CHAPTER XVI.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Higher Deities of Polytheism—Human characteristics applied

to Deity—Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy—Polytheism: its

course of development in lower and higher Culture—Principles

of its investigation; classification of Deities according

to central conceptions of their significance and

function—Heaven-god—Rain-god—Thunder-god—Wind

gods—Earth-god—Water-god—Sea-god—Fire-god—Sun-god—Moon-god.

Surveying the religions of the world and studying the descriptions of

deity among race after race, we may recur to old polemical terms in

order to define a dominant idea of theology at large. Man so habitually

ascribes to his deities human shape, human passions, human nature, that

we may declare him an Anthropomorphite, an Anthropopathite, and (to

complete the series) an Anthropophysite. In this state of religious

thought, prevailing as it does through so immense a range among mankind,

one of the strongest confirmations may be found of the theory here

advanced concerning the development of Animism. This theory that the

conception of the human soul is the very ‘fons et origo’ of the

conceptions of spirit and deity in general, has been already vouched for

by the fact of human souls being held to pass into the characters of

good and evil demons, and to ascend to the rank of deities. But beyond

this, as we consider the nature of the great gods of the nations, in

whom the vastest functions of the universe are vested, it will still be

apparent that these mighty deities are modelled on human souls, that in

great measure their feeling and sympathy, their character and habit,

their will and action, even their material and form, display throughout

their adaptations, exaggerations and distortions, characteristics shaped

upon those of the human spirit. The key to investigation of the Dii

Majorum Gentium of the world is the reflex of humanity, and as we behold

their figures in their proper districts of theology, memory ever brings

back the Psalmist’s words, ‘Thou thoughtest I was altogether as

thyself.’

The higher deities of Polytheism have their places in the general

animistic system of mankind. Among nation after nation it is still clear

how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became

the model on which divine society and government were shaped. As chiefs

and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser spirits.

They differ from the souls and minor spiritual beings which we have as

yet chiefly considered, but the difference is rather of rank than of

nature. They are personal spirits, reigning over personal spirits. Above

the disembodied souls and manes, the local genii of rocks and fountains

and trees, the host of good and evil demons, and the rest of the

spiritual commonality, stand these mightier deities, whose influence is

less confined to local or individual interests, and who, as it pleases

them, can act directly within their vast domain, or control and operate

through the lower beings of their kind, their servants, agents, or

mediators. The great gods of Polytheism, numerous and elaborately

defined in the theology of the cultured world, do not however make their

earliest appearance there. In the religions of the lower races their

principal types were already cast, and thenceforward, for many an age of

progressing or relapsing culture, it became the work of poet and priest,

legend-monger and historian, theologian and philosopher, to develop and

renew, to degrade and abolish, the mighty lords of the Pantheon.

With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of religion

is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the

spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe. In the

lists, it is true, there are set down great deities, good or evil, who

probably came in from modern Christian missionary teaching, or otherwise

by contact with foreign religions. It is often difficult to distinguish

from these the true local gods, animistic figures of native meaning and

origin. Among the following polytheistic systems, examples may be found

of such combinations, with the complex theological problems they

suggest. Among the Australians, above the swarming souls,

nature-spirits, demons, there stand out mythic figures of higher

divinity; Nguk-wonga, the Spirit of the Waters; Biam, who gives

ceremonial songs and causes disease, and is perhaps the same as Baiame

the creator; Nambajandi and Warrugura, lords of heaven and the nether

world.[593] In South America, if we look into the theology of the Manaos

(whose name is well known in the famous legend of El Dorado and the

golden city of Manoa), we see Mauari and Saraua, who may be called the

Good and Evil Spirit, and beside the latter the two Gamainhas, Spirits

of the Waters and the Forest.[594] In North America the description of a

solemn Algonquin sacrifice introduces a list of twelve dominant manitus

or gods; first the Great Manitu in heaven, then the Sun, Moon, Earth,

Fire, Water, the House-god, the Indian corn, and the four Winds or

Cardinal Points.[595] The Polynesian’s crowd of manes, and the lower

ranks of deities of earth, sea, and air, stand below the great gods of

Peace and War, Oro and Tane the national deities of Tahiti and Huahine,

Raitubu the Sky-producer, Hina who aided in the work of forming the

world, her father Taaroa, the uncreate Creator who dwells in

Heaven.[596] Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, the commonalty of spirits

consists of the souls of the departed, and of such beings as dwell in

the noble old forests on the tops of lofty hills, or such as hover about

villages and devour the stores of rice; above these are Tapa, creator

and preserver of man, and Iang, who taught the Dayaks their religion,

Jirong, whose function is the birth and death of men, and Tenabi, who

made, and still causes to flourish, the earth and all things therein

save the human race.[597] In West Africa, an example may be taken from

the theology of the Slave Coast, a systematic scheme of all nature as

moved and quickened by spirits, kindly or hostile to mankind. These

spirits dwell in field and wood, mountain and valley; they live in air

and water; multitudes of them have been human souls, such ghosts hover

about the graves and near the living, and have influence with the

under-gods, whom they worship; among these ‘edrõ’ are the patron-deities

of men and families and tribes; through these subordinate beings works

the highest god, Mawu. The missionary who describes this negro hierarchy

quite simply sees in it Satan and his Angels.[598] In Asia, the

Samoyed’s little spirits that are bound to his little fetishes, and the

little elves of wood and stream, have greater beings above them, the

Forest-Spirit, the River-Spirit, the Sun and Moon, the Evil Spirit and

the Good Spirit above all.[599] The countless host of the local gods of

the Khonds pervade the world, rule the functions of nature, and control

the life of men, and these have their chiefs; above them rank the

deified souls of men who have become tutelary gods of tribes; above

these are the six great gods, the Rain-god, the goddess of Firstfruits,

the god of Increase, the god of Hunting, the iron god of War, the god of

Boundaries, with which group stands also the Judge of the Dead, and

above all other gods, the Sun-god and Creator Boora Pennu, and his wife

the mighty Earth-goddess, Tari Pennu.[600] The Spanish conquerors found

in Mexico a complex and systematic hierarchy of spiritual beings;

numberless were the little deities who had their worship in house and

lane, grove and temple, and from these the worshipper could pass to gods

of flowers or of pulque, of hunters and goldsmiths, and then to the

great deities of the nation and the world, the figures which the

mythologist knows so well, Centeotl the Earth-goddess, Tlaloc the

Water-god, Huitzilopochtli the War-god, Mictlanteuctli the Lord of

Hades, Tonatiuh and Metztli the Sun and Moon.[601] Thus, starting from

the theology of savage tribes, the student arrives at the polytheistic

hierarchies of the Aryan nations. In ancient Greece, the

cloud-compelling Heaven-god reigns over such deities as the god of War

and the goddess of Love, the Sun-god and the Moon-goddess, the Fire-god

and the ruler of the Under-world, the Winds and Rivers, the nymphs of

wood and well and forest.[602] In modern India, Brahma-Vishnu-Siva reign

pre-eminent over a series of divinities, heterogeneous and often obscure

in nature, but among whom stand out in clear meaning and purpose such

figures as Indra of Heaven and Sûrya of the Sun, Agni of the Fire,

Pavana of the Winds and Varuna of the Waters, Yama lord of the

Under-world, Kâma god of Love and Kârttikeya of War, Panchânana who

gives epilepsy and Manasâ who preserves from snake-bites, the divine

Rivers, and below these the ranks of nymphs, elves, demons, ministering

spirits, of heaven and earth—Gandharvas, Apsaras, Siddhas, Asuras,

Bhûtas, Râkshasas.[603]

The systematic comparison of polytheistic religions has been of late

years worked with admirable results. These have been due to the adoption

of comparatively exact methods, as where the ancient Aryan deities of

the Veda have been brought into connexion with those of the Homeric

poems, in some cases as clearly as where we Englishmen can study in the

Scandinavian Edda the old gods of our own race, whose names stand in

local names on the map of England, and serve as counters to reckon our

days of the week. Yet it need scarcely be said that to compare in full

detail the deities even of closely connected nations, and à fortiori

those of tribes not united in language and history, is still a difficult

and unsatisfactory task. The old-fashioned identifications of the gods

and heroes of different nations admitted most illusory evidence. Some

had little more ground than similar-sounding names, as when the Hindu

Brahma and Prajâpati were discovered to be the Hebrew Abraham and

Japhet, and when even Sir William Jones identified Woden with Buddha.

With not much more stringency, it is still often taken as matter of

course that the Keltic Beal, whose bealtines correspond with a whole

class of bonfire-customs among several branches of the Aryan race, is

the Bel or the Baal of the Semitic cultus. Unfortunately, classical

scholarship at the Renaissance started the subject on an unsound

footing, by accepting the Greek deities with the mystified shapes and

perverted names they had assumed in Latin literature. That there was a

partial soundness in such comparisons, as in identifying Zeus and

Jupiter, Hestia and Vesta, made the plan all the more misleading when

Kronos came to figure as Saturn, Poseidon as Neptune, Athene as Minerva.

To judge by example of the possible results of comparative theology

worked on such principles, Thoth being identified with Hermes, Hermes

with Mercury, and Mercury with Woden, there comes to pass the absurd

transition from the Egyptian ibis-headed divine scribe of the gods, to

the Teutonic heaven-dwelling driver of the raging tempest. It is not in

this loose fashion that the mental processes are to be sought out, which

led nations to arrange so similarly and yet so diversely their array of

deities.

A twofold perplexity besets the soberest investigator on this ground,

caused by the modification of deities by development at home and

adoption from abroad. Even among the lower races, gods of long

traditional legend and worship acquire a mixed and complex personality.

The mythologist who seeks to ascertain the precise definition of the Red

Indian Michabu in his various characters of Heaven-god and Water-god,

Creator of the Earth and first ancestor of Man, or who examines the

personality of the Polynesian Maui in his relation to Sun, lord of

Heaven or Hades, first Man, and South Sea Island hero, will sympathize

with the Semitic or Aryan student bewildered among the heterogeneous

attributes of Baal and Astarte, Herakles and Athene. Sir William Jones

scarcely overstated the perplexity of the problem in the following

remarkable forecast delivered more than a century ago, in the first

anniversary discourse before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at a time

when glimpses of the relation of the Hindu to the Greek Pantheon were

opening into a new broad view of comparative theology in his mind. ‘We

must not be surprised,’ he says, ‘at finding, on a close examination,

that the characters of all the Pagan deities, male and female, melt into

each other and at last into one or two; for it seems a well-founded

opinion, that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome, and

modern Váránes [Benares] mean only the powers of nature, and principally

those of the Sun, expressed in a variety of ways and by a multitude of

fanciful names.’ As to the travelling of gods from country to country,

and the changes they are apt to suffer on the road, we may judge by

examples of what has happened within our knowledge. It is not merely

that one nation borrows a god from another with its proper figure and

attributes and rites, as where in Rome the worshipper of the Sun might

take his choice whether he would adore in the temple of the Greek

Apollo, the Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Mithra, or the Syrian

Elagabalus. The intercourse of races can produce quainter results than

this. Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu

and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down

among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi the

Earth-god (Arabic jin = demon, Sanskrit bhûmi = earth); incense is burnt

to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god) who intercedes with Pirman the supreme

invisible deity above the sky (Brahma?); the Moslem Allah Táala, with

his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in the Hinduized

characters of creator and destroyer of all things; and while the spirits

worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of ‘dewa’ or deity,

Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of the

stone-worshipper, that he will give to his sacred boulder the title of a

Prophet Mohammed.[604] If we would have examples nearer home, we may

trace the evil demon Aeshma Daeva of the ancient Persian religion

becoming the Asmodeus of the book of Tobit, afterwards to find a place

in the devilry of the middle ages, and to end his career as the Diable

Boiteux of Le Sage. Even the Aztec war-god Huitzilopochtli may be found

figuring as the demon Vizlipuzli in the popular drama of Doctor Faustus.

In ethnographic comparisons of the religions of mankind, unless there is

evidence of direct relation between gods belonging to two peoples, the

safe and reasonable principle is to limit the identification of deities

to the attributes they have in common. Thus it is proper to compare the

Dendid of the White Nile with the Aryan Indra, in so far as both are

Heaven-gods and Rain-gods; the Aztec Tonatiuh with the Greek Apollo, in

so far as both are Sun-gods; the Australian Baiame with the Scandinavian

Thor, in so far as both are Thunder-gods. The present purpose of

displaying Polytheism as a department of Animism does not require that

elaborate comparison of systems which would be in place in a manual of

the religions of the world. The great gods may be scientifically ranged

and treated according to their fundamental ideas, the strongly-marked

and intelligible conceptions which, under names often obscure and

personalities often mixed and mystified, they stand to represent. It is

enough to show the similarity of principle on which the theologic mind

of the lower races shaped those old familiar types of deity, with which

our first acquaintance was gained in the pantheon of classic mythology.

It will be observed that not all, but the principal figures, belong to

strict Nature-worship. These may be here first surveyed. They are Heaven

and Earth, Rain and Thunder, Water and Sea, Fire and Sun and Moon,

worshipped either directly for themselves, or as animated by their

special deities, or these deities are more fully set apart and adored in

anthropomorphic shape—a group of conceptions distinctly and throughout

based on the principles of savage fetishism. True, the great Nature-gods

are huge in strength and far-reaching in influence, but this is because

the natural objects they belong to are immense in size or range of

action, pre-eminent and predominant among lesser fetishes, though still

fetishes themselves.

In the religion of the North American Indians, the Heaven-god displays

perfectly the gradual blending of the material sky itself with its

personal deity. In the early times of French colonization, Father

Brebeuf mentions the Hurons addressing themselves to the earth, rivers,

lakes, and dangerous rocks, but above all to heaven, believing that it

is all animated, and some powerful demon dwells therein. He describes

them as speaking directly to heaven by its personal name ‘Aronhiaté!’

Thus when they throw tobacco into the fire as sacrifice, if it is Heaven

they address, they say ‘Aronhiaté! (Heaven!) behold my sacrifice, have

pity on me, aid me!’ They have recourse to Heaven in almost all their

necessities, and respect this great body above all creatures, remarking

in it particularly something divine. They imagine in the sky an ‘oki,’

i.e. demon or power, which rules the seasons of the year and controls

the winds and waves. They dread its anger, calling it to witness when

they make some important promise or treaty, saying, Heaven hears what we

do this day, and fearing chastisement should their word be broken. One

of their renowned sorcerers said, Heaven will be angry if men mock him;

when they cry every day to Heaven, Aronhiaté! yet give him nothing, he

will avenge himself. Etymology again suggests the divine sky as the

inner meaning of the Iroquois supreme deity, Taronhiawagon the

‘sky-comer’ or ‘sky-holder,’ who had his festival about the winter

solstice, who brought the ancestral race out of the mountain, taught

them hunting, marriage, and religion, gave them corn and beans, squashes

and potatoes and tobacco, and guided them on their migrations as they

spread over the land. Among the North American tribes, not only does the

conception of the personal divine Heaven thus seem the fundamental idea

of the Heaven-god, but it may expand under Christian influence into a

yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven.[605]

In South Africa, the Zulus speak of the Heaven as a person, ascribing to

it the power of exercising a will, and they also speak of a Lord of

Heaven, whose wrath they deprecate during a thunderstorm. In the native

legends of the Zulu princess in the country of the Half-Men, the captive

maiden expostulates personally with the Sky, for only acting in an

ordinary way, and not in the way she wishes, to destroy her enemies:—

‘Listen, yon heaven. Attend; mayoya, listen.

Listen, heaven. It does not thunder with loud thunder.

It thunders in an undertone. What is it doing?

It thunders to produce rain and change of season.’

Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously; the princess sings again and

it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her,

but she is left unharmed.[606] West Africa is another district where the

Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from

the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme

creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud;

and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of

this latter deity, the Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by

Riis, ‘The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and uncertain, and

often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world

(sorro) which lies beyond human reach; and hence the same word is used

also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.’[607] The same

transition from the divine sky to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in

the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed’s mind scarcely if at

all separates the visible personal Heaven from the divinity united with

it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the

cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same

original nature; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the

bearer of the Firmament, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds,

the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs.[608] So far as the

evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the

record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of

the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in

personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Universe.

The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity; they may say that

his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked,

that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests

himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight,

penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly

away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history

still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven.[609]

With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the Heaven-god among

our Indo-European race. This being, adored in ancient Aryan religion,

was—

‘... the whole circle of the heavens, for him

A sensitive existence, and a God,

With lifted hands invoked, and songs of praise.’

The evidence of language to this effect has been set forth with extreme

clearness by Professor Max Müller. In the first stage, the Sanskrit Dyu

(Dyaus), the bright sky, is taken in a sense so direct that it expresses

the idea of day, and the storms are spoken of as going about in it;

while Greek and Latin rival this distinctness in such terms as ἔνδιος,

‘in the open air,’ εὔδιος, ‘well-skyed, calm,’ sub divo, ‘in the open

air,’ sub Jove frigido, ‘under the cold sky,’ and that graphic

description by Ennius of the bright firmament, Jove whom all invoke:—

‘Aspice hoc sublime candens, quem invocant omnes Jovem.’

In the second stage, Dyaus pitar, Heaven-father, stands in the Veda as

consort of Prithivî mâtar, Earth-mother, ranked high or highest among

the bright gods. To the Greek he is Ζεὺς πατήρ, the Heaven-father, Zeus

the All-seer, the Cloud-compeller, King of Gods and Men. As Max Müller

writes: ‘There was nothing that could be told of the sky that was not in

some form or other ascribed to Zeus. It was Zeus who rained, who

thundered, who snowed, who hailed, who sent the lightning, who gathered

the clouds, who let loose the winds, who held the rainbow. It is Zeus

who orders the days and nights, the months, seasons, and years. It is he

who watches over the fields, who sends rich harvests, and who tends the

flocks. Like the sky, Zeus dwells on the highest mountains; like the

sky, Zeus embraces the earth; like the sky, Zeus is eternal, unchanging,

the highest god. For good and for evil, Zeus the sky and Zeus the god

are wedded together in the Greek mind, language triumphing over thought,

tradition over religion.’ The same Aryan Heaven-father is Jupiter, in

that original name and nature which he bore in Rome long before they

arrayed him in the borrowed garments of Greek myth, and adapted him to

the ideas of classic philosophy.[610] Thus, in nation after nation, took

place the great religious development by which the Father-Heaven became

the Father in Heaven.

The Rain-god is most often the Heaven-god exercising a special function,

though sometimes taking a more distinctly individual form, or blending

in characteristics with a general Water-god. In East Central Africa, the

spirit of an old chief dwelling on a cloudy mountain-top may receive the

worship of his votaries and send down the refreshing showers in answer

to their prayers; among the Damaras the highest deity is Omakuru the

Rain-giver, who dwells in the far North; while to the negro of West

Africa the Heaven-god is the rain-giver, and may pass in name into the

rain itself.[611] Pachacamac, the Peruvian world-creator, has set the

Rain-goddess to pour waters over the land, and send down hail and

snow.[612] The Aztec Tlaloc was no doubt originally a Heaven-god, for he

holds the thunder and lightning, but he has taken especially the

attributes of Water-god and Rain-god; and so in Nicaragua the Rain-god

Quiateot (Aztec quiahuitl = rain, teotl = god) to whom children were

sacrificed to bring rain, shows his larger celestial nature by being

also sender of thunder and lightning.[613] The Rain-god of the Khonds is

Pidzu Pennu, whom the priests and elders propitiate with eggs and arrack

and rice and a sheep, and invoke with quaintly pathetic prayers. They

tell him how, if he will not give water, the land must remain

unploughed, the seed will rot in the ground, they and their children and

cattle will die of want, the deer and the wild hog will seek other

haunts, and then of what avail will it be for the Rain-god to relent,

how little any gift of water will avail, when there shall be left

neither man, nor cattle, nor seed; so let him, resting on the sky, pour

waters down upon them through his sieve, till the deer are drowned out

of the forest and take refuge in the houses, till the soil of the

mountains is washed into the valleys, till the cooking-pots burst with

the force of the swelling rice, till the beasts gather so plentifully in

the green and favoured land, that men’s axes shall be blunted with

cutting up the game.[614] With perfect meteorological fitness, the Kol

tribes of Bengal consider their great deity Marang Buru, Great Mountain,

to be the Rain-god. Marang Buru, one of the most conspicuous hills of

the plateau near Lodmah in Chota-Nagpur, is the deity himself or his

dwelling. Before the rains come on, the women climb the hill, led by the

wives of the pahans, with girls drumming, to carry offerings of milk and

bel-leaves, which are put on the flat rock at the top. Then the wives of

the pahans kneel with loosened hair and invoke the deity, beseeching him

to give the crops seasonable rain. They shake their heads violently as

they reiterate this prayer, till they work themselves into a frenzy, and

the movement becomes involuntary. They go on thus wildly gesticulating,

till a cloud is seen; then they rise, take the drums, and dance the

kurrun on the rock, till Marang Buru’s response to their prayer is heard

in the distant rumbling of thunder, and they go home rejoicing. They

must go fasting to the mount, and stay there till there is ‘a sound of

abundance of rain,’ when they get them down to eat and drink. It is said

that the rain always comes before evening, but the old women appear to

choose their own moment for beginning the fast.[615] It was to Ukko the

Heaven-god, that in old days the Finn turned with such prayers:—

‘Ukko, thou, O God above us

Thou, O Father in the heavens,

Thou who rulest in the cloud-land,

And the little cloud-lambs leadest,

Send us down the rain from heaven,

Make the clouds to drop with honey,

Let the drooping corn look upward,

Let the grain with plenty rustle.’[616]

Quite like this were the classic conceptions of Ζεὺς ὑέτιος Jupiter

Pluvius. They are typified in the famous Athenian prayer recorded by

Marcus Aurelius, ‘Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the plough-lands of the

Athenians, and the plains!’[617] and in Petronius Arbiter’s complaint of

the irreligion of his times, that now no one thinks heaven is heaven, no

one keeps a fast, no one cares a hair for Jove, but all men with closed

eyes reckon up their goods. Afore-time the ladies walked up the hill in

their stoles with bare feet and loosened hair and pure minds, and

entreated Jove for water; then all at once it rained bucketsfull, then

or never, and they all went home wet as drowned rats.[618] In later

ages, when drought parched the fields of the mediæval husbandman, he

transferred to other patrons the functions of the Rain-god, and with

procession and litany sought help from St. Peter or St. James, or, with

more of mythological consistency, from the Queen of Heaven. As for

ourselves, we have lived to see the time when men shrink from addressing

even to Supreme Deity the old customary rain-prayers, for the rainfall

is passing from the region of the supernatural, to join the tides and

seasons in the realm of physical science.

The place of the Thunder-god in polytheistic religion is similar to that

of the Rain-god, in many cases even to entire coincidence. But his

character is rather of wrath than of beneficence, a character which we

have half lost the power to realize, since the agonizing terror of the

thunderstorm which appals savage minds has dwindled away in ours, now

that we behold in it not the manifestation of divine wrath, but the

restoration of electric equilibrium. North American tribes, as the

Mandans, heard in the thunder and saw in the lightning the clapping

wings and flashing eyes of that awful heaven-bird which belongs to, or

even is, the Great Manitu himself.[619] The Dacotas could show at a

place called Thunder-tracks, near the source of the St. Peter’s River,

the footprints of the thunder-bird five and twenty miles apart. It is to

be noticed that these Sioux, among their varied fancies about

thunder-birds and the like, give unusually well a key to the great

thunderbolt-myth which recurs in so many lands. They consider the

lightning entering the ground to scatter there in all directions

thunderbolt-stones, which are flints, &c., their reason for this notion

being the very rational one, that these siliceous stones actually

produce a flash when struck.[620] In an account of certain Carib

deities, who were men and are now stars, occurs the name of Savacou, who

was changed into a great bird; he is captain of the hurricane and

thunder, he blows fire through a tube and that is lightning, he gives

the great rain. Rochefort describes the effect of a thunderstorm on the

partly Europeanized Caribs of the West Indies two centuries ago. When

they perceive its approach, he says, they quickly betake themselves to

their cabins, and range themselves in the kitchen on their little seats

near the fire; hiding their faces and leaning their heads in their hands

and on their knees, they fall to weeping and lamenting in their jargon

‘Maboya mouche fache contre Caraïbe,’ i.e., Maboya (the evil demon) is

very angry with the Caribs. This they say also when there comes a

hurricane, not leaving off this dismal exercise till it is over, and

there is no end to their astonishment that the Christians on these

occasions manifest no such affliction and fear.[621] The Tupi tribes of

Brazil are an example of a race among whom the Thunder or the Thunderer,

Tupan, flapping his celestial wings and flashing with celestial light,

was developed into the very representative of highest deity, whose name

still stands among their Christian descendants as the equivalent of

God.[622] In Peru, a mighty and far-worshipped deity was Catequil the

Thunder-god, child of the Heaven-god, he who set free the Indian race

from out of the ground by turning it up with his golden spade, he who in

thunder-flash and clap hurls from his sling the small round smooth

thunderstones, treasured in the villages as fire-fetishes and charms to

kindle the flames of love. How distinct in personality and high in rank

was the Thunder and Lightning (Chuqui yllayllapa) in the religion of the

Incas, may be judged from his huaca or fetish-idol standing on the bench

beside the idols of the Creator and the Sun at the great Solar festival

in Cuzco, when the beasts to be sacrificed were led round them, and the

priests prayed thus: ‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever

young! do not grow old. Let all things be at peace! let the people

multiply, and their food, and let all other things continue to

increase.’[623]

In Africa, we may contrast the Zulu, who perceives in thunder and

lightning the direct action of Heaven or Heaven’s lord, with the Yoruba,

who assigns them not to Olorun the Lord of Heaven, but to a lower deity,

Shango the Thunder-god, whom they call also Dzakuta the Stone-caster,

for it is he who (as among so many other peoples who have forgotten

their Stone Age) flings down from heaven the stone hatchets which are

found in the ground, and preserved as sacred objects.[624] In the

religion of the Kamchadals, Billukai, the hem of whose garment is the

rainbow, dwells in the clouds with many spirits, and sends thunder and

lightning and rain.[625] Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus the Thunderer

is Ilya, in whose name mythologists trace a Christian tradition of

Elijah, whose fiery chariot seems indeed to have been elsewhere

identified with that of the Thunder-god, while the highest peak of

Ægina, once the seat of Pan-hellenic Zeus, is now called Mount St.

Elias. Among certain Moslem schismatics, it is even the historical Ali,

cousin of Mohammed, who is enthroned in the clouds, where the thunder is

his voice, and the lightning the lash wherewith he smites the

wicked.[626] Among the Turanian or Tatar race, the European branch shows

most distinctly the figure of the Thunder-god. To the Lapps, Tiermes

appears to have been the Heaven-god, especially conceived as Aija the

Thunder-god; of old they thought the Thunder (Aija) to be a living

being, hovering in the air and hearkening to the talk of men, smiting

such as spoke of him in an unseemly way; or, as some said, the

Thunder-god is the foe of sorcerers, whom he drives from heaven and

smites, and then it is that men hear in thunder-peals the hurtling of

his arrows, as he speeds them from his bow, the Rainbow. In Finnish

poetry, likewise, Ukko the Heaven-god is portrayed with such attributes.

The Runes call him Thunderer, he speaks through the clouds, his fiery

shirt is the lurid storm-cloud, men talk of his stones and his hammer,

he flashes his fiery sword and it lightens, or he draws his mighty

rainbow, Ukko’s bow, to shoot his fiery copper arrows, wherewith men

would invoke him to smite their enemies. Or when it is dark in his

heavenly house he strikes fire, and that is lightning. To this day the

Finlanders call a thunderstorm an ‘ukko,’ or an ‘ukkonen,’ that is, ‘a

little ukko,’ and when it lightens they say, ‘There is Ukko striking

fire!’[627]

What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god, but a poetic

elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage state through which

the primitive Aryans had passed? The Hindu Thunder-god is the Heaven-god

Indra, Indra’s bow is the rainbow, Indra hurls the thunderbolts, he

smites his enemies, he smites the dragon-clouds, and the rain pours down

on earth, and the sun shines forth again. The Veda is full of Indra’s

glories: ‘Now will I sing the feats of Indra, which he of the

thunderbolt did of old. He smote Ahi, then he poured forth the waters;

he divided the rivers of the mountains. He smote Ahi by the mountain;

Tvashtar forged for him the glorious bolt.’—‘Whet, O strong Indra, the

heavy strong red weapon against the enemies!’—‘May the axe (the

thunderbolt) appear with the light; may the red one blaze forth bright

with splendour!’—‘When Indra hurls again and again his thunderbolt, then

they believe in the brilliant god.’ Nor is Indra merely a great god in

the ancient Vedic pantheon, he is the very patron-deity of the invading

Aryan race in India, to whose help they look in their conflicts with the

dark-skinned tribes of the land. ‘Destroying the Dasyus, Indra protected

the Aryan colour’—‘Indra protected in battle the Aryan worshipper, he

subdued the lawless for Manu, he conquered the black skin.’[628] This

Hindu Indra is the offspring of Dyaus the Heaven. But in the Greek

religion, Zeus is himself Zeus Kerauneios, the wielder of the

thunderbolt, and thunders from the cloud-capped tops of Ida or Olympos.

In like manner the Jupiter Capitolinus of Rome is himself Jupiter

Tonans:

‘Ad penetrale Numæ, Capitolinumque Tonantem.’[629]

Thus, also, it was in accurate language that the old Slavonic nations

were described as adoring Jupiter Tonans as their highest god. He was

the cloud-dwelling Heaven-god, his weapon the thunder-bolt, the

lightning-flash, his name Perun the Smiter (Perkun, Perkunas). In the

Lithuanian district, the thunder itself is Perkun; in past times the

peasant would cry when he heard the thunder peal ‘Dewe Perkune apsaugog

mus!—God Perkun spare us!’ and to this day he says, ‘Perkunas

gravja!—Perkun is thundering!’ or ‘Wezzajs barrahs!—the Old One

growls!’[630] The old German and Scandinavian theology made Thunder,

Donar, Thor, a special deity to rule the clouds and rain, and hurl his

crushing hammer through the air. He reigned high in the Saxon heaven,

till the days came when the Christian convert had to renounce him in

solemn form, ‘ec forsacho Thunare!—I forsake Thunder!’ Now, his survival

is for the most part in mere verbal form, in the etymology of such names

as Donnersberg, Thorwaldsen, Thursday.[631]

In the polytheism of the lower as of the higher races, the Wind-gods are

no unknown figures. The Winds themselves, and especially the Four Winds

in their four regions, take name and shape as personal divinities, while

some deity of wider range, a Wind-god, Storm-god, Air-god, or the mighty

Heaven-god himself, may stand as compeller or controller of breeze and

gale and tempest. We have already taken as examples from the Algonquin

mythology of North America the four winds whose native legends have been

versified in ‘Hiawatha;’ Mudjekeewis the West Wind, Father of the Winds

of Heaven, and his children, Wabun the East Wind, the morning-bringer,

the lazy Shawondasse the South Wind, the wild and cruel North Wind, the

fierce Kabibonokka. Viewed in their religious aspect, these mighty

beings correspond with four of the great manitus sacrificed to among the

Delawares, the West, South, East, and North; while the Iroquois

acknowledged a deity of larger grasp, Gäoh, the Spirit of the Winds, who

holds them prisoned in the mountains in the Home of the Winds.[632] The

Polynesian Wind-gods are thus described by Ellis: ‘The chief of these

were Veromatautoru and Tairibu, brother and sister to the children of

Taaroa, their dwelling was near the great rock, which was the foundation

of the world. Hurricanes, tempests, and all destructive winds, were

supposed to be confined within them, and were employed by them to punish

such as neglected the worship of the gods. In stormy weather their

compassion was sought by the tempest-driven mariner at sea, or the

friends of such on shore. Liberal presents, it was supposed, would at

any time purchase a calm. If the first failed, subsequent ones were

certain of success. The same means were resorted to for procuring a

storm, but with less certainty. Whenever the inhabitants of one island

heard of invasion from those of another, they immediately carried large

offerings to these deities, and besought them to destroy by tempest the

hostile fleet whenever it might put to sea. Some of the most intelligent

people still think evil spirits had formerly great power over the winds,

as they say there have been no such fearful storms since they abolished

idolatry, as there were before.’ Or, again, the great deity Maui adds a

new complication to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by appearing

as a Wind-God. In Tahiti he was identified with the East Wind; in New

Zealand he holds all the winds but the west in his hands, or he

imprisons them with great stones rolled to the mouths of their caves,

save the West Wind which he cannot catch or prison, so that it almost

always blows.[633] To the Kamchadal, it is Billukai the Heaven-god who

comes down and drives his sledge on earth, and men see his traces in the

wind-drifted snow.[634] To the Finn, while there are traces of

subordinate Wind-gods in his mythology, the great ruler of wind and

storm is Ukko the Heaven-god;[635] while the Esth looked rather to

Tuule-ema, Wind’s Mother, and when the gale shrieks he will still say

‘Wind’s mother wails, who knows what mothers shall wail next.’[636] Such

instances from Allophylian mythology[637] show types which are found

developed in full vigour by the Aryan races. In the Vedic hymns, the

Storm Gods, the Maruts, borne along with the fury of the boisterous

winds, with the rain-clouds distribute showers over the earth, make

darkness during the day, rend the trees and devour the forests like wild

elephants.[638] No effort of the Red Indian’s personifying fancy in the

tales of the dancing Pauppuk-keewis the Whirlwind, or that fierce and

shifty hero, Manabozho the North-West Wind, can more than match the

description in the Iliad, of Achilles calling on Boreas and Zephyros

with libations and vows of sacrifice, to blow into a blaze the funeral

pyre of Patroklos—

... his prayer

Swift Iris heard, and bore it to the Winds.

They in the hall of gusty Zephyrus

Were gathered round the feast; in haste appearing,

Swift Iris on the stony threshold stood.

They saw, and rising all, besought her each

To sit beside him; she with their requests

Refused compliance, and addressed them thus,’ &c.

Æolus with the winds imprisoned in his cave has the office of the Red

Indian Spirit of the Winds, and of the Polynesian Maui. With quaint

adaptation to nature-myth and even to moral parable, the Harpies, the

Storm-gusts that whirl and snatch and dash and smirch with eddying

dust-clouds, become the loathsome bird-monsters sent to hover over the

table of Phineus to claw and defile his dainty viands.[639] If we are to

choose an Aryan Storm-god for ideal grandeur, we must seek him in

‘... the hall where Runic Odin

Howls his war-song to the gale.’

Jakob Grimm has defined Odin or Woden as ‘the all-penetrating creative

and formative power.’ But such abstract conceptions can hardly be

ascribed to his barbaric worshippers. As little may his real nature be

discovered among the legends which degrade him to a historical king of

Northern men, an ‘Othinus rex.’ See the All-father sitting cloud-mantled

on his heaven-seat, overlooking the deeds of men, and we may discern in

him the attributes of the Heaven-god. Hear the peasant say of the raging

tempest, that it is ‘Odin faring by;’ trace the mythological transition

from Woden’s tempest to the ‘Wütende Heer,’ the ‘Wild Huntsman’ of our

own grand storm-myth, and we shall recognize the old Teutonic deity in

his function of cloud-compeller, of Tempest-god.[640] The ‘rude

Carinthian boor’ can show a relic from a yet more primitive stage of

mental history, when he sets up a wooden bowl of various meats on a tree

before his house, to fodder the wind that it may do no harm. In Swabia,

Tyrol, and the Upper Palatinate, when the storm rages, they will fling a

spoonful or a handful of meal in the face of the gale, with this formula

in the last-named district, ‘Da Wind, hast du Mehl für dein Kind, aber

aufhören musst du!’[641]

The Earth-deity takes an important place in polytheistic religion. The

Algonquins would sing medicine-songs to Mesukkummik Okwi, the Earth, the

Great-Grandmother of all. In her charge (and she must be ever at home in

her lodge) are left the animals whose flesh and skins are man’s food and

clothing, and the roots and medicines of sovereign power to heal

sickness and kill game in time of hunger; therefore good Indians never

dig up the roots of which their medicines are made, without depositing

an offering in the earth for Mesukkummik Okwi.[642] In the list of

fetish-deities of Peruvian tribes, the Earth, adored as Mamapacha,

Mother Earth, took high subordinate rank below Sun and Moon in the

pantheon of the Incas, and at harvest-time ground corn and libations of

chicha were offered to her that she might grant a good harvest.[643] Her

rank is similar in the Aquapim theology of West Africa; first the

Highest God in the firmament, then the Earth as universal mother, then

the fetish. The negro, offering his libation before some great

undertaking, thus calls upon the triad: ‘Creator, come drink! Earth,

come drink! Bosumbra, come drink!’[644]

Among the indigenes of India, the Bygah tribes of Seonee show a

well-marked worship of the Earth. They call her ‘Mother Earth’ or

Dhurteemah, and before praying or eating their food, which is looked on

always as a daily sacrifice, they invariably offer some of it to the

earth, before using the name of any other god.[645] Of all religions of

the world, perhaps that of the Khonds of Orissa gives the Earth-goddess

her most remarkable place and function. Boora Pennu or Bella Pennu, the

Light-god or Sun-god, created Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess for his

consort, and from them were born the other great gods. But strife arose

between the mighty parents, and it became the wife’s work to thwart the

good creation of her husband, and to cause all physical and moral ill.

Thus to the Sun-worshipping sect she stands abhorred on the bad eminence

of the Evil Deity. But her own sect, the Earth-worshipping sect, seem to

hold ideas of her nature which are more primitive and genuine. The

functions which they ascribe to her, and the rites with which they

propitiate her, display her as the Earth-mother, raised by an intensely

agricultural race to an extreme height of divinity. It was she who with

drops of her blood made the soft muddy ground harden into firm earth;

thus men learnt to offer human victims, and the whole earth became firm;

the pastures and ploughed fields came into use, and there were cattle

and sheep and poultry for man’s service; hunting began, and there were

iron and ploughshares and harrows and axes, and the juice of the

palm-tree; and love arose between the sons and daughters of the people,

making new households, and society with its relations of father and

mother, and wife and child, and the bonds between ruler and subject. It

was the Khond Earth-goddess who was propitiated with those hideous

sacrifices, the suppression of which is matter of recent Indian history.

With dances and drunken orgies, and a mystery play to explain in

dramatic dialogue the purpose of the rite, the priest offered Tari Pennu

her sacrifice, and prayed for children and cattle and poultry and brazen

pots and all wealth; every man and woman wished a wish, and they tore

the slave-victim piecemeal, and spread the morsels over the fields they

were to fertilize.[646] In Northern Asia, also, among the Tatar races,

the office of the Earth-deity is strongly and widely marked. Thus in the

nature-worship of the Tunguz and Buraets, Earth stands among the greater

divinities. It is especially interesting to notice among the Finns a

transition like that just observed from the god Heaven to the

Heaven-god. In the designation of Maaemä, Earth-mother, given to the

earth itself, there may be traced survival from the stage of direct

nature-worship, while the passage to the conception of a divine being

inhabiting and ruling the material substance, is marked by the use of

the name Maan emo, Earth’s mother, for the ancient subterranean goddess

whom men would ask to make the grass shoot thick and the thousandfold

ears mount high, or might even entreat to rise in person out of the

earth to give them strength. The analogy of other mythologies agrees

with the definition of the divine pair who reign in Finn theology: as

Ukko the Grandfather is the Heaven-god, so his spouse Akka the

Grandmother is the Earth-goddess.[647] Thus in the ancient

nature-worship of China, the personal Earth holds a place below the

Heaven. Tien and Tu are closely associated in the national rites, and

the idea of the pair as universal parents, if not an original conception

in Chinese theology, is at any rate developed in Chinese classic

symbolism. Heaven and Earth receive their solemn sacrifices not at the

hands of common mortals but of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, and his

great vassals and mandarins. Yet their adoration is national; they are

worshipped by the people who offer incense to them on the hill-tops at

their autumn festival, they are adored by successful candidates in

competitive examination; and, especially and appropriately, the

prostration of bride and bridegroom before the father and mother of all

things, the ‘worshipping of Heaven and Earth,’ is the all-important

ceremony of a Chinese marriage.[648]

The Vedic hymns commemorate the goddess Prithivî, the broad Earth, and

in their ancient strophes the modern Brahmans still pray for benefits to

mother Earth and father Heaven, side by side:—

‘Tanno Vâto mayobhu vâtu bheshajam tanmâtâ Prithivî tatpitâ

Dyauh.’[649]

Greek religion shows a transition to have taken place like that among

the Turanian tribes, for the older simpler nature-deity Gaia, Γῆ πάντων

μήτηρ, Earth the All-Mother, seems to have faded into the more

anthropomorphic Dēmētēr, Earth-Mother, whose eternal fire burned in

Mantinēa, and whose temples stood far and wide over the land which she

made kindly to the Greek husbandman.[650] The Romans acknowledged her

plain identity as Terra Mater, Ops Mater.[651] Tacitus could rightly

recognize this deity of his own land among German tribes, worshippers of

‘Nerthum (or, Hertham), id est Terram matrem,’ Mother Earth, whose holy

grove stood in an ocean isle, whose chariot drawn by cows passed through

the land making a season of peace and joy, till the goddess, satiated

with mortal conversation, was taken back by her priest to her temple,

and the chariot and garments and even the goddess herself were washed in

a secret lake, which forthwith swallowed up the ministering

slaves—‘hence a mysterious terror and sacred ignorance, what that should

be which only the doomed to perish might behold.’[652] If in these

modern days we seek in Europe traces of Earth-worship, we may find them

in curiously distinct survival in Germany, if no longer in the Christmas

food-offerings buried in and for the earth up to early in this

century,[653] at any rate among Gypsy hordes. Dewel, the great god in

heaven (dewa, deus), is rather feared than loved by these weatherbeaten

outcasts, for he harms them on their wanderings with his thunder and

lightning, his snow and rain, and his stars interfere with their dark

doings. Therefore they curse him foully when misfortune falls on them,

and when a child dies, they say that Dewel has eaten it. But Earth,

Mother of all good, self-existing from the beginning, is to them holy,

so holy that they take heed never to let the drinking-cup touch the

ground, for it would become too sacred to be used by men.[654]

Water-worship, as has been seen, may be classified as a special

department of religion. It by no means follows, however, that savage

water-worshippers should necessarily have generalized their ideas, and

passed beyond their particular water-deities to arrive at the conception

of a general deity presiding over water as an element. Divine springs,

streams, and lakes, water-spirits, deities concerned with the clouds and

rain, are frequent, and many details of them are cited here, but I have

not succeeded in finding among the lower races any divinity whose

attributes, fairly criticized, will show him or her to be an original

and absolute elemental Water-god. Among the deities of the Dakotas,

Unktahe the fish-god of the waters is a master-spirit of sorcery and

religion, the rival even of the mighty Thunderbird.[655] In the Mexican

pantheon, Tlaloc god of rain and waters, fertilizer of earth and lord of

paradise, whose wife is Chalchihuitlicue, Emerald-Skirt, dwells among

the mountain-tops where the clouds gather and pour down the

streams.[656] Yet neither of these mythic beings approaches the

generality of conception that belongs to full elemental deity, and even

the Greek Nēreus, though by his name he should be the very

personification of water (νηρός), seems too exclusively marine in his

home and family to be cited as the Water-god. Nor is the reason of this

hard to find. It is an extreme stretch of the power of theological

generalization to bring water in its myriad forms under one divinity,

though each individual body of water, even the smallest stream or lake,

can have its personal individuality or indwelling spirit.

Islanders and coast-dwellers indeed live face to face with mighty

water-deities, the divine Sea and the great Sea-gods. What the sea may

seem to an uncultured man who first beholds it, we may learn among the

Lampongs of Sumatra: ‘The inland people of that country are said to pay

a kind of adoration to the sea, and to make to it an offering of cakes

and sweetmeats on their beholding it for the first time, deprecating its

power of doing them mischief.’[657] The higher stage of such doctrine is

where the sea, no longer itself personal, is considered as ruled by

indwelling spirits. Thus Tuaraatai and Ruahatu, principal among marine

deities of Polynesia, send the sharks to execute their vengeance. Hiro

descends to the depths of the ocean and dwells among the monsters, they

lull him to sleep in a cavern, the Wind-god profits by his absence to

raise a violent storm to destroy the boats in which Hiro’s friends are

sailing, but, roused by a friendly spirit-messenger, the Sea-god rises

to the surface and quells the tempest.[658] This South Sea Island myth

might well have been in the Odyssey. We may point to the Guinea Coast as

a barbaric region where Sea-worship survives in its extremest form. It

appears from Bosman’s account, about 1700, that in the religion of

Whydah, the Sea ranked only as younger brother in the three divine

orders, below the Serpents and Trees. But at present, as appears from

Captain Burton’s evidence, the religion of Whydah extends through

Dahome, and the divine Sea has risen in rank. ‘The youngest brother of

the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly it was subject to

chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Huno, or

ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at

Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach,

begs ‘Agbwe,’ the ... ocean god, not to be boisterous, and throws in

rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries, and other valuables.... At

times the king sends as an ocean sacrifice from Agbome a man carried in

a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer; a

canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks.’[659]

While in these descriptions the individual divine personality of the sea

is so well marked, an account of the closely related Slave Coast

religion states that a great god dwells in the sea, and it is to him,

not to the sea itself, that offerings are cast in.[660] In South America

the idea of the divine Sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of

Mamacocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men.[661] Eastern Asia, both in

its stages of lower and higher civilization, contributes members to the

divine group. In Kamchatka, Mitgk the Great Spirit of the Sea, fish-like

himself, sends the fish up the rivers.[662] Japan deifies separately on

land and at sea the lords of the waters; Midsuno Kami, the Water-god, is

worshipped during the rainy season; Jebisu, the Sea-god, is younger

brother of the Sun.[663]

Among barbaric races we thus find two conceptions current, the personal

divine Sea and the anthropomorphic Sea-god. These represent two stages

of development of one idea—the view of the natural object as itself an

animated being, and the separation of its animating fetish-soul as a

distinct spiritual deity. To follow the enquiry into classic times shows

the same distinction as strongly marked. When Kleomenes marched down to

Thyrea, having slaughtered a bull to the sea (σφαγιασάμενος δέ τῇ

θαλάσσῃ ταῦρον) he embarked his army in ships for the Tirynthian land

and Nauplia.[664] Cicero makes Cotta remark to Balbus that ‘our

generals, embarking on the sea, have been accustomed to immolate a

victim to the waves,’ and he goes on to argue, not unfairly, that if the

Earth herself is a goddess, what is she other than Tellus, and ‘if the

Earth, the Sea too, whom thou saidst to be Neptune.’[665] Here is direct

nature-worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the

anthropomorphic stage appear that dim præ-Olympian figure of Nēreus the

Old Man of the Sea, father of the Nereids in their ocean caves, and the

Homeric Poseidōn the Earth-shaker, who stables his coursers in his cave

in the Ægean deeps, who harnesses the gold-maned steeds to his chariot

and drives through the dividing waves, while the subject sea-beasts come

up at the passing of their lord, a king so little bound to the element

he governs, that he can come from the brine to sit in the midst of the

gods in the assembly on Olympos, and ask the will of Zeus.[666]

Fire-worship brings into view again, though under different aspects and

with different results, the problems presented by water-worship. The

real and absolute worship of fire falls into two great divisions, the

first belonging rather to fetishism, the second to polytheism proper,

and the two apparently representing an earlier and later stage of

theological ideas. The first is the rude barbarian’s adoration of the

actual flame which he watches writhing, roaring, devouring like a live

animal; the second belongs to an advanced generalization, that any

individual fire is a manifestation of one general elemental being—the

Fire-god. Unfortunately, evidence of the exact meaning of fire-worship

among the lower races is scanty, while the transition from fetishism to

polytheism seems a gradual process of which the stages elude close

definition. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that rites performed with

fire are, though often, yet by no means necessarily, due to worship of

the fire itself. Authors who have indiscriminately mixed up such rites

as the new fire, the perpetual fire, the passing through the fire,

classing them as acts of fire-worship, without proper evidence as to

their meaning in any particular case, have added to the perplexity of a

subject not too easy to deal with, even under strict precautions. Two

sources of error are especially to be noted. On the one hand, fire

happens to be a usual means whereby sacrifices are transmitted to

departed souls and deities in general; and on the other hand, the

ceremonies of earthly fire-worship are habitually and naturally

transferred to celestial fire-worship in the religion of the Sun.

It may best serve the present purpose to carry a line of some of the

best-defined facts which seems to bear on fire-worship proper, from

savagery on into the higher culture. In the last century, Loskiel, a

missionary among the North American Indians, remarks that ‘In great

danger, an Indian has been observed to lie prostrate on his face, and

throwing a handful of tobacco into the fire, to call aloud, as in an

agony of distress, “There, take and smoke, be pacified, and don’t hurt

me.”’ Of course this may have been a mere sacrifice transmitted to some

other spiritual being through fire, but we have in this region explicit

statements as to a distinct fire-deity. The Delawares, it appears from

the same author, acknowledged the Fire-manitu, first parent of all

Indian nations, and celebrated a yearly festival in his honour, when

twelve manitus, animal and vegetable, attended him as subordinate

deities.[667] In North-West America, in Washington Irving’s account of

the Chinooks and other Columbia River Tribes, mention is made of the

spirit which inhabits fire. Powerful both for evil and good, and

seemingly rather evil than good in nature, this being must be kept in

good humour by frequent offerings. The Fire-spirit has great influence

with the winged aërial supreme deity, wherefore the Indians implore him

to be their interpreter, to procure them success in hunting and fishing,

fleet horses, obedient wives, and male children.[668] In the elaborately

systematic religion of Mexico, there appears in his proper place a

Fire-god, closely related to the Sun-god in character, but keeping well

marked his proper identity. His name was Xiuhteuctli, Fire-lord, and

they called him likewise Huehueteotl, the old god. Great honour was paid

to this god Fire, who gives them heat, and bakes their cakes, and roasts

their meat. Therefore at every meal the first morsel and libation were

cast into the fire, and every day the deity had incense burnt to him.

Twice in the year were held his solemn festivals. At the first, a felled

tree was set up in his honour, and the sacrificers danced round his fire

with the human victims, whom afterwards they cast into a great fire,

only to drag them out half roasted for the priests to complete the

sacrifice. The second was distinguished by the rite of the new fire, so

well known in connexion with solar worship; the friction-fire was

solemnly made before the image of Xiuhteuctli in his sanctuary in the

court of the great teocalli, and the game brought in at the great hunt

which began the festival was cooked at the sacred fire for the banquets

that ended it.[669] Polynesia well knows from the mythological point of

view Mahuika the Fire-god, who keeps the volcano-fire on his

subterranean hearth, whither Maui goes down (as the Sun into the

Underworld) to bring up fire for man; but in the South Sea islands there

is scarcely a trace of actual rites of fire-worship.[670] In West

Africa, among the gods of Dahome is Zo the fire-fetish; a pot of fire is

placed in a room, and sacrifice is offered to it, that fire may ‘live’

there, and not go forth to destroy the house.[671]

Asia is a region where distinct fire-worship may be peculiarly well

traced through the range of lower and higher civilization. The rude

Kamchadals, worshipping all things that did them harm or good,

worshipped the fire, offering to it noses of foxes and other game, so

that one might tell by looking at furs whether they had been taken by

baptized or heathen hunters.[672] The Ainos of Yesso worship Abe kamui

the Fire-deity as the benefactor of men, the messenger to the other

gods, the purifier who heals the sick.[673] Turanian tribes likewise

hold fire a sacred element, many Tunguz, Mongol, and Turk tribes

sacrifice to Fire, and some clans will not eat meat without first

throwing a morsel upon the hearth. The following passage is from a

Mongol wedding-song to the personified Fire, ‘Mother Ut, Queen of Fire,

thou who art made from the elm that grows on the mountain-tops of

Changgai-Chan and Burchatu-Chan, thou who didst come forth when heaven

and earth divided, didst come forth from the footsteps of Mother Earth,

and wast formed by the King of Gods. Mother Ut, whose father is the hard

steel, whose mother is the flint, whose ancestors are the elm-trees,

whose shining reaches to the sky and pervades the earth. Goddess Ut, we

bring thee yellow oil for offering, and a white wether with yellow head,

thou who hast a manly son, a beauteous daughter-in-law, bright

daughters. To thee, Mother Ut, who ever lookest upward, we bring brandy

in bowls, and fat in both hands. Give prosperity to the King’s son (the

bridegroom), to the King’s daughter (the bride), and to all the

people!’[674] As an analogue to Hephaistos the Greek divine smith, may

stand the Circassian Fire-god, Tleps, patron of metal-workers, and the

peasants whom he has provided with plough and hoe.[675]

Among the most ancient cultured nations of the Old World, Egyptians,

Babylonians, Assyrians, accounts of fire-worship are absent, or so

scanty and obscure that their study is more valuable in compiling the

history than in elucidating the principles of religion.[676] For this

scientific purpose, the more full and minute documents of Aryan religion

can give a better answer. In various forms and under several names, the

Fire-god is known. Nowhere does he carry his personality more distinctly

than under his Sanskrit name of Agni, a word which keeps its quality,

though not his divinity, in the Latin ‘ignis.’ The name of Agni is the

first word of the first hymn of the Rig-Veda: ‘Agnim île puro-hitam

yajnasya devam ritvijam!—Agni I entreat, divine appointed priest of

sacrifice!’ The sacrifices which Agni receives go to the gods, he is the

mouth of the gods, but he is no lowly minister, as it is said in another

hymn:

‘No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty

one, with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!’

Such the mighty Agni is among the gods, yet he comes within the

peasant’s cottage to be protector of the domestic hearth. His worship

has survived the transformation of the ancient patriarchal Vedic

religion of nature into the priest-ridden Hinduism of our own day. In

India there may yet be found the so-called Fire-priests (Agnihotri) who

perform according to Vedic rite the sacrifices entitling the worshippers

to heavenly life. The sacred fire-drill for churning the new fire by

friction of wood (arani) is used so that Agni still is new-born of the

twirling fire-sticks, and receives the melted butter of the

sacrifice.[677] Among the records of fire-worship in Asia, is the

account of Jonas Hanways’s ‘Travels,’ dating from about 1740, of the

everlasting fire at the burning wells near Baku, on the Caspian. At the

sacred spot stood several ancient stone temples, mostly arched vaults 10

to 15 feet high. One little temple was still used for worship, near the

altar of which, about three feet high, a large hollow cane conveyed the

gas up from the ground, burning at the mouth with a blue flame. Here

were generally forty or fifty poor devotees, come on pilgrimage from

their country to make expiation for themselves and others, and

subsisting on wild celery, &c. These pilgrims are described as marking

their foreheads with saffron, and having great veneration for a red cow;

they wore little clothing, and the holiest of them kept one arm on their

heads, or continued unmoved in some other posture; they are described as

Ghebers, or Gours, the usual Moslem term for Fire-worshippers.[678]

In general, this name of Ghebers is applied to the Zoroastrians or

Parsis, whom a modern European would all but surely point to if asked to

instance a modern race of Fire-worshippers. Classical accounts of the

Persian religion set down fire-worship as part and parcel of it; the

Magi, it is recorded, hold the gods to be Fire and Earth and Water; and

again, the Persians reckon the Fire to be a god (θεοφοροῦσιν).[679] On

the testimony of the old religious books of the Parsis themselves, Fire,

as the greatest Ized, as giver of increase and health, as craving for

wood and scents and fat, seems to take the distinctest divine

personality. Their doctrine that Ardebehist, the presiding angel or

spirit of fire, is adored, but not the material object he belongs to, is

a perfect instance of the development of the idea of an elemental

divinity from that of an animated fetish. When, driven by Moslem

persecution from Persia, Parsi exiles landed in Gujarat, they described

their religion in an official document as being the worship of Agni or

Fire, thus claiming for themselves a place among recognized Hindu

sects.[680] In modern times, though for the most part the Parsis have

found toleration and prosperity in India, yet an oppressed remnant of

the race still keeps up the everlasting fires at Yezd and Kirman, in

their old Persian land. The modern Parsis, as in Strabo’s time, scruple

to defile the fire or blow it with their breath, they abstain from

smoking out of regard not to themselves but to the sacred element, and

they keep up consecrated ever-burning fires before which they do

worship. Nevertheless, Prof. Max Müller is able to say of the Parsis of

our own day: ‘The so-called Fire-worshippers certainly do not worship

the fire, and they naturally object to a name which seems to place them

on a level with mere idolators. All they admit is, that in their youth

they are taught to face some luminous object while worshipping God, and

that they regard the fire, like other great natural phenomena, as an

emblem of the Divine power. But they assure us that they never ask

assistance or blessings from an unintelligent material object, nor is it

even considered necessary to turn the face to any emblem whatever in

praying to Ormuzd.’[681] Now, admitting this view of fire-worship as

true of the more intelligent Parsis, and leaving aside the question how

far among the more ignorant this symbolism may blend (as in such cases

is usual) into actual adoration, we may ask what is the history of

ceremonies which thus imitate, yet are not, fire-worship. The

ethnographic answer is clear and instructive. The Parsi is the

descendant of a race in this respect represented by the modern Hindu, a

race who did simply and actually worship Fire. Fire-worship still forms

a link historically connecting the Vedic with the Zoroastrian ritual;

for the Agnishtoma or praise of Agni the Fire, where four goats are to

be sacrificed and burnt, is represented by the Yajishn ceremony, where

the Parsi priests are now content to put some hair of an ox in a vessel

and show it to the Fire. But the development of the more philosophic

Zarathustrian doctrines has led to a result common in the history of

religion, that the ancient distinctly meant rite has dwindled to a

symbol, to be preserved with changed sense in a new theology.

Somewhat of the same kind may have taken place among the European race

who seem in some respects the closest relatives of the old Persians.

Slavonic history possibly keeps up some trace of direct and absolute

fire-worship, as where in Bohemia the Pagans are described as

worshipping fires, groves, trees, stones. But though the Lithuanians and

Old Prussians and Russians are among the nations whose especial rite it

was to keep up sacred everlasting fires, yet it seems that their

fire-rites were in the symbolic stage, ceremonies of their great

celestial-solar religion, rather than acts of direct worship to a

Fire-god.[682] Classical religion, on the other hand, brings prominently

into view the special deities of fire. Hēphaistos, Vulcan, the divine

metallurgist who had his temples on Ætna and Lipari, stands in especial

connexion with the subterranean volcanic fire, and combines the nature

of the Polynesian Mahuika and the Circassian Tleps. The Greek Hestia,

the divine hearth, the ever-virgin venerable goddess, to whom Zeus gave

fair office instead of wedlock, sits in the midst of the house,

receiving fat:—

‘Τῇ δὲ πατὴρ Ζεὺς δῶκε καλὸν γέρας ἀντὶ γάμοιο,

Καί τε μέσῳ οἴκῳ κατ’ ἄρ’ ἔζετο πῖαρ ἑλοῦσα.’

In the high halls of gods and men she has her everlasting seat, and

without her are no banquets among mortals, for to Hestia first and last

is poured the honey-sweet wine:—

‘Ἐστίη, ἣ πάντων ἐν δώμασιν ὑψηλοῖσιν

Ἀθανάτων τε θεῶν χαμαὶ ἐρχομένων τ’ ἀνθρώπων

Ἔδρην ἀίδιον ἔλαχε, πρεσβηίδα τιμὴν,

Καλὸν ἔχουσα γέρας καὶ τίμιον· οὐ γὰρ ἄτερ σοῦ

Εἰλαπίναι θνητοῖσιν, ἵν’ οὐ πρῶτῃ πυμάτῃ τε

Ἑστίῃ ἀρχόμενος σπένδει μελιηδέα οἶνον.’[683]

In Greek civil life, Hestia sat in house and assembly as representative

of domestic and social order. Like her in name and origin, but not

altogether in development, is Vesta with her ancient Roman cultus, and

her retinue of virgins to keep up her pure eternal fire in her temple,

needing no image, for she herself dwelt within:—

‘Esse diu stultus Vestæ simulacra putavi:

Mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo.

Ignis inextinctus templo celatur in illo.

Effigiem nullam Vesta nec ignis habet.’[684]

The last lingering relics of fire-worship in Europe reach us, as usual,

both through Turanian and Aryan channels of folklore. The Esthonian

bride consecrates her new hearth and home by an offering of money cast

into the fire, or laid on the oven for Tule-ema, Fire-mother.[685] The

Carinthian peasant will ‘fodder’ the fire to make it kindly, and throw

lard or dripping to it, that it may not burn his house. To the Bohemian

it is a godless thing to spit into the fire, ‘God’s fire’ as he calls

it. It is not right to throw away the crumbs after a meal, for they

belong to the fire. Of every kind of dish some should be given to the

fire, and if some runs over it is wrong to scold, for it belongs to the

fire. It is because these rites are now so neglected that harmful fires

so often break out.[686]

What the Sea is to Water-worship, in some measure the Sun is to

Fire-worship. From the doctrines and rites of earthly fire, various and

ambiguous in character, generalized from many phenomena, applied to many

purposes, we pass to the religion of heavenly fire, whose great deity

has a perfect definiteness from his embodiment in one great individual

fetish, the Sun.

Rivalling in power and glory the all-encompassing Heaven, the Sun moves

eminent among the deities of nature, no mere cosmic globe affecting

distant material worlds by force in the guise of light and heat and

gravity, but a living reigning Lord:—

‘O thou, that with surpassing glory crown’d,

Look’st from thy sole dominion like the God

Of this new world.’

It is no exaggeration to say, with Sir William Jones, that one great

fountain of all idolatry in the four quarters of the globe was the

veneration paid by men to the sun: it is no more than an exaggeration to

say with Mr. Helps of the sun-worship in Peru, that it was inevitable.

Sun-worship is by no means universal among the lower races of mankind,

but manifests itself in the upper levels of savage religion in districts

far and wide over the earth, often assuming the prominence which it

keeps and develops in the faiths of the barbaric world. Why some races

are sun-worshippers and others not, is indeed too hard a question to

answer in general terms. Yet one important reason is obvious, that the

Sun is not so evidently the god of wild hunters and fishers, as of the

tillers of the soil, who watch him day by day giving or taking away

their wealth and their very life. On the geographical significance of

sun-worship, D’Orbigny has made a remark, suggestive if not altogether

sound, connecting the worship of the sun not so much with the torrid

regions where his glaring heat oppresses man all day long, and drives

him to the shade for refuge, as with climates where his presence is

welcomed for his life-giving heat, and nature chills at his departure.

Thus while the low sultry forests of South America show little

prominence of Sun-worship, this is the dominant organized cultus of the

high table-lands of Peru and Cundinamarca.[687] The theory is ingenious,

and if not carried too far may often be supported. We may well compare

the feelings with which the sun-worshipping Massagetæ of Tartary must

have sacrificed their horses to the deity who freed them from the

miseries of winter, with the thoughts of men in those burning lands of

Central Africa where, as Sir Samuel Baker says, ‘the rising of the sun

is always dreaded ... the sun is regarded as the common enemy,’ words

which recall Herodotus’ old description of the Atlantes or Atarantes who

dwelt in the interior of Africa, who cursed the sun at his rising, and

abused him with shameful epithets for afflicting them with his burning

heat, them and their land.[688]

The details of Sun-worship among the native races of America give an

epitome of its development among mankind at large. Among many of the

ruder tribes of the northern continent, the Sun is looked upon as one of

the great deities, as representative of the greatest deity, or as that

greatest deity himself. Indian chiefs of Hudson’s Bay smoked thrice to

the rising sun. In Vancouver Island men pray in time of need to the sun

as he mounts toward the zenith. Among the Delawares the sun received

sacrifice as second among the twelve great manitus; the Virginians bowed

before him with uplifted hands and eyes as he rose and set; the

Pottawatomis would climb sometimes at sunrise on their huts, to kneel

and offer to the luminary a mess of Indian corn; his likeness is found

representing the Great Manitu in Algonquin picture-writings. Father

Hennepin, whose name is well known to geologists as the earliest visitor

to the Falls of Niagara, about 1678, gives an account of the native

tribes, Sioux and others, of this far-west region. He describes them as

venerating the Sun, ‘which they recognize, though only in appearance, as

the Maker and Preserver of all things;’ to him first they offer the

calumet when they light it, and to him they often present the best and

most delicate of their game in the lodge of the chief, ‘who profits more

by it than the Sun.’ The Creeks regarded the Sun as symbol or minister

of the Great Spirit, sending toward him the first puff of the calumet at

treaties, and bowing reverently toward him in confirming their council

talk or haranguing their warriors to battle.[689] Among the rude

Botocudos of Brazil, the idea of the Sun as the great good deity seems

not unknown; the Araucanians are described as bringing offerings to him

as highest deity; the Puelches as ascribing to the sun, and praying to

him for, all good things they possess or desire; the Diaguitas of

Tucuman as having temples dedicated to the Sun, whom they adored, and to

whom they consecrated birds’ feathers, which they then brought back to

their cabins, and sprinkled from time to time with the blood of

animals.[690]

Such accounts of Sun-worship appearing in the lower native culture of

America, may be taken to represent its first stage. It is on the whole

within distinctly higher culture that its second stage appears, where it

has attained to full development of ritual and appurtenance, and become

in some cases even the central doctrine of national religion and

statecraft. Sun-worship had reached this level among the Natchez of

Louisiana, with whom various other tribes of this district stood in

close relation. Every morning at sunrise the great Sun-chief stood at

the house-door facing the east, shouted and prostrated himself thrice,

and smoked first toward the sun, and then toward the other three

quarters. The Sun-temple was a circular hut some thirty feet across and

dome-roofed: here in the midst was kept up the everlasting fire, here

prayer was offered thrice daily, and here were kept images and fetishes

and the bones of dead chiefs. The Natchez government was a solar

hierarchy. At its head stood the great chief, called the Sun or the

Sun’s brother, high priest and despot over his people. By his side stood

his sister or nearest female relative, the female chief who of all women

was alone permitted to enter the Sun-temple. Her son, after the custom

of female succession common among the lower races, would succeed to the

primacy and chiefship; and the solar family took to themselves, wives

and husbands from the plebeian order, who were their inferiors in life,

and were slain to follow them as attendants in death.[691] Another

nation of sun-worshippers were the Apalaches of Florida, whose daily

service was to salute the Sun at their doors as he rose and set. The

Sun, they said, had built his own conical mountain of Olaimi, with its

spiral path leading to the cave-temple, in the east side. Here, at the

four solar festivals, the worshippers saluted the rising sun with chants

and incense as his rays entered the sanctuary, and again when at midday

the sunlight poured down upon the altar through the hole or shaft

pierced for this purpose in the rocky vault of the cave; through this

passage the sun-birds, the tonatzuli, were let fly up sunward as

messengers, and the ceremony was over.[692] Day by day, in the temples

of Mexico, the rising sun was welcomed with blast of horns, and incense,

and offering of a little of the officiators’ own blood drawn from their

ears, and a sacrifice of quails. Saying, the Sun has risen, we know not

how he will fulfil his course nor whether misfortune will happen, they

prayed to him—‘Our Lord, do your office prosperously.’ In distinct and

absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh,

whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness

of his worship for future ages. Beyond this, the religion of Mexico, in

its complex system or congeries of great gods, such as results from the

mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar

element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine

mythology, and attributes especially to the Sun the title of Teotl,

God.[693] Again, the high plateau of Bogota in New Granada was the seat

of the semi-civilized Chibchas or Muyscas, of whose mythology and

religion the leading ideas were given by the Sun. The Sun was the great

deity to whom the human sacrifices were offered, and especially the

holiest sacrifice, the blood of a pure captive youth daubed on a rock on

a mountain-top for the rising sun to shine on. In native Muysca legend,

the mythic civilizer of the land, the teacher of agriculture, the

founder of the theocracy and institutor of sun-worship, is a figure in

whom we cannot fail to discern the personal Sun himself.[694] It is

thus, lastly, in the far more celebrated native theocracy to the south.

In the royal religion of Peru, the Sun was at once ancestor and founder

of the dynasty of Incas, who reigned as his representatives and almost

in his person, who took wives from the convent of virgins of the Sun,

and whose descendants were the solar race, the ruling aristocracy. The

Sun’s innumerable flocks of llamas grazed on the mountains, and his

fields were tilled in the valleys, his temples stood throughout the

land, and first among them the ‘Place of Gold’ in Cuzco, where his new

fire was kindled at the annual solar festival of Raymi, and where his

splendid golden disc with human countenance looked forth to receive the

first rays of its divine original. Sun-worship was ancient in Peru, but

it was the Incas who made it the great state religion, imposing it

wherever their wide conquests reached, till it became the central idea

of Peruvian life.[695] The culture of the Old World never surpassed this

highest range of Sun-worship in the New.

In Australia and Polynesia the place of the solar god or hero is rather

in myth than in religion. In Africa, though found in some

districts,[696] Sun-worship is not very conspicuous out of Egypt. In

tracing its Old World development, we begin among the ruder Allophylian

tribes of Asia, and end among the great polytheistic nations. The

northeast quarter of India shows the doctrine well defined among the

indigenous stocks. The Bodo and Dhimal place the Sun in the pantheon as

an elemental god, though in practical rank below the sacred rivers.[697]

The Kol tribes of Bengal, Mundas, Oraons, Santals, know and worship as

supreme, Sing-bonga, the Sun-god; to him some tribes offer white animals

in token of his purity, and while not regarding him as author of

sickness or calamity, they will resort to him when other divine aid

breaks down in sorest need.[698] Among the Khonds, Bura Pennu the

Light-god, or Bella Pennu the Sun-god, is creator of all things in

heaven and earth, and great first cause of good. As such, he is

worshipped by his own sect above the ranks of minor deities whom he

brought into being to carry out the details of the universal work.[699]

The Tatar tribes with much unanimity recognize as a great god the Sun,

whose figure may be seen beside the Moon’s on their magic drums, from

Siberia to Lapland. Castrén, the ethnologist, speaking of the Samoyed

expression for heaven or deity in general (jilibeambaertje), tells an

anecdote from his travels, which gives a lively idea of the thorough

simple nature-religion still possible to the wanderers of the steppes.

‘A Samoyed woman,’ he says, ‘told me it was her habit every morning and

evening to step out of her tent and bow down before the sun; in the

morning saying, “When thou Jilibeambaertje risest, I too rise from my

bed!” in the evening, “When thou Jilibeambaertje sinkest down, I too get

me to rest!” The woman brought this as a proof of her assertion that

even among the Samoyeds they said their morning and evening prayers, but

she added with pity that “there were also among them wild people who

never sent up a prayer to God.”’ Mongol hordes may still be met with

whose shamans invoke the Sun, and throw milk up into the air as an

offering to him, while the Karagas Tatars would bring to him as a

sacrifice the head and heart of bear or stag. Tunguz, Ostyaks, Woguls,

worship him in a character blending with that of their highest deity and

Heaven-god; while among the Lapps, Baiwe the Sun, though a mighty deity,

stood in rank below Tiermes the Thunder-god, and the great celestial

ruler who had come to bear the Norwegian name of Storjunkare.[700]

In direct personal nature-worship like that of Siberian nomades of our

day, the solar cultus of the ancient pastoral Aryans had its source. The

Vedic bards sing of the great god Sûrya, knower of beings, the

all-revealer before whom the stars depart with the nights like thieves.

We approach Sûrya (they say) shining god among the gods, light most

glorious. He shines on the eight regions, the three worlds, the seven

rivers; the golden-handed Savitar, all-seeing, goes between heaven and

earth. To him they pray, ‘On thy ancient paths, O Savitar, dustless,

well made, in the air, on those good-going paths this day preserve us

and bless us, O God!’ Modern Hinduism is full of the ancient

Sun-worship, in offerings and prostrations, in daily rites and appointed

festivals, and it is Savitar the Sun who is invoked in the ‘gâyatrî,’

the time-honoured formula repeated day by day since long-past ages by

every Brahman: ‘Tat Savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhîmahi dhiyo yo nah

prakodayât.—Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun;

may he rouse our minds!’ Every morning the Brahman worships the sun,

standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel,

looking towards the east, holding his hands open before him in a hollow

form, and repeating to himself these prayers: ‘The rays of light

announce the splendid fiery sun, beautifully rising to illumine the

universe.’—‘He rises, wonderful, the eye of the sun, of water, and of

fire, collective power of gods; he fills heaven, earth, and sky with his

luminous net; he is the soul of all that is fixed or locomotive.’—‘That

eye, supremely beneficial, rises pure from the east; may we see him a

hundred years; may we live a hundred years; may we hear a hundred

years.’—‘May we, preserved by the divine power, contemplating heaven

above the region of darkness, approach the deity, most splendid of

luminaries!’[701] A Vedic celestial deity, Mitra the Friend, came to be

developed in the Persian religion into that great ruling divinity of

light, the victorious Mithra, lord of life and head of all created

beings. The ancient Persian Mihr-Yasht invokes him in the character of

the sun-light, Mithra with wide pastures, whom the lords of the regions

praise at early dawn, who as the first heavenly Yazata rises over

Hara-berezaiti before the sun, the immortal with swift steeds, who first

with golden form seizes the fair summits, then surrounds the whole Aryan

region. Mithra came to be regarded as the very Sun, as where Dionysos

addresses the Tyrian Bel, ‘εἴτε σὺ Μίθρης Ηέλιος Βαβυλῶνος.’ His worship

spread from the East across the Roman empire, and in Europe he takes

rank among the great solar gods absolutely identified with the personal

Sun, as in this inscription on a Roman altar dating from Trajan’s

time—‘Deo Soli Mithræ.’[702] The earlier Sun-worship of Europe, upon

which this new Oriental variety was intruded, in certain of its

developments shows the same clear personality. The Greek Helios, to whom

horses were sacrificed on the mountain-top of Taugetos, was that same

personal Sun to whom Sokrates, when he had staid rapt in thought till

daybreak, offered a prayer before he departed (ἔπειτ’ ὤχετ’ ἀπιὼν

προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλιῳ).[703] Cæsar devotes to the German theology of his

time three lines of his Commentaries. They reckon in the number of the

gods, he says, those only whom they perceive and whose benefits they

openly enjoy, Sun and Vulcan and Moon, the rest they know not even by

report.[704] It is true that Cæsar’s short summary does no justice to

the real number and quality of the deities of the German pantheon, yet

his forcible description of nature-worship in its most primitive stage

may probably be true of the direct adoration of the sun and moon, and

possibly of fire. On the other hand, European sun-worship leads into the

most perplexing problems of mythology. Well might Cicero exclaim, ‘How

many suns are set forth by the theologians!’[705] The modern student who

shall undertake to discriminate among the Sun-gods of European lands, to

separate the solar and non-solar elements of the Greek Apollo and

Herakles, or of the Slavonic Swatowit, has a task before him complicate

with that all but hopeless difficulty which besets the study of myth,

the moment that the clue of direct comparison with nature falls away.

The religion of ancient Egypt is one of which we know much, yet

little—much of its temples, rites, names of deities, liturgical

formulas, but little of the esoteric religious ideas which lay hidden

within these outer manifestations. Yet it is clear that central solar

conceptions as it were radiate through the Egyptian theology. Ra, who

traverses in his boat the upper and lower regions of the universe, is

the Sun himself in plain cosmic personality. And to take two obvious

instances of solar characters in other deities, Osiris the manifester of

good and truth, who dies by the powers of darkness and becomes judge of

the dead in the west-land of Amenti, is solar in his divine nature, as

is also his son Horus, smiter of the monster Set.[706] In the religions

of the Semitic race, the place of the Sun is marked through a long range

of centuries. The warning to the Israelites lest they should worship and

serve sun, moon, and stars, and the mention of Josiah taking away the

horses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burning the

chariots of the sun with fire,[707] agree with the place given in other

Semitic religions to the Sun-god, Shamas of Assyria, or Baal, even

expressly qualified as Baal-Shemesh or Lord Sun. Syrian religion, like

Persian, introduced a new phase of Sun-worship into Rome, the cultus of

Elagabal, and the vile priest emperor who bore this divine name made it

more intelligible to classic ears as Heliogabalus.[708] Eusebius is a

late writer as regards Semitic religion, but with such facts as these

before us we need not withhold our confidence from him when he describes

the Phœnicians and Egyptians as holding Sun, Moon, and Stars to be gods,

sole causes of the generation and destruction of all things.[709]

The widely spread and deeply rooted religion of the Sun naturally

offered strenuous resistance to the invasion of Christianity, and it was

one of the great signs of the religious change of the civilized world

when Constantine, that ardent votary of the Sun, abandoned the faith of

Apollo for that of Christ. Amalgamation even proved possible between the

doctrines of Sabæism and Christianity, and in and near Armenia a sect of

Sun-worshippers have lasted on into modern times under the profession of

Jacobite Christians;[710] a parallel case within the limits of

Mohammedanism being that of Beduin Arabs who still continue the old

adoration of the rising sun, in spite of the Prophet’s expressed command

not to bow before the sun or moon, and in spite of the good Moslem’s

dictum, that ‘the sun rises between the devil’s horns.’[711] Actual

worship of the sun in Christendom soon shrank to the stage of survival.

In Lucian’s time the Greeks kissed their hands as an act of worship to

the rising sun; and Tertullian had still to complain of many Christians

that with an affectation of adoring the heavenly bodies they would move

their lips toward the sunrise (Sed et plerique vestrum affectatione

aliquando et cœlestia adorandi ad solis ortum labia vibratis).[712] In

the 5th century, Leo the Great complains of certain Christians who,

before entering the Basilica of St. Peter, or from the top of a hill,

would turn and bow to the rising sun; this comes, he says, partly of

ignorance and partly of the spirit of paganism.[713] To this day, in the

Upper Palatinate, the peasant takes off his hat to the rising sun; and

in Pomerania, the fever-stricken patient is to pray thrice turning

toward the sun at sunrise, ‘Dear Sun, come soon down, and take the

seventy-seven fevers from me. In the name of God the Father, &c.’[714]

For the most part, the ancient rites of solar worship are represented in

modern Christendom in two ways; by the ceremonies connected with turning

to the east, of which an account is given in an ensuing chapter under

the heading of Orientation; and in the continuance of the great

sun-festivals, countenanced by or incorporated in Christianity.

Spring-tide, reckoned by so many peoples as New-Year, has in great

measure had its solar characteristics transferred to the Paschal

festival. The Easter bonfires with which the North German hills used to

be ablaze mile after mile, are not altogether given up by local custom.

On Easter morning in Saxony and Brandenburg, the peasants still climb

the hill-tops before dawn, to see the rising sun give his three joyful

leaps, as our forefathers used to do in England in the days when Sir

Thomas Browne so quaintly apologized for declaring that ‘the sun doth

not dance on Easter Day.’ The solar rite of the New Fire, adopted by the

Roman Church as a Paschal ceremony, may still be witnessed in Europe,

with its solemn curfew on Easter Eve, and the ceremonial striking of the

new holy fire. On Easter Eve, under the solemn auspices of the Greek

Church, a mob of howling fanatics crush and trample to death the victims

who faint and fall in their struggles to approach the most shameless

imposture of modern Christendom, the miraculous fire from heaven which

descends into the Holy Sepulchre.[715] Two other Christian festivals

have not merely had solar rites transferred to them, but seem distinctly

themselves of solar origin. The Roman winter-solstice festival, as

celebrated on December 25 (VIII. Kal. Jan.) in connexion with the

worship of the Sun-god Mithra, appears to have been instituted in this

special form after the Eastern campaign of Aurelian A.D. 273, and to

this festival the day owes its apposite name of Birthday of the

Unconquered Sun, ‘Dies Natalis Solis invicti.’ With full symbolic

appropriateness, though not with historical justification, the day was

adopted in the Western Church, where it appears to have been generally

introduced by the 4th century, and whence in time it passed to the

Eastern Church, as the solemn anniversary of the birth of Christ, the

Christian Dies Natalis, Christmas Day. Attempts have been made to ratify

this date as matter of history, but no valid nor even consistent early

Christian tradition vouches for it. The real solar origin of the

festival is clear from the writings of the Fathers after its

institution. In religious symbolism of the material and spiritual sun,

Augustine and Gregory of Nyassa discourse on the glowing light and

dwindling darkness that follow the Nativity, while Leo the Great, among

whose people the earlier solar meaning of the festival evidently

remained in strong remembrance, rebukes in a sermon the pestiferous

persuasion, as he calls it, that this solemn day is to be honoured not

for the birth of Christ, but for the rising, as they say, of the new

sun.[716] As for modern memory of the sun-rites of mid-winter, Europe

recognizes Christmas as a primitive solar festival by bonfires which our

‘yule-log,’ the ‘souche de Noël,’ still keeps in mind; while the

adaptation of ancient solar thought to Christian allegory is as plain as

ever in the Christmas service chant, ‘Sol novus oritur.’[717] The solar

Christmas festival has its pendant at Midsummer. The summer solstice was

the great season of fire-festivals throughout Europe, of bonfires on the

heights, of dancing round and leaping through the fires, of sending

blazing fire-wheels to roll down from the hills into the valleys in sign

of the sun’s descending course. These ancient rites attached themselves

in Christendom to St. John’s Eve.[718] It seems as though the same train

of symbolism which had adapted the midwinter festival to the Nativity,

may have suggested the dedication of the midsummer festival to John the

Baptist, in clear allusion to his words, ‘He must increase, but I must

decrease.’

Moon-worship, naturally ranking below Sun-worship in importance, ranges

through nearly the same district of culture. There are remarkable cases

in which the Moon is recognized as a great deity by tribes who take less

account, or none at all, of the Sun. The rude savages of Brazil seem

especially to worship or respect the moon, by which they regulate their

time and festivals, and draw their omens. They would lift up their hands

to the moon with wonder-struck exclamations of teh! teh! they would have

children smoked by the sorcerers to preserve them from moon-given

sickness, or the women would hold up their babes to the luminary. The

Botocudos are said to give the highest rank among the heavenly bodies to

Taru the Moon, as causing thunder and lightning and the failure of

vegetables and fruits, and as even sometimes falling to the earth,

whereby many men die.[719] An old account of the Caribs describes them

as esteeming the Moon more than the Sun, and at new moon coming out of

their houses crying ‘Behold the Moon!’[720] The Ahts of Vancouver’s

Island, it is stated, worship the Sun and Moon, particularly the full

moon and the sun ascending to the zenith. Regarding the Moon as husband

and the Sun as wife, their prayers are more generally addressed to the

Moon as the superior deity; he is the highest object of their worship,

and they speak of him as ‘looking down upon the earth in answer to

prayer, and seeing everybody.’[721] With a somewhat different turn of

mythic fancy, the Hurons seem to have considered Ataentsic the Moon as

maker of the earth and man, and grandmother of Iouskeha the Sun, with

whom she governs the world.[722] In Africa, Moon-worship is prominent in

an immense district where Sun-worship is unknown or insignificant. Among

south-central tribes, men will watch for the first glimpses of the new

Moon, which they hail with shouts of kua! and vociferate prayers to it;

on such an occasion Dr. Livingstone’s Makololo prayed, ‘Let our journey

with the white man be prosperous!’ &c.[723] These people keep holiday at

new-moon, as indeed in many countries her worship is connected with the

settlement of periodic festival. Negro tribes seem almost universally to

greet the new Moon, whether in delight or disgust. The Guinea people

fling themselves about with droll gestures, and pretend to throw

firebrands at it; the Ashango men behold it with superstitious fear; the

Fetu negroes jumped thrice into the air with hands together and gave

thanks.[724] The Congo people fell on their knees, or stood and clapped

their hands, crying, ‘So may I renew my life as thou art renewed!’[725]

The Hottentots are described early in the last century as dancing and

singing all night at new and full moon, calling the Moon the Great

Captain, and crying to him ‘Be greeted!’ ‘Let us get much honey!’ ‘May

our cattle get much to eat and give much milk!’ With the same thought as

that just noticed in the district north-west of them, the Hottentots

connect the Moon in legend with that fatal message sent to Man, which

ought to have promised to the human race a moon-like renewal of life,

but which was perverted into a doom of death like that of the beast who

brought it.[726]

The more usual status of the Moon in the religions of the world is, as

nature suggests, that of a subordinate companion deity to the Sun, such

a position as is acknowledged in the precedence of Sunday to Monday.

Their various mutual relations as brother and sister, husband and wife,

have already been noticed here as matter of mythology. As wide-lying

rude races who place them thus side by side in their theology, it is

enough to mention the Delawares of North America,[727] the Ainos of

Yesso,[728] the Bodos of North-East-India,[729] the Tunguz of

Siberia.[730] This is the state of things which continues at higher

levels of systematic civilization. Beside the Mexican Tonatiuh the Sun,

Metztli the Moon had a smaller pyramid and temple;[731] in Bogota, the

Moon, identified in local myth with the Evil Deity, had her place and

figure in the temple beside the Sun her husband;[732] the Peruvian

Mother-Moon, Mama-Quilla, had her silver disc-face to match the golden

one of her brother and husband the Sun, whose companion she had been in

the legendary civilizing of the land.[733] In the ancient Kami-religion

of Japan, the supreme Sun-god ranks high above the Moon-god, who was

worshipped under the form of a fox.[734] Among the historic nations of

the Old World, documents of Semitic culture show Sun and Moon side by

side. For one, we may take the Jewish law, to stone with stones till

they died the man or woman who ‘hath gone and served other gods, and

worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven.’

For another, let us glance over the curious record of the treaty-oath

between Philip of Macedon and the general of the Carthaginian and Libyan

army, which so well shows how the original identity of nature-deities

may be forgotten in their different local shapes, so that the same

divinity may come twice or even three times over in as many national

names and forms. Herakles and Apollo stand in company with the personal

Sun, and as well as the personal Moon is to be seen the ‘Carthaginian

deity,’ whom there is reason to look on as Astarte, a goddess latterly

of lunar nature. This is the list of deities invoked: ‘Before Zeus and

Hera and Apollo; before the goddess of the Carthaginians (δαίμονος

Καρχηδονίων) and Herakles and Iolaos; before Ares, Triton, Poseidon;

before the gods who fought with the armies, and Sun and Moon and Earth;

before the rivers and meadows and waters; before all the gods who rule

Macedonia and the rest of Greece; before all the gods who were at the

war, they who have presided over this oath.’[735] When Lucian visited

the famous temple of Hierapolis in Syria, he saw the images of the other

gods, ‘but only of the Sun and Moon they show no images.’ And when he

asked why, they told him that the forms of other gods were not seen by

all, but Sun and Moon are altogether clear, and all men see them.[736]

In Egyptian theology, not to discuss other divine beings to whom a lunar

nature has been ascribed, it is at least certain that Khonsu is the Moon

in absolute personal divinity.[737] In Aryan theology, the personal Moon

stands as Selēnē beside the more anthropomorphic forms of Hekatē and

Artemis,[738] as Luna beside the less understood Lucina, and Diana with

her borrowed attributes,[739] while our Teutonic forefathers were

content with his plain name of Moon.[740] As for lunar survivals in the

higher religions, they are much like the solar. Monotheist as he is, the

Moslem still claps his hands at sight of the new moon, and says a

prayer.[741] In Europe in the 15th century it was matter of complaint

that some still adored the new moon with bended knee, or hood or hat

removed, and to this day we may still see a hat raised or a curtsey

dropped to her, half in conservatism and half in jest. It is with

reference to silver as the lunar metal, that money is turned when the

act of adoration is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells on the

ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new moon is first

seen.[742]

Thus, in tracing the development of Nature-Worship, it appears that

though Fire, Air, Earth, and Water are not yet among the lower races

systematized into a quaternion of elements, their adoration, with that

of Sun and Moon, shows already arising in primitive culture the familiar

types of those great divinities, who received their further development

in the higher Polytheism.

Footnote 593:

Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 362; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol.

iii. p. 228; Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 444.

Footnote 594:

Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 583.

Footnote 595:

Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. America,’ part i. p. 43.

Footnote 596:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 1322.

Footnote 597:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 180.

Footnote 598:

J. B. Schlegel, ‘Schlüssel zur Ewe Sprache,’ p. xii.; compare Bowen,

‘Yoruba Lang.’ in ‘Smithsonian Contrib.’ vol. i. p. xvi.

Footnote 599:

Samoiedia, in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 531.

Footnote 600:

Macpherson, p. 84, &c.

Footnote 601:

Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. ch. i.

Footnote 602:

Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi,’ ch. vii. &c.

Footnote 603:

Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii.

Footnote 604:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. pp. 33, 255, 275, 338, vol. ii. p. 692.

Footnote 605:

Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.,’ 1636, p. 107; Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages

Amériquains,’ vol. i. p. 132. Schoolcraft, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 36, &c. 237.

Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ pp. 48, 172. J. G. Müller, ‘Amer.

Urrelig.’ p. 119.

Footnote 606:

Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 203.

Footnote 607:

Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 168, &c.; Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W.

Afr.’ p. 76.

Footnote 608:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 7, &c.

Footnote 609:

Plath, ‘Religion und Cultus der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 18, &c.;

part ii. p. 32; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396. See Max Müller,

‘Lectures,’ 2nd S. p. 437; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 100. For further

evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Heaven as Supreme

Deity, see chap. xvii.

Footnote 610:

Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd Series, p. 425; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. ix.;

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 4. Connexion of the Sanskrit Dyu with

the Scandinavian Tyr and the Anglo Saxon Tiw is perhaps rather of

etymology than definition.

Footnote 611:

Duff Macdonald, ‘Africana,’ vol. i. p. 60 (E. Centr. Afr.). Waitz,

‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 169 (W. Afr.) p. 416 (Damaras).

Footnote 612:

Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp.

318, 368.

Footnote 613:

Ibid. pp. 496-9; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ pp. 40, 72.

Footnote 614:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 89, 355.

Footnote 615:

Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 34. Compare 1 Kings

xviii.

Footnote 616:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 36; Kalewala, Rune ii. 317.

Footnote 617:

Marc. Antonin. v. 7. ‘Ἐὐχὴ Ἀθηναίων, ὖσον, ὖσον, ὦ φίλε Ζεῦ, κατὰ τῆς

ἀρούρας τῶν Ἀθηναίων καὶ τῶν πεδίων.’

Footnote 618:

Petron. Arbiter. Sat. xliv. ‘Antea stolatæ ibant nudis pedibus in

clivum, passis capillis, mentibus puris, et Jovem aquam exorabant.

Itaque statim urceatim pluebat: aut tunc aut nunquam; et omnes

redibant udi tanquam mures.’ See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 160.

Footnote 619:

Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘N. Amer.’ vol. ii. pp. 152, 223; J. G. Müller, p.

120; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 179.

Footnote 620:

Keating, ‘Narr.’ vol. i. p. 407; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p. 71; Brinton,

p. 150, &c.; see M’Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 363.

Footnote 621:

De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530; Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 431.

Footnote 622:

De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ xv. 2. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417; J. G. Müller,

p. 270; also 421 (thunderstorms by anger of Sun, in Cumana, &c.).

Footnote 623:

Brinton, p. 153; Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ Dec., v. 4. J. G.

Müller p. 327. ‘Rites and Laws of the Yncas,’ tr. & ed. by C. R.

Markham, p. 16, see 81; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86.

Footnote 624:

Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ p. xvi. in ‘Smithsonian Contr.’ vol. i. See

Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 142. Details as to thunder-axes, &c., in

‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. viii.

Footnote 625:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 266.

Footnote 626:

Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iv. p. 85. (Ossetes, &c.) See Welcker, vol. i. p.

170; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 158. Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. ii. p. 423

(Ali-sect.).

Footnote 627:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 39, &c.

Footnote 628:

‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 32. 1, 55. 5, 130. 8, 165; iii. 34. 9; vi. 20; x. 44.

9, 89. 9. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd S. p. 427; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p.

42, vol. ii. p. 323. See Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts.’

Footnote 629:

Homer. Il. viii. 170, xvii. 595. Ovid. Fast. ii. 69. See Welcker,

‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 194.

Footnote 630:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 257.

Footnote 631:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ ch. viii. Edda; Gylfaginning, 21, 44.

Footnote 632:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 139, vol. ii. p. 214; Loskiel,

part i. p. 43; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 190. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 157; J.

G. Müller, p. 56. Further American evidence in Brinton, ‘Myths of New

World,’ pp. 50, 74; Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267 (Sillagiksartok,

Weather-spirit); De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530 (Carib Star Curumon,

makes the billows and upsets canoes).

Footnote 633:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 329 (compare with the Maori

Tempest-god Tawhirimatea, Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 5); Schirren,

‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ &c. p. 85; Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144.

See also Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 115.

Footnote 634:

Steller, ‘Kamschatka,’ p. 266.

Footnote 635:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 37, 68.

Footnote 636:

Boecler, pp. 106, 147.

Footnote 637:

See also Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iv. p. 85 (Circassian Water-god

and Wind-god).

Footnote 638:

Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ vol. v. p. 150.

Footnote 639:

Homer. Il. xxiii. 192, Odyss. xx. 66, 77; Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica;

Apollodor. i. 9. 21; Virg. Æn. i. 56; Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.

i. p. 707, vol. iii. p. 67.

Footnote 640:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 121, 871.

Footnote 641:

Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 86.

Footnote 642:

Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ p. 193; Loskiel, l.c. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles

Antilles,’ p. 414; J. G. Müller, p. 178 (Antilles).

Footnote 643:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10; Rivero & Tschudi,

p. 161; J. G. Müller, p. 369.

Footnote 644:

Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 170.

Footnote 645:

‘Report of Ethnological Committee, Jubbulpore Exhibition,’ 1866-7.

Nagpore, 1868, part ii. p. 54.

Footnote 646:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ chap. vi.

Footnote 647:

Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Castrén, ‘Finn.

Myth,’ p. 86, &c.

Footnote 648:

Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. pp. 36, 73, part ii. p.

32. Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. 86, 354, 413, vol. ii. pp. 67,

380, 455.

Footnote 649:

‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 89. 4, &c., &c.

Footnote 650:

Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 385, &c.

Footnote 651:

Varro de Ling. Lat. iv.

Footnote 652:

Tacit. Germania, 40. Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 229, &c.

Footnote 653:

Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 87.

Footnote 654:

Liebich, ‘Die Zigeuner,’ pp. 30, 84.

Footnote 655:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 485; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’

pp. i. 118, 161.

Footnote 656:

Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 14.

Footnote 657:

Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 301; see also 303 (Tagals).

Footnote 658:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 328.

Footnote 659:

Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xix.; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494. Burton,

‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 141. See also below, chap. xviii. (sacrifice).

Footnote 660:

Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. xiv.

Footnote 661:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10, vi. 17; Rivero &

Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 161.

Footnote 662:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 265.

Footnote 663:

Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

Footnote 664:

Herod. vi. 76.

Footnote 665:

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 20.

Footnote 666:

Homer, Il. i. 538, xiii. 18, xx. 13. Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.

i. p. 616 (Nereus), p. 622 (Poseidon). Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan

Nations,’ vol. ii. ch. vi.

Footnote 667:

Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. pp. 41, 45. See also J. G. Müller, p.

55.

Footnote 668:

Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. xxii.

Footnote 669:

Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vi. c. 28, x. c. 22, 30; Brasseur,

‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. pp. 492, 522, 536.

Footnote 670:

Schirren, ‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ &c., p. 32; Turner,

‘Polynesia,’ pp. 252, 527.

Footnote 671:

Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148; Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. xv.

Footnote 672:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 276.

Footnote 673:

Batchelor in ‘Tr. As. Soc. Japan,’ vols. x. xvi.

Footnote 674:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 57; Billings, ‘N. Russia,’ p. 123 (Yakuts);

Bastian, ‘Vorstellungen von Wasser und Feuer,’ in ‘Zeitschr. für

Ethnologie,’ vol. i. p. 383 (Mongols).

Footnote 675:

Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. vi. p. 85 (Circassia). Welcker, vol. i. p.

663.

Footnote 676:

See ‘Records of the Past,’ vol. iii. p. 137, vol. ix. p. 143; Sayce,

‘Lectures on Rel. of Ancient Babylonians,’ p. 170. For accounts of

Semitic fire-worship, see Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 327, &c.,

337, &c., 401.

Footnote 677:

‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 1. 1, 19. 2, iii. 1. 18, &c.; Max Müller, vol. i. p.

39; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 53. Haug, ‘Essays on Parsis,’ iv.;

‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 255.

Footnote 678:

Hanway, ‘Journal of Travels,’ London, 1753, vol. i. ch. lvii.

Footnote 679:

Diog. Lært. Proœm. ii. 6. Sextus Empiricus adv. Physicos, ix.; Strabo,

xv. 3, 13.

Footnote 680:

John Wilson, ‘The Parsi Religion,’ ch. iv.; ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel,

Yacna, i. lxi.

Footnote 681:

Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 169. Haug, ‘Essays on Parsis,’ p. 281.

Footnote 682:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 88, 98.

Footnote 683:

Homer. Hymn. Aphrod. 29, Hestia 1. Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.

ii. pp. 686, 691.

Footnote 684:

Ovid. Fast. vi. 295.

Footnote 685:

Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergl.’ p. 29, &c.

Footnote 686:

Wuttke, ‘Volksabergl.’ p. 86. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p.

41.

Footnote 687:

D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 242.

Footnote 688:

Herod, i. 216, iv. 184. Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 144.

Footnote 689:

Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 181 (Hudson’s B., Pottawatomies),

205 (Virginians). J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 117 (Delawares,

Sioux, Mingos, &c.). Sproat, ‘Ind. of Vancouver’s I.’ in ‘Tr. Eth.

Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253. Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 43

(Delawares). Hennepin, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique,’ p. 302 (Sioux), &c.

Bartram, ‘Creek and Cherokee Ind.’ in ‘Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii.

part i. pp. 20, 26; see also Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part ii. p.

127 (Comanches, &c.); Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 164; Gregg, vol. ii. p.

238 (Shawnees); but compare the remarks of Brinton, ‘Myths of New

World,’ p. 141.

Footnote 690:

Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 327 (Botocudos). Waitz, vol. iii.

p. 518 (Araucanians). Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 89 (Puelches).

Charlevoix, ‘Hist. du Paraguay,’ vol. i. p. 331 (Diaguitas). J. G.

Müller, p. 255 (Botocudos, Aucas, Diaguitas).

Footnote 691:

Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 172; Waitz, vol. iii. p.

217.

Footnote 692:

Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ book ii. ch. viii.

Footnote 693:

Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ ix. c. 34; Sahagun, ‘Hist. de Nueva

España,’ ii. App. in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico;’ Waitz,

vol. iv. p. 138; J. G. Müller, p. 474, &c.; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol.

iii. p. 487; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ p. 141.

Footnote 694:

Piedrahita, ‘Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’

Antwerp, 1688: part i. book i. c. iii. iv.; Humboldt, ‘Vues des

Cordillères;’ Waitz, vol. iv. p. 352, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 432, &c.

Footnote 695:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ lib. i. c. 15, &c., iii.

c. 20; v. c. 2, 6; ‘Rites and Laws of the Yncas,’ tr. & ed. by C. R.

Markham, (Hakluyt Soc., 1873) p. 84; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ book i. ch.

iii.; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 447, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 362, &c.

Footnote 696:

Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. p. 383. Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol.

ii. p. 346; ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 147.

Footnote 697:

Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 167, 175 (Bodos, &c.).

Footnote 698:

Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 33 (Oraons, &c.);

Hunter, ‘Annals of Rural Bengal,’ p. 184 (Santals).

Footnote 699:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84, &c. (Khonds).

Footnote 700:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 16, 51, &c. Meiners, l.c. Georgi, ‘Reise im

Russ. Reich.’ vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Klemm, ‘Cultur-Geschichte,’ vol.

iii. p. 87. Sun-Worship in Japan, Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9. For

further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Sun as

Supreme Deity, see chap. xvii.

Footnote 701:

‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 35, 50; iii. 62, 10. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd Ser.

pp. 378, 411; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 19. Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i.

pp. 30, 133. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 42.

Footnote 702:

‘Khordah-Avesta,’ xxvi. in Avesta tr. by Spiegel, vol. iii.; M. Haug,

‘Essays on Parsis.’ Strabo, xv. 3, 13. Nonnus, xl. 400. Movers,

‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 180: ‘Ἡλίῳ Μίθρᾳ ἀνικήτῳ’; ‘Διὸς ἀνικήτον

Ἡλίου.’

Footnote 703:

Plat. Sympos. xxxvi. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ vol. i. pp.

400, 412.

Footnote 704:

Cæsar de Bello Gallico, vi. 21: ‘Deorum numero eos solos ducunt, quos

cernunt et quorum aperte opibus juvantur, Solem et Vulcanum et Lunam,

reliquos ne fama quidem acceperunt.’

Footnote 705:

Cicero de Natura Deorum, iii. 21.

Footnote 706:

See Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians’; Renouf, ‘Religion of Ancient

Egypt.’

Footnote 707:

Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3; 2 Kings xxiii. 11.

Footnote 708:

Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. pp. 162, 180, &c. Lamprid. Heliogabal. i.

Footnote 709:

Euseb. Præparat. Evang. i. 6.

Footnote 710:

Neander, ‘Church History,’ vol. vi. p. 341. Carsten Niebuhr,

‘Reisebeschr.’ vol. ii. p. 396.

Footnote 711:

Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 9; vol. ii. p. 258. See Koran, xli. 37.

Footnote 712:

Tertullian. Apolog. adv. Gentes, xvi. See Lucian. de Saltat. xvii.;

compare Job. xxxi. 26.

Footnote 713:

Leo. I. Serm. viii. in Natal. Dom.

Footnote 714:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 150.

Footnote 715:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 581, &c. Wuttke, pp. 17, 93. Brand, ‘Pop.

Ant.’ vol. i. p. 157, &c. ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 260. Murray’s

‘Handbook for Syria and Palestine,’ 1868, p. 162.

Footnote 716:

See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘Sol;’ Petavius, ‘Juliani Imp.

Opera,’ 290-2, 277. Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church,’ book

xx. ch. iv.; Neander, ‘Church Hist.’ vol. iii. p. 437; Beausobre,

‘Hist. de Manichée,’ vol. ii. p. 691; Gibbon, ch. xxii.; Creuzer,

‘Symbolik,’ vol. i. p. 761, &c.

Footnote 717:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 593, 1223. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p.

467. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 188.

Footnote 718:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 583; Brand, vol. i. p. 298; Wuttke, pp. 14, 140.

Beausobre, l.c.

Footnote 719:

Spix and Martius, ‘Reise in Brasilien,’ vol. i. pp. 377, 381; Martius,

‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 327; Pr. Max. v. Wied, vol. ii. p. 58; J.

G. Müller, pp. 218, 254; also Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ pp. 58, 179.

Footnote 720:

De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 721:

Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 206; ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253.

Footnote 722:

Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1635, p. 34.

Footnote 723:

Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 235; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 175, 342.

Footnote 724:

Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 84; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 428; see

Purchas, vol. v. p. 766. Müller, ‘Fetu,’ p. 47.

Footnote 725:

Merolla, ‘Congo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 273.

Footnote 726:

Kolbe, ‘Beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop,’ part i. xxix. See

ante, vol. i. p. 355.

Footnote 727:

Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 43.

Footnote 728:

Bickmore, ‘Ainos,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20.

Footnote 729:

Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 167.

Footnote 730:

Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 275.

Footnote 731:

Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 9, 35; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ l.c.

Footnote 732:

Waitz, vol. iv. p. 362.

Footnote 733:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ iii. 21.

Footnote 734:

Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

Footnote 735:

Deuteron. xvii. 3; Polyb. vii. 9; see Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ pp. 159,

536, 605.

Footnote 736:

Lucian. de Syria Dea, iv. 34.

Footnote 737:

Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ ed. by Birch, vol. iii. p. 174. See

Plutarch. Is. et Osir.

Footnote 738:

Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 550, &c.

Footnote 739:

Cic. de Nat. Deor. ii. 27.

Footnote 740:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxii.

Footnote 741:

Akerblad, ‘Lettre à Italinsky.’ Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p.

346. Mungo Park, ‘Travels,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. p. 875.

Footnote 742:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 29, 667; Brand, vol. iii. p. 146; Forbes Leslie,

‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 136.