ANIMISM (_continued_).
Polytheism comprises a class of Great Deities, ruling
the course of Nature and the life of
Man—Childbirth-god—Agriculture-god—War-god—God of the Dead—First Man
as Divine Ancestor—Dualism; its rudimentary and unethical nature
among low races; its development through the course of culture—Good
and Evil Deity—Doctrine of Divine Supremacy, distinct from, while
tending towards, the doctrine of Monotheism—Idea of a Highest or
Supreme Deity evolved in various forms; its place as completion of
the Polytheistic system and outcome of the Animistic philosophy; its
continuance and development among higher nations—General survey of
Animism as a Philosophy of Religion—Recapitulation of the theory
advanced as to its development through successive stages of culture;
its primary phases best represented among the lower races, while
survivals of these among the higher races mark the transition from
savage through barbaric to civilized faiths—Transition of Animism in
the History of Religion; its earlier and later stages as a
Philosophy of the Universe; its later stages as the principle of a
Moral Institution.
Polytheism acknowledges, beside great fetish-deities like Heaven and
Earth, Sun and Moon, another class of great gods whose importance lies
not in visible presence, but in the performance of certain great offices
in the course of Nature and the life of Man. The lower races can furnish
themselves with such deities, either by giving the recognized gods
special duties to perform, or by attributing these functions to beings
invented in divine personality for the purpose. The creation of such
divinities is however carried to a much greater extent in the complex
systems of the higher polytheism. For a compact group of examples
showing to what different ideas men will resort for a deity to answer a
special end, let us take the deity presiding over Childbirth. In the
West Indies, a special divinity occupied with this function took rank as
one of the great indigenous fetish-gods;[743] in the Samoan group, the
household god of the father’s or mother’s family was appealed to;[744]
in Peru the Moon takes to this office,[745] and the same natural idea
recurs in Mexico;[746] in Esthonian religion the productive Earth-mother
appropriately becomes patroness of human birth;[747] in the classic
theology of Greece and Italy, the divine spouse of the Heaven-king,
Hera,[748] Juno,[749] favours and protects on earth marriage and the
birth of children; and to conclude the list, the Chinese work out the
problem from the manes-worshipper’s point of view, for the goddess whom
they call ‘Mother’ and propitiate with many a ceremony and sacrifice to
save and prosper their children, is held to have been in human life a
skilful midwife.[750]
The deity of Agriculture may be a cosmic being affecting the weather and
the soil, or a mythic giver of plants and teacher of their cultivation
and use. Thus among the Iroquois, Heno the Thunder, who rides through
the heavens on the clouds, who splits the forest-trees with the
thunderbolt-stones he hurls at his enemies, who gathers the clouds and
pours out the warm rains, was fitly chosen as patron of husbandry,
invoked at seed-time and harvest, and called Grandfather by his children
the Indians.[751] It is interesting to notice again on the southern
continent the working out of this idea in the Tupan of Brazilian tribes;
Thunder and Lightning, it is recorded, they call Tupan, considering
themselves to owe to him their hoes and the profitable art of tillage,
and therefore acknowledging him as a deity.[752] Among the Guarani race,
Tamoi the Ancient of Heaven had no less rightful claim, in his character
of heaven-god, to be venerated as the divine teacher of agriculture to
his people.[753] In Mexico, Centeotl the Grain-goddess received homage
and offerings at her two great festivals, and took care of the growth
and keeping of the corn.[754] In Polynesia, we hear in the Society
Islands of Ofanu the god of husbandry, in the Tonga Islands of Alo Alo
the fanner, god of wind and weather, bearing office as god of harvest,
and receiving his offering of yams when he had ripened them.[755] A
picturesque figure from barbaric Asia is Pheebee Yau, the Ceres of the
Karens, who sits on a stump and watches the growing and ripening com, to
fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious.[756] The Khonds
worship at the same shrine, a stone or tree near the village, both Būrbi
Pennu the goddess of new vegetation, and Pidzu Pennu the rain-god.[757]
Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately
undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits.[758] And so among the
Greeks it is the same being, Dēmētēr the Earth-mother, who performs this
function, while the Roman Ceres who is confused with her is rather, as
in Mexico, a goddess of grain and fruit.[759]
The War-god is another being wanted among the lower races, and formed or
adapted accordingly. Areskove the Iroquois War-god seems to be himself
the great celestial deity; for his pleasant food they slaughtered human
victims, that he might give them victory over their enemies; as a
pleasant sight for him they tortured the war-captives; on him the
war-chief called in solemn council, and the warriors, shouting his name,
rushed into the battle he was surveying from on high. Canadian Indians
before the fight would look toward the sun, or addressed the Great
Spirit as god of war; Floridan Indians prayed to the Sun before their
wars.[760] Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thunder-god that he
would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a
victory.[761] The very name of Mexico seems derived from Mexitli, the
national War-god, identical or identified with the hideous gory
Huitzilopochtli. Not to attempt a general solution of the enigmatic
nature of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity, we may
notice the association of his principal festival with the
winter-solstice, when his paste idol was shot through with an arrow, and
being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten, wherefore the
ceremony was called the teoqualo or ‘god-eating.’ This and other details
tend to show Huitzilopochtli as originally a nature-deity, whose life
and death were connected with the year’s, while his functions of War-god
may be of later addition.[762] Polynesia is a region where quite an
assortment of war-gods may be collected. Such, to take but one example,
was Tairi, war-god of King Kamehameha of the Sandwich Islands, whose
hideous image, covered with red feathers, shark-toothed,
mother-of-pearl-eyed, with helmet-crest of human hair, was carried into
battle by his special priest, distorting his own face into hideous
grins, and uttering terrific yells which were considered to proceed from
the god.[763] Two examples from Asia may show what different original
conceptions may serve to shape such deities as these upon. The Khond
War-god, who entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace
they became weapons of war, who gave edge to the axe and point to the
arrow, is the very personified spirit of tribal war, his token is the
relic of iron and the iron weapons buried in his sacred grove which
stands near each group of hamlets, and his name is Loha Pennu or
Iron-god.[764] The Chinese War-god, Kuang Tä, on the other hand, is an
ancient military ghost; he was a distinguished officer, as well as a
‘faithful and honest courtier,’ who flourished during the wars of the
Han dynasty, and emperors since then have delighted to honour him by
adding to his usual title more and more honorary distinctions.[765]
Looking at these selections from the army of War-gods of the different
regions of the world, we may well leave their classic analogues, Arēs
and Mars, as beings whose warlike function we recognize, but not so
easily their original nature.[766]
It would be easy, going through the religious systems of Polynesia and
Mexico, Greece and Rome, India and China, to give the names and offices
of a long list of divinities, patrons of hunting and fishing,
carpentering and weaving, and so forth. But studying here rather the
continuity of polytheistic ideas than the analysis of polytheistic
divinities, it is needless to proceed farther in the comparison of these
deities of special function, as recognized to some extent in the lower
civilization, before their elaborate development became one of the great
features of the higher.
The great polytheistic deities we have been examining, concerned as they
are with the earthly course of nature and human life, are gods of the
living. But even in savage levels man began to feel an intellectual need
of a God of the Dead, to reign over the souls of men in the next life,
and this necessity has been supplied in various ways. Of the deities set
up as lords of Deadman’s Land, some are beings whose original meaning is
obscure. Some are distinctly nature-deities appointed to this office,
often for local reasons, as happening to belong to the regions where the
dead take up their abode. Some, again, are as distinctly the deified
souls of men. The two first classes may be briefly instanced together in
America, where the light-side and shadow-side (as Dr. J. G. Müller well
calls them) of the conception of a future life are broadly contrasted in
the definitions of the Lord of the Dead. Among the Northern Indians this
may be Tarenyawagon the Heaven-God, identified with the Great Spirit,
who receives good warriors in his happy hunting-grounds, or his
grandmother, the Death-goddess Atahentsic.[767] In Brazil, the
Under-world-god, who places good warriors and sorcerers in Paradise,
contrasts with Aygnan the evil deity who takes base and cowardly Tupi
souls,[768] much as the Mexican Tlaloc, Water-god and lord of the
earthly paradise, contrasts with Mictlanteuctli, ruler of the dismal
dead-land in the shades below.[769] In Peru there has been placed on
record a belief that the departed spirits went to be with the Creator
and Teacher of the World—‘Bring us too near to thee ... that we may be
fortunate, being near to thee, O Uira-cocha!’ There are also statements
as to an under-world of shades, the land of the demon Supay.[770]
Accounts of this class must often be suspected of giving ideas
mis-stated under European influence, or actually adopted from Europeans,
but there is in some a look of untouched genuineness. Thus in Polynesia,
the idea of a Devil borrowed from colonists or missionaries may be
suspected in such a figure as the evil deity Wiro, chief of Reigna, the
New Zealander’s western world of departed souls. But few conceptions of
deity are more quaintly original than that of the Samoan deity
Saveasiuleo, at once ruler of destinies of war and other affairs of men
and chief of the subterranean Bulotū, with the human upper half of his
body reclining in his great house in company with the spirits of
departed chiefs, while his tail or extremity stretches far away into the
sea, in the shape of an eel or serpent. Under a name corresponding
dialectically (Siuleo = Hikuleo), this composite being reappears in the
kindred myths of the neighbouring group, the Tonga Islands. The Tongan
Hikuleo has his home in the spirit-land of Bulotū, here conceived as out
in the far western sea. Here we are told the use of his tail. His body
goes away on journeys, but his tail remains watching in Bulotū, and thus
he is aware of what goes on in more places than one. Hikuleo used to
carry off the first-born sons of Tongan chiefs, to people his island of
the blest, and he so thinned the ranks of the living that at last the
other gods were moved to compassion. Tangaloa and Maui seized Hikuleo,
passed a strong chain round him, and fastened one end to heaven and the
other to earth. Another god of the dead, of well-marked native type, is
the Rarotongan Tiki, an ancestral deity as in New Zealand, to whose long
house, a place of unceasing joys, the dead are to find their way.[771]
Among Turanian tribes, there are Samoyeds who believe in a deity called
‘A,’ dwelling in impenetrable darkness, sending disease and death to men
and reindeer, and ruling over a crowd of spirits which are manes of the
dead. Tatars tell of the nine Irle-Chans, who in their gloomy
subterranean kingdom not only rule over souls of the dead, but have at
their command a multitude of ministering spirits, visible and invisible.
In the gloomy under-world of the Finns reigns Mana or Tuoni, a being
whose nature is worked out by personification from the dismal dead-land
or death itself.[772] Much the same may be said of the Greek Aidēs,
Hades, and the Scandinavian Hel, whose names, perhaps not so much by
confusion as with a sense of their latent significance, have become
identified in language with the doleful abodes over which a personifying
fancy set them to preside.[773] As appropriately, though working out a
different idea, the ancient Egyptians conceived their great solar deity
to rule in the regions of his western under-world—Osiris is Lord of the
Dead in Amenti.[774]
In the world’s assembly of great gods, an important place must be filled
up by the manes-worshipper in logical development of his special system.
The theory of family manes, carried back to tribal gods, leads to the
recognition of superior deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor or
First Man, and it is of course reasonable that such a being, if
recognized, should sometimes fill the place of lord of the dead, whose
ancestral chief he is. There is an anecdote among the Mandans told by
Prince Maximilian von Wied, which brings into view conceptions lying in
the deepest recesses of savage religion, the idea of the divine first
ancestor, the mythic connexion of the sun’s death and descent into the
under-world, with the like fate of man and the nature of the spiritual
intercourse between man’s own soul and his deity. The First Man, it is
said, promised the Mandans to be their helper in time of need, and then
departed into the West. It came to pass that the Mandans were attacked
by foes. One Mandan would send a bird to the great ancestor to ask for
help, but no bird could fly so far. Another thought a look would reach
him, but the hills walled him in. Then said a third, thought must be the
safest way to reach the First Man. He wrapped himself in his
buffalo-robe, fell down, and spoke, ‘I think—I have thought—I come
back.’ Throwing off the fur, he was bathed in sweat. The divine helper
he had called on in his distress appeared.[775] There is instructive
variety in the ways in which the lower American races work out the
conception of the divine forefather. The Mingo tribes revere and make
offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a
powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him;
some Mississippi Indians said that the First Man ascended into heaven,
and thunders there; among the Dog-ribs, he was creator of sun and
moon;[776] Tamoi, the grandfather and ancient of heaven of the Guaranis,
was their first ancestor, who dwelt among them and taught them to till
the soil, and rose to heaven in the east, promising to succour them on
earth, and at death to carry them from the sacred tree into a new life
where they should all meet again, and have much hunting.[777]
Polynesia, again, has thoroughly worked the theory of divine ancestors
into the native system of multiform and blending nature-deities. Men are
sprung from the divine Maui, whom Europeans have therefore called the
‘Adam of New Zealand,’ or from the Rarotongan Tiki, who seems his
equivalent (Mauitiki), and who again is the Tii of the Society Islands;
it is, however, the son of Tii who precisely represents a Polynesian
Adam, for his name is Taata, i.e., Man, and he is the ancestor of the
human race. There is perhaps also reason to identify Maui and the First
Man with Akea, first King of Hawaii, who at his earthly death descended
to rule over his dark subterranean kingdom, where his subjects are the
dead who recline under the spreading kou-trees, and drink of the
infernal rivers, and feed on lizards and butterflies.[778] In the
mythology of Kamchatka, the relation between the Creator and the First
Man is one not of identity but of parentage. Among the sons of Kutka the
Creator is Haetsh the First Man, who dwelt on earth, and died, and
descended into Hades to be chief of the under-world; there he receives
the dead and new-risen Kamchadals, to continue a life like that of earth
in his pleasant subterranean land where mildness and plenty prevail, as
they did in the regions above in the old days when the Creator was still
on earth.[779] Among all the lower races who have reasoned out this
divine ancestor, none excel those consistent manes-worshippers, the
Zulus. Their worship of the manes of the dead has not only made the
clan-ancestors of a few generations back into tribal deities
(Unkulunkulu), but beyond these, too far off and too little known for
actual worship, yet recognized as the original race-deity and identified
with the Creator, stands the First Man, he who ‘broke off in the
beginning,’ the Old-Old-One, the great Unkulunkulu. While the Zulu’s
most intense religious emotions are turned to the ghosts of the
departed, while he sacrifices his beloved oxen and prays with agonising
entreaty to his grandfather, and carries his tribal worship back to
those ancestral deities whose praise-giving names are still remembered,
the First Man is beyond the reach of such rites. ‘At first we saw that
we were made by Unkulunkulu. But when we were ill we did not worship
him, nor ask anything of him. We worshipped those whom we had seen with
our eyes, their death and their life among us.... Unkulunkulu had no
longer a son who could worship him; there was no going back to the
beginning, for people increased, and were scattered abroad, and each
house had its own connections; there was no one who said, “For my part I
am of the house of Unkulunkulu.”’ Nay more, the Zulus who would not dare
to affront an ‘idhlozi,’ a common ghost, that might be angry and kill
them, have come to make open mock of the name of the great first
ancestor. When the grown-up people wish to talk privately or eat
something by themselves, it is the regular thing to send the children
out to call at the top of their voices for Unkulunkulu. ‘The name of
Unkulunkulu has no respect paid to it among black men; for his house no
longer exists. It is now like the name of a very old crone, who has no
power to do even a little thing for herself, but sits continually where
she sat in the morning till the sun sets. And the children make sport of
her, for she cannot catch them and flog them, but only talk with her
mouth. Just so is the name of Unkulunkulu when all the children are told
to go and call him. He is now a means of making sport of children.’[780]
In Aryan religion, the divinities just described give us analogues for
the Hindu Yama, throughout his threefold nature as First Man, as solar
God of Hades, as Judge of the Dead. Professor Max Müller thus suggests
his origin, which may indeed be inferred from his being called the child
of Vivasvat, himself the Sun: ‘The sun, conceived as setting or dying
every day, was the first who had trodden the path of life from East to
West—the first mortal—the first to show us the way when our course is
run, and our sun sets in the far West. Thither the fathers followed
Yama; there they sit with him rejoicing, and thither we too shall go
when his messengers (day and night) have found us out.... Yama is said
to have crossed the rapid waters, to have shown the way to many, to have
first known the path on which our fathers crossed over.’ It is a
perfectly consistent myth-formation, that the solar Yama should become
the first of mortals who died and discovered the way to the other world,
who guides other men thither and assembles them in a home which is
secured to them for ever. As representative of death, Yama had even in
early Aryan times his aspects of terror, and in later Indian theology he
becomes not only the Lord but the awful Judge of the Dead, whom some
modern Hindus are said to worship alone of all the gods, alleging that
their future state is to be determined only by Yama, and that they have
nothing therefore to hope or fear from any beside him. In these days,
Hindu and Parsi in Bombay are learning from scholars in Europe the
ancient connexion of their long antagonistic faiths, and have to hear
that Yama son of Visavat sitting on his awful judgment-seat of the dead,
to reward the good and punish the wicked with hideous tortures, and Yima
son of Vivanhâo who in primæval days reigned over his happy deathless
kingdom of good Zarathustrian men, are but two figures developed in the
course of ages out of one and the same Aryan nature-myth.[781] Within
the limits of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theology, the First Man
scarcely occupies more than a place of precedence among the human race
in Hades or in Heaven, not the high office of Lord of the Dead. Yet that
tendency to deify an ideal ancestor, which we observe to act so strongly
on lower races, has taken effect also here. The Rabbinical Adam is a
gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven, for the definition of
whose stature Rabbi Eliezer cites Deuteronomy iv. 32, ‘God made man
(Adam) upon the earth, and from one end of heaven to the other.’[782] It
is one of the familiar episodes of the Koran, how the angels were bidden
to bow down before Adam, the regent of Allah upon earth, and how Eblis
(Diabolus) swelling with pride, refused the act of adoration.[783] Among
the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the
Deity had revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the
Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.[784]
The figures of the great deities of Polytheism, thus traced in outline
according to the determining idea on which each is shaped, seem to show
that conceptions originating under rude and primitive conditions of
human thought and passing thence into the range of higher culture, may
suffer in the course of ages the most various fates, to be expanded,
elaborated, transformed, or abandoned. Yet the philosophy of modern ages
still to a remarkable degree follows the primitive courses of savage
thought, even as the highways of our land so often follow the unchanging
tracks of barbaric roads. Let us endeavour timidly and circumspectly to
trace onward from savage times the courses of vast and pregnant
generalization which tend towards the two greatest of the world’s
schemes of religious doctrine, the systems of Dualism and Monotheism.
Rudimentary forms of Dualism, the antagonism of a Good and Evil Deity,
are well known among the lower races of mankind. The investigation of
these savage and barbaric doctrines, however, is a task demanding
peculiar caution. The Europeans in contact with these rude tribes since
their discovery, themselves for the most part holding strongly dualistic
forms of Christianity, to the extent of practically subjecting the world
to the contending influences of armies of good and evil spirits under
the antagonistic control of God and Devil, were liable on the one hand
to mistake and exaggerate savage ideas in this direction, so that their
records of native religion can only be accepted with reserve, while on
the other hand there is no doubt that dualistic ideas have been largely
introduced and developed among the savages themselves, under this same
European influence. For instance, among the natives of Australia, we
hear of the great deity Nambajandi who dwells in his heavenly paradise,
where the happy shades of black men feast and dance and sing for
evermore; over against him stands the great evil being Warrūgūra, who
dwells in the nethermost regions, who causes the great calamities which
befall mankind, and whom the natives represent with horns and tail,
although no horned beast is indigenous in the land.[785] There may be
more or less native substratum in all this, but the hints borrowed from
popular Christian ideas are unmistakeable. Thus also, among the North
American Indians, the native religion was modified under the influence
of ideas borrowed from the white men, and there arose a full dualistic
scheme, of which Loskiel, a Moravian missionary conversant especially
with Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, gives the following suggestive
particulars, dating from 1794. ‘They (the Indians) first received in
modern times through the Europeans the idea of the Devil, the Prince of
Darkness. They consider him as a very mighty spirit, who can only do
evil, and therefore call him the Evil One. Thus they now believe in a
great good and a great evil spirit; to the one they ascribe all good,
and to the other all evil. About thirty years ago, a remarkable change
took place in the religious opinions of the Indians. Some preachers of
their own nation pretended to have received revelations from above, to
have travelled into heaven, and conversed with God. They gave different
accounts of their journey to heaven, but all agreed in this, that no one
could arrive there without great danger; for the road runs close by the
gates of hell. There the Devil lies in ambush, and snatches at every one
who is going to God. Now those who have passed by this dangerous place
unhurt, come first to the Son of God, and from him to God himself, from
whom they pretend to have received a commandment, to instruct the
Indians in the way to heaven. By them the Indians were informed that
heaven was the dwelling of God, and hell that of the Devil. Some of
these preachers had not indeed reached the dwelling of God, but
professed to have approached near enough to hear the cocks in heaven
crow, or to see the smoke of the chimneys in heaven, &c., &c.’[786]
Such unequivocal proofs that savage tribes can adopt and work into the
midst of their native beliefs the European doctrine of the Good and Evil
Spirit, must induce us to criticize keenly all recorded accounts of the
religion of uncultured tribes, lest we should mistake the confused
reflexion of Christendom for the indigenous theology of Australia or
Canada. It is the more needful to bring this state of things into the
clearest light, in order that the religion of the lower tribes may be
placed in its proper relation to the religion of the higher nations.
Genuine savage faiths do in fact bring to our view what seem to be
rudimentary forms of ideas which underlie dualistic theological schemes
among higher nations. It is certain that even among rude savage hordes,
native thought has already turned toward the deep problem of good and
evil. Their crude though earnest speculation has already tried to solve
the great mystery which still resists the efforts of moralists and
theologians. But as in general the animistic doctrine of the lower races
is not yet an ethical institution, but a philosophy of man and nature,
so savage dualism is not yet a theory of abstract moral principles, but
a theory of pleasure or pain, profit or loss, affecting the individual
man, his family, or at the utmost stretch, his people. This narrow and
rudimentary distinction between good and evil was not unfairly stated by
the savage who explained that if anybody took away his wife, that would
be bad, but if he himself took someone’s else’s, that would be good. Now
by the savage or barbarian mind, the spiritual beings which by their
personal action account for the events of life and the operations of
nature, are apt to be regarded as kindly or hostile, sometimes or
always, like the human beings on whose type they are so obviously
modelled. In such a case, we may well judge by the safe analogy of
disembodied human souls, and it appears that these are habitually
regarded as sometimes friends and sometimes foes of the living. Nothing
could be more conclusive in this respect than an account of the three
days’ battle between two factions of Zulu ghosts for the life of a man
and wife whom the one spiritual party desired to destroy and the other
to save; the defending spirits prevailed, dug up the bewitched
charm-bags which had been buried to cause sympathetic disease, and flung
these objects into the midst of the assembly of the people watching in
silence, just as the spirits now fling real flowers at a table-rapping
séance.[787] For spirits less closely belonging to the definition of
ghosts, may be taken Rochefort’s remarks in the 17th century as to the
two sorts of spirits, good and bad, recognized by the Caribs of the West
Indies. This writer declares that their good spirits or divinities are
in fact so many demons who seduce them and keep them enchained in their
damnable servitude; but nevertheless, he says, the people themselves do
distinguish them from their evil spirits.[788] Nor can we pronounce this
distinction of theirs unreasonable, learning from other authorities that
it was the office of some of these spirits to attend men as familiar
genii, and of others to inflict diseases. After the numerous details
which have incidentally been cited in the present volumes, it will be
needless to offer farther proof that spiritual beings are really
conceived by savages and barbarians as ranged in antagonistic ranks as
good and evil, i.e., friendly and hostile to themselves. The interesting
enquiry on which it is here desirable to collect evidence, is this: how
far are the doctrines of the higher nations anticipated in principle
among the lower tribes, in the assignment of the conduct of the universe
to two mighty hostile beings, in whom the contending powers of good and
evil are personified, the Good Deity and the Evil Deity, each the head
and ruler of a spiritual host like-minded? The true answer seems to be
that savage belief displays to us the primitive conceptions which, when
developed in systematic form and attached to ethical meaning, take their
place in religious systems of which the Zoroastrian is the type.
First, when in district after district two special deities with special
native names are contrasted in native religion as the Good and Evil
Deity, it is in some cases easier to explain these beings as native at
least in origin, than to suppose that foreign intercourse should have
exerted the consistent and far-reaching influence needed to introduce
them. Second, when the deities in question are actually polytheistic
gods, such as Sun, Moon, Heaven, Earth, considered as of good or evil,
i.e., favourable or unfavourable aspect, this looks like native
development, not innovation derived from a foreign religion ignoring
such divinities. Third, when it is held that the Good Deity is remote
and otiose, but the Evil Deity present and active, and worship is
therefore directed especially to the propitiation of the hostile
principle, we have here a conception which appears native in the lower
culture, rather than derived from the higher culture to which it is
unfamiliar and even hateful. Now Dualism, as prevailing among the lower
races, will be seen in a considerable degree to assert its originality
by satisfying one or more of these conditions.
There have been recorded among the Indians of North America a group of
mythic beliefs, which display the fundamental idea of dualism in the
very act of germinating in savage religion. Yet the examination of these
myths leads us first to destructive criticism of a picturesque but not
ancient member of the series. An ethnologist, asked to point out the
most striking savage dualistic legend of the world, would be likely to
name the celebrated Iroquois myth of the Twin Brethren. The current
version of this legend is that set down in 1825 by the Christian chief
of the Tuscaroras, David Cusick, as the belief of his people. Among the
ancients, he relates, there were two worlds, the lower world in darkness
and possessed by monsters, the upper world inhabited by mankind. A woman
near her travail sank from this upper region to the dark world below.
She alighted on a Tortoise, prepared to receive her with a little earth
on his back, which Tortoise became an island. The celestial mother bore
twin sons into the dark world, and died. The tortoise increased to a
great island, and the twins grew up. One was of gentle disposition, and
was called Enigorio, the Good Mind, the other was of insolent character,
and was named Enigonhahetgea, the Bad Mind. The Good Mind, not contented
to remain in darkness, wished to create a great light; the Bad Mind
desired that the world should remain in its natural state. The Good Mind
took his dead mother’s head and made it the sun, and of a remnant of her
body he made the moon. These were to give light to the day and to the
night. Also he created many spots of light, now stars: these were to
regulate the days, nights, seasons, years. Where the light came upon the
dark world, the monsters were displeased, and hid themselves in the
depths, lest man should find them. The Good Mind continued the creation,
formed many creeks and rivers on the Great Island, created small and
great beasts to inhabit the forests, and fishes to inhabit the waters.
When he had made the universe, he doubted concerning beings to possess
the Great Island. He formed two images of the dust of the ground in his
own likeness, male and female, and by breathing into their nostrils gave
them living souls, and named them Ea-gwe-howe, that is ‘real people;’
and he gave the Great Island all the animals of game for their
maintenance; he appointed thunder to water the earth by frequent rains;
the island became fruitful, and vegetation afforded to the animals
subsistence. The Bad Mind went throughout the island and made high
mountains and waterfalls and great steeps, and created reptiles
injurious to mankind; but the Good Mind restored the island to its
former condition. The Bad Mind made two clay images in the form of man,
but while he was giving them existence they became apes; and so on. The
Good Mind accomplished the works of creation, notwithstanding the
imaginations of the Bad Mind were continually evil; thus he attempted to
enclose all the animals of game in the earth away from mankind, but his
brother set them free, and traces of them were made on the rocks near
the cave where they were shut in. At last the brethren came to single
combat for the mastery of the universe. The Good Mind falsely persuaded
the Bad Mind that whipping with flags would destroy his own life, but he
himself used the deer-horns, the instrument of death. After a two days’
fight, the Good Mind slew his brother and crushed him in the earth; and
the last words of the Bad Mind were that he would have equal power over
men’s souls after death, then he sank down to eternal doom and became
the Evil Spirit. The Good Mind visited the people, and then retired from
the earth.[789]
This is a graphic tale. Its versions of the cosmic myth of the
World-Tortoise, and its apparent philosophical myth of fossil
footprints, have much mythological interest. But its Biblical copying
extends to the very phraseology, and only partial genuineness can be
allowed to its main theme. Dr. Brinton has shown from early American
writers how much dualistic fancy has sprung up since the times of first
intercourse between natives and white men. When this legend is compared
with the earlier version given by Father Brebeuf, missionary to the
Hurons in 1636, we find its whole complexion altered; the moral dualism
vanishes; the names of Good and Bad Mind do not appear; it is the story
of Ioskeha the White One, with his brother Tawiscara the Dark One, and
we at once perceive that Christian influence in the course of two
centuries had given the tale a meaning foreign to its real intent. Yet
to go back to the earliest sources and examine this myth of the White
One and the Dark One, proves it to be itself a perfect example of the
rise of primitive dualism in the savage mind. Father Brebeuf’s story is
as follows: Aataentsic the Moon fell from heaven on earth, and bore two
sons, Taouiscaron and Iouskeha, who being grown up quarrelled; judge, he
says, if there be not in this a touch of the death of Abel. They came to
combat, but with very different weapons. Iouskeha had a stag-horn,
Taouiscaron contented himself with some wild-rose berries, persuading
himself that as soon as he should thus smite his brother, he would fall
dead at his feet; but it fell out quite otherwise than he had promised
himself, and Iouskeha struck him so heavy a blow in the side that the
blood gushed forth in streams. The poor wretch fled, and from his blood
which fell upon the land came the flints which the savages still call
Taouiscara, from the victim’s name. From this we see it to be true that
the original myth of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One,
had no moral element. It seems mere nature-myth, the contest between Day
and Night, for the Hurons knew that Iouskeha was the Sun, even as his
mother or grandmother Aataentsic was the Moon. Yet in the contrast
between these two, the Huron mind had already come to the rudimentary
contrast of the Good and Evil Deity. Iouskeha the Sun, it is expressly
said, seemed to the Indians their benefactor; their kettle would not
boil were it not for him; it was he who learnt from the Tortoise the art
of making fire; without him they would have no luck in hunting; it is he
who makes the corn to grow. Iouskeha the Sun takes care for the living
and all things concerning life, and therefore, says the missionary, they
say he is good. But Aataentsic the Moon, the creatress of earth and man,
makes men die and has charge of their departed souls, and they say she
is evil. The Sun and Moon dwell together in their cabin at the end of
the earth, and thither it was that the Indians made the mythic journey
of which various episodes have been more than once cited here; true to
their respective characters, the Sun receives the travellers kindly and
saves them from the harm the beauteous but hurtful Moon would have done
them. Another missionary of still earlier time identifies Iouskeha with
the supreme deity Atahocan: ‘Iouskeha,’ he says, ‘is good and gives
growth and fair weather; his grandmother Eatahentsic is wicked and
spoils.’[790] Thus in early Iroquois legend, the Sun and Moon, as god
and goddess of Day and Night, had already acquired the characters of the
great friend and enemy of man, the Good and Evil Deity. And as to the
related cosmic legend of Day and Night, contrasted in the persons of the
two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, though this was originally
pure unethic nature-myth, yet it naturally took the same direction among
the half-Europeanized Indians of later times, becoming a moral myth of
Good and Evil. The idea comes to full maturity in the modern shaping of
Iroquois religion, where the good and great deity Häwenneyu the Ruler
has opposed to him a rival deity keeping the same name as in the myth,
Hänegoategeh the Evil-minded. We have thus before us the profoundly
interesting fact, that the rude North American Indians have more than
once begun the same mythologic transition which in ancient Asia shaped
the contrast of light and darkness into the contrast of righteousness
and wickedness, by following out the same thought which still in the
European mind arrays in the hostile forms of Light and Darkness the
contending powers of Good and Evil.
Judging by such evidence, at once of the rudimentary dualism springing
up in savage animism, and of the tendency of this to amalgamate with
similar thought brought in by foreign intercourse, it is possible to
account for many systems of the dualistic class found in the native
religions of America. While the evidence may lead us to agree with Waitz
that the North American Indian dualism, the most distinct and universal
feature of their religion, is not to be altogether referred to a modern
Christian origin, yet care must be taken not to claim as the result of
primitive religious development what shows signs of being borrowed
civilized theology. The records remain of the Jesuit missionary teaching
under which the Algonquins came to use their native term Manitu, that
is, spirit or demon, in speaking of the Christian God and Devil as the
good and the evil Manitu. Still later, the Great Spirit and the Evil
Spirit, Kitchi Manitu and Matchi Manitu, gained a wider place in the
beliefs of North American tribes, who combined these adopted Christian
conceptions with older native beliefs in powers of light and warmth and
life and protection, of darkness and cold and death and destruction.
Thus the two great antagonistic Beings became chiefs of the kindly and
harmful spirits pervading the world and struggling for the mastery over
it. Here the nature-religion of the savage was expanded and developed
rather than set on foot by the foreigner. Among other American races,
such combinations of foreign and native religious ideas are easy to
find, though hard to analyse. In the extreme north-west, we may doubt
any native origin in the semi-Christianized Kodiak’s definition of
Shljem Shoá the creator of heaven and earth, to whom offerings were made
before and after the hunt, as contrasted with Ijak the bad spirit
dwelling in the earth. In the extreme south-east may be found more
originality among the Floridan Indians two or three centuries ago, for
they are said to have paid solemn worship to the Bad Spirit Toia who
plagued them with visions, but to have had small regard for the Good
Spirit, who troubles himself little about mankind.[791] On the southern
continent, Martius makes this characteristic remark as to the rude
tribes of Brazil: ‘All Indians have a lively conviction of the power of
an evil principle over them; in many there dawns also a glimpse of the
good; but they revere the one less than they fear the other. It might be
thought that they hold the Good Being weaker in relation to the fate of
man than the evil.’ This generalization is to some extent supported by
statements as to particular tribes. The Macusis are said to recognize
the good creator Macunaima, ‘he who works by night,’ and his evil
adversary Epel or Horiuch: of these people it is observed that ‘All the
powers of nature are products of the Good Spirit, when they do not
disturb the Indian’s rest and comfort, but the work of evil spirits when
they do.’ Uauüloa and Locozy, the good and evil deity of the Yumanas,
live above the earth and toward the sun; the Evil Deity is feared by
these savages, but the Good Deity will come to eat fruit with the
departed and take their souls to his dwelling, wherefore they bury the
dead each doubled up in his great earthen pot, with fruit in his lap,
and looking toward the sunrise. Even the rude Botocudos are thought to
recognize antagonistic principles of good and evil in the persons of the
Sun and Moon.[792] This idea has especial interest from its
correspondence on the one hand with that of the Iroquois tribes, and on
the other with that of the comparatively civilized Muyscas of Bogota,
whose good deity is unequivocally a mythic Sun, thwarted in his kindly
labours for man by his wicked wife Huythaca the Moon.[793] The native
religion of Chili is said to have placed among the subaltern deities
Meulen, the friend of man, and Huecuvu the bad spirit and author of
evil. These people can hardly have learnt from Christianity to conceive
their evil spirit as simply and fully the general cause of misfortune:
if the earth quakes, Huecuvu has given it a shock; if a horse tires,
Huecuvu has ridden him; if a man falls sick, Huecuvu has sent the
disease into his body, and no man dies but that Huecuvu suffocates
him.[794]
In Africa, again, allowing for Moslem influence, dualism is not ill
represented in native religion. An old account from Loango describes the
natives as theoretically recognizing Zambi the supreme deity, creator of
good and lover of justice, and over against him Zambi-anbi the
destroyer, the counsellor of crime, the author of loss and accident, of
disease and death. But when it comes to actual worship, as the good god
will always be favourable, it is the god of evil who must be appeased,
and it is for his satisfaction that men abstain some from one kind of
food and some from another.[795] Among accounts of the two rival deities
in West Africa, one describes the Guinea negroes as recognizing below
the Supreme Deity two spirits (or classes of spirits), Ombwiri and
Onyambe, the one kind and gentle, doing good to men and rescuing them
from harm, the other hateful and wicked, whose seldom mentioned name is
heard with uneasiness and displeasure.[796] It would be scarcely
profitable, in an enquiry where accurate knowledge of the doctrine of
any insignificant tribe is more to the purpose than vague speculation on
the theology of the mightiest nation, to dwell on the enigmatic traces
of ancient Egyptian dualism. Suffice it to say that the two
brother-deities Osiris and Seti, Osiris the beneficent solar divinity
whose nature the blessed dead took on them, Seti perhaps a rival
national god degraded to a Typhon, seem to have become the
representative figures of a contrasted scheme of light and darkness,
good and evil; the sculptured granite still commemorates the contests of
their long-departed sects, where the hieroglyphic square-eared beast of
Seti has been defaced to substitute for it the figure of Osiris.[797]
The conception of the light-god as the good deity in contrast to a rival
god of evil, is one plainly suggested by nature, and naturally recurring
in the religions of the world. The Khonds of Orissa may be counted its
most perfect modern exponents in barbaric culture. To their supreme
creative deity, Būra Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, there
stands opposed his evil consort Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, and the
history of good and evil in the world is the history of his work and her
counterwork. He created a world paradisaic, happy, harmless; she
rebelled against him, and to blast the lot of his new creature, man, she
brought in disease, and poison, and all disorder, ‘sowing the seeds of
sin in mankind as in a ploughed field.’
Death became the divine punishment of wickedness, the spontaneously
fertile earth went to jungle and rock and mud, plants and animals grew
poisonous and fierce, throughout nature good and evil were commingled,
and still the fight goes on between the two great powers. So far all
Khonds agree, and it is on the practical relation of good and evil that
they split into their two hostile sects of Būra and Tari. Būra’s sect
hold that he triumphed over Tari, in sign of her discomfiture imposed
the cares of childbirth on her sex, and makes her still his subject
instrument wherewith to punish; Tari’s sect hold that she still
maintains the struggle, and even practically disposes of the happiness
of man, doing evil or good on her own account, and allowing or not
allowing the Creator’s blessings to reach mankind.[798]
Now that the sacred books of the Zend-Avesta are open to us, it is
possible to compare the doctrines of savage tribes with those of the
great faith through which of all others Dualism seems to have impressed
itself on the higher nations. The religion of Zarathustra was a schism
from that ancient Aryan nature-worship which is represented in a pure
and early form in the Veda, and in depravity and decay in modern
Hinduism. The leading thought of the Zarathustrian faith was the contest
of Good and Evil in the world, a contrast typified and involved in that
of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, and brought to personal shape in
the warfare of Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu, the Good and Evil Deity,
Ormuzd and Ahriman. The prophet Zarathustra said: ‘In the beginning
there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity.
These are the good and the base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one
of these two spirits. Be good, not base!’ The sacred Vendidad begins
with the record of the primæval contest of the two principles.
Ahura-Mazda created the best of regions and lands, the Aryan home,
Sogdia, Bactria, and the rest; Anra-Mainyu against his work created snow
and pestilence, buzzing insects and poisonous plants, poverty and
sickness, sin and unbelief. The modern Parsi, in passages of his
formularies of confession, still keeps alive the old antagonism. I
repent, he says, of all kind of sins which the evil Ahriman produced
amongst the creatures of Ormuzd in opposition. ‘That which was the wish
of Ormazd the Creator, and I ought to have thought and have not thought,
what I ought to have spoken and have not spoken, what I ought to have
done and have not done; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and
works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with
the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin. That which was the
wish of Ahriman, and I ought not to have thought and yet have thought,
what I ought not to have spoken and yet have spoken, what I ought not to
have done and yet have done; of these sins repent I with thoughts,
words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as
heavenly, with the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin.’ ...
‘May Ahriman be broken, may Ormazd increase.’[799] The Izedis or
Yezidis, the so-called Devil-worshippers, still remain a numerous though
oppressed people in Mesopotamia and adjacent countries. Their adoration
of the sun and horror of defiling fire accord with the idea of a Persian
origin of their religion (Persian ized = god), an origin underlying more
superficial admixture of Christian and Moslem elements. This remarkable
sect is distinguished by a special form of dualism. While recognizing
the existence of a Supreme Being, their peculiar reverence is given to
Satan, chief of the angelic host, who now has the means of doing evil to
mankind, and in his restoration will have the power of rewarding them.
‘Will not Satan then reward the poor Izedis, who alone have never spoken
ill of him, and have suffered so much for him?’ Martyrdom for the rights
of Satan! exclaims the German traveller to whom an old white-bearded
devil-worshipper thus set forth the hopes of his religion.[800]
Direct worship of the Evil Principle, familiar as it is to low barbaric
races, is scarcely to be found among people higher in civilization than
these persecuted and stubborn sectaries of Western Asia. So far as such
ideas extend in the development of religion, they seem fair evidence how
far worship among low tribes turns rather on fear than love. That the
adoration of a Good Deity should have more and more superseded the
propitiation of an Evil Deity, is the sign of one of the great movements
in the education of mankind, a result of happier experience of life, and
of larger and more gladsome views of the system of the universe. It is
not, however, through the inactive systems of modern Parsism and Izedism
that the mighty Zoroastrian dualism has exerted its main influence on
mankind. We must look back to long-past ages for traces of its contact
with Judaism and Christianity. It is often and reasonably thought that
intercourse between Jews and ancient Persians was an effective agent in
producing that theologic change which differences the later Jew of the
Rabbinical books from the earlier Jew of the Pentateuch, a change in
which one important part is the greater prominence of the dualistic
scheme. So in later times (about the fourth century), the contact of
Zoroastrism and Christianity appears to have been influential in
producing Manichæism. Manichæism is known mostly on the testimony of its
adversaries, but thus much seems clear, that it is based on the very
doctrine of the two antagonistic principles of good and evil, of spirit
and matter. It sets on the one hand God, original good and source of
good alone, primal light and lord of the kingdom of light, and on the
other hand the Prince of Darkness, with his kingdom of darkness, of
matter, of confusion, and destruction. The theory of ceaseless conflict
between these contending powers becomes a key to the physical and moral
nature and course of the universe.[801] Among Christian or
semi-Christian sects, the Manichæans stand as representatives of dualism
pushed to its utmost development. It need scarcely be said, however,
that Christian dualism is not bounded by the limits of this or that
special sect. In so far as the Evil Being, with his subordinate powers
of darkness, is held to exist and act in any degree in independence of
the Supreme Deity and his ministering spirits of light, so far
theological schools admit, though in widely different grades of
importance, a philosophy of nature and of life which has its basis
rather in dualism than in monotheism.
We now turn to the last objects of our present survey, those theological
beliefs of the lower tribes of mankind which point more or less
distinctly toward a doctrine of Monotheism. Here it is by no means
proposed to examine savage ideas from the point of view of doctrinal
theology, an undertaking which would demand arguments quite beyond the
present range. Their treatment is limited to classifying the actual
beliefs of the lower races, with some ethnographic considerations as to
their origin and their relation to higher religions. For this purpose it
is desirable to distinguish the prevalent doctrines of the uncultured
world from absolute monotheism. At the outset, care is needed to exclude
an ambiguity of which the importance often goes unnoticed. How are the
mighty but subordinate divinities, recognized in different religions, to
be classed? Beings who in Christian or Moslem theology would be called
angels, saints, demons, would under the same definitions be called
deities in polytheistic systems. This is obvious, but we may realize it
more distinctly from its actually having happened. The Chuwashes, a race
of Tatar affinity, are stated to reverence a god of Death, who takes to
himself the souls of the departed, and whom they call Esrel; it is
curious that Castrén, in mentioning this, should fail to point out that
this deity is no other than Azrael the angel of death, adopted under
Moslem influence.[802] Again, in the mixed Pagan and Christian religion
of the Circassians, which at least in its recently prevalent form would
be reckoned polytheistic, there stand beneath the Supreme Being a number
of mighty subordinate deities, of whom the principal are Iele the
Thunder-god, Tleps the Fire-god, Seoseres the god of Wind and Water,
Misitcha the Forest-god, and Mariam the Virgin Mary.[803] If the
monotheistic criterion be simply made to consist in the Supreme Deity
being held as creator of the universe and chief of the spiritual
hierarchy, then its application to savage and barbaric theology will
lead to perplexing consequences. Races of North and South America, of
Africa, of Polynesia, recognizing a number of great deities, are usually
and reasonably considered polytheists, yet under this definition their
acknowledgment of a Supreme Creator, of which various cases will here be
shown, would entitle them at the same time to the name of monotheists.
To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required,
assigning the distinctive attributes of deity to none save the Almighty
Creator. It may be declared that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe
of monotheists has been ever known. Nor are any fair representatives of
the lower culture in a strict sense pantheists. The doctrine which they
do widely hold, and which opens to them a course tending in one or other
of these directions, is polytheism culminating in the rule of one
supreme divinity. High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of
local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and element, there
are to be discerned in barbaric theology shadowings, quaint or majestic,
of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforth to be traced onward in
expanding power and brightening glory along the history of religion. It
is no unimportant task, partial as it is, to select and group the
typical data which show the nature and position of the doctrine of
supremacy, as it comes into view within the lower culture.
On the threshold of the investigation, there meets us the same critical
difficulty which obstructs the study of primitive dualism. Among low
tribes who have been in contact with Christianity or Mohammedanism, how
are we to tell to what extent, under this foreign influence, dim,
uncouth ideas of divine supremacy may have been developed into more
cultured forms, or wholly foreign ideas implanted? We know how the
Jesuit missionaries led the native Canadians to the conception of the
Great Manitu; how they took up the native Brazilian name of the divine
Thunder, Tupan, and adapted its meaning to convey in Christian teaching
the idea of God. Thus, again, we find most distinctly-marked African
ideas of a Supreme Deity in the West, where intercourse with Moslems has
actually Islamized or semi-Islamized whole negro nations, and the name
of Allah is in all men’s mouths. The ethnographer must be ever on the
look-out for traces of such foreign influence in the definition of the
Supreme Deity acknowledged by any uncultured race, a divinity whose
nature and even whose name may betray his adoption from abroad. Thus the
supreme Iroquois deity, Neo or Hawaneu, the pre-existent creator, has
been triumphantly adduced to show the monotheism underlying the native
creeds of America. But it seems that this divinity was introduced by the
French Catholic missionaries, and that Niio is an altered form of
Dieu.[804] Among the list of supreme deities of the lower races who are
also held to be first ancestors of man, we hear of Louquo, the uncreate
first Carib, who descended from the eternal heaven, made the flat earth,
and produced man from his own body. He lived long on earth among men,
died and came to life again after three days, and returned to
heaven.[805] It would be hardly reasonable to enumerate, among genuine
deities of native West Indian religion, a being with characteristics
thus on the face of them adopted from the religion of the white men. Yet
even in such extreme cases, it does not necessarily follow that the
definitions of these deities, vitiated as they are for ethnographical
use by foreign influence, have not to some extent a native substratum.
In criticising details, moreover, it must not be forgotten how largely
the similarities in the religions of different races may be of
independent origin, and how closely allied are many ideas in the rude
native theologies of savages to ideas holding an immemorial place in the
religions of their civilized invaders. For the present purpose, however,
it is well to dwell especially on such evidence as by characteristic
traits or early date is farthest removed from suspicion of being
borrowed from a foreign source.
In surveying the peoples of the world, the ethnographer finds many who
are not shown to have any definite conception of a supreme deity; and
even where such a conception is placed on record, it is sometimes so
vaguely asserted, or on such questionable authority, that he can but
take note of it and pass on. In numerous cases, however, illustrated by
the following collection from different regions, certain leading ideas,
singly or blended, may be traced. There are many savage and barbaric
religions which solve their highest problem by the simple process of
raising to divine primacy one of the gods of polytheism itself. Even the
system of the manes-worshipper has been stretched to reach the limit of
supreme deity, in the person of the primæval ancestor. More frequently,
it is the nature-worshipper’s principle which has prevailed, giving to
one of the great nature-deities the precedence of the rest. Here, by no
recondite speculation, but by the plain teaching of nature, the choice
has for the most part lain between two mighty visible divinities, the
all-animating Sun and the all-encompassing Heaven. In the study of such
schemes, we are on intellectual terra firma. There is among the
religions of the lower races another notable group of systems, seemingly
in close connexion with the first. These display to us a heavenly
pantheon arranged on the model of an earthly political constitution,
where the commonalty are crowds of human souls and other tribes of
world-pervading spirits, the aristocracy are great polytheistic gods,
and the King is the supreme Deity. To this comparatively intelligible
side of the subject, a more perplexed and obscure side stands
contrasted. Among thoughtful men whose theory of the soul animating the
body has already led them to suppose a divine spirit animating the huge
mass of earth or sky, this idea needs but a last expansion to become a
doctrine of the universe as animated by one greatest, all-pervading
divinity, the World-Spirit. Moreover, where speculative philosophy
grapples with the vast fundamental world-problem, the solution is
attained by ascending from the Many to the One, by striving to discern
through and beyond the Universe a First Cause. Let the basis of such
reasoning be laid in theological ground, then the First Cause is
realized as the Supreme Deity. In such ways, the result of carrying to
their utmost limits the animistic conceptions which among low races and
high pervade the philosophy of religion, is to reach an idea of as it
were a soul of the world, a shaper, animator, ruler of the universe.
Entering these regions of transcendental theology, we are not to wonder
that the comparative distinctness belonging to conceptions of lower
spiritual beings here fades away. Human souls, subordinate
nature-spirits, and huge polytheistic nature-gods, carry with the
defined special functions they perform some defined character and
figure, but beyond such limits form and function blend into the infinite
and universal in the thought of supreme divinity. To realize this widest
idea, two especial ways are open. The first way is to fuse the
attributes of the great polytheistic powers into more or less of common
personality, thus conceiving that, after all, it is the same Highest
Being who holds up the heavens, shines in the sun, smites his foes in
the thunder, stands first in the human pedigree as the divine ancestor.
The second way is to remove the limit of theologic speculation into the
region of the indefinite and the inane. An unshaped divine entity
looming vast, shadowy, and calm beyond and over the material world, too
benevolent or too exalted to need human worship, too huge, too remote,
too indifferent, too supine, too merely existent, to concern himself
with the petty race of men,—this is a mystic form of formlessness in
which religion has not seldom pictured the Supreme.
Thus, then, it appears that the theology of the lower races already
reaches its climax in conceptions of a highest of the gods, and that
these conceptions in the savage and barbaric world are no copies stamped
from one common type, but outlines widely varying among mankind. The
degeneration-theory, in some instances no doubt with justice, may claim
such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remnants of higher religions.
Yet for the most part, the development-theory is competent to account
for them without seeking their origin in grades of culture higher than
those in which they are found existing. Looked upon as products of
natural religion, such doctrines of divine supremacy seem in no way to
transcend the powers of the low-cultured mind to reason out, nor of the
low-cultured imagination to deck with mythic fancy. There have existed
in times past, and do still exist, savage or barbaric peoples who hold
such views of a highest god as they may have attained to of themselves,
without the aid of more cultured nations. Among these races, Animism has
its distinct and consistent outcome, and Polytheism its distinct and
consistent completion, in the doctrine of a Supreme Deity.
The native religions of South America and the West Indies display a
well-marked series of types. The primacy of the Sun was long ago well
stated by the Moluches when a Jesuit missionary preached to them, and
they replied, ‘Till this hour, we never knew nor acknowledged anything
greater or better than the Sun.’[806] So when a later missionary argued
with the chief of the Tobas, ‘My god is good and punishes wicked
people,’ the chief replied, ‘My God (the Sun) is good likewise; but he
punishes nobody, satisfied to do good to all.’[807] In various
manifestations, moreover, there reigns among barbarians a supreme being
whose characteristics are those of the Heaven-god. It is thus with the
Tamoi of the Guaranis, ‘that beneficent deity worshipped in his blended
character of ancestor of mankind and ancient of heaven, lord of the
celestial paradise.’[808] It is so with the highest deity of the
Araucanians, Pillan the Thunder or the Thunderer, called also
Huenu-Pillan or Heaven-Thunder, and Vuta-gen or Great Being. ‘The
universal government of Pillan,’ says Molina, ‘is a prototype of the
Araucanian polity. He is the great Toqui (Governor) of the invisible
world, and as such has his Apo-Ulmenes, and his Ulmenes, to whom he
entrusts the administration of affairs of less importance. These ideas
are certainly very rude, but it must be acknowledged that the
Araucanians are not the only people who have regulated the things of
heaven by those of the earth.’[809] A different but not less
characteristic type of the Supreme Deity is placed on record among the
Caribs, a beneficent power dwelling in the skies, reposing in his own
happiness, careless of mankind, and by them not honoured nor
adored.[810]
The theological history of Peru, in ages before the Spanish conquest,
has lately had new light thrown on it by the researches of Mr. Markham.
Here the student comes into view of a rivalry full of interest in the
history of barbaric religion, the rivalry between the Creator and the
divine Sun. In the religion of the Incas, precedence was given to
Uiracocha, called Pachacamac, ‘Creator of the World.’ The Sun (with whom
was coupled his sister-wife the Moon) was the divine ancestor, the dawn
or origin, the totem or lar, of the Inca family. The three great deities
were the Creator, Sun, and Thunder; their images were brought out
together at great festivals into the square of Cuzco, llamas were
sacrificed to all three, and they could be addressed in prayer together,
‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever young, multiply the
people, and let them always be at peace.’ Yet the Thunder and Lightning
was held to come by the command of the Creator, and the following prayer
shows clearly that even ‘our father the Sun’ was but his creature:—
‘Uiracocha! Thou who gavest being to the Sun, and afterwards said
let there be day and night. Raise it and cause it to shine, and
preserve that which thou hast created, that it may give light to
men. Grant this, Uiracocha!
‘Sun! Thou who art in peace and safety, shine upon us, keep us from
sickness, and keep us in health and safety.’
Among the transitions of religion, however, it is not strange that a
subordinate God, by virtue of his nearer intercourse and power, should
usurp the place of the supreme deity. Among the various traces of this
taking place under the Incas, are traditions of the great temple at
Cuzco called ‘The Golden Place,’ where Manco Ccapac originally set up a
flat oval golden plate to signify the Creator; Mayta Ccapac, it is said,
renewed the Creator’s symbol, but Huascar Inca took it down, and set up
in its stead in the place of honour a round golden plate like the sun
with rays. The famous temple itself, Ccuricancha the ‘Golden Place,’ was
known to the Spaniards as the Temple of the Sun; no wonder that the idea
has come to be so generally accepted, that the Sun was the chief god of
Peru. There is even on record a memorable protest made by one Inca, who
dared to deny that the Sun could be the maker of all things, comparing
him to a tethered beast that must make ever the same daily round, and to
an arrow that must go whither it is sent, not whither it will. But what
availed philosophic protest, even from the head of church and state
himself, against a state church of which the world has seldom seen the
equal for stiff and solid organization? The Sun reigned in Peru till
Pizarro overthrew him, and his splendid golden likeness came down from
the temple wall to be the booty of a Castilian soldier, who lost it in
one night at play.[811]
Among rude tribes of the North American continent, evidence of the
primacy of the divine Sun is not unknown. Father Hennepin’s account of
the Sioux worshipping the Sun as the Creator is explicit enough, and
agrees with the argument of the modern Shawnees, that the Sun animates
everything, and therefore must be the Master of Life or Great
Spirit.[812] It is the widespread belief in this Great Spirit which has
long and deservedly drawn the attention of European thinkers to the
native religions of the North American tribes. The name of the Great
Spirit originates with the equivalent term Kitchi Manitu in the language
of the Algonquin Indians. Before the European intercourse in the 17th
century, these tribes had indeed no deity so called, but as has been
already pointed out, the term came first into use by the application of
the native word manitu, meaning demon or deity, to the Christian God.
During the following centuries, the name of the Great Spirit, with the
ideas belonging to the name, travelled far and wide over the continent.
It became the ordinary expression of Europeans in their descriptions of
Indian religion, and in discourse carried on in English words between
Europeans and Indians, and was more or less naturalized among the
Indians themselves. On their religions it had on the one hand a
transforming influence, while on the other hand, as is usual in the
combination of religions, the new divinity incorporated into himself the
characteristics of native divinities, so that native ideas remained in
part represented in him. A divine being whose characteristics are often
so unlike what European intercourse would have suggested, could be
hardly altogether of foreign origin.[813] Again, among the Greenlanders,
Torngarsuk or Great Spirit (his name is an augmentative of
‘torngak’—‘demon’) was known to the early Danish missionary Egede as the
oracular deity of the angekoks, to whose under-world souls hope to
descend at death. He so far held the place of supreme deity in the
native mind, that, as Cranz the missionary relates somewhat afterwards,
many Greenlanders hearing of God and his almighty power were apt to fall
on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who was meant; but he was
eventually identified with the Devil.[814] In like manner, Algonquin
Indians, early in the 17th century, hearing of the white man’s Deity,
identified him with one known to their own native belief, Atahocan the
Creator. When Le Jeune the missionary talked to them of an almighty
creator of heaven and earth, they began to say to one another,
‘Atahocan, Atahocan, it is Atahocan!’ The traditional idea of such a
being seems indeed to have lain in utter mythic vagueness in their
thoughts, for they had made his name into a verb, ‘Nitatahocan,’
meaning, ‘I tell a fable, an old fanciful story.’[815]