to the

mere thread pulled from his poncho by the poor wayfarer who had nothing

better to give. Men would pour libations of spirits and maté into a

certain hole, and smoke upwards to gratify Walleechu, and all around lay

the bleached bones of the horses slaughtered as sacrifices. All Indians

made their offerings here, that their horses might not tire, and that

they themselves might prosper. Mr. Darwin reasonably judges on this

evidence that it was to the deity Walleechu that the worship was paid,

the sacred tree being only his altar; but he mentions that the Gauchos

think the Indians consider the tree as the god itself, a good example of

the misunderstanding possible in such cases.[511] The New Zealanders

would hang an offering of food or a lock of hair on a branch at a

landing place, or near remarkable rocks or trees would throw a bunch of

rushes as an offering to the spirit dwelling there.[512] The Dayaks

fasten rags of their clothes on trees at cross roads, fearing for their

health if they neglect the custom;[513] the Macassar man halting to eat

in the forest will put a morsel of rice or fish on a leaf, and lay it on

a stone or stump.[514] The divinities of African tribes may dwell in

trees remarkable for size and age, or inhabit sacred groves where the

priest alone may enter.[515] Trees treated as idols by the Congo people,

who put calabashes of palm wine at their feet in case they should be

thirsty,[516] and amongst West African negro tribes farther north, trees

hung with rags by the passers-by, and the great baobabs pegged to hang

offerings to, and serving as shrines before which sheep are

sacrificed,[517] display well the rites of tree sacrifice, though

leaving undefined the precise relation conceived between deity and tree.

The forest theology that befits a race of hunters is dominant still

among Turanian tribes of Siberia, as of old it was across to Lapland.

Full well these tribes know the gods of the forest. The Yakuts hang on

any remarkably fine tree iron, brass, and other trinkets; they choose a

green spot shaded by a tree for their spring sacrifice of horses and

oxen, whose heads are set up in the boughs; they chant their

extemporised songs to the Spirit of the Forest, and hang for him on the

branches of the trees along the roadside offerings of horsehair, emblems

of their most valued possession. A clump of larches on a Siberian

steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a

Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur-coats, each set up

beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless

reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and

spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings

before the gods—such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the

stage when the contact of foreign civilization has begun by ornamenting

the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing.[518] A race

ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture,

kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In

Esthonian districts, during the last century, the traveller might often

see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing

inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house, and old memories

are handed down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast

was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an

offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the

worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back,

which stone he kissed thrice when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an

offering!’ It may well have been an indwelling tree-deity for whom this

worship was intended, for folklore shows that the Esths recognized such

a conception with the utmost distinctness; they have a tale of the

tree-elf who appeared in personal shape outside his crooked birch-tree,

whence he could be summoned by three knocks on the trunk and the

inquiry, ‘Is the crooked one at home?’ But also it may have been the

Wood-Father or Tree-King, or some other deity, who received sacrifice

and answered prayer beneath his sacred tree, as in a temple.[519] If,

again, we glance at the tree-and-grove worship of the non-Aryan

indigenous tribes of British India, we shall gather clear and

instructive hints of its inner significance. In the courtyard of a Bodo

house is planted the sacred ‘sij’ or euphorbia of Batho, the national

god, to whom under this representation the ‘deoshi’ or priest offers

prayer and kills a pig.[520] When the Khonds settle a new village, the

sacred cotton-tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is

placed the stone which enshrines the village deity.[521] Nowhere,

perhaps, in the world in these modern days is the original meaning of

the sacred grove more picturesquely shown than among the Mundas of

Chota-Nagpur, in whose settlements a sacred grove of sal-trees, a

remnant of the primæval forest spared by the woodman’s axe, is left as a

home for the spirits, and in this hallowed place offerings to the gods

are made.[522]

Here, then, among the lower races, is surely evidence enough to put on

their true historic footing the rites of tree and grove which are found

flourishing or surviving within the range of Semitic or Aryan culture.

Mentions in the Old Testament record the Canaanitish Ashera-worship, the

sacrifice under every green tree, the incense rising beneath oak and

willow and shady terebinth, rites whose obstinate revival proves how

deeply they were rooted in the old religion of the land.[523] The

evidence of these Biblical passages is corroborated by other evidence

from Semitic regions, as in the lines by Silius Italicus which mention

the prayer and sacrifice in the Numidian holy groves, and the records of

the council of Carthage which show that in the 5th century, an age after

Augustine’s time, it was still needful to urge that the relics of

idolatry in trees and groves should be done away.[524] From the more

precise descriptions which lie within the range of Aryan descent and

influence, examples may be drawn to illustrate every class of belief and

rite of the forest. Modern Hinduism is so largely derived from the

religions of the non-Aryan indigenes, that we may fairly explain thus a

considerable part of the tree-worship of modern India, as where in the

Birbhûm district of Bengal a great annual pilgrimage is made to a shrine

in a jungle, to give offerings of rice and money and sacrifice animals

to a certain ghost who dwells in a bela-tree.[525] In thoroughly Hindu

districts may be seen the pippala (Ficus religiosa) planted as the

village tree, the ‘chaityataru’ of Sanskrit literature, while the Hindu

in private life plants the banyan and other trees and worships them with

divine honours.[526] Greek and Roman mythology give perfect types not

only of the beings attached to individual trees, but of the dryads,

fauns, and satyrs living and roaming in the forest—creatures whose

analogues are our own elves and fairies of the woods. Above these

graceful fantastic beings are the higher deities who have trees for

shrines and groves for temples. Witness the description in Ovid’s story

of Erisichthon:—

‘And Ceres’ grove he ravaged with the axe,

They say, and shame with iron the ancient glades.

There stood a mighty oak of age-long strength,

Festooned with garlands, bearing on its trunk

Memorial tablets, proofs of helpful vows.

Beneath, the dryads led their festive dance,

And circled hand-in-hand the giant bole.’[527]

In more prosaic fashion, Cato instructs the woodman how to gain

indemnity for thinning a holy grove; he must offer a hog in sacrifice

with this prayer, ‘Be thou god or goddess to whom this grove is sacred,

permit me, by the expiation of this pig, and in order to restrain the

overgrowth of this wood, &c., &c.’[528] Slavonic lands had their groves

where burned the everlasting fire of Piorun the Heaven-god; the old

Prussians venerated the holy oak of Romowe, with its drapery and images

of the gods, standing in the midst of the sacred inviolate forest where

no twig might be broken nor beast slain; and so on down to the

elder-tree beneath which Pushkait was worshipped with offerings of bread

and beer.[529] The Keltic Heaven-god, whose image was a mighty oak, the

white-robed Druids climbing the sacred tree to cut the mistletoe, and

sacrificing the two white bulls beneath, are types from another national

group.[530] Teutonic descriptions begin with Tacitus, ‘Lucos ac nemora

consecrant, deorumque nominibus adpellant secretum illud, quod sola

reverentia vident,’ and the curious passage which describes the Semnones

entering the sacred grove in bonds, a homage to the deity that dwelt

there; many a century after, the Swedes were still holding solemn

sacrifice and hanging the carcases of the slaughtered beasts in the

grove hard by the temple of Upsal.[531] With Christianity comes a

crusade against the holy trees and groves. Boniface hews down in the

presence of the priest the huge oak of the Hessian Heaven-god, and

builds of the timber a chapel to St. Peter. Amator expostulated with the

hunters who hung the heads of wild beasts to the boughs of the sacred

pear-tree of Auxerre, ‘Hoc opus idololatriæ culturæ est, non christianæ

elegantissimæ disciplinæ;’ but this mild persuasion not availing, he

chopped it down and burned it. In spite of all such efforts, the old

religion of the tree and grove survived in Europe often in most pristine

form. Within the last two hundred years, there were old men in Gothland

who would ‘go to pray under a great tree, as their forefathers had done

in their time;’ and to this day the sacrificial rite of pouring milk and

beer over the roots of trees is said to be kept up on out-of-the-way

Swedish farms.[532] In Russia, the Lyeshy or wood-demon still protects

the birds and beasts in his domain, and drives his flocks of field-mice

and squirrels from forest to forest, when we should say they are

migrating. The hunter’s luck depends on his treatment of the

forest-spirit, wherefore he will leave him as a sacrifice the first game

he kills, or some smaller offering of bread or salted pancake on a

stump. Or if one falls ill on returning from the forest, it is known

that this is the Lyeshy’s doing, so the patient carries to the wood some

bread and salt in a clean rag, and leaving it with a prayer, comes home

cured.[533] Names like _Holyoake_ and _Holywood_ record our own old

memories of the holy trees and groves, memories long lingering in the

tenacious peasant mind; and it was a great and sacred _linden_-tree with

three stems, standing in the parish of Hvitaryd in South Sweden, which

with curious fitness gave a name to the family of _Linnæus_. Lastly,

Jakob Grimm even ventures to connect historically the ancient sacred

inviolate wood with the later royal forest, an ethnological argument

which would begin with the savage adoring the Spirit of the Forest, and

end with the modern landowner preserving his pheasants.[534]

To the modern educated world, few phenomena of the lower civilization

seem more pitiable than the spectacle of a man worshipping a beast. We

have learnt the lessons of Natural History at last thoroughly enough to

recognize our superiority to our ‘younger brothers,’ as the Red Indians

call them, the creatures whom it is our place not to adore but to

understand and use. By men at lower levels of culture, however, the

inferior animals are viewed with a very different eye. For various

motives, they have become objects of veneration ranking among the most

important in the lower ranges of religion. Yet I must here speak shortly

and slightly of Animal-worship, not as wanting in interest, but as

over-abounding in difficulty. Wishing rather to bring general principles

into view than to mass uninterpreted facts, all I can satisfactorily do

is to give some select examples from the various groups of evidence, so

as at once to display the more striking features of the subject, and to

trace the ancient ideas upward from the savage level far into the higher

civilization.

First and foremost, uncultured man seems capable of simply worshipping a

beast as beast, looking on it as possessed of power, courage, cunning,

beyond his own, and animated like a man by a soul which continues to

exist after bodily death, powerful as ever for good and harm. Then this

idea blends with the thought of the creature as being an incarnate

deity, seeing, hearing, and acting even at a distance, and continuing

its power after the death of the animal body to which the divine spirit

was attached. Thus the Kamchadals, in their simple veneration of all

things that could do them harm or good, worshipped the whales that could

overturn their boats, and the bears and wolves of whom they stood in

fear. The beasts, they thought, could understand their language, and

therefore they abstained from calling them by their names when they met

them, but propitiated them with certain appointed formulas.[535] Tribes

of Peru, says Garcilaso de la Vega, worshipped the fish and vicuñas that

provided them food, the monkeys for their cunning, the sparrowhawks for

their keen sight. The tiger and the bear were to them ferocious deities,

and mankind, mere strangers and intruders in the land, might well adore

these beings, its old inhabitants and lords.[536] How, indeed, can one

wonder that in direct and simple awe, the Philippine islanders, when

they saw an alligator, should have prayed him with great tenderness to

do them no harm, and to this end offered him of whatever they had in

their boats, casting it into the water.[537] Such rites display at least

a partial truth in the famous apophthegm which attributes to fear the

origin of religion: ‘Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.’[538] In

discussing the question of the souls of animals in a previous chapter,

instances were adduced of men seeking to appease by apologetic phrase

and rite the animals they killed.[539] It is instructive to observe how

naturally such personal intercourse between man and animal may pass into

full worship, when the creature is powerful or dangerous enough to claim

it. When the Stiêns of Kambodia asked pardon of the beast they killed,

and offered sacrifice in expiation, they expressly did so through fear

lest the creature’s disembodied soul should come and torment them.[540]

Yet, strange to say, even the worship of the animal as divine does not

prevent the propitiatory ceremony from passing into utter mockery. Thus

Charlevoix describes North American Indians who, when they had killed a

bear, would set up its head painted with many colours, and offer it

homage and praise while they performed the painful duty of feasting on

its body.[541] So among the Ainos, the indigenes of Yesso, the bear is a

great divinity. It is true they slay him when they can, but while they

are cutting him up they salute him with obeisances and fair speeches,

and set up his head outside the house to preserve them from

misfortune.[542] In Siberia, the Yakuts worship the bear in common with

the spirits of the forest, bowing toward his favourite haunts with

appropriate phrases of prose and verse, in praise of the bravery and

generosity of their ‘beloved uncle.’ Their kindred the Ostyaks swear in

the Russian courts of law on a bear’s head, for the bear, they say, is

all-knowing, and will slay them if they lie. This idea actually serves

the people as a philosophical, though one would say rather superfluous,

explanation of a whole class of accidents: when a hunter is killed by a

bear, it is considered that he must at some time have forsworn himself,

and now has met his doom. Yet these Ostyaks, when they have overcome and

slain their deity, will stuff its skin with hay, kick it, spit on it,

insult and mock it till they have satiated their hatred and revenge, and

are ready to set it up in a yurt as an object of worship.[543]