CHAPTER XVII.
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 Diety 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;[1] in the Samoan group, the household god of the father's or mother's family was appealed to;[2] in Peru the Moon takes to this office,[3] and the same natural idea recurs in Mexico;[4] in Esthonian religion the productive Earth-mother appropriately becomes patroness of human birth;[5] in the classic theology of Greece and Italy, the divine spouse of the Heaven-king, Hēra,[6] Juno,[7] 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.[8]
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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13] 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 corn, to fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious.[14] 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.[15] Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits.[16] 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.[17]
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.[18] Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thunder-god that he would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a victory.[19] 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.[20] 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.[21] 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.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24]
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.[25] 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,[26] 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.[27] 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.[28] 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.[29] 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.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32]
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.[33] 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;[34] 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.[35]
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.[36] 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.[37] 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.'[38]
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 man 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.[39] 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.'[40] 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.[41] Among the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the Deity bad revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.[42]
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,
1 'Rig-Veda,' x. 'Atharva-Veda,' xviii. Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd Ser. p. 514. Muir, 'Yama,' &c., in 'Journ. As. Soc. N. S.' vol. i. 1865. Roth in 'Ztschr. Deutsch. Morgenl. G.' vol. iv. p. 426. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 60. Avesta: 'Vendidad,' ii. Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. p. 621.
2 Eisenmenger, part i. p. 365.
3 Koran, ii. 28, vii. 10, &c.
4 Neander, 'Hist. of Chr.' vol. ii. pp. 81, 109, 174. 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 homed beast is indigenous in the land.[43] 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.'[44]
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 any body took away his wife, that would be bad, but if he himself took someone's else, 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.[45] 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.[46] 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.[47]
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 banishes; 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.'[48] 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.[49] 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 is 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.[50] 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.[51] 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.[52]
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.[53] 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.[54] 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.[55]
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.[56]
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 Ormazd 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.'[57] 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.[58]
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.[59] 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.[60] 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.[61] 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.[62] 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.[63] 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 diving 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.'[64] 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.'[65] 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.'[66] 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.'[67] 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.[68]
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 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 aflat 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.[69]
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.[70] 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 I7th 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.[71] 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.[72] 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.'[73]
In late times, Schoolcraft represents the Great Spirit as a Soul of the Universe, inhabiting and animating all things, recognized in rocks and trees, in cataracts and clouds, in thunder and lightning, in tempest and zephyr, becoming incarnate in birds and beasts as titular deities, existing in the world under every possible form, animate and inanimate.[74] Whether the Red Indian mind even in modern times really entertained this extreme pantheistic scheme, we may well doubt. In early times of American discovery, the records show a quite different and more usual conception of a supreme deity. Among the more noteworthy of these older documents are the following. Jacques Cartier, in his second Canadian voyage (1535), speaks of the people having no valid belief in God, for they believe in one whom they call Cudouagni, and say that he often speaks with them, and tells them what the weather will be; they say that when he is angry with them he casts earth in their eyes. Thevet's statement somewhat later is as follows: 'As to their religion, they have no worship or prayer to God, except that they contemplate the new moon, called in their language Osannaha, saying that Andouagni calls it thus, sending it little by little to advance or retard the waters. For the rest, they fully believe that there is a Creator, greater than the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, and who holds all in his power. He it is whom they call Andouagni, without however having any form or method of prayer to him.[75] In Virginia about 1586, we learn from Heriot that the natives believed in many gods, which they call 'mantoac,' but of different sorts and degrees, also that there is one chief god who first made other principal gods, and afterwards the sun, moon, and stars as petty gods. In New England, in 1622, Winslow says that they believe, as do the Virginians, in many divine powers, yet of one above all the rest; the Massachusetts call their great god Kiehtan, who made all the other gods; he dwells far westerly above the heavens, whither all good men go when they die; 'They never saw Kiehtan, but they hold it a great charge and dutie, that one age teach another; and to him they make feasts, and cry and sing for plentie and victorie, or anything is good.' Another famous native American name for the supreme deity is Oki. Captain John Smith, the hero of the colonization of Virginia in 1607, he who was befriended by Pocahontas, 'La Belle Sauvage,' thus describes the religion of the country, and especially of her tribe, the Powhatans: 'There is yet in Virginia no place discovered to be so Savage in which they haue not a Religion, Deer, and Bow and Arrowes. All things that are able to doe them hurt beyond their prevention, they adore with their kinde of divine worship; as the fire, water, lightning, thunder, our Ordnance peeces, horses, &c. But their chief e god they worship is the Devill. Him they call Okee, and serue him more of feare than loue. They say they haue conference with him, and fashion themselves as neare to his shape as they can imagine. In their Temples they haue his image evill favouredly carved, and then painted and adorned with chaines of copper, and beads, and covered with a skin in such manner as the deformities may well suit with such a God.'[76] This quaint account deserves to be quoted at length as an example of the judgment which a half-educated and whole-prejudiced European is apt to pass on savage deities, which from his point of view seem of simply diabolic nature. It is known from other sources that Oki, a word belonging not to the Powhatan but to the Huron language, was in fact a general name for spirit or deity. We may judge the real belief of these Indians better from Father Brebeuf's description of the Heaven God, cited here in a former chapter: they imagine in the heavens an Oki, that is, a Demon or power ruling the seasons of the year, and controlling the winds and waves, a being whose anger they fear, and whom they call on in making solemn treaties.[77] About a century later, Father Lafitau wrote passages which illustrate well the transformation of native animistic conceptions under missionary influence into analogues of Christian theology. Such general terms for spiritual beings as 'oki' or 'manitu' had become to him individual names of one supreme being. 'This great Spirit, known among the Caribs under the name of Chemiin, under that of Manitou among the Algonquin nations, and under that of Okki among those who speak the Huron tongue ...' &c. All American tribes, he says, use expressions which can only denote God: they call him the great Spirit, sometimes the Master and Author of Life ...' &c.[78] The longer rude tribes of America have been in contact with European belief, the less confidently can we ascribe to purely native sources the theologic scheme their religions have settled into. Yet the Greeks towards the end of the 18th century preserved some elements of native faith. They believed in the Great Spirit, the Master of Breath (a being whom Bartram represents as a soul and governor of the universe): to him they would address their frequent prayers and ejaculations, at the same time paying a kind of homage to the sun, moon, and stars, as the mediators or ministers of the Great Spirit, in dispensing his attributes for their comfort and well-being in this life.[79] In our own day, among the wild Comanches of the prairies, the Great Spirit, their creator and supreme deity, is above Sun and Moon and Earth; towards him is sent the first puff of tobacco-smoke before the Sun receives the second, and to him is offered the first morsel of the feast.[80]
Turning from the simple faiths of savage tribes of North America to the complex religion of the half-civilized Mexican nation, we find what we might naturally except, a cumbrous polytheism complicated by mixture of several national pantheons, and beside and beyond this, certain appearances of a doctrine of divine supremacy. But these doctrines seem to have been spoken of more definitely than the evidence warrants. A remarkable native development of Mexican theism must be admitted, in so far as we may receive the native historian Ixtlilxochitl's account of the worship paid by Nezahualcoyotl, the poet king of Tezcuco, to the invisible supreme Tloque Nahuaque, he who has all in him, the cause of causes, in whose star-roofed pyramid stood no idol, and who there received no bloody sacrifice, but only flowers and incense. Yet it would have been more satisfactory were the stories told by this Aztec panegyrist of his royal ancestor confirmed by other records. Traces of divine supremacy in Mexican religion are especially associated with Tezcatlipoca, 'Shining Mirror,' a deity who seems in his original nature the Sun-God, and thence by expansion to have become the soul of the world, creator of heaven and earth, lord of all things, Supreme Deity. Such conceptions may in more or less measure have arisen in native thought, but it should be pointed out that the remarkable Aztec religious formulas collected by Sahagun, in which the deity Tezcatlipoca is so prominent a figure, show traces of Christian admixture in their material, as well as of Christian influence in their style. For instance, all students of Mexican antiquities know the belief in Mictlan, the Hades of the dead. But when one of these Aztec prayer-formulas (concerning auricular confession, the washing away of sins, and a new birth) makes mention of sinners being plunged into a lake of intolerable misery and torment, the introduction of an idea so obviously European condemns the composition as not purely native. The question of the actual developments of ideas verging on pantheism or theism, among the priests and philosophers of native Mexico, is one to be left for further criticism.[81]
In the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity is especially manifested in that great mythologic divinity of the Polynesian race, whom the New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the Hawaiians Kanaroa, the Tongans and Samoans Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa. Students of the science of religion who hold polytheism to be but the mis-development of a primal idea of divine unity, which in spite of corruption continues to pervade it, might well choose this South Sea Island divinity as their aptest illustration from the savage world. Taaroa, says Moerenhout, is their supreme or rather only god; for all the others, as in other known polytheisms, seem scarcely more than sensible figures and images of the infinite attributes united in his divine person. The following is given as a native poetic definition of the Creator. 'He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named.' According to Ellis, Taaroa is described in the Leeward Islands as the eternal parentless uncreate Creator, dwelling alone in the highest heaven, whose bodily form mortals cannot see, who after intervals of innumerable seasons casts off his body or shell and becomes renewed. It was he who created Hina his daughter, and with her aid formed the sky and earth and sea. He founded the world on a solid rock, which with all the creation he sustains by his invisible power. Then he created the ranks of lesser deities such as reign over sea and land and air, and govern peace and war, and preside over physic and husbandry, and canoe-building, and roofing, and theft. The version from the Windward Islands is that Taaroa's wife was the rock, the foundation of all things, and she gave birth to earth and sea. Now, fortunately for our understanding of this myth, the name of Taaroa's wife, with whom he begat the lesser deities, was taken down in Tahiti in Captain Cook's time. She was a rock called Papa, and her name plainly suggests her identity with Papa the Earth, the wife of Rangi the Heaven in the New Zealand myth of Heaven and Earth, the great first parents. If this inference be just, then it seems that Taaroa the Creator is no personification of a primæval theistic idea, but simply the divine personal Heaven transformed under European influence into the supreme Heaven-god. Thus, when Turner gives the Samoan myths of Tangaloa in heaven presiding over the production of the earth from beneath the waters, or throwing down from the sky rocks which are now islands, the classic name by which he calls him is that which rightly describes his nature and mythic origin — Tangaloa, the Polynesian Jupiter. Yet in island district after district, we find the name of the mighty heavenly creator given to other and lesser mythic beings. In Tahiti, the manes-worshipper's idea is applied not only to lesser deities, but to Taaroa the Creator himself, whom some maintained to be but a man deified after death. In the New Zealand mythology, Tangaroa figures on the one hand as Sea-god and father of fish and reptiles, on the other as the mischievous eaves-dropping god who reveals secrets. In Tonga, Tangaloa was god of artificers and arts, and his priests were carpenters; it was he who went forth to fish, and dragged up the Tonga islands from the bottom of the sea. Here, then, he corresponds with Maui, and indeed Tangaroa and Maui are found blending in Polynesia even to full identification. It is neither easy nor safe to fix to definite origin the Protean shapes of South Sea mythology, but on the whole the native myths are apt to embody cosmic ideas, and as the idea of the Sun preponderates in Maui, so the idea of the Heaven in Taaroa.[82] In the Fiji Islands, whose native mythology is on the whole distinct from that of Polynesia proper, a strange weird figure takes the supreme place among the gods. His name is Ndengei, the serpent is his shrine, some traditions represent him with a serpent's head and body and the rest of him stone. He passes a monotonous existence in his gloomy cavern, feeling no emotion nor sensation, nor any appetite but hunger; he takes no interest in any one but Uto, his attendant, and gives no sign of life beyond eating, answering his priest, and changing his position from one side to the other. No wonder Ndengei is less worshipped than most of the inferior gods. The natives have even made a comic song about him, where he talks with his attendant, Uto, who has been to attend the feast at Rakiraki, where Ndengei has especially his temple and worship.
Ndengei. 'Have you been to the sharing of food to-day?'
Uto. 'Yes: and turtles formed a part; but only the under-shell was shared to us two.'
Ndengei. 'Indeed, Uto! This is very bad. How is it? We made them men, placed them on the earth, gave them food, and yet they share to us only the under-shell. Uto, how is this?'[83]
The native religion of Africa, a land pervaded by the doctrines of divine hierarchy and divine supremacy, affords apt evidence for the problem before us. The capacity of the manes-worshipper's scheme to extend in this direction may be judged from the religious speculations of the Zulus, where may be traced the merging of the First Man, the Old-Old-One, Unkulunkulu, into the ideal of the Creator, Thunderer, and Heaven-god.[84] If we examine a collection of documents illustrating the doctrines of the West African races lying between the Hottentots on the south and the Berbers on the north, we may fairly judge their conceptions, evidently influenced as these have been by Christian intercourse, to be nevertheless based on native ideas of the personal Heaven.[85] Whether they think of their supreme deity as actively pervading and governing his universe, or as acting through his divine subordinates, or as retiring from his creation and leaving the lesser spirits to work their will, he is always to their minds the celestial ruler, the Heaven-god. Examples may be cited, each in its way full of instruction. In the mind of the Gold-coast negro, tendencies towards theistic religion seem to have been mainly developed through the idea of Nyongmo, the personal Heaven, or its animating personal deity. Heaven, wide-arching, rain-giving, light-giving, who has been and is and shall be, is to him the Supreme Deity. The sky is Nyongmo's creature, the clouds are his veil, the stars his face-ornaments. Creator of all things, and of their animating powers whose chief and elder he is, he sits in majestic rest surrounded by his children, the wongs, the spirits of the air who serve him and represent him on earth. Though men's worship is for the most part paid to these, reverence is also given to Nyongmo, the Eldest, the Highest. Every day, said a fetish-man, we see how the grass and corn and trees spring forth by the rain and sunshine that Nyongmo sends, how should he not be the Creator? Again, the mighty Heaven-god, far removed from man and seldom roused to interfere in earthly interests, is the type on which the Guinea negroes may have modelled their thoughts of a Highest Deity who has abandoned the control of his world to lesser and evil spirits.[86] The religion of another district seems to show clearly the train of thought by which such ideas may be worked out. Among the Kimbunda race of Congo, Suku-Vakange is the highest being. He takes little interest in mankind, leaving the real government of the world to the good and evil kilulu or spirits, into whose ranks the souls of men pass at death. Now in that there are more bad spirits who torment, than good who favour living men, human misery would be unbearable, were it not that from time to time Suku-Vakange, enraged at the wickedness of the evil spirits, terrifies them with thunder, and punishes the more obstinate with his thunderbolts. Then he returns to rest, and lets the kilulu rule again.[87] Who, we may ask, is this divinity, calm and indifferent save when his wrath bursts forth in storm, but the Heaven himself? The relation of the Supreme Deity to the lesser gods of polytheism is graphically put in the following passage, where an American missionary among the Yorubas describes the relation of Olorung, the Lord of Heaven, to his lesser deities (orisa), among whom the chief are the androgynous Obatala, representing the reproductive power of nature, and Shango the Thunder-god. 'The doctrine of idolatry prevalent in Yoruba appears to be derived by analogy from the form and customs of the civil government. There is but one king in the nation, and one God over the universe. Petitioners to the king approach him through the intervention of his servants, courtiers, and nobles: and the petitioner conciliates the courtier whom he employs by good words and presents. In like manner no man can directly approach God; but the Almighty himself, they say, has appointed various kinds of orisas, who are mediators and intercessors between himself and mankind. No sacrifices are made to God, because he needs nothing; but the orisas, being much like men, are pleased with offerings of sheep, pigeons, and other things. They conciliate the orisa or mediator that he may bless them, not in his own power, but in the power of God.'[88]
Rooted as they are in the depths of nature-worship, the doctrines of the supreme Sun and Heaven both come to the surface again in the native religions of Asia. The divine Sun holds his primacy distinctly enough among the rude indigenous tribes of India. Although one sect of the Khonds of Orissa especially direct their worship to Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, yet even they agree theoretically with the sect who worship Bura Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, in giving to him supremacy above the manes-gods and nature-gods, and all spiritual powers.[89] Among the Kol tribes of Bengal, the acknowledged primate of all classes of divinities is the beneficient supreme deity, Sing-bonga, Sun-god. Among some Munda tribes his authority is so real that they will appeal to him for help where recourse to minor deities has failed; while among the Santals his cultus has so dwindled away that he receives less practical worship than his malevolent inferiors, and is scarce honoured with more than nominal dignity and an occasional feast.[90] These are rude tribes who, so far as we know, have never been other than rude tribes. The Japanese are a comparatively civilized nation, one of those so instructive to the student of culture from the stubborn conservatism with which they have consecrated by traditional reverence, and kept up by state authority, the religion of their former barbarism. This is the Kami-religion, Spirit-religion, the ancient but mixed faith of divine spirits of ancestors, nature-spirits, and polytheistic gods, which still holds official place by the side of the imported Buddhism and Confucianism. The Sun-goddess, Amaterasu, 'Heaven-shiner,' though but sprung from the left eye of the parent Izanagi, came to be honoured above all lesser kamis or gods, while by a fiction of ancestor-worship the solar race, as in Peru, became the royal family, her spirit descending to animate the Mikado. Kaempfer, in his 'History of Japan,' written early in the 18th century, showed how absolutely the divine Tensio Dai Sin, represented below on the imperial throne, was looked upon as ruler of the minor powers; he mentions the Japanese tenth month, called the 'godless month,' because then the lesser gods are considered to be away from their temples, gone to pay their annual homage to the Dairi. He describes, as it was in his time, the great Japanese place of pilgrimage, Yse. There was to be seen the small cavern in a hill near the sea, where the divine Sun once hid herself, depriving the world of light, and thus showing herself to be supreme above all gods. Within the small ancient temple hard by, of which an account and a picture are given from a Japanese book, there were to be seen round the walls the usual pieces of cut white paper, and in the midst nothing but a polished metal mirror.[91]
Over the vast range of the Tatar races, it is the type of the supreme Heaven that comes prominently into view. Nature-worshippers in the extreme sense, these rude tribes conceived their ghosts and elves and demons and great powers of the earth and air to be, like men themselves, within the domain of the divine Heaven, almighty and all-encompassing. To trace the Samoyed's thought of Num the personal Sky passing into vague conceptions of pervading deity; to see with the Tunguz how Boa the Heaven-god, unseen but all-knowing, kindly but indifferent, has divided the business of his world among such lesser powers as sun and moon, earth and fire; to discern the meaning of the Mongrel Tengri, shading from Heaven into Heaven-god, and thence into god or spirit in general; to follow the records of Heaven-worship among the ancient Turks and Hiong-nu; to compare the supremacy among the Lapps of Tiermes, the Thunderer, with the supremacy among the Finns of Jumala and Ukko, the Heaven-god and heavenly Grandfather — such evidence seems good ground for Castrén's argument, that the doctrine of the divine Sky underlay the first Turanian conceptions, not merely of a Heaven-god, but of a highest deity who in after ages of Christian conversion blended into the Christian God.[92] Here, again, we may have the advantage of studying among a cultured race the survival of religion from ruder ancient times, kept up by official ordinance. The state religion of China is in its dominant doctrine the worship of Tien, Heaven, identified with Shang-ti, the Emperor-above, next to whom stands Tu, Earth; while below them are worshipped great nature-spirits and ancestors. It is possible that this faith, as Professor Max Müller argues, may be ethnologically and even linguistically part and parcel of the general Heaven-worship of the Turanian tribes of Siberia. At any rate, it is identical with it in its primary idea, the adoration of the supreme Heaven. Dr. Legge charges Confucius with an inclination to substitute in his religious teaching the name of Tien, Heaven, for that known to more ancient religion and used in more ancient books, Shang-ti, the personal ruling Deity. But it seems rather that the sage was in fact upholding the traditions of the ancient faith, thus acting according to the character on which he prided himself, that of a transmitter and not a maker, a preserver of old knowledge, not a new revealer. It is in accordance with the usual course of theologic development, for the divine Heaven to reign in rude mythologic religion over the lesser spirits of the world before the childlike poetic thought passes into the statesman's conception of a Celestial Emperor. As Plath well remarks, 'It belongs to the Chinese system that all nature is animated by spirits, and that all these follow one order. As the Chinese cannot think of a Chinese Empire with an Emperor only, and without the host of vassal-princes and officials, so he cannot think of the Upper Emperor without the host of spirits.' Developed in a different line, the idea of a supreme Heaven comes to pervade Chinese philosophy and ethics as a general expression of fate, ordinance, duty. 'Heaven's order is nature' — 'The wise man readily awaits Heaven's command' — 'Man must first do his own part; when he has done all, then he can wait for Heaven to complete it' — 'All state officers are Heaven's workmen, and represent him' — 'How does Heaven speak? The four seasons have their course, the hundred things arise, what speaks he?' — 'No, Heaven speaks not; by the course of events he makes himself understood, no more.'[93]
These stray scraps from old Chinese literature are intelligible to European ears, for our Aryan race has indeed worked out religious ideas from the like source and almost in the like directions. The Samoyed or Tunguz Heaven-god had his analogue in Dyu, Heaven, of the Vedic hymns. Once meaning the sky, and the sky personified, this Zeus came to mean far more than mere heaven in the minds of Greek poets and philosophers, when it rose toward 'that conception which in sublimity, brightness, and infinity transcended all others as much as the bright blue sky transcended all other things visible upon earth.' At the lower level of mythic religion, the ideal process of shaping the divine world into a monarchic constitution was worked out by the ancient Greeks, on the same simple plan as among such barbarians as the Kols of Chota-Nagpur or the Gallas of Abyssinia; Zeus is King over Olympian gods, and below these again are marshalled the crowded ranks of demigods, heroes, demons, nymphs, ghosts. At the higher level of theologic speculation, exalted thoughts of universal cause and being, of physical and moral law, took personality under the name of Zeus. It is in direct derivation along this historic line, that the classical heaven-cultus still asserts itself in song and pageant among us, in that quaintest of quaint survivals, the factitious religion of the Italian Opera, where such worship as artistic ends require is still addressed to the divine Cielo. Even in our daily talk, colloquial expressions call up before the mind of the ethnographer outlines of remotest religious history. Heaven grants, forbids, blesses still in phrase, as heretofore in fact.
Vast and difficult as is the research into the full scope and history of the doctrine of supremacy among the higher nations, it may be at least seen that helpful clues exist to lead the explorer. The doctrine of mighty nature-spirits, inhabiting and controlling sky and earth and sea, seems to expand in Asia into such ideas as that of Mahâtman the Great Spirit, Paramâtman the Highest Spirit, taking personality as Brahma the all-pervading universal soul[94]—in Europe into philosophic conceptions of which a grand type stands out in Kepler's words, that the universe is a harmonious whole, whose soul is God. There is a saying of Comte's that throws strong light upon this track of speculative theology: he declares that the conception among the ancients of the Soul of the Universe, the notion that the earth is a vast living animal, and in our own time, the obscure pantheism which is so rife among German metaphysicians, are only fetishism generalized and made systematic.[95] Polytheism, in its inextricable confusion of the persons and functions of the great divinities, and in its assignment of the sovereignty of the world to a supreme being who combines in himself the attributes of several such minor deities, tends toward the doctrine of fundamental unity. Max Müller, in a lecture on the Veda, has given the name of kathenotheism to the doctrine of divine unity in diversity which comes into view in these instructive lines:—
'Indram Mitram Varunam Agnim âhur atho
divyah sa suparno Garutmân:
Ekam sad viprâ bahudha vadanti Agnim
Yamam Mâtariçvânam âhuh.'
'They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; then he is the beautiful-winged heavenly Garutmat: That which is One the wise call it in divers manners; they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariçvan.'[96]
The figure of the supreme deity, be he Heaven-god, Sun-god, Great Spirit, beginning already in uncultured thought to take the form and function of a divine ruler of the world, represents a conception which it becomes the age-long work of systematic theology to develop and to define. Thus in Greece arises Zeus the highest, greatest, best, 'who was and is and shall be,' 'beginning and chief of all things,' 'who rules over all mortals and immortals,' 'Zeus the god of gods.'[97] Such is Ahura Mazda in the Persian faith, among whose seventy-two names of might are these: Creator, Protector, Nourisher, Holiest Heavenly One, Healing Priest, Most Pure, Most Majestic, Most Knowing, Most Ruling at Will.[98] There may be truth in the assertion that the esoteric religion of ancient Egypt centred in a doctrine of divine unity, manifested through the heterogeneous crowd of popular deities.[99] It may be a hopeless task to disentangle the confused personalities of Baal, Bel, and Moloch, and no antiquary may ever fully solve the enigma how far the divine name of El carried in its wide range among the Jewish and other Semitic nations a doctrine of divine supremacy.[100] The great Syro-Phœnician kingdoms and religions have long since passed away into darkness, leaving but antiquarian relics to vouch for their former might. Far other has been the history of their Jewish kindred, still standing fast to their ancient nationality, still upholding to this day their patriarchal religion, in the midst of nations who inherit from the faith of Israel the belief in one God, highest, almighty, who in the beginning made the heavens and the earth, whose throne is established of old, who is from everlasting to everlasting.
Before now bringing these researches to a close, it will be well to state compactly the reasons for treating the animism of the modern savage world as more or less representing the animism of remotely ancient races of mankind. Savage animism, founded on a doctrine of souls carried to an extent far beyond its limits in the cultivated world, and thence expanding to a yet wider doctrine of spiritual beings animating and controlling the universe in all its parts, becomes a theory of personal causes developed into a general philosophy of man and nature. As such, it may be reasonably accounted for as the direct product of natural religion, using this term according to the sense of its definition by Bishop Wilkins: 'I call that Natural Religion, which men might know, and should be obliged unto, by the meer principles of Reason, improved by Consideration and Experience, without the help of Revelation.'[101] It will scarcely be argued by theologians familiar with the religions of savage tribes, that they are direct or nearly direct products of revelation, for the theology of our time would abolish or modify their details till scarce one was left intact. The main issue of the problem is this, whether savage animism is a primary formation belonging to the lower culture, or whether it consists, mostly or entirely, of beliefs originating in some higher culture, and conveyed by adoption or degradation into the lower. The evidence for the first alternative, though not amounting to complete demonstration, seems reasonably strong, and not met by contrary evidence approaching it in force. The animism of the lower tribes, self-contained and self-supporting, maintained in close contact with that direct evidence of the senses on which it appears to be originally based, is a system which might quite reasonably exist among mankind, had they never anywhere risen above the savage condition. Now it does not seem that the animism of the higher nations stands in a connexion so direct and complete with their mental state. It is by no means so closely limited to doctrines evidenced by simple contemplation of nature. The doctrines of the lower animism appear in the higher often more and more modified, to bring them into accordance with an advancing intellectual condition, to adapt them at once to the limits of stricter science and the needs of higher faith; and in the higher animism these doctrines are retained side by side with other and special beliefs, of which the religions of the lower world show scarce a germ. In tracing the course of animistic thought from stage to stage of history, instruction is to be gained alike from the immensity of change and from the intensity of permanence. Savage animism, both by what it has and by what it wants, seems to represent the earlier system in which began the age-long course of the education of the world. Especially is it to be noticed that various beliefs and practices, which in the lower animism stand firm upon their grounds as if they grew there, in the higher animism belong rather to peasants than philosophers, exist rather as ancestral relics than as products belonging to their age, are falling from full life into survival. Thus it is that savage religion can frequently explain doctrines and rites of civilized religion. The converse is far less often the case. Now this is a state of things which appears to carry a historical as well as a practical meaning. The degradation-theory would expect savages to hold beliefs and customs intelligible as broken-down relics of former higher civilization. The development-theory would expect civilized men to keep up beliefs and customs which have their reasonable meaning in less cultured states of society. So far as the study of survival enables us to judge between the two theories, it is seen that what is intelligible religion in the lower culture is often meaningless superstition in the higher, and thus the development-theory has the upper hand. Moreover, this evidence fits with the teaching of prehistoric archæology. Savage life, carrying on into our own day the life of the Stone Age, may be legitimately claimed as representing remotely ancient conditions of mankind, intellectual and moral as well as material. If so, a low but progressive state of animistic religion occupies a like ground in savage and in primitive culture.
Lastly, a few words of explanation may be offered as to the topics which this survey has included and excluded. To those who have been accustomed to find theological subjects dealt with on a dogmatic, emotional, and ethical, rather than an ethnographic scheme, the present investigation may seem misleading, because one-sided. This one-sided treatment, however, has been adopted with full consideration. Thus, though the doctrines here examined bear not only on the development but the actual truth of religious systems, I have felt neither able nor willing to enter into this great argument fully and satisfactorily, while experience has shown that to dispose of such questions by an occasional dictatorial phrase is one of the most serious of errors. The scientific value of descriptions of savage and barbarous religions, drawn up by travellers and especially by missionaries, is often lowered by their controversial tone, and by the affectation of infallibility with which their relation to the absolutely true is settled. There is something pathetic in the simplicity with which a narrow student will judge the doctrines of a foreign religion by their antagonism or conformity to his own orthodoxy, on points where utter difference of opinion exists among the most learned and enlightened scholars. The systematization of the lower religions, the reduction of their multifarious details to the few and simple ideas of primitive philosophy which form the common groundwork of them all, appeared to me an urgently needed contribution to the science of religion. This work I have carried out to the utmost of my power, and I can now only leave the result in the hands of other students, whose province it is to deal with such evidence in wider schemes of argument. Again, the intellectual rather than the emotional side of religion has here been kept in view. Even in the life of the rudest savage, religious belief is associated with intense emotion, with awful reverence, with agonizing terror, with rapt ecstasy when sense and thought utterly transcend the common level of daily life. How much the more in faiths where not only does the believer experience such enthusiasm, but where his utmost feelings of love and hope, of justice and mercy, of fortitude and tenderness and self-sacrificing devotion, of unutterable misery and dazzling happiness, twine and clasp round the fabric of religion. Language, dropping at times from such words as soul and spirit their mere philosophic meaning, can use them in full conformity with this tendency of the religious mind, as phrases to convey a mystic sense of transcendent emotion. Yet of all this religion, the religion of vision and of passion, little indeed has been said in these pages, and even that little rather in incidental touches than with purpose. Those to whom religion means above all things religious feeling, may say of my argument that I have written soullessly of the soul, and unspiritually of spiritual things. Be it so: I accept the phrase not as needing an apology, but as expressing a plan. Scientific progress is at times most furthered by working along a distinct intellectual line, without being tempted to diverge from the main object to what lies beyond, in however intimate connexion. The anatomist does well to discuss bodily structure independently of the world of happiness and misery which depends upon it. It would be thought a mere impertinence for a strategist to preface a dissertation on the science of war, by an enquiry how far it is lawful for a Christian man to bear weapons and serve in the wars. My task has been here not to discuss Religion in all its bearings, but to portray in outline the great doctrine of Animism, as found in what I conceive to be its earliest stages among the lower races of mankind, and to show its transmission along the lines of religious thought.
The almost entire exclusion of ethical questions from this investigation has more than a mere reason of arrangement. It is due to the very nature of the subject. To some the statement may seem startling, yet the evidence seems to justify it, that the relation of morality to religion is one that only belongs in its rudiments, or not at all, to rudimentary civilization. The comparison of savage and civilized religions bring into view, by the side of a deep-lying resemblance in their philosophy, a deep-lying contrast in their practical action on human life. So far as savage religion can stand as representing natural religion, the popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of natural religion simply falls to the ground. Savage animism is almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainspring of practical religion. Not, as I have said, that morality is absent from the life of the lower races. Without a code of morals, the very existence of the rudest tribe would be impossible; and indeed the moral standards of even savage races are to no small extent well-defined and praiseworthy. But these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion, comparatively independent of the animistic belief and rites which exist beside them. The lower animism is not immoral, it is unmoral. For this plain reason, it has seemed desirable to keep the discussion of animism, as far as might be, separate from that of ethics. The general problem of the relation of morality to religion is difficult, intricate, and requiring immense array of evidence, and may be perhaps more profitably discussed in connexion with the ethnography of morals. To justify their present separation, it will be enough to refer in general terms to the accounts of savage tribes whose ideas have been little affected by civilized intercourse; proper caution being used not to trust vague statements about good and evil, but to ascertain whether these are what philosophic moralists would call virtue and vice, righteousness and wickedness, or whether they are mere personal advantage and disadvantage. The essential connexion of theology and morality is a fixed idea in many minds. But it is one of the lessons of history that subjects may maintain themselves independently for ages, till the event of coalescence takes place. In the course of history, religion has in various ways attached to itself matters small and great outside its central scheme, such as prohibition of special meats, observance of special days, regulation of marriage as to kinship, division of society into castes, ordinance of social law and civil government. Looking at religion from a political point of view, as a practical influence on human society, it is clear that among its greatest powers have been its divine sanction of ethical laws, its theological enforcement of morality, its teaching of moral government of the universe, its supplanting the 'continuance-doctrine' of a future life by the 'retribution-doctrine' supplying moral motive in the present. But such alliance belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage level, not to the earlier and lower creeds. It will aid us to see how much more the fruit of religion belongs to ethical influence than to philosophical dogma, if we consider how the introduction of the moral element separates the religions of the world, united as they are throughout by one animistic principle, into two great classes, those lower systems whose best result is to supply a crude childlike natural philosophy, and those higher faiths which implant on this the law of righteousness and of holiness, the inspiration of duty and of love.
- ↑ Herrera, 'Indias Occidentales,' Dec. i. 3, 3; J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 175, 221.
- ↑ Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 174.
- ↑ Rivero and Tschudi, 'Peru,' p. 160.
- ↑ Kingsborough, 'Mexico,' vol. v. p. 179.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 89.
- ↑ Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. i. p. 371.
- ↑ Ovid. Fast. ii. 449.
- ↑ Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 264.
- ↑ Morgan, 'Iroquois,' p. 158.
- ↑ De Laet, 'Novus Orbis,' xv. 2; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417; Brinton, pp. 152, 185; J. G. Müller, p. 271, &c.
- ↑ D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 319.
- ↑ Clavigero, 'Messico,' vol. ii. pp. 16, 68, 75.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 333. Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 115.
- ↑ Cross, in 'Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.' vol. iv. p. 316; Mason, p. 215.
- ↑ Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 91, 355.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 89.
- ↑ Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. ii. p. 467. Cox, 'Mythology of Aryan Nations,' vol ii. p. 308.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 141, 271, 274, 591, &c.
- ↑ Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. ii. p. 90.
- ↑ Clavigero, 'Messico,' vol. ii. pp. 17, 81.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 326; vol. iv. p. 158. See also Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 112; Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 218.
- ↑ Macpherson, 'India,' pp. 90, 360.
- ↑ Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 267.
- ↑ Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. i. p. 413. Cox, 'Myth, of Aryan N.,' vol. ii. pp. 254, 311.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 137, &c., 272, 286, &c., 500, &c. See Sproat, p. 213 (Ahts), cited ante, p. 85. Chay-her signifies not only the world below, but Death personified as a boneless greybeard who wanders at night stealing men's souls away.
- ↑ Lery, 'Bresil,' p. 234.
- ↑ Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 14, 17; Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 495.
- ↑ 'Rites and Laws of Yncas,' tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, pp. 32, 48 (prayer from MS. communication by C. R. M.); Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. ii. c. 2, 7; Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 251.
- ↑ Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 237; Farmer, 'Tonga,' p. 126. Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 140; J. Williams, 'Missionary Enterprise,' p. 145. See Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' p. 89; Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 246.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 128, 147, 155; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171 (Africa).
- ↑ Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. i. p. 395; Roscher, s.v. 'Hades.' Grimm, 'Deutsch. Myth.' p. 288.
- ↑ Brugsch, 'Religion der alten Aegypter'; 'Book of Dead.'
- ↑ Pr. Max. v. Wied, 'N. Amerika,' vol. ii. p. 157.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 133, &c., 228, 255. Catlin, 'N. A. Ind.' vol. i. pp. 159, 177; Pr. Max v. Wied, vol. ii. pp. 149, &c. Compare Sproat, 'Savage Life,' p. 179 (Quawteaht the Great Spirit is also First Man).
- ↑ D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 319.
- ↑ Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' p. 64, &c., 88, &c. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 111, vol. iv. pp. 145, 366.
- ↑ Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 271.
- ↑ Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' pp. 1-104.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 4
- ↑ Oldfield in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 228. See also Eyre, vol. ii. p. 356; Lang, 'Queensland,' p. 444.
- ↑ Loskiel, 'Gesch. der Mission unter den Ind. in Nord-Amer.' part i. ch. 3.
- ↑ Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 348.
- ↑ Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 416. See J. G. Müller, p. 207.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part v. p. 632; see part i. p. 316, part vi. p. 166; 'Iroquois,' p. 36, see 237; Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 63.
- ↑ Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,' 1635, p. 34, 1636, p. too. Sagard, 'Histoire du Canada,' Paris, 1636, p. 490. L. H. Morgan, 'Iroquois.' p. 156. See ante, vol. i. pp. 288, 349.
- ↑ Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. iii. pp. 182, 330, 335, 345; Le Jeune in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1637, p. 49; La Potherie, 'Hist. de l'Amer. Septentrionale,' Paris, 1722, vol. i. p. 121; J. G. Müller, p. 149, &c. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 35, &c., 320, 412; Catlin, vol. i. p. 156; Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 263.
- ↑ Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 327, 485, 583, 645, see 247, 393, 427, 696. See also J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 259, &c., 403, 423; D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. i. p. 405, vol. ii. p. 257; Falkner, 'Patagonia,' p. 114; Musters, 'Patagonians,' p. 179; Fitzroy, 'Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,' vol. i. pp. 180, 190.
- ↑ Piedrahita, 'Hist. de Neuv. Granada,' part i. book i. ch. 3.
- ↑ Molina, 'Hist. of Chili,' vol. ii. p. 84; Febres, 'Diccionario Chileño,' s.v.
- ↑ Proyart, 'Loango,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 504. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 109. See Kolbe, 'Kaap de Goede Hoop,' part i. xxix.: Waitz, vol. ii. p. 342 (Hottentots).
- ↑ J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 217, 387. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 173.
- ↑ Birch, in Bunsen, vol. v. p. 136. Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.' &c.
- ↑ Macpherson, 'India,' p. 84.
- ↑ Avesta, tr. by Spiegel. Vendidad, i.; 'Khorda-Avesta.' xlv. xlvi, Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 1st Ser. p. 208.
- ↑ Layard, 'Nineveh,' vol. i. p. 297; Ainsworth, 'Izedis,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 11.
- ↑ Beausobre, 'Hist. de Manichée,' &c. Neander, 'Hist. of Christian Religion,' vol. ii. p. 157, &c.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 155.
- ↑ Klemm, 'Cultur-Gesch.' vol. vi. p. 85.
- ↑ 'Etudes Philologiques sur quelques Langues Sauvages de l'Amérique,' par N. O. (J. A. Cuoq.) Montreal, 1866, p. 14. Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 53. Schoolcraft, 'Iroquois,' p. 33.
- ↑ De la Borde, 'Caraibes,' p. 524. J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' p. 228.
- ↑ Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. ii. p. 89.
- ↑ Hutchinson, 'Chaco Ind.' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 327.
- ↑ D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 319.
- ↑ Molina, 'Hist. of Chili,' vol. ii. p. 84, &c. Compare Febres, 'Diccionario Chileño.'
- ↑ Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 415. Musters, 'Patagonians,' p. 179.
- ↑ 'Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas,' trans. from the original Spanish MSS., and ed. by C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Soc. 1873, p. ix. 5, 16, 30, 76, 84, 154, &c. The above remarks are based on the early evidence here printed for the first time, and on private suggestions for which I am also indebted to Mr. Markham. The title Pachacamac has been also considered to mean Animator or Soul of the World, camani=I create, camac=creator, cama=soul (note to 2nd ed.). Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. i., ii. c. 2, iii. c. 20; Herrera, dec. v. 4; Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 177, see 142; Rivero and Tschudi, 'Peruvian Antiquities,' ch. vii.; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 447; J. G. Müller, p. 317, &c.
- ↑ Sagard, 'Hist. du Canada,' p. 490. Hennepin, 'Voy. dans l'Amérique,' p. 302. Gregg, 'Commerce of Prairies,' vol. ii. p. 237.
- ↑ Le Jeune, 'Rel. des Jés.' 1637, p. 49 5 Brinton, p. 52; Lafitau, 'Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains,' vol. i. pp. 126, 145 (note to 3rd ed.).
- ↑ Egede, 'Descr. of Greenland,' ch. xviii.; Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 263; Rink, 'Eskimoiske Eventyr,' &c., p. 28.
- ↑ Le Jeune, 1633, p. 16; 1634, p. 13.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 15.
- ↑ Cartier, 'Relation;' Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 212; Lescarbot, 'Nouvelle France,' p. 613. Thevet, 'Singularitez de la France Antarctique,' Paris, 1558, ch. 77. See also J. G. Müller, p. 102. Andouagni is perhaps a miscopied form of Cudouagni. Other forms, Cudruagni, &c., occur.
- ↑ Smith, 'Hist. of Virginia,' London, 1632, in Pinkerton, 'Voyages,' vol. xiii. pp. 13, 18, 244. (New Eng.); see Arber's edition. Priority has been claimed for E. Strachey (see Lang, 'Making of Religion,' p. 254), but this copyist seems only to have copied Capt. Smith's 'Map of Virginia' (1608). Brinton, p. 58; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 177, &c. J. G. Müller, pp. 99, &c.; Loskiel, part i. pp. 33, 43.
- ↑ Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1636, p. 107; see above, p. 255. Sagard, p. 494; Cuoq, p. 176; J. G. Müller, p. 103. For other mention of a Supreme Deity among North American tribes see Joutel, 'Journal du Voyage,' &c., Paris, 1713, p. 224 (Louisiana); Sproat in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. v. p. 253 (Vancouver's I.).
- ↑ Lafitau, 'Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains,' 1724, vol. i. pp. 124-6.
- ↑ Bartram in 'Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. pp. 20, 26.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Ind. Tribes,' part ii. p. 127.
- ↑ Prescott, 'Mexico,' book i. ch. vi. Sahagun, 'Hist. de Nueva España,' lib. vi. in Kingsborough, vol. v.; Torquemada, 'Monarq. Ind.' lib. x. c. 14. Waitz, vol. iv. p. 136; J. G. Müller, p. 621, &c.
- ↑ Moerenhout, 'Voy. aux Iles du Grand Océan,' vol. i. pp. 419, 437. Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 321, &c. J. R. Forster, 'Voyage round the World,' pp. 540, 567. Grey, 'Polyn. Myth.' p. 6. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 118; see above, vol. i. p. 322. Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 244. Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. pp. 116, 121. Schirren, 'Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,' pp. 68, 89.
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 217.
- ↑ Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' part i. See ante, pp. 116, 313.
- ↑ See especially Waitz, vol. ii. p. 167, &c.; J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 209, 387; Bosman, Mungo Park, &c. Comp. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 390.
- ↑ Steinhauser, 'Religion des Negers,' in 'Mag. der Miss.' Basel, 1856. No. 2, p. 128. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 92, 209; Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 42. See also Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 171, 419.
- ↑ Magyar, 'Reisen in Süd-Afrika,' pp. 125, 335.
- ↑ Bowen, 'Gr. and Dic. of Yoruba,' p. xvi. in 'Smithsonian Contr.' vol. i.
- ↑ Macpherson, 'India,' p. 84, &c.
- ↑ Dalton, 'Kols,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 32. Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 184.
- ↑ Siebold, 'Nippon.' Kaempfer, 'Hist. of Japan,' 1727, book I. ch. I, IV. For accurate modern information, see papers of Chamberlain and Satow in 'Tr. As. Soc. Japan,' and Murray's Handbook (note to 3rd ed.).
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 1, &c. Klemm, 'Cultur-Gesch.' vol. iii. p. 101. 'Samoiedia,' in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 531. Georgi, 'Reise im Russ. Reich.' vol. i. p. 275.
- ↑ Plath, 'Rel. der Alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 18, &c. See Max Müller, 'Lectures on Science of Religion,' No. III. in 'Fraser's Mag.' 1870. Legge, 'Confucius,' p. 100.
- ↑ See Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. ii. Wuttke, 'Heidenthum,' part i. p. 254. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. xxi. vol. ii. p. 1.
- ↑ Comte, 'Philosophie Positive.' Cf. Bp. Berkeley's 'Siris'; and for a modern dissertation on the universal æther as the divine soul of the world, see Phil. Spiller, 'Gott im Lichte der Naturwissenschaften,' Berlin, 1873 (note to 2nd ed.).
- ↑ 'Rig- Veda,' i. 164, 46. Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i. pp. 27, 241.
- ↑ See Welcker, 'Griech. Götterlehre,' pp. 143, 175.
- ↑ Avesta; trans, by Spiegel, 'Ormazd-Yasht.' 12.
- ↑ Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.' vol. iv. ch. xii.; Bunsen, 'Egypt,' vol. iv. p. 325.
- ↑ Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. p. 169, &c.
- ↑ 'Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion,' London, 1678, book i. ch. vi. Johnson's Dictionary, s.v. The term 'natural religion' is used in various and even incompatible senses. Thus Butler in his 'Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature,' signifies by 'natural religion' a primæval system which he expressly argues to have been not reasoned out, but taught first by revelation. This system, of which the main tenets are the belief in one God, the Creator and Moral Governor of the World, and in a future state of moral retribution, differs in the extreme from the actual religions of the lower races.