Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/340

We have now gone over what Mr. Howitt and Mr. Matthews tell us of Daramulun, Bunjil, Baiame, and Mungan-ngaur, supplementing the accounts of Bunjil and Baiame from Mr. Brough Smyth. We have not found these Supreme Beings eternal. Of Daramulun, it is expressly asserted that he died; he is "a confessed ghost-god." Bunjil, whatever he was once (perhaps an eaglehawk), is now a star. Baiame "went away" (or was puffed away by the jay), and now has his camp above the clouds. Munganngaur, who used to live on the earth, "ascended to the sky, where he still remains." In no case was heaven, or the sky, the god's first home. Hence it is the reverse of correct to say that "they were, naturally, from the beginning, from before the coming in of death, immortal Fathers in Heaven" (p. 206). We must be on our guard, too, against the expression "Father in Heaven," and against many other expressions rhetorically used by Mr. Lang anent gods of the lower races. They convey to our minds reminiscences of Christian teaching of which the savage mind is guiltless. Equally the words "eternal" and "immortal" are the vehicle of thoughts unknown to the lower culture. Vain will be the attempt to read the mind of the savage if we persist in putting a civilised gloss on all his ideas. Mr. Lang tells us that death is not envisaged by the savage as necessary and inevitable even for himself. He uses this fact, admitted by all anthropologists, against "the ghost theory" of the origin of religion (p. 203). But, if good for anything, it is good for more inferences than Mr. Lang cares to draw. A savage, who did not admit that he himself must die, would not think or speak of his gods as immortal; for that would be to assign them a distinctive quality, and to imply that he, on the other hand, was inevitably mortal. If they do not die, it is because their vaster power enables them to ward off dangers, magical or violent, to which all living things are liable. Still less would he conceive of them as eternal. Eternity and immortality express definite