on their backs a wooden doll to represent it.[1] Among the Bechuanas, it is a custom for married women to carry a doll with them till they have a child, when the doll is discarded. There is one of these dolls in the London Missionary Museum, consisting simply of a long calabash, like a bottle, wound round with strings of beads. The Basuto women use clay dolls in the same way, giving them the names of tutelary deities, and treating them as children.[2] Among the Ostyaks of Eastern Siberia, there is found a still more instructive case, in which we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol. When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him, which receives offerings and has honours paid to it, and the widow embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so, but sometimes the image of a shaman[3] is set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.[4]
The principal use of images to races in the lower stages of civilization is that to which their name of "the visible," ειδωλον, idol, has come to be in great measure restricted in modern language. The idol answers to the savage in one province of thought the same purpose that its analogue the doll does to the child. It enables him to give a definite existence and a personality to the vague ideas of higher beings, which his mind can hardly grasp without some material aid. How these ideas came into the minds of even the lowest savages, need not be discussed here; it is sufficient to know that, so far as we have accurate information, they seem to be present everywhere in at least a rudimentary state.
It does not appear that idols accompany religious ideas down to the lowest levels of the human race, but rather that they belong to a period of transition and growth. At least this seems the only reasonable explanation of the fact, that in America, for instance, among the lowest races, the Fuegians and the Indians
- ↑ Bastian, vol. ii. p. 376.
- ↑ Casalis, p. 251.
- ↑ A shaman is a native sorcerer or medicine-man. His name is corrupted from Sanskrit çramana, a Buddhist ascetic, a term which is one of the many relics of Buddhism in Northern Asia, having been naturalized into the grovelling fetish-worship of the Ostyaks and Tunguzes. See Weber, 'Indische Skizzen,' p. 66.
- ↑ Erman, 'Reise um die Erde;' Berlin, 1833–43, vol. ii. p. 677. 'Voyages au Nord,' vol. viii. p. 415.
