the same set of ideas in more detail, are Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906)
and Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1905). See A.
Lang, Magic and Religion (London, 1901), for a criticism in detail
of the general theory as set forth in The Golden Bough. Whatever
may be said, Frazer has certainly made the most important of recent
contributions to the study of mythology. He has fixed the attention
of students on a mass of early ideas, previously much neglected save
by W. Mannhardt, and on the facts of ritual, which preserve these
ideas and represent them in a kind of mystery plays.
We are now in a position to sum up the ideas of savages about man’s relations to the world. We started on this inquiry because we found that savages regarded sky, wind, sun, earth and so forth as practically men, and we had then to ask, what sort of men, men with what powers? The result of our examination, so far, is that in savage opinion sky, wind, sun, sea and many other phenomena have, being personal, all the powers attributed to real human persons. These powers and qualities are: (1) relationship to animals and ability to be transformed and to transform others into animals and other objects; (2) magical accomplishments, as—(a) power to visit or to procure the visits of the dead; (b) other magical powers, such as control over the weather and over the fertility of nature in all departments. Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his myths, while these, again, are all the scientific explanations of the universe with which he has been able to supply himself.
Examples of Mythology.—Myths of the origin of the world and man are naturally most widely diffused. Man has everywhere asked himself whence things came and how, and his myths are his earliest extant form of answer to this question. So confused and inconsistent are the mythical answers that it is very difficult to classify them according to any system. If we try beginning with myths of creative gods, we find that the world is sometimes represented as pre-existent to the divine race. If we try beginning with myths of the origin of the world, we frequently find that it owes its origin to the activity of pre-existent supernatural beings. According to all modern views of creation, the creative mind is prior to the universe which it created. There is no such consistency of opinion in myths, whether of civilized or savage races. Perhaps the plan least open to objection is to begin with myths of the gods. But when we speak of gods, we must not give to the word a modern significance. As used here, gods merely mean non-natural and powerful beings, sometimes “magnified non-natural men,” sometimes beasts, birds or insects, sometimes the larger forces and phenomena of the universe conceived of as endowed with human personality and passions. When Plutarch examined the Osirian myth (De Isid. xxv.) he saw that the “gods” in the tale were really “demons,” “stronger than men, but having the divine part not wholly unalloyed”—“magnified non-natural men,” in short. And such are the gods of mythology.
In examining the myths of the gods we shall begin with the conceptions of the most backward tribes, and advance to the divine legends of the ancient civilized races. It will appear that, while the non-civilized gods are often theriomorphic, made in accordance with the ideas of non-civilized men, the civilized gods retain many characteristics of the savage gods, and these characteristics are the “irrational element” in the divine myths.
Myths of Gods: Savage Ideas.—It is not easy to separate the discussion of savage myths of gods from the problem, Whence and how arose the savage belief in gods? The orthodox anthropological explanation has been that of E. B. Tylor, which closely resembles Herbert Spencer’s “ghost theory.” By reflection on dreams, in which the self, or “spirit,” of the savage seems to wander free from the bounds of time and space, to see things remote, and to meet and recognize dead friends or foes; by speculation on the experiences of trance and of phantasms of the dead or living, beheld with waking eyes; by pondering on the phenomena of shadows, of breath, of death and life, the savage evolved the idea of a separable soul or spirit capable of surviving bodily death. The spirit of the dead may tenant a material object, a “fetish,” or may roam hungry and comfortless and need propitiation by food, for unpropitiated it is dangerous, or may be reincarnated, or may “go to its own herd” in another world. Again, it is naturally kind to its living kinsfolk, and so may be addressed in prayer. These are the doctrines of animism (q.v.), and, according to the usual anthropological theory, these spirits come to thrive to god’s estate in favourable circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great mana or wakan a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics, is the viewless vehicle of magical influences. Thus the ghost of the hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank, while again—the doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky, thunder, the sea, the forests—we have the beginnings of departmental deities, such as Agni, god of fire; Poseidon, god of the sea; Zeus, god of the sky—though in recent theories Zeus appears to be regarded as primarily the god of the oak tree, a spirit of vegetation.
On this theory animism, the doctrine of spirits, is the source of all belief in gods. But it is found that among the lowest or least cultured races, such as the south-eastern tribes of Australia, who do not propitiate ancestral spirits by offerings of food, or address them in prayer, there often exists a belief in an “All-Father,” to use Howitt’s convenient expression. This being cannot have been evolved out of the cult of ancestors, where ancestors are not worshipped; and he is not even regarded as a spirit, but, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, as “a magnified non-natural man.” He existed before death came into the world, and he still exists. His home is in or above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and institutions as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to their own places of reward and punishment. He is usually supposed to watch over human conduct, but this is by no means invariably the case. Sometimes he, like the Atnatu of the Kaitish tribe of central Australia, is only vigilant in matters of ritual, such as circumcision, subincision and the use of the sacred bull-roarer, the Greek ῥόμβος. As an almost universal rule, in the lowest culture, no prayers are addressed to this being; he has no sacrifices, no dwelling made with hands; and the images of him, in clay, that are made and danced round with invocations of his name at the tribal ceremonies of initiation, are destroyed at the close of the performances. If the name of “god” is denied to such beings because they receive little cult, it may still be admitted that the belief might easily develop into a form of theism, independent of and underived from animism, or the ghost theory.
The best account of this All-Father belief in the lowest culture is to be read in R. Howitt’s Native Races of South-East Australia. Under the names of Baiame, Pundjel, Mulkari, Daramulun and many others, the south-eastern tribes (both those who reckon descent in the female and those who reckon by the male line) have this faith in an All-Father, the Australian Savages. attributes varying in various communities. The most highly developed All-Father is the Baiame or Byamee of the Euahlayi tribe of north-western New South Wales, to whom prayers for the welfare of the souls of the dead are, or recently were, addressed—the tribe dwelling a hundred miles away from the nearest missionary station (Protestant).[1]
In the centre of Australia, Atnatu, self-created, is known, as has been said, to the Kaitish tribe, next neighbours of the Arunta of the Macdonnell Hills. Among the Arunta, Mr Strehlow (Globus, May 1907) finds such a being as Atnatu, and also among some other adjacent tribes, as the Luritja. See, too, Strehlow and von Leonhardi, in Veröffentlichungen aus dem städtischen Völker-Museum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1907, vol. i.). But Messrs B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, who discovered Atnatu, did not find any trace of an All-Father among the Arunta, or any other of the tribes to the north and north-east of the centre. Mr Strehlow’s branch of the Arunta they did not examine.
It is plain that the All-Father belief, in favourable circumstances, especially if ghost worship remained undeveloped, might be evolved into theism. But all over the savage world, especially in Africa, spirit worship has sprung up and choked the All-Father, who, however, in most savage regions, abides as a name, receiving no sacrifice, and, save among the Masai, seldom being addressed in prayer. A list of such otiose great beings in the background of religion is given in Lang’s The Making of Religion (1898). Since the publication of that book much additional evidence has accrued from Africa and Melanesia, where the belief occurs in a few islands, but, in the majority, is absent or unrecorded. Most of the fresh evidence is given in La Notion de l’être suprême chez les peuples non-civilisés, by René Hoffmann (Geneva, 1907). See also the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1899–1907), vols. xxix., xxxii., xxxiv., xxxv., and the works of Miss Mary Kingsley, and Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme, Reimer (Berlin, 1906), and Sundermann in Warneck’s Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, vol. xi. An excellent statement is that of Père Schmidt, S.V.D., in Anthropos, Bd. III., Hft. 3 (1908), pp. 559–611. Tylor’s efforts to show that these All-Fathers were derived from missionary or other European influences (Nineteenth
- ↑ See Mrs Langloh Parker’s The Euahlayi Tribe.
