THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.

    Culture or Civilization—Its phenomena related according to definite
    Laws—Method of classification and discussion of the
    evidence—Connexion of successive stages of culture by Permanence,
    Modification, and Survival—Principal topics examined in the present
    work.

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies
of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general
principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and
action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades
civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of
uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be
regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of
previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history
of the future. To the investigation of these two great principles in
several departments of ethnography, with especial consideration of the
civilization of the lower tribes as related to the civilization of the
higher nations, the present volumes are devoted.

Our modern investigators in the sciences of inorganic nature are
foremost to recognize, both within and without their special fields of
work, the unity of nature, the fixity of its laws, the definite sequence
of cause and effect through which every fact depends on what has gone
before it, and acts upon what is to come after it. They grasp firmly the
Pythagorean doctrine of pervading order in the universal Kosmos. They
affirm, with Aristotle, that nature is not full of incoherent episodes,
like a bad tragedy. They agree with Leibnitz in what he calls ‘my axiom,
that nature never acts by leaps (la nature n’agit jamais par saut),’ as
well as in his ‘great principle, commonly little employed, that nothing
happens without sufficient reason.’ Nor again, in studying the structure
and habits of plants and animals, or in investigating the lower
functions even of man, are these leading ideas unacknowledged. But when
we come to talk of the higher processes of human feeling and action, of
thought and language, knowledge and art, a change appears in the
prevalent tone of opinion. The world at large is scarcely prepared to
accept the general study of human life as a branch of natural science,
and to carry out, in a large sense, the poet’s injunction, to ‘Account
for moral as for natural things.’ To many educated minds there seems
something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts,
wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern
the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth
of plants and animals.

The main reasons of this state of the popular judgment are not far to
seek. There are many who would willingly accept a science of history if
placed before them with substantial definiteness of principle and
evidence, but who not unreasonably reject the systems offered to them,
as falling too far short of a scientific standard. Through resistance
such as this, real knowledge always sooner or later makes its way, while
the habit of opposition to novelty does such excellent service against
the invasions of speculative dogmatism, that we may sometimes even wish
it were stronger than it is. But other obstacles to the investigation of
laws of human nature arise from considerations of metaphysics and
theology. The popular notion of free human will involves not only
freedom to act in accordance with motive, but also a power of breaking
loose from continuity and acting without cause,—a combination which may
be roughly illustrated by the simile of a balance sometimes acting in
the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty of turning by itself
without or against its weights. This view of an anomalous action of the
will, which it need hardly be said is incompatible with scientific
argument, subsists as an opinion patent or latent in men’s minds, and
strongly affecting their theoretic views of history, though it is not,
as a rule, brought prominently forward in systematic reasoning. Indeed
the definition of human will, as strictly according with motive, is the
only possible scientific basis in such enquiries. Happily, it is not
needful to add here yet another to the list of dissertations on
supernatural intervention and natural causation, on liberty,
predestination, and accountability. We may hasten to escape from the
regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more
hopeful journey over more practicable ground. None will deny that, as
each man knows by the evidence of his own consciousness, definite and
natural cause does, to a great extent, determine human action. Then,
keeping aside from considerations of extra-natural interference and
causeless spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of natural
cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel on it so far as it
will bear us. It is on this same basis that physical science pursues,
with ever-increasing success, its quest of laws of nature. Nor need this
restriction hamper the scientific study of human life, in which the real
difficulties are the practical ones of enormous complexity of evidence,
and imperfection of methods of observation.

Now it appears that this view of human will and conduct as subject to
definite law, is indeed recognised and acted upon by the very people who
oppose it when stated in the abstract as a general principle, and who
then complain that it annihilates man’s free will, destroys his sense of
personal responsibility, and degrades him to a soulless machine. He who
will say these things will nevertheless pass much of his own life in
studying the motives which lead to human action, seeking to attain his
wishes through them, framing in his mind theories of personal character,
reckoning what are likely to be the effects of new combinations, and
giving to his reasoning the crowning character of true scientific
enquiry, by taking it for granted that in so far as his calculation
turns out wrong, either his evidence must have been false or incomplete,
or his judgment upon it unsound. Such a one will sum up the experience
of years spent in complex relations with society, by declaring his
persuasion that there is a reason for everything in life, and that where
events look unaccountable, the rule is to wait and watch in hope that
the key to the problem may some day be found. This man’s observation may
have been as narrow as his inferences are crude and prejudiced, but
nevertheless he has been an inductive philosopher ‘more than forty years
without knowing it.’ He has practically acknowledged definite laws of
human thought and action, and has simply thrown out of account in his
own studies of life the whole fabric of motiveless will and uncaused
spontaneity. It is assumed here that they should be just so thrown out
of account in wider studies, and that the true philosophy of history
lies in extending and improving the methods of the plain people who form
their judgments upon facts, and check them upon new facts. Whether the
doctrine be wholly or but partly true, it accepts the very condition
under which we search for new knowledge in the lessons of experience,
and in a word the whole course of our rational life is based upon it.

‘One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the
parentage,’ was a remark made by a Bechuana chief to Casalis the African
missionary. Thus at all times historians, so far as they have aimed at
being more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show not
merely succession, but connexion, among the events upon their record.
Moreover, they have striven to elicit general principles of human
action, and by these to explain particular events, stating expressly or
taking tacitly for granted the existence of a philosophy of history.
Should any one deny the possibility of thus establishing historical
laws, the answer is ready with which Boswell in such a case turned on
Johnson: ‘Then, sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an
almanack.’ That nevertheless the labours of so many eminent thinkers
should have as yet brought history only to the threshold of science,
need cause no wonder to those who consider the bewildering complexity of
the problems which come before the general historian. The evidence from
which he is to draw his conclusions is at once so multifarious and so
doubtful, that a full and distinct view of its bearing on a particular
question is hardly to be attained, and thus the temptation becomes all
but irresistible to garble it in support of some rough and ready theory
of the course of events. The philosophy of history at large, explaining
the past and predicting the future phenomena of man’s life in the world
by reference to general laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the
present state of knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but
hardly able to cope. Yet there are departments of it which, though
difficult enough, seem comparatively accessible. If the field of enquiry
be narrowed from History as a whole to that branch of it which is here
called Culture, the history, not of tribes or nations, but of the
condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them,
the task of investigation proves to lie within far more moderate
compass. We suffer still from the same kind of difficulties which beset
the wider argument, but they are much diminished. The evidence is no
longer so wildly heterogeneous, but may be more simply classified and
compared, while the power of getting rid of extraneous matter, and
treating each issue on its own proper set of facts, makes close
reasoning on the whole more available than in general history. This may
appear from a brief preliminary examination of the problem, how the
phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in
a probable order of evolution.

Surveyed in a broad view, the character and habit of mankind at once
display that similarity and consistency of phenomena which led the
Italian proverb-maker to declare that ‘all the world is one country,’
‘tutto il mondo è paese.’ To general likeness in human nature on the one
hand, and to general likeness in the circumstances of life on the other,
this similarity and consistency may no doubt be traced, and they may be
studied with especial fitness in comparing races near the same grade of
civilization. Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in
history or for place on the map; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be
set beside the mediæval Aztec, and the Ojibwa of North America beside
the Zulu of South Africa. As Dr. Johnson contemptuously said when he had
read about Patagonians and South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth’s Voyages,
‘one set of savages is like another.’ How true a generalization this
really is, any Ethnological Museum may show. Examine for instance the
edged and pointed instruments in such a collection; the inventory
includes hatchet, adze, chisel, knife, saw, scraper, awl, needle, spear
and arrow-head, and of these most or all belong with only differences of
detail to races the most various. So it is with savage occupations; the
wood-chopping, fishing with net and line, shooting and spearing game,
fire-making, cooking, twisting cord and plaiting baskets, repeat
themselves with wonderful uniformity in the museum shelves which
illustrate the life of the lower races from Kamchatka to Tierra del
Fuego, and from Dahome to Hawaii. Even when it comes to comparing
barbarous hordes with civilized nations, the consideration thrusts
itself upon our minds, how far item after item of the life of the lower
races passes into analogous proceedings of the higher, in forms not too
far changed to be recognized, and sometimes hardly changed at all. Look
at the modern European peasant using his hatchet and his hoe, see his
food boiling or roasting over the log-fire, observe the exact place
which beer holds in his calculation of happiness, hear his tale of the
ghost in the nearest haunted house, and of the farmer’s niece who was
bewitched with knots in her inside till she fell into fits and died. If
we choose out in this way things which have altered little in a long
course of centuries, we may draw a picture where there shall be scarce a
hand’s breadth difference between an English ploughman and a negro of
Central Africa. These pages will be so crowded with evidence of such
correspondence among mankind, that there is no need to dwell upon its
details here, but it may be used at once to override a problem which
would complicate the argument, namely, the question of race. For the
present purpose it appears both possible and desirable to eliminate
considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man, and to treat
mankind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of
civilization. The details of the enquiry will, I think, prove that
stages of culture may be compared without taking into account how far
tribes who use the same implement, follow the same custom, or believe
the same myth, may differ in their bodily configuration and the colour
of their skin and hair.

A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details,
and to classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining
weapons, they are to be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow,
and so forth; among textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and
several grades of making and weaving threads; myths are divided under
such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths,
earthquake-myths, local myths which account for the names of places by
some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account for the parentage of a
tribe by turning its name into the name of an imaginary ancestor; under
rites and ceremonies occur such practices as the various kinds of
sacrifice to the ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the
turning to the east in worship, the purification of ceremonial or moral
uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a few miscellaneous
examples from a list of hundreds, and the ethnographer’s business is to
classify such details with a view to making out their distribution in
geography and history, and the relations which exist among them. What
this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by comparing
these details of culture with the species of plants and animals as
studied by the naturalist. To the ethnographer the bow and arrow is a
species, the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the
practice of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical
distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to
region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of
his botanical and zoological, species. Just as certain plants and
animals are peculiar to certain districts, so it is with such
instruments as the Australian boomerang, the Polynesian stick-and-groove
for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by
tribes about the Isthmus of Panama, and in like manner with many an art,
myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular field. Just as the
catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a district
represents its Flora and Fauna, so the list of all the items of the
general life of a people represents that whole which we call its
culture. And just as distant regions so often produce vegetables and
animals which are analogous, though by no means identical, so it is with
the details of the civilization of their inhabitants. How good a working
analogy there really is between the diffusion of plants and animals and
the diffusion of civilization, comes well into view when we notice how
far the same causes have produced both at once. In district after
district, the same causes which have introduced the cultivated plants
and domesticated animals of civilization, have brought in with them a
corresponding art and knowledge. The course of events which carried
horses and wheat to America carried with them the use of the gun and the
iron hatchet, while in return the whole world received not only maize,
potatoes, and turkeys, but the habit of tobacco-smoking and the sailor’s
hammock.

It is a matter worthy of consideration, that the accounts of similar
phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world,
actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. Some years
since, a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great
historian—‘How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a
savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of
some traveller or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or
less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted
talk, a man prejudiced or even wilfully deceitful?’ This question is,
indeed, one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and
constantly before his mind. Of course he is bound to use his best
judgment as to the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and if
possible to obtain several accounts to certify each point in each
locality. But it is over and above these measures of precaution that the
test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different
countries, say a mediæval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman
in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in the Fiji
Islands, agree in describing some analogous art or rite or myth among
the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set
down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud. A story by a
bushranger in Australia may, perhaps, be objected to as a mistake or an
invention, but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to
cheat the public by telling the same story there? The possibility of
intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a
state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands,
by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears
never to have heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart
the dates, how different the creeds and characters of the observers, in
the catalogue of facts of civilization, needs no farther showing to any
one who will even glance at the footnotes of the present work. And the
more odd the statement, the less likely that several people in several
places should have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable
to judge that the statements are in the main truly given, and that their
close and regular coincidence is due to the cropping up of similar facts
in various districts of culture. Now the most important facts of
ethnography are vouched for in this way. Experience leads the student
after a while to expect and find that the phenomena of culture, as
resulting from widely-acting similar causes, should recur again and
again in the world. He even mistrusts isolated statements to which he
knows of no parallel elsewhere, and waits for their genuineness to be
shown by corresponding accounts from the other side of the earth, or the
other end of history. So strong, indeed, is this means of
authentication, that the ethnographer in his library may sometimes
presume to decide, not only whether a particular explorer is a shrewd,
honest observer, but also whether what he reports is conformable to the
general rules of civilization. ‘Non quis, sed quid.’

To turn from the distribution of culture in different countries, to its
diffusion within these countries. The quality of mankind which tends
most to make the systematic study of civilization possible, is that
remarkable tacit consensus or agreement which so far induces whole
populations to unite in the use of the same language, to follow the same
religion and customary law, to settle down to the same general level of
art and knowledge. It is this state of things which makes it so far
possible to ignore exceptional facts and to describe nations by a sort
of general average. It is this state of things which makes it so far
possible to represent immense masses of details by a few typical facts,
while, these once settled, new cases recorded by new observers simply
fall into their places to prove the soundness of the classification.
There is found to be such regularity in the composition of societies of
men, that we can drop individual differences out of sight, and thus can
generalize on the arts and opinions of whole nations, just as, when
looking down upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier,
whom, in fact, we can scarce distinguish in the mass, while we see each
regiment as an organized body, spreading or concentrating, moving in
advance or in retreat. In some branches of the study of social laws it
is now possible to call in the aid of statistics, and to set apart
special actions of large mixed communities of men by means of
taxgatherers’ schedules, or the tables of the insurance office. Among
modern arguments on the laws of human action, none have had a deeper
effect than generalizations such as those of M. Quetelet, on the
regularity, not only of such matters as average stature and the annual
rates of birth and death, but of the recurrence, year after year, of
such obscure and seemingly incalculable products of national life as the
numbers of murders and suicides, and the proportion of the very weapons
of crime. Other striking cases are the annual regularity of persons
killed accidentally in the London streets, and of undirected letters
dropped into post-office letter-boxes. But in examining the culture of
the lower races, far from having at command the measured arithmetical
facts of modern statistics, we may have to judge of the condition of
tribes from the imperfect accounts supplied by travellers or
missionaries, or even to reason upon relics of prehistoric races of
whose very names and languages we are hopelessly ignorant. Now these may
seem at the first glance sadly indefinite and unpromising materials for
scientific enquiry. But in fact they are neither indefinite nor
unpromising, but give evidence that is good and definite so far as it
goes. They are data which, for the distinct way in which they severally
denote the condition of the tribe they belong to, will actually bear
comparison with the statistician’s returns. The fact is that a stone
arrow-head, a carved club, an idol, a grave-mound where slaves and
property have been buried for the use of the dead, an account of a
sorcerer’s rites in making rain, a table of numerals, the conjugation of
a verb, are things which each express the state of a people as to one
particular point of culture, as truly as the tabulated numbers of deaths
by poison, and of chests of tea imported, express in a different way
other partial results of the general life of a whole community.

That a whole nation should have a special dress, special tools and
weapons, special laws of marriage and property, special moral and
religious doctrines, is a remarkable fact, which we notice so little
because we have lived all our lives in the midst of it. It is with such
general qualities of organized bodies of men that ethnography has
especially to deal. Yet, while generalizing on the culture of a tribe or
nation, and setting aside the peculiarities of the individuals composing
it as unimportant to the main result, we must be careful not to forget
what makes up this main result. There are people so intent on the
separate life of individuals that they cannot grasp a notion of the
action of a community as a whole—such an observer, incapable of a wide
view of society, is aptly described in the saying that he ‘cannot see
the forest for the trees.’ But, on the other hand, the philosopher may
be so intent upon his general laws of society as to neglect the
individual actors of whom that society is made up, and of him it may be
said that he cannot see the trees for the forest. We know how arts,
customs, and ideas are shaped among ourselves by the combined actions of
many individuals, of which actions both motive and effect often come
quite distinctly within our view. The history of an invention, an
opinion, a ceremony, is a history of suggestion and modification,
encouragement and opposition, personal gain and party prejudice, and the
individuals concerned act each according to his own motives, as
determined by his character and circumstances. Thus sometimes we watch
individuals acting for their own ends with little thought of their
effect on society at large, and sometimes we have to study movements of
national life as a whole, where the individuals co-operating in them are
utterly beyond our observation. But seeing that collective social action
is the mere resultant of many individual actions, it is clear that these
two methods of enquiry, if rightly followed, must be absolutely
consistent.

In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several
districts, and their prevalence within each district, there come before
us ever-reiterated proofs of regular causation producing the phenomena
of human life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion according to
which these phenomena settle into permanent standard conditions of
society, at definite stages of culture. But, while giving full
importance to the evidence bearing on these standard conditions of
society, let us be careful to avoid a pitfall which may entrap the
unwary student. Of course the opinions and habits belonging in common to
masses of mankind are to a great extent the results of sound judgment
and practical wisdom. But to a great extent it is not so. That many
numerous societies of men should have believed in the influence of the
evil eye and the existence of a firmament, should have sacrificed slaves
and goods to the ghosts of the departed, should have handed down
traditions of giants slaying monsters and men turning into beasts—all
this is ground for holding that such ideas were indeed produced in men’s
minds by efficient causes, but it is not ground for holding that the
rites in question are profitable, the beliefs sound, and the history
authentic. This may seem at the first glance a truism, but, in fact, it
is the denial of a fallacy which deeply affects the minds of all but a
small critical minority of mankind. Popularly, what everybody says must
be true, what everybody does must be right—‘Quod ubique, quod semper,
quod ab omnibus creditum est, hoc est vere proprieque Catholicum’—and so
forth. There are various topics, especially in history, law, philosophy,
and theology, where even the educated people we live among can hardly be
brought to see that the cause why men do hold an opinion, or practise a
custom, is by no means necessarily a reason why they ought to do so. Now
collections of ethnographic evidence bringing so prominently into view
the agreement of immense multitudes of men as to certain traditions,
beliefs, and usages, are peculiarly liable to be thus improperly used in
direct defence of these institutions themselves, even old barbaric
nations being polled to maintain their opinions against what are called
modern ideas. As it has more than once happened to myself to find my
collections of traditions and beliefs thus set up to prove their own
objective truth, without proper examination of the grounds on which they
were actually received, I take this occasion of remarking that the same
line of argument will serve equally well to demonstrate, by the strong
and wide consent of nations, that the earth is flat, and nightmare the
visit of a demon.

It being shown that the details of Culture are capable of being
classified in a great number of ethnographic groups of arts, beliefs,
customs, and the rest, the consideration comes next how far the facts
arranged in these groups are produced by evolution from one another. It
need hardly be pointed out that the groups in question, though held
together each by a common character, are by no means accurately defined.
To take up again the natural history illustration, it may be said that
they are species which tend to run widely into varieties. And when it
comes to the question what relations some of these groups bear to
others, it is plain that the student of the habits of mankind has a
great advantage over the student of the species of plants and animals.
Among naturalists it is an open question whether a theory of development
from species to species is a record of transitions which actually took
place, or a mere ideal scheme serviceable in the classification of
species whose origin was really independent. But among ethnographers
there is no such question as to the possibility of species of implements
or habits or beliefs being developed one out of another, for development
in Culture is recognized by our most familiar knowledge. Mechanical
invention supplies apt examples of the kind of development which affects
civilization at large. In the history of fire-arms, the clumsy
wheel-lock, in which a notched steel wheel revolved by means of a spring
against a piece of pyrites till a spark caught the priming, led to the
invention of the more serviceable flint-lock, of which a few still hang
in the kitchens of our farm-houses for the boys to shoot small birds
with at Christmas; the flint-lock in time passed by modification into
the percussion-lock, which is just now changing its old-fashioned
arrangement to be adapted from muzzle-loading to breech-loading. The
mediæval astrolabe passed into the quadrant, now discarded in its turn
by the seaman, who uses the more delicate sextant, and so it is through
the history of one art and instrument after another. Such examples of
progression are known to us as direct history, but so thoroughly is this
notion of development at home in our minds, that by means of it we
reconstruct lost history without scruple, trusting to general knowledge
of the principles of human thought and action as a guide in putting the
facts in their proper order. Whether chronicle speaks or is silent on
the point, no one comparing a long-bow and a cross-bow would doubt that
the cross-bow was a development arising from the simpler instrument. So
among the fire-drills for igniting by friction, it seems clear on the
face of the matter that the drill worked by a cord or bow is a later
improvement on the clumsier primitive instrument twirled between the
hands. That instructive class of specimens which antiquaries sometimes
discover, bronze celts modelled on the heavy type of the stone hatchet,
are scarcely explicable except as first steps in the transition from the
Stone Age to the Bronze Age, to be followed soon by the next stage of
progress, in which it is discovered that the new material is suited to a
handier and less wasteful pattern. And thus, in the other branches of
our history, there will come again and again into view series of facts
which may be consistently arranged as having followed one another in a
particular order of development, but which will hardly bear being turned
round and made to follow in reversed order. Such for instance are the
facts I have here brought forward in a chapter on the Art of Counting,
which tend to prove that as to this point of culture at least, savage
tribes reached their position by learning and not by unlearning, by
elevation from a lower rather than by degradation from a higher state.

Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of
the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote
which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals.’
These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been
carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from
that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as
proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a
newer has been evolved. Thus, I know an old Somersetshire woman whose
hand-loom dates from the time before the introduction of the ‘flying
shuttle,’ which new-fangled appliance she has never even learnt to use,
and I have seen her throw her shuttle from hand to hand in true classic
fashion; this old woman is not a century behind her times, but she is a
case of survival. Such examples often lead us back to the habits of
hundreds and even thousands of years ago. The ordeal of the Key and
Bible, still in use, is a survival; the Midsummer bonfire is a survival;
the Breton peasants’ All Souls’ supper for the spirits of the dead is a
survival. The simple keeping up of ancient habits is only one part of
the transition from old into new and changing times. The serious
business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later
generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore,
while superseded habits of old-world life may be modified into new-world
forms still powerful for good and evil. Sometimes old thoughts and
practices will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that
thought them long since dead or dying; here survival passes into
revival, as has lately happened in so remarkable a way in the history of
modern spiritualism, a subject full of instruction from the
ethnographer’s point of view. The study of the principles of survival
has, indeed, no small practical importance, for most of what we call
superstition is included within survival, and in this way lies open to
the attack of its deadliest enemy, a reasonable explanation.
Insignificant, moreover, as multitudes of the facts of survival are in
themselves, their study is so effective for tracing the course of the
historical development through which alone it is possible to understand
their meaning, that it becomes a vital point of ethnographic research to
gain the clearest possible insight into their nature. This importance
must justify the detail here devoted to an examination of survival, on
the evidence of such games, popular sayings, customs, superstitions, and
the like, as may serve well to bring into view the manner of its
operation.

Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of
the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization.
It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to
set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but
the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking
round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who only knows
his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is
the ‘honeysuckle’ of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice
with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV, and
its parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass between them.
Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art still carry
their history plainly stamped upon them; and if the history yet farther
behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because we cannot
clearly discern it there is therefore no history there. It is thus even
with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails of
the German postilion’s coat show of themselves how they came to dwindle
to such absurd rudiments; but the English clergyman’s bands no longer so
convey their history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough till one
has seen the intermediate stages through which they came down from the
more serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait, and
which gave their name to the ‘band-box’ they used to be kept in. In
fact, the books of costume, showing how one garment grew or shrank by
gradual stages and passed into another, illustrate with much force and
clearness the nature of the change and growth, revival and decay, which
go on from year to year in more important matters of life. In books,
again, we see each writer not for and by himself, but occupying his
proper place in history; we look through each philosopher,
mathematician, chemist, poet, into the background of his
education,—through Leibnitz into Descartes, through Dalton into
Priestley, through Milton into Homer. The study of language has,
perhaps, done more than any other in removing from our view of human
thought and action the ideas of chance and arbitrary invention, and in
substituting for them a theory of development by the co-operation of
individual men, through processes ever reasonable and intelligible where
the facts are fully known. Rudimentary as the science of culture still
is, the symptoms are becoming very strong that even what seem its most
spontaneous and motiveless phenomena will, nevertheless, be shown to
come within the range of distinct cause and effect as certainly as the
facts of mechanics. What would be popularly thought more indefinite and
uncontrolled than the products of the imagination in myths and fables?
Yet any systematic investigation of mythology, on the basis of a wide
collection of evidence, will show plainly enough in such efforts of
fancy at once a development from stage to stage, and a production of
uniformity of result from uniformity of cause. Here, as elsewhere,
causeless spontaneity is seen to recede farther and farther into shelter
within the dark precincts of ignorance; like chance, that still holds
its place among the vulgar as a real cause of events otherwise
unaccountable, while to educated men it has long consciously meant
nothing but this ignorance itself. It is only when men fail to see the
line of connexion in events, that they are prone to fall upon the
notions of arbitrary impulses, causeless freaks, chance and nonsense and
indefinite unaccountability. If childish games, purposeless customs,
absurd superstitions, are set down as spontaneous because no one can say
exactly how they came to be, the assertion may remind us of the like
effect that the eccentric habits of the wild rice-plant had on the
philosophy of a Red Indian tribe, otherwise disposed to see in the
harmony of nature the effects of one controlling personal will. The
Great Spirit, said these Sioux theologians, made all things except the
wild rice; but the wild rice came by chance.

‘Man,’ said Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘ever connects on from what lies at
hand (der Mensch knüpft immer an Vorhandenes an).’ The notion of the
continuity of civilization contained in this maxim is no barren
philosophic principle, but is at once made practical by the
consideration that they who wish to understand their own lives ought to
know the stages through which their opinions and habits have become what
they are. Auguste Comte scarcely overstated the necessity of this study
of development when he declared at the beginning of his ‘Positive
Philosophy’ that ‘no conception can be understood except through its
history,’ and his phrase will bear extension to culture at large. To
expect to look modern life in the face and comprehend it by mere
inspection, is a philosophy whose weakness can easily be tested. Imagine
any one explaining the trivial saying, ‘a little bird told me,’ without
knowing of the old belief in the language of birds and beasts, to which
Dr. Dasent, in the introduction to the Norse Tales, so reasonably traces
its origin. Attempts to explain by the light of reason things which want
the light of history to show their meaning, may be instanced from
Blackstone’s Commentaries. To Blackstone’s mind, the very right of the
commoner to turn his beast out to graze on the common, finds its origin
and explanation in the feudal system. ‘For, when lords of manors granted
out parcels of land to tenants, for services either done or to be done,
these tenants could not plough or manure the land without beasts; these
beasts could not be sustained without pasture; and pasture could not be
had but in the lord’s wastes, and on the uninclosed fallow grounds of
themselves and the other tenants. The law therefore annexed this right
of common, as inseparably incident, to the grant of the lands; and this
was the original of common appendant,’ &c.[2] Now though there is
nothing irrational in this explanation, it does not agree at all with
the Teutonic land-law which prevailed in England long before the Norman
Conquest, and of which the remains have never wholly disappeared. In the
old village-community even the arable land, lying in the great common
fields which may still be traced in our country, had not yet passed into
separate property, while the pasturage in the fallows and stubbles and
on the waste belonged to the householders in common. Since those days,
the change from communal to individual ownership has mostly transformed
this old-world system, but the right which the peasant enjoys of
pasturing his cattle on the common still remains, not as a concession to
feudal tenants, but as possessed by the commoners before the lord ever
claimed the ownership of the waste. It is always unsafe to detach a
custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to
be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.

In carrying on the great task of rational ethnography, the investigation
of the causes which have produced the phenomena of culture, and of the
laws to which they are subordinate, it is desirable to work out as
systematically as possible a scheme of evolution of this culture along
its many lines. In the following chapter, on the Development of Culture,
an attempt is made to sketch a theoretical course of civilization among
mankind, such as appears on the whole most accordant with the evidence.
By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to
history, with the aid of archæological inference from the remains of
prehistoric tribes, it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an
early general condition of man, which from our point of view is to be
regarded as a primitive condition, whatever yet earlier state may in
reality have lain behind it. This hypothetical primitive condition
corresponds in a considerable degree to that of modern savage tribes,
who, in spite of their difference and distance, have in common certain
elements of civilization, which seem remains of an early state of the
human race at large. If this hypothesis be true, then, notwithstanding
the continual interference of degeneration, the main tendency of culture
from primæval up to modern times has been from savagery towards
civilization. On the problem of this relation of savage to civilized
life, almost every one of the thousands of facts discussed in the
succeeding chapters has its direct bearing. Survival in Culture, placing
all along the course of advancing civilization way-marks full of meaning
to those who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst
primæval monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells
strongly in favour of the view that the European may find among the
Greenlanders or Maoris many a trait for reconstructing the picture of
his own primitive ancestors. Next comes the problem of the Origin of
Language. Obscure as many parts of this problem still remain, its
clearer positions lie open to the investigation whether speech took its
origin among mankind in the savage state, and the result of the enquiry
is that consistently with all known evidence, this may have been the
case. From the examination of the Art of Counting a far more definite
consequence is shown. It may be confidently asserted, that not only is
this important art found in a rudimentary state among savage tribes, but
that satisfactory evidence proves numeration to have been developed by
rational invention from this low stage up to that in which we ourselves
possess it. The examination of Mythology contained in the first volume,
is for the most part made from a special point of view, on evidence
collected for a special purpose, that of tracing the relation between
the myths of savage tribes and their analogues among more civilized
nations. The issue of such enquiry goes far to prove that the earliest
myth-maker arose and flourished among savage hordes, setting on foot an
art which his more cultured successors would carry on, till its results
came to be fossilized in superstition, mistaken for history, shaped and
draped in poetry, or cast aside as lying folly.

Nowhere, perhaps, are broad views of historical development more needed
than in the study of religion. Notwithstanding all that has been written
to make the world acquainted with the lower theologies, the popular
ideas of their place in history and their relation to the faiths of
higher nations are still of the mediæval type. It is wonderful to
contrast some missionary journals with Max Müller’s Essays, and to set
the unappreciating hatred and ridicule that is lavished by narrow
hostile zeal on Brahmanism, Buddhism, Zoroastrism, besides the catholic
sympathy with which deep and wide knowledge can survey those ancient and
noble phases of man’s religious consciousness; nor, because the
religions of savage tribes may be rude and primitive compared with the
great Asiatic systems, do they lie too low for interest and even for
respect. The question really lies between understanding and
misunderstanding them. Few who will give their minds to master the
general principles of savage religion will ever again think it
ridiculous, or the knowledge of it superfluous to the rest of mankind.
Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish-heap of miscellaneous
folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin,
as soon as even roughly classified, to display the principles of their
formation and development; and these principles prove to be essentially
rational, though working in a mental condition of intense and inveterate
ignorance. It is with a sense of attempting an investigation which bears
very closely on the current theology of our own day, that I have set
myself to examine systematically, among the lower races, the development
of Animism; that is to say, the doctrine of souls and other spiritual
beings in general. More than half of the present work is occupied with a
mass of evidence from all regions of the world, displaying the nature
and meaning of this great element of the Philosophy of Religion, and
tracing its transmission, expansion, restriction, modification, along
the course of history into the midst of our own modern thought. Nor are
the questions of small practical moment which have to be raised in a
similar attempt to trace the development of certain prominent Rites and
Ceremonies—customs so full of instruction as to the inmost powers of
religion, whose outward expression and practical result they are.

In these investigations, however, made rather from an ethnographic than
a theological point of view, there has seemed little need of entering
into direct controversial argument, which indeed I have taken pains to
avoid as far as possible. The connexion which runs through religion,
from its rudest forms up to the status of an enlightened Christianity,
may be conveniently treated of with little recourse to dogmatic
theology. The rites of sacrifice and purification may be studied in
their stages of development without entering into questions of their
authority and value, nor does an examination of the successive phases of
the world’s belief in a future life demand a discussion of the arguments
adduced for or against the doctrine itself. The ethnographic results may
then be left as materials for professed theologians, and it will not
perhaps be long before evidence so fraught with meaning shall take its
legitimate place. To fall back once again on the analogy of natural
history, the time may soon come when it will be thought as unreasonable
for a scientific student of theology not to have a competent
acquaintance with the principles of the religions of the lower races, as
for a physiologist to look with the contempt of past centuries on
evidence derived from the lower forms of life, deeming the structure of
mere invertebrate creatures matter unworthy of his philosophic study.

Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important
practical guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of
the future, the investigation into the origin and early development of
civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of
knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No
kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or
complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry
is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is
everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of
facts may lead to, and to declare any problem insoluble because
difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the wrong side in science;
and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the
limits of discovery. One remembers Comte starting in his account of
astronomy with a remark on the necessary limitation of our knowledge of
the stars: we conceive, he tells us, the possibility of determining
their form, distance, size, and movement, whilst we should never by any
method be able to study their chemical composition, their mineralogical
structure, &c. Had the philosopher lived to see the application of
spectrum analysis to this very problem, his proclamation of the
dispiriting doctrine of necessary ignorance would perhaps have been
recanted in favour of a more hopeful view. And it seems to be with the
philosophy of remote human life somewhat as with the study of the nature
of the celestial bodies. The processes to be made out in the early
stages of our mental evolution lie distant from us in time as the stars
lie distant from us in space, but the laws of the universe are not
limited with the direct observation of our senses. There is vast
material to be used in our enquiry; many workers are now busied in
bringing this material into shape, though little may have yet been done
in proportion to what remains to do; and already it seems not too much
to say that the vague outlines of a philosophy of primæval history are
beginning to come within our view.

Footnote 2:

  Blackstone, ‘Commentaries on the Laws of England,’ bk. II., ch. 3. The
  above example replaces that given in former editions. Another example
  may be found in his explanation of the origin of deodand, bk. I., ch.
  8, as designed, in the blind days of popery, as an expiation for the
  souls of such as were snatched away by sudden death; see below, p.
  287. [Note to 3rd ed.]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE.

    Stages of culture, industrial, intellectual, political,
    moral—Development of culture in great measure corresponds
    with transition from savage through barbaric to civilized
    life—Progression-theory—Degeneration-theory—Development-theory
    includes both, the one as primary, the other as secondary—Historical
    and traditional evidence not available as to low stages
    of culture—Historical evidence as to principles of
    Degeneration—Ethnological evidence as to rise and fall in culture
    from comparison of different levels of culture in branches of the
    same race—Extent of historically recorded antiquity of
    civilization—Prehistoric Archæology extends the antiquity of man in
    low stages of civilization—Traces of Stone Age, corroborated by
    megalithic structures, lake dwellings, shell-heaps, burial-places,
    &c., prove original low culture throughout the world—Stages of
    Progressive Development in industrial arts.

In taking up the problem of the development of culture as a branch of
ethnological research, a first proceeding is to obtain a means of
measurement. Seeking something like a definite line along which to
reckon progression and retrogression in civilization, we may apparently
find it best in the classification of real tribes and nations, past and
present. Civilization actually existing among mankind in different
grades, we are enabled to estimate and compare it by positive examples.
The educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard
by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and
savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these
limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to
cultured life. The principal criteria of classification are the absence
or presence, high or low development, of the industrial arts, especially
metal-working, manufacture of implements and vessels, agriculture,
architecture, &c., the extent of scientific knowledge, the definiteness
of moral principles, the condition of religious belief and ceremony, the
degree of social and political organization, and so forth. Thus, on the
definite basis of compared facts, ethnographers are able to set up at
least a rough scale of civilization. Few would dispute that the
following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:—Australian,
Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian. By treating the development of
civilization on this plain ethnographic basis, many difficulties may be
avoided which have embarrassed its discussion. This may be seen by a
glance at the relation which theoretical principles of civilization bear
to the transitions to be observed as matter of fact between the extremes
of savage and cultured life.

From an ideal point of view, civilization may be looked upon as the
general improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual
and of society, to the end of promoting at once man’s goodness, power,
and happiness. This theoretical civilization does in no small measure
correspond with actual civilization, as traced by comparing savagery
with barbarism, and barbarism with modern educated life. So far as we
take into account only material and intellectual culture, this is
especially true. Acquaintance with the physical laws of the world, and
the accompanying power of adapting nature to man’s own ends, are, on the
whole, lowest among savages, mean among barbarians, and highest among
modern educated nations. Thus a transition from the savage state to our
own would be, practically, that very progress of art and knowledge which
is one main element in the development of culture.

But even those students who hold most strongly that the general course
of civilization, as measured along the scale of races from savages to
ourselves, is progress towards the benefit of mankind, must admit many
and manifold exceptions. Industrial and intellectual culture by no means
advances uniformly in all its branches, and in fact excellence in
various of its details is often obtained under conditions which keep
back culture as a whole. It is true that these exceptions seldom swamp
the general rule; and the Englishman, admitting that he does not climb
trees like the wild Australian, nor track game like the savage of the
Brazilian forest, nor compete with the ancient Etruscan and the modern
Chinese in delicacy of goldsmith’s work and ivory carving, nor reach the
classic Greek level of oratory and sculpture, may yet claim for himself
a general condition above any of these races. But there actually have to
be taken into account developments of science and art which tend
directly against culture. To have learnt to give poison secretly and
effectually, to have raised a corrupt literature to pestilent
perfection, to have organized a successful scheme to arrest free enquiry
and proscribe free expression, are works of knowledge and skill whose
progress toward their goal has hardly conduced to the general good.
Thus, even in comparing mental and artistic culture among several
peoples, the balance of good and ill is not quite easy to strike.

If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political
excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon
on an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture.
In fact, a combined intellectual and moral measure of human condition is
an instrument which no student has as yet learnt properly to handle.
Even granting that intellectual, moral, and political life may, on a
broad view, be seen to progress together, it is obvious that they are
far from advancing with equal steps. It may be taken as man’s rule of
duty in the world, that he shall strive to know as well as he can find
out, and to do as well as he knows how. But the parting asunder of these
two great principles, that separation of intelligence from virtue which
accounts for so much of the wrong-doing of mankind, is continually seen
to happen in the great movements of civilization. As one conspicuous
instance of what all history stands to prove, if we study the early ages
of Christianity, we may see men with minds pervaded by the new religion
of duty, holiness, and love, yet at the same time actually falling away
in intellectual life, thus at once vigorously grasping one half of
civilization, and contemptuously casting off the other. Whether in high
ranges or in low of human life, it may be seen that advance of culture
seldom results at once in unmixed good. Courage, honesty, generosity,
are virtues which may suffer, at least for a time, by the development of
a sense of value of life and property. The savage who adopts something
of foreign civilization too often loses his ruder virtues without
gaining an equivalent. The white invader or colonist, though
representing on the whole a higher moral standard than the savage he
improves or destroys, often represents his standard very ill, and at
best can hardly claim to substitute a life stronger, nobler, and purer
at every point than that which he supersedes. The onward movement from
barbarism has dropped behind it more than one quality of barbaric
character which cultured modern men look back on with regret, and will
even strive to regain by futile attempts to stop the course of history,
and to restore the past in the midst of the present. So it is with
social institutions. The slavery recognised by savage and barbarous
races is preferable in kind to that which existed for centuries in late
European colonies. The relation of the sexes among many savage tribes is
more healthy than among the richer classes of the Mohammedan world. As a
supreme authority of government, the savage councils of chiefs and
elders compare favourably with the unbridled despotism under which so
many cultured races have groaned. The Creek Indians, asked concerning
their religion, replied that where agreement was not to be had, it was
best to ‘let every man paddle his canoe his own way:’ and after long
ages of theological strife and persecution, the modern world seems
coming to think these savages not far wrong.

Among accounts of savage life, it is not, indeed, uncommon to find
details of admirable moral and social excellence. To take one prominent
instance, Lieut. Bruijn Kops and Mr. Wallace have described, among the
rude Papuans of the Eastern Archipelago, a habitual truthfulness,
rightfulness, and kindliness which it would be hard to match in the
general moral life of Persia or India, to say nothing of many a
civilized European district.[3] Such tribes may count as the ‘blameless
Ethiopians’ of the modern world, and from them an important lesson may
be learnt. Ethnographers who seek in modern savages types of the
remotely ancient human race at large, are bound by such examples to
consider the rude life of primæval man under favourable conditions to
have been, in its measure, a good and happy life. On the other hand, the
pictures drawn by some travellers of savagery as a kind of paradisiacal
state may be taken too exclusively from the bright side. It is remarked
as to these very Papuans, that Europeans whose intercourse with them has
been hostile become so impressed with the wild-beast-like cunning of
their attacks, as hardly to believe in their having feelings in common
with civilized men. Our Polar explorers may well speak in kindly terms
of the industry, the honesty, the cheerful considerate politeness of the
Esquimaux; but it must be remembered that these rude people are on their
best behaviour with foreigners, and that their character is apt to be
foul and brutal where they have nothing to expect or fear. The Caribs
are described as a cheerful, modest, courteous race, and so honest among
themselves that if they missed anything out of a house they said quite
naturally: ‘There has been a Christian here.’ Yet the malignant ferocity
with which these estimable people tortured their prisoners of war with
knife and fire-brand and red pepper, and then cooked and ate them in
solemn debauch, gave fair reason for the name of Carib (Cannibal) to
become the generic name of man-eaters in European languages.[4] So when
we read descriptions of the hospitality, the gentleness, the bravery,
the deep religious feeling of the North American Indians, we admit their
claims to our sincere admiration; but we must not forget that they were
hospitable literally to a fault, that their gentleness would pass with a
flash of anger into frenzy, that their bravery was stained with cruel
and treacherous malignity, that their religion expressed itself in
absurd belief and useless ceremony. The ideal savage of the 18th century
may be held up as a living reproof to vicious and frivolous London; but
in sober fact, a Londoner who should attempt to lead the atrocious life
which the real savage may lead with impunity and even respect, would be
a criminal only allowed to follow his savage models during his short
intervals out of gaol. Savage moral standards are real enough, but they
are far looser and weaker than ours. We may, I think, apply the
often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their
moral as to their intellectual condition. The better savage social life
seems in but unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch
of distress, temptation, or violence, and then it becomes the worse
savage life, which we know by so many dismal and hideous examples.
Altogether, it may be admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be
envied by some barbarous races, and even by the outcasts of higher
nations. But that any known savage tribe would not be improved by
judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to
make; while the general tenour of the evidence goes far to justify the
view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wiser and more
capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the
barbarian stands between.

It might, perhaps, seem practicable to compare the whole average of the
civilization of two peoples, or of the same people in different ages, by
reckoning each, item by item, to a sort of sum-total, and striking a
balance between them, much as an appraiser compares the value of two
stocks of merchandise, differ as they may both in quantity and quality.
But the few remarks here made will have shown how loose must be the
working-out of these rough-and-ready estimates of culture. In fact, much
of the labour spent in investigating the progress and decline of
civilization has been mis-spent, in premature attempts to treat that as
a whole which is as yet only susceptible of divided study. The present
comparatively narrow argument on the development of culture at any rate
avoids this greatest perplexity. It takes cognizance principally of
knowledge, art, and custom, and indeed only very partial cognizance
within this field, the vast range of physical, political, social, and
ethical considerations being left all but untouched. Its standard of
reckoning progress and decline is not that of ideal good and evil, but
of movement along a measured line from grade to grade of actual
savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The thesis which I venture to
sustain, within limits, is simply this, that the savage state in some
measure represents an early condition of mankind, out of which the
higher culture has gradually been developed or evolved, by processes
still in regular operation as of old, the result showing that, on the
whole, progress has far prevailed over relapse.

On this proposition, the main tendency of human society during its long
term of existence has been to pass from a savage to a civilized state.
Now all must admit a great part of this assertion to be not only truth,
but truism. Referred to direct history, a great section of it proves to
belong not to the domain of speculation, but to that of positive
knowledge. It is mere matter of chronicle that modern civilization is a
development of mediæval civilization, which again is a development from
civilization of the order represented in Greece, Assyria, or Egypt. Thus
the higher culture being clearly traced back to what may be called the
middle culture, the question which remains is whether this middle
culture may be traced back to the lower culture, that is, to savagery.
To affirm this, is merely to assert that the same kind of development in
culture which has gone on inside our range of knowledge has also gone on
outside it, its course of proceeding being unaffected by our having or
not having reporters present. If any one holds that human thought and
action were worked out in primæval times according to laws essentially
other than those of the modern world, it is for him to prove by valid
evidence this anomalous state of things, otherwise the doctrine of
permanent principle will hold good, as in astronomy or geology. That the
tendency of culture has been similar throughout the existence of human
society, and that we may fairly judge from its known historic course
what its prehistoric course may have been, is a theory clearly entitled
to precedence as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research.

Gibbon in his ‘Roman Empire’ expresses in a few vigorous sentences his
theory of the course of culture, as from savagery upward. Judged by the
knowledge of nearly a century later, his remarks cannot, indeed, pass
unquestioned. Especially he seems to rely with misplaced confidence on
traditions of archaic rudeness, to exaggerate the lowness of savage
life, to underestimate the liability to decay of the ruder arts, and in
his view of the effect of high on low civilization, to dwell too
exclusively on the brighter side. But, on the whole, the great
historian’s judgment seems so substantially that of the unprejudiced
modern student of the progressionist school, that I gladly quote the
passage here at length, and take it as a text to represent the
development theory of culture:—‘The discoveries of ancient and modern
navigators, and the domestic history, or tradition, of the most
enlightened nations, represent the human savage naked both in mind and
body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language.
From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of
man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the
earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress
in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties
has been irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and
increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity: ages of laborious ascent
have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several
climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness.
Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and
diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human
species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may
safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is
changed, will relapse into their original barbarism. The improvements of
society may be viewed under a threefold aspect. 1. The poet or
philosopher illustrates his age and country by the efforts of a single
mind; but these superior powers of reason or fancy are rare and
spontaneous productions; and the genius of Homer, or Cicero, or Newton,
would excite less admiration, if they could be created by the will of a
prince, or the lessons of a preceptor. 2. The benefits of law and
policy, of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences, are more solid
and permanent; and many individuals may be qualified, by education and
discipline, to promote, in their respective stations, the interest of
the community. But this general order is the effect of skill and labour;
and the complex machinery may be decayed by time, or injured by
violence. 3. Fortunately for mankind, the more useful, or, at least,
more necessary arts, can be performed without superior talents, or
national subordination; without the powers of one, or the union of
many. Each village, each family, each individual, must always possess
both ability and inclination, to perpetuate the use of fire and of
metals; the propagation and service of domestic animals; the methods of
hunting and fishing; the rudiments of navigation; the imperfect
cultivation of corn, or other nutritive grain; and the simple practice
of the mechanic trades. Private genius and public industry may be
extirpated; but these hardy plants survive the tempest, and strike an
everlasting root into the most unfavourable soil. The splendid days of
Augustus and Trajan were eclipsed by a cloud of ignorance; and the
barbarians subverted the laws and palaces of Rome. But the scythe, the
invention, or emblem of Saturn, still continued annually to mow the
harvests of Italy; and the human feasts of Læstrigons have never been
renewed on the coast of Campania. Since the first discovery of the arts,
war, commerce, and religious zeal, have diffused, among the savages of
the Old and New World, these inestimable gifts: they have been
successively propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore
acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has
increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the
knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.’[5]

This progression-theory of civilization may be contrasted with its
rival, the degeneration-theory, in the dashing invective of Count Joseph
de Maistre, written toward the beginning of the 19th century. ‘Nous
partons toujours,’ he says, ‘de l’hypothèse banale que l’homme s’est
élevé graduellement de la barbarie à la science et à la civilisation.
C’est le rêve favori, c’est l’erreur-mère, et comme dit l’école le
proto-pseudes de notre siècle. Mais si les philosophes de ce malheureux
siècle, avec l’horrible perversité que nous leur avons connue, et qui
s’obstinent encore malgré les avertissements qu’ils ont reçus, avaient
possédé de plus quelques-unes de ces connaissances qui ont dû
nécessairement appartenir aux premiers hommes, &c.’[6] The
degeneration-theory, which this eloquent antagonist of ‘modern ideas’
indeed states in an extreme shape, has received the sanction of men of
great learning and ability. It has practically resolved itself into two
assumptions, first, that the history of culture began with the
appearance on earth of a semi-civilized race of men, and second, that
from this stage culture has proceeded in two ways, backward to produce
savages, and forward to produce civilized men. The idea of the original
condition of man being one of more or less high culture, must have a
certain prominence given to it on account of its considerable hold on
public opinion. As to definite evidence, however, it does not seem to
have any ethnological basis whatever. Indeed, I scarcely think that a
stronger counter-persuasion could be used on an intelligent student
inclined to the ordinary degeneration-theory than to induce him to
examine critically and impartially the arguments of the advocates on his
own side. It must be borne in mind, however, that the grounds on which
this theory has been held have generally been rather theological than
ethnological. The strength of the position it has thus occupied may be
well instanced from the theories adopted by two eminent French writers
of the 18th century, which in a remarkable way piece together a belief
in degeneration and an argument for progression. De Brosses, whose whole
intellectual nature turned to the progression-theory, argued that by
studying what actually now happens ‘we may trace men upward from the
savage state to which the flood and dispersion had reduced them.’[7] And
Goguet, holding that the pre-existing arts perished at the deluge, was
thus left free to work out on the most thorough-going progressionist
principles his theories of the invention of fire, cooking, agriculture,
law, and so forth, among tribes thus reduced to a condition of low
savagery.[8] At the present time it is not unusual for the origin of
civilization to be treated as matter of dogmatic theology. It has
happened to me more than once to be assured from the pulpit that the
theories of ethnologists who consider man to have risen from a low
original condition are delusive fancies, it being revealed truth that
man was originally in a high condition. Now as a matter of Biblical
criticism it must be remembered that a large proportion of modern
theologians are far from accepting such a dogma. But in investigating
the problem of early civilization, the claim to ground scientific
opinion upon a basis of revelation is in itself objectionable. It would
be, I think, inexcusable if students who have seen in Astronomy and
Geology the unhappy results of attempting to base science on religion,
should countenance a similar attempt in Ethnology.

By long experience of the course of human society, the principle of
development in culture has become so ingrained in our philosophy that
ethnologists, of whatever school, hardly doubt but that, whether by
progress or degradation, savagery and civilization are connected as
lower and higher stages of one formation. As such, then, two principal
theories claim to account for their relation. As to the first
hypothesis, which takes savage life as in some sort representing an
early human state whence higher states were, in time, developed, it has
to be noticed that advocates of this progression-theory are apt to look
back toward yet lower original conditions of mankind. It has been truly
remarked that the modern naturalist’s doctrine of progressive
development has encouraged a train of thought singularly accordant with
the Epicurean theory of man’s early existence on earth, in a condition
not far removed from that of the lower animals. On such a view, savage
life itself would be a far advanced condition. If the advance of culture
be regarded as taking place along one general line, then existing
savagery stands directly intermediate between animal and civilized life;
if along different lines, then savagery and civilization may be
considered as at least indirectly connected through their common origin.
The method and evidence here employed are not, however, suitable for the
discussion of this remoter part of the problem of civilization. Nor is
it necessary to enquire how, under this or any other theory, the savage
state first came to be on earth. It is enough that, by some means or
other, it has actually come into existence; and so far as it may serve
as a guide in inferring an early condition of the human race at large,
so far the argument takes the very practicable shape of a discussion
turning rather on actual than imaginary states of society. The second
hypothesis, which regards higher culture as original, and the savage
condition as produced from it by a course of degeneration, at once cuts
the hard knot of the origin of culture. It takes for granted a
supernatural interference, as where Archbishop Whately simply refers to
miraculous revelation that condition above the level of barbarism which
he considers to have been man’s original state.[9] It may be
incidentally remarked, however, that the doctrine of original
civilization bestowed on man by divine intervention, by no means
necessarily involves the view that this original civilization was at a
high level. Its advocates are free to choose their starting-point of
culture above, at, or below the savage condition, as may on the evidence
seem to them most reasonable.

The two theories which thus account for the relation of savage to
cultured life may be contrasted according to their main character, as
the progression-theory and the degradation-theory. Yet of course the
progression-theory recognizes degradation, and the degradation-theory
recognizes progression, as powerful influences in the course of culture.
Under proper limitations the principles of both theories are conformable
to historical knowledge, which shows us, on the one hand, that the state
of the higher nations was reached by progression from a lower state,
and, on the other hand, that culture gained by progression may be lost
by degradation. If in this enquiry we should be obliged to end in the
dark, at any rate we need not begin there. History, taken as our guide
in explaining the different stages of civilization, offers a theory
based on actual experience. This is a development-theory, in which both
advance and relapse have their acknowledged places. But so far as
history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation
secondary; culture must be gained before it can be lost. Moreover, in
striking a balance between the effects of forward and backward movement
in civilization, it must be borne in mind how powerfully the diffusion
of culture acts in preserving the results of progress from the attacks
of degeneration. A progressive movement in culture spreads, and becomes
independent of the fate of its originators. What is produced in some
limited district is diffused over a wider and wider area, where the
process of effectual ‘stamping out’ becomes more and more difficult.
Thus it is even possible for the habits and inventions of races long
extinct to remain as the common property of surviving nations; and the
destructive actions which make such havoc with the civilizations of
particular districts fail to destroy the civilization of the world.

The enquiry as to the relation of savagery to barbarism and
semi-civilization lies almost entirely in præ-historic or extra-historic
regions. This is of course an unfavourable condition, and must be
frankly accepted. Direct history hardly tells anything of the changes of
savage culture, except where in contact with and under the dominant
influence of foreign civilization, a state of things which is little to
our present purpose. Periodical examinations of low races otherwise left
isolated to work out their own destinies, would be interesting evidence
to the student of civilization if they could be made; but unfortunately
they cannot. The lower races, wanting documentary memorials, loose in
preserving tradition, and ever ready to clothe myth in its shape, can
seldom be trusted in their stories of long-past ages. History is oral or
written record which can be satisfactorily traced into contact with the
events it describes; and perhaps no account of the course of culture in
its lower stages can satisfy this stringent criterion. Traditions may be
urged in support either of the progression-theory or of the
degradation-theory. These traditions may be partly true, and must be
partly untrue; but whatever truth or untruth they may contain, there is
such difficulty in separating man’s recollection of what was from his
speculation as to what might have been, that ethnology seems not likely
to gain much by attempts to judge of early stages of civilization on a
traditional basis. The problem is one which has occupied the philosophic
mind even in savage and barbaric life, and has been solved by
speculations asserted as facts, and by traditions which are, in great
measure, mere realized theories. The Chinese can show, with all due
gravity, the records of their ancient dynasties and tell us how in old
times their ancestors dwelt in caves, clothed themselves with leaves,
and ate raw flesh, till, under such and such rulers, they were taught to
build huts, prepare skins for garments, and make fire.[10] Lucretius can
describe to us, in his famous lines, the large-boned, hardy, lawless,
primæval race of man, living the roving life of the wild beasts which
they overcame with stones and heavy clubs, devouring berries and acorns,
ignorant as yet of fire, and agriculture, and the use of skins for
clothing. From this state the Epicurean poet traces up the development
of culture, beginning outside but ending inside the range of human
memory.[11] To the same class belong those legends which, starting from
an ancient savage state, describe its elevation by divine civilizers:
this, which may be called the supernatural progression-theory, is
exemplified in the familiar culture-traditions of Peru and Italy.

But other minds, following a different ideal track from the present to
the past, have seen in a far different shape the early stages of human
life. Those men whose eyes are always turned to look back on the wisdom
of the ancients, those who by a common confusion of thought ascribe to
men of old the wisdom of old men, those who hold fast to some
once-honoured scheme of life which new schemes are superseding before
their eyes, are apt to carry back their thought of present degeneration
into far-gone ages, till they reach a period of primæval glory. The
Parsi looks back to the happy rule of King Yima, when men and cattle
were immortal, when water and trees never dried up and food was
inexhaustible, when there was no cold nor heat, no envy nor old age.[12]
The Buddhist looks back to the age of glorious soaring beings who had no
sin, no sex, no want of food, till the unhappy hour when, tasting a
delicious scum that formed upon the surface of the earth, they fell into
evil, and in time became degraded to eat rice, to bear children, to
build houses, to divide property, and to establish caste. In after ages,
record preserves details of the continuing course of degeneration. It
was King Chetiya who told the first lie, and the citizens who heard of
it, not knowing what a lie was, asked if it were white, black or blue.
Men’s lives grew shorter and shorter, and it was King Maha Sâgara who,
after a brief reign of 252,000 years, made the dismal discovery of the
first grey hair.[13]

Admitting the imperfection of the historical record as regards the
lowest stages of culture, we must bear in mind that it tells both ways.
Niebuhr, attacking the progressionists of the 18th century, remarks that
they have overlooked the fact ‘that no single example can be brought
forward of an actually savage people having independently become
civilized.’[14] Whately appropriated this remark, which indeed forms the
kernel of his well-known Lecture on the Origin of Civilisation: ‘Facts
are stubborn things,’ he says, ‘and that no authenticated instance can
be produced of savages that ever did emerge, unaided, from that state
is no theory, but a statement, hitherto never disproved, of a matter
of fact.’ He uses this as an argument in support of his general
conclusion, that man could not have risen independently from a savage to
a civilized state, and that savages are degenerate descendants of
civilized men.[15] But he omits to ask the counter-question, whether we
find one recorded instance of a civilized people falling independently
into a savage state? Any such record, direct and well vouched, would be
of high interest to ethnologists, though, of course, it would not
contradict the development-theory, for proving loss is not disproving
previous gain. But where is such a record to be found? The defect of
historical evidence as to the transition between savagery and higher
culture is a two-sided fact, only half taken into Archbishop Whately’s
one-sided argument. Fortunately the defect is by no means fatal. Though
history may not account directly for the existence and explain the
position of savages, it at least gives evidence which bears closely on
the matter. Moreover, we are in various ways enabled to study the lower
course of culture on evidence which cannot have been tampered with to
support a theory. Old traditional lore, however untrustworthy as direct
record of events, contains most faithful incidental descriptions of
manners and customs; archæology displays old structures and buried
relics of the remote past; philology brings out the undesigned history
in language, which generation after generation have handed down without
a thought of its having such significance; the ethnological survey of
the races of the world tells much; the ethnographical comparison of
their condition tells more.

Arrest and decline in civilization are to be recognised as among the
more frequent and powerful operations of national life. That knowledge,
arts, and institutions should decay in certain districts, that peoples
once progressive should lag behind and be passed by advancing
neighbours, that sometimes even societies of men should recede into
rudeness and misery—all these are phenomena with which modern history is
familiar. In judging of the relation of the lower to the higher stages
of civilization, it is essential to gain some idea how far it may have
been affected by such degeneration. What kind of evidence can direct
observation and history give as to the degradation of men from a
civilized condition towards that of savagery? In our great cities, the
so-called ‘dangerous classes’ are sunk in hideous misery and depravity.
If we have to strike a balance between the Papuans of New Caledonia and
the communities of European beggars and thieves, we may sadly
acknowledge that we have in our midst something worse than savagery. But
it is not savagery; it is broken-down civilization. Negatively, the
inmates of a Whitechapel casual ward and of a Hottentot kraal agree in
their want of the knowledge and virtue of the higher culture. But
positively, their mental and moral characteristics are utterly
different. Thus, the savage life is essentially devoted to gaining
subsistence from nature, which is just what the proletarian life is not.
Their relations to civilized life—the one of independence, the other of
dependence—are absolutely opposite. To my mind the popular phrases about
‘city savages’ and ‘street Arabs’ seem like comparing a ruined house to
a builder’s yard. It is more to the purpose to notice how war and
misrule, famine and pestilence, have again and again devastated
countries, reduced their population to miserable remnants, and lowered
their level of civilization, and how the isolated life of wild country
districts seems sometimes tending towards savagery. So far as we know,
however, none of these causes have ever really reproduced a savage
community. For an ancient account of degeneration under adverse
circumstances, Ovid’s mention of the unhappy colony of Tomi on the Black
Sea is a case in point, though perhaps not to be taken too literally.
Among its mixed Greek and barbaric population, harassed and carried off
into slavery by the Sarmatian horsemen, much as the Persians till lately
were by the Turkomans, the poet describes the neglect of the gardener’s
craft, the decay of textile arts, the barbaric clothing of hides.

              ‘Nec tamen hæc loca sunt ullo pretiosa metallo:
                Hostis ab agricola vix sinit illa fodi.
              Purpura sæpe tuos fulgens prætexit amictus:
                Sed non Sarmatico tingitur illa mari.
              Vellera dura ferunt pecudes, et Palladis uti
                Arte Tomitanæ non didicere nurus.
              Femina pro lana Cerialia munera frangit,
                Suppositoque gravem vertice portat aquam.
              Non hic pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus:
                Nulla premunt ramos pondere poma suo.
              Tristia deformes pariunt absinthia campi,
                Terraque de fructu quam sit amara docet.’[16]

Cases of exceptionally low civilization in Europe may perhaps be
sometimes accounted for by degeneration of this kind. But they seem more
often the relics of ancient unchanged barbarism. The evidence from wild
parts of Ireland two or three centuries ago is interesting from this
point of view. Acts of Parliament were passed against the inveterate
habits of fastening ploughs to the horses’ tails, and of burning oats
from the straw to save the trouble of threshing. In the 18th century
Ireland could still be thus described in satire:—

                 ‘The Western isle renowned for bogs,
                 For tories and for great wolf-dogs,
                 For drawing hobbies by the tails,
                 And threshing corn with fiery flails.’[17]

Fynes Moryson’s description of the wild or ‘meere’ Irish about 1600, is
amazing. The very lords of them, he says, dwelt in poor clay houses, or
cabins of boughs covered with turf. In many parts men as well as women
had in very winter time but a linen rag about the loins and a woollen
mantle on their bodies, so that it would turn a man’s stomach to see an
old woman in the morning before breakfast. He notices their habit of
burning oats from the straw, and making cakes thereof. They had no
tables, but set their meat on a bundle of grass. They feasted on fallen
horses, and seethed pieces of beef and pork with the unwashed entrails
of beasts in a hollow tree, lapped in a raw cow’s hide, and so set over
the fire, and they drank milk warmed with a stone first cast into the
fire.[18] Another district remarkable for a barbaric simplicity of life
is the Hebrides. Till of late years, there were to be found there in
actual use earthen vessels, unglazed and made by hand without the
potter’s wheel, which might pass in a museum as indifferent specimens of
savage manufacture. These ‘craggans’ are still made by an old woman at
Barvas for sale as curiosities. Such a modern state of the potter’s art
in the Hebrides fits well with George Buchanan’s statement in the 16th
century that the islanders used to boil meat in the beast’s own paunch
or hide.[19] Early in the 18th century Martin mentions as prevalent
there the ancient way of dressing corn by burning it dexterously from
the ear, which he notices to be a very quick process, thence called
‘graddan’ (Gaelic, grad=quick).[20] Thus we see that the habit of
burning out the grain, for which the ‘meere Irish’ were reproached, was
really the keeping up of an old Keltic art, not without its practical
use. So the appearance in modern Keltic districts of other widespread
arts of the lower culture—hide-boiling, like that of the Scythians in
Herodotus, and stone-boiling, like that of the Assinaboins of North
America—seems to fit not so well with degradation from a high as with
survival from a low civilization. The Irish and the Hebrideans had been
for ages under the influence of comparatively high civilization, which
nevertheless may have left unaltered much of the older and ruder habit
of the people.

Instances of civilized men taking to a wild life in outlying districts
of the world, and ceasing to obtain or want the appliances of
civilization, give more distinct evidence of degradation. In connexion
with this state of things takes place the nearest known approach to an
independent degeneration from a civilized to a savage state. This
happens in mixed races, whose standard of civilization may be more or
less below that of the higher race. The mutineers of the Bounty, with
their Polynesian wives, founded a small but not savage community on
Pitcairn’s Island.[21] The mixed Portuguese and native races of the East
Indies and Africa lead a life below the European standard, but not a
savage life.[22] The Gauchos of the South American Pampas, a mixed
European and Indian race of equestrian herdsmen, are described as
sitting about on ox-skulls, making broth in horns with hot cinders
heaped round, living on meat without vegetables, and altogether leading
a foul, brutal, comfortless, degenerate, but not savage life.[23] One
step beyond this brings us to the cases of individual civilized men
being absorbed in savage tribes and adopting the savage life, on which
they exercise little influence for improvement; the children of these
men may come distinctly under the category of savages. These cases of
mixed breeds, however, do not show a low culture actually produced as
the result of degeneration from a high one. Their theory is that, given
a higher and a lower civilization existing among two races, a mixed race
between the two may take to the lower or an intermediate condition.

Degeneration probably operates even more actively in the lower than in
the higher culture. Barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less
knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem peculiarly exposed to
degrading influences. In Africa, for instance, there seems to have been
in modern centuries a falling off in culture, probably due in a
considerable degree to foreign influence. Mr. J. L. Wilson, contrasting
the 16th and 17th century accounts of powerful negro kingdoms in West
Africa with the present small communities, with little or no tradition
of their forefathers’ more extended political organization, looks
especially to the slave-trade as the deteriorating cause.[24] In
South-East Africa, also, a comparatively high barbaric culture, which we
especially associate with the old descriptions of the kingdom of
Monomotapa, seems to have fallen away, not counting the remarkable ruins
of buildings of hewn stone fitted without mortar which indicate the
intrusion of more civilized foreigners into the gold region![25] In
North America, Father Charlevoix remarks of the Iroquois of the last
century, that in old times they used to build their cabins better than
other nations, and better than they do themselves now; they carved rude
figures in relief on them; but since in various expeditions almost all
their villages have been burnt, they have not taken the trouble to
restore them in their old condition.[26] The degradation of the Cheyenne
Indians is matter of history. Persecuted by their enemies the Sioux, and
dislodged at last even from their fortified village, the heart of the
tribe was broken. Their numbers were thinned, they no longer dared to
establish themselves in a permanent abode, they gave up the cultivation
of the soil, and became a tribe of wandering hunters, with horses for
their only valuable possession, which every year they bartered for a
supply of corn, beans, pumpkins, and European merchandise, and then
returned into the heart of the prairies.[27] When in the Rocky
Mountains, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle came upon an outlying fragment of
the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, sheltering themselves under
rude temporary slants of bark or matting, falling year by year into
lower misery, and rapidly dying out; this is another example of the
degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage
people.[28] There are tribes who are the very outcasts of savage life.
There is reason to look upon the miserable Digger Indians of North
America and the Bushmen of South Africa as the persecuted remnants of
tribes who have seen happier days.[29] The traditions of the lower races
of their ancestors’ better life may sometimes be real recollections of a
not far distant past. The Algonquin Indians look back to old days as to
a golden age when life was better than now, when they had better laws
and leaders, and manners less rude.[30] And indeed, knowing what we do
of their history, we may admit that they have cause to remember in
misery happiness gone by. Well, too, might the rude Kamchadal declare
that the world is growing worse and worse, that men are becoming fewer
and viler, and food scarcer, for the hunter, and the bear, and the
reindeer are hurrying away from here to the happier life in the regions
below.[31] It would be a valuable contribution to the study of
civilization to have the action of decline and fall investigated on a
wider and more exact basis of evidence than has yet been attempted. The
cases here stated are probably but part of a long series which might be
brought forward to prove degeneration in culture to have been, by no
means indeed the primary cause of the existence of barbarism and
savagery in the world, but a secondary action largely and deeply
affecting the general development of civilization. It may perhaps give
no unfair idea to compare degeneration of culture, both in its kind of
operation and in its immense extent, to denudation in the geological
history of the earth.

In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something
may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this
end the classification by families of languages may be conveniently
used, if checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt
speech by itself is an insufficient guide in tracing national descent,
as witness the extreme cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negro
races in the West Indies, nevertheless speaking English as their
mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, connexion of speech
does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. As a guide in
tracing the history of civilization, language gives still better
evidence, for common language to a great extent involves common culture.
The race dominant enough to maintain or impose its language, usually
more or less maintains or imposes its civilization also. Thus the common
descent of the languages of Hindus, Greeks, and Teutons is no doubt due
in great measure to common ancestry, but is still more closely bound up
with a common social and intellectual history, with what Professor Max
Müller well calls their ‘spiritual relationship.’ The wonderful
permanence of language often enables us to detect among remotely ancient
and distant tribes the traces of connected civilization. How, on such
grounds, do savage and civilized tribes appear to stand related, within
the various groups of mankind connected historically by the possession
of kindred languages?

The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known
civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phœnicians, Syrians,
&c., and has an earlier as well as a later connexion in North Africa.
This family takes in some rude tribes, but none which would be classed
as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly
for many thousand years, and there are well-known and well-marked traces
of its early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least
change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and
Himalaya. There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe
having become savage. The Gypsies and other outcasts are, no doubt,
partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In
India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather
of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks
with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes coming
under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the Bombay
Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least,
whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people themselves
are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their
original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. But these all appear
to stand at higher stages of civilization than any wild forest tribes of
the peninsula who can be reckoned as nearly savages; all such are
non-Aryan both in blood and speech.[32] In Ceylon, however, we have the
remarkable phenomenon of men leading a savage life while speaking an
Aryan dialect. This is the wild part of the race of Veddas or ‘hunters,’
of whom a remnant still inhabit the forest land. These people are
dark-skinned and flat-nosed, slight of frame, and very small of skull,
and five feet is an average man’s height. They are a shy, harmless,
simple people, living principally by hunting; they lime birds, take fish
by poisoning the water, and are skilful in getting wild honey; they have
bows with iron-pointed arrows, which, with their hunting-dogs, are their
most valuable possessions. They dwell in caves or bark huts, and their
very word for a house is Singhalese for a hollow tree (rukula); a
patch of bark was formerly their dress, but now a bit of linen hangs to
their waist-cords; their planting of patches of ground is said to be
recent. They count on their fingers, and produce fire with the simplest
kind of fire-drill twirled by hand. They are most truthful and honest.
Their monogamy and conjugal fidelity contrast strongly with the opposite
habits of the more civilized Singhalese. A remarkable Vedda marriage
custom sanctioned a man’s taking his younger (not elder) sister as his
wife; sister-marriage existing among the Singhalese, but being confined
to the royal family. Mistaken statements have been made as to the Veddas
having no religion, no personal names, no language. Their religion, in
fact, corresponds with the animism of the ruder tribes of India; some of
their names are remarkable as being Hindu, but not in use among the
modern Singhalese; their language is a Singhalese dialect. There is no
doubt attaching to the usual opinion that the Veddas are in the main
descended from the ‘yakkos’ or demons; i.e. from the indigenous tribes
of the island. Legend and language concur to make probable an admixture
of Aryan blood accompanying the adoption of Aryan speech, but the
evidence of bodily characteristics shows the Vedda race to be
principally of indigenous pre-Aryan type.[33]

The Tatar family of Northern Asia and Europe (Turanian, if the word be
used in a restricted sense) displays evidence of quite a different kind.
This wide-lying group of tribes and nations has members nearly or quite
touching the savage level in ancient and even modern times, such as
Ostyaks, Tunguz, Samoyeds, Lapps, while more or less high ranges of
culture are represented by Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. Here,
however, it is unquestionable that the rude tribes represent the earlier
condition of the Tatar race at large, from which its more mixed and
civilized peoples, mostly by adopting the foreign culture of Buddhist,
Moslem, and Christian nations, and partly by internal development, are
well known to have risen. The ethnology of South-Eastern Asia is
somewhat obscure; but if we may classify under one heading the native
races of Siam, Burma, &c., the wilder tribes may be considered as
representing earlier conditions, for the higher culture of this region
is obviously foreign, especially of Buddhist origin. The Malay race is
also remarkable for the range of civilization represented by tribes
classed as belonging to it. If the wild tribes of the Malayan peninsula
and Borneo be compared with the semi-civilized nations of Java and
Sumatra, it appears that part of the race survives to represent an early
savage state, while part is found in possession of a civilization which
the first glance shows to have been mostly borrowed from Hindu and
Moslem sources. Some forest tribes of the peninsula seem to be
representatives of the Malay race at its lowest level of culture, how
far original and how far degraded it is not easy to say. Among them the
very rude Orang Sabimba, who have no agriculture and no boats, give a
remarkable account of themselves, that they are descendants of
shipwrecked Malays from the Bugis country, but were so harassed by
pirates that they gave up civilization and cultivation, and vowed not to
eat fowls, which betrayed them by their crowing. So they plant nothing,
but eat wild fruit and vegetables, and all animals but the fowl. This,
if at all founded on fact, is an interesting case of degeneration. But
savages usually invent myths to account for peculiar habits, as where,
in the same district, the Biduanda Kallang account for their not
cultivating the ground by the story that their ancestors vowed not to
make plantations. Another rude people of the Malay peninsula are the
Jakuns, a simple, kindly race, among whom some trace their pedigree to a
pair of white monkeys, while others declare that they are descendants of
white men; and indeed there is some ground for supposing these latter to
be really of mixed race, for they use a few Portuguese words, and a
report exists of some refugees having settled up the country.[34] The
Melanesians, Papuans, and Australians represent grades of savagery
spread each over its own vast area in a comparatively homogeneous way.
Lastly, the relations of savagery to higher conditions are remarkable,
but obscure, on the American continents. There are several great
linguistic families whose members were discovered in a savage state
throughout; such are the Esquimaux, Algonquin, and Guarani groups. On
the other hand there were three apparently unconnected districts of
semi-civilization reaching a high barbaric level, viz., in Mexico and
Central America, Bogota, and Peru. Between these higher and lower
conditions were races at the level of the Natchez of Louisiana and the
Apalaches of Florida. Linguistic connexion is not unknown between the
more advanced peoples and the lower races around them.[35] But definite
evidence showing the higher culture to have arisen from the lower, or
the lower to have fallen from the higher, is scarcely forthcoming. Both
operations may in degree have happened.

It is apparent, from such general inspection of this ethnological
problem, that it would repay a far closer study than it has as yet
received. As the evidence stands at present, it appears that when in any
race some branches much excel the rest in culture, this more often
happens by elevation than by subsidence. But this elevation is much more
apt to be produced by foreign than by native action. Civilization is a
plant much oftener propagated than developed. As regards the lower
races, this accords with the results of European intercourse with savage
tribes during the last three or four centuries; so far as these tribes
have survived the process, they have assimilated more or less of
European Culture and risen towards the European level, as in Polynesia,
South Africa, South America. Another important point becomes manifest
from this ethnological survey. The fact, that during so many thousand
years of known existence, neither the Aryan nor the Semitic race appears
to have thrown off any direct savage offshoot, tells, with some force,
against the probability of degradation to the savage level ever
happening from high-level civilization.

With regard to the opinions of older writers on early civilization,
whether progressionists or degenerationists, it must be borne in mind
that the evidence at their disposal fell far short of even the miserably
imperfect data now accessible. Criticizing an 18th century ethnologist
is like criticizing an 18th century geologist. The older writer may have
been far abler than his modern critic, but he had not the same
materials. Especially he wanted the guidance of Prehistoric Archæology,
a department of research only established on a scientific footing within
the last few years. It is essential to gain a clear view of the bearing
of this newer knowledge on the old problem.

Chronology, though regarding as more or less fictitious the immense
dynastic schemes of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Chinese, passing as they
do into mere ciphering-book sums with years for units, nevertheless
admits that existing monuments carry back the traces of comparatively
high civilization to a distance of above five thousand years. By piecing
together Eastern and Western documentary evidence it seems that the
great religious divisions of the Aryan race, to which modern Brahmanism,
Zarathustrism, and Buddhism are due, belong to a period of remotely
ancient history. Even if we cannot hold, with Professor Max Müller, in
the preface to his translation of the ‘Rig Veda,’ that this collection
of Aryan hymns ‘will take and maintain for ever its position as the most
ancient of books in the library of mankind,’ and if we do not admit the
stringency of his reckonings of its date in centuries B.C., yet we must
grant that he shows cause to refer its composition to a very ancient
period, where it then proves that a comparatively high barbaric culture
already existed. The linguistic argument for the remotely ancient common
origin of the Indo-European nations, in a degree as to their bodily
descent, and in a greater degree as to their civilization, tends toward
the same result. So it is again with Egypt. The calculations of Egyptian
dynasties in thousands of years, however disputable in detail, are based
on facts which at any rate authorize the reception of a long chronology.
To go no further than the identification of two or three Egyptian names
mentioned in Biblical and Classical history, we gain a strong impression
of remote antiquity. Such are the names of Shishank; of the Psammitichos
line, whose obelisks are to be seen in Rome; of Tirhakah, King of
Ethiopia, whose nurse’s coffin is in the Florence Museum; of the city of
Rameses, plainly connected with that great Ramesside line which
Egyptologists call the 19th Dynasty. Here, before classic culture had
arisen, the culture of Egypt culminated, and behind this time lies the
somewhat less advanced age of the Pyramid kings, and behind this again
the indefinite lapse of ages which such a civilization required for its
production. Again, though no part of the Old Testament can
satisfactorily prove for itself an antiquity of composition approaching
that of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, yet all critics
must admit that the older of the historical books give on the one hand
contemporary documents showing considerable culture in the Semitic world
at a date which in comparison with classic history is ancient; while on
the other hand they afford evidence by way of chronicle, carrying back
ages farther the record of a somewhat advanced barbaric civilization.
Now if the development-theory is to account for phenomena such as these,
its chronological demand must be no small one, and the more so when it
is admitted that in the lower ranges of culture progress would be
extremely slow in comparison with that which experience shows among
nations already far advanced. On these conditions of the first
appearance of the middle civilization being thrown back to distant
antiquity, and of slow development being required to perform its heavy
task in ages still more remote, Prehistoric Archæology cheerfully takes
up the problem. And, indeed, far from being dismayed by the vastness of
the period required on the narrowest computation, the prehistoric
archæologist shows even too much disposition to revel in calculations of
thousands of years, as a financier does in reckonings of thousands of
pounds, in a liberal and maybe somewhat reckless way.

Prehistoric Archæology is fully alive to facts which may bear on
degeneration in culture. Such are the colossal human figures of hewn
stone in Easter Island, which may possibly have been shaped by the
ancestors of the existing islanders, whose present resources, however,
are quite unequal to the execution of such gigantic works.[36] A much
more important case is that of the former inhabitants of the Mississippi
Valley. In districts where the native tribes known in modern times rank
as savages, there formerly dwelt a race whom ethnologists call the
Mound-Builders, from the amazing extent of their mounds and enclosures,
of which there is a single group occupying an area of four square miles.
The regularity of the squares and circles and the repetition of
enclosures similar in dimensions, raise interesting questions as to the
methods by which these were planned out. To have constructed such works
the Mound-Builders must have been a numerous population, mainly
subsisting by agriculture, and indeed vestiges of their ancient tillage
are still to be found. They did not however in industrial arts approach
the level of Mexico. For instance, their use of native copper, hammered
into shape for cutting instruments, is similar to that of some of the
savage tribes farther north. On the whole, judging by their earthworks,
fields, pottery, stone implements and other remains, they seem to have
belonged to those high savage or barbaric tribes of the Southern States,
of whom the Creeks and Cherokees, as described by Bartram, may be taken
as typical.[37] If any of the wild roving hunting tribes now found
living near the huge earthworks of the Mound-Builders are the
descendants of this somewhat advanced race, then a very considerable
degradation has taken place. The question is an open one. The
explanation of the traces of tillage may perhaps in this case be like
that of the remains of old cultivation-terraces in Borneo, the work of
Chinese colonists whose descendants have mostly been merged in the mass
of the population and follow the native habits.[38] On the other hand,
the evidence of locality may be misleading as to race. A traveller in
Greenland, coming on the ruined stone buildings at Kakortok, would not
argue justly that the Esquimaux are degenerate descendants of ancestors
capable of such architecture, for in fact these are the remains of a
church and baptistery built by the ancient Scandinavian settlers.[39] On
the whole it is remarkable how little of colourable evidence of
degeneration has been disclosed by archæology. Its negative evidence
tells strongly the other way. As an instance may be quoted Sir John
Lubbock’s argument against the idea that tribes now ignorant of
metallurgy and pottery formerly possessed but have since lost these
arts. ‘We may also assert, on a general proposition, that no weapons or
instruments of metal have ever been found in any country inhabited by
savages wholly ignorant of metallurgy. A still stronger case is afforded
by pottery. Pottery is not easily destroyed; when known at all it is
always abundant, and it possesses two qualities, namely, those of being
easy to break and yet difficult to destroy, which render it very
valuable in an archæological point of view. Moreover, it is in most
cases associated with burials. It is, therefore, a very significant
fact, that no fragment of pottery has ever been found in Australia, New
Zealand, or in the Polynesian Islands.’[40] How different a state of
things the popular degeneration-theory would lead us to expect is
pointedly suggested by Sir Charles Lyell’s sarcastic sentences in his
‘Antiquity of Man.’ Had the original stock of mankind, he argues, been
really endowed with superior intellectual powers and inspired knowledge,
while possessing the same improvable nature as their posterity, how
extreme a point of advancement would they have reached. ‘Instead of the
rudest pottery or flint tools, so irregular in form as to cause the
unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of
design, we should now be finding sculptured forms surpassing in beauty
the masterpieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or
electric telegraphs from which the best engineers of our day might gain
invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more
advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of
perfection in the arts and sciences, such as the nineteenth century has
not yet witnessed. Still farther would the triumphs of inventive genius
be found to have been carried, when the later deposits, now assigned to
the ages of bronze and iron, were formed. Vainly should we be straining
our imaginations to guess the possible uses and meaning of such
relics—machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths
of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants
or even the conceptions of living mathematicians.’[41]

The master-key to the investigation of man’s primæval condition is held
by Prehistoric Archæology. This key is the evidence of the Stone Age,
proving that men of remotely ancient ages were in the savage state. Ever
since the long-delayed recognition of M. Boucher de Perthes’ discoveries
(1841 and onward) of the flint implements in the Drift gravels of the
Somme Valley, evidence has been accumulating over a wide European area
to show that the ruder Stone Age, represented by implements of the
Palæolithic or Drift type, prevailed among savage tribes of the
Quaternary period, the contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly
rhinoceros, in ages for which Geology asserts an antiquity far more
remote than History can avail to substantiate for the human race. Mr.
John Frere had already written in 1797 respecting such flint instruments
discovered at Hoxne in Suffolk. ‘The situation in which these weapons
were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed,
even beyond that of the present world.’[42] The vast lapse of time
through which the history of London has represented the history of human
civilization, is to my mind one of the most suggestive facts disclosed
by archæology. There the antiquary, excavating but a few yards deep, may
descend from the débris representing our modern life, to relics of the
art and science of the Middle Ages, to signs of Norman, Saxon,
Romano-British times, to traces of the higher Stone Age. And on his way
from Temple Bar to the Great Northern Station he passes near the spot
(‘opposite to black Mary’s near Grayes inn lane’) where a Drift
implement of black flint was found with the skeleton of an elephant by
Mr. Conyers, about a century and a half ago, the relics side by side of
the London mammoth and the London savage.[43] In the gravel-beds of
Europe, the laterite of India, and other more superficial localities,
where relics of the Palæolithic Age are found, what principally
testifies to man’s condition is the extreme rudeness of his stone
implements, and the absence of even edge-grinding. The natural inference
that this indicates a low savage state is confirmed in the caves of
Central France. There a race of men, who have left indeed really
artistic portraits of themselves and the reindeer and mammoths they
lived among, seem, as may be judged from the remains of their weapons,
implements, &c., to have led a life somewhat of Esquimaux type, but
lower by the want of domesticated animals. The districts where
implements of the rude primitive Drift type are found are limited in
extent. It is to ages later in time and more advanced in development,
that the Neolithic or Polished Stone Period belonged, when the
manufacture of stone instruments was much improved, and grinding and
polishing were generally introduced. During the long period of
prevalence of this state of things, Man appears to have spread almost
over the whole habitable earth. The examination of district after
district of the world has now all but established a universal rule that
the Stone Age (bone or shell being the occasional substitutes for stone)
underlies the Metal Age everywhere. Even the districts famed in history
as seats of ancient civilization show, like other regions, their traces
of a yet more archaic Stone Age. Asia Minor, Egypt, Palestine, India,
China, furnish evidence from actual specimens, historical mentions, and
survivals, which demonstrate the former prevalence of conditions of
society which have their analogues among modern savage tribes.[44] The
Duke of Argyll, in his ‘Primeval Man,’ while admitting the Drift
implements as having been the ice hatchets and rude knives of low tribes
of men inhabiting Europe toward the end of the Glacial Period, concludes
thence ‘that it would be about as safe to argue from these implements as
to the condition of Man at that time in the countries of his Primeval
Home, as it would be in our own day to argue from the habits and arts of
the Eskimo as to the state of civilization in London or in Paris.’[45]
The progress of Archæology for years past, however, has been continually
cutting away the ground on which such an argument as this can stand,
till now it is all but utterly driven off the field. Where now is the
district of the earth that can be pointed to as the ‘Primeval Home’ of
Man, and that does not show by rude stone implements buried in its soil
the savage condition of its former inhabitants? There is scarcely a
known province of the world of which we cannot say certainly, savages
once dwelt here, and if in such a case an ethnologist asserts that these
savages were the descendants or successors of a civilized nation, the
burden of proof lies on him. Again, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age
belong in great measure to history, but their relation to the Stone Age
proves the soundness of the judgement of Lucretius, when, attaching
experience of the present to memory and inference from the past, he
propounded what is now a tenet of archæology, the succession of the
Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages:

             ‘Arma antiqua manus ungues dentesque fuerunt,
             Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami

             Posterius ferri vis est ærisque reperta,
             Et prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus.’[46]

Throughout the various topics of Prehistoric Archæology, the force and
convergence of its testimony upon the development of culture are
overpowering. The relics discovered in gravel-beds, caves, shell-mounds,
terramares, lake-dwellings, earthworks, the results of an exploration of
the superficial soil in many countries, the comparison of geological
evidence, of historical documents, of modern savage life, corroborate
and explain one another. The megalithic structures, menhirs, cromlechs,
dolmens, and the like, only known to England, France, Algeria, as the
work of races of the mysterious past, have been kept up as matters of
modern construction and recognized purpose among the ruder indigenous
tribes of India. The series of ancient lake-settlements which must
represent so many centuries of successive population fringing the shores
of the Swiss lakes, have their surviving representatives among the rude
tribes of the East Indies, Africa, and South America. Outlying savages
are still heaping up shell-mounds like those of far-past Scandinavian
antiquity. The burial mounds still to be seen in civilized countries
have served at once as museums of early culture and as proofs of its
savage or barbaric type. It is enough, without entering farther here
into subjects fully discussed in modern special works, to claim the
general support given to the development-theory of culture by
Prehistoric Archæology. It was with a true appreciation of the bearings
of this science that one of its founders, the venerable Professor Sven
Nilsson, declared in 1843 in the Introduction to his ‘Primitive
Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ that we are ‘unable properly to understand
the significance of the antiquities of any individual country without at
the same time clearly realizing the idea that they are the fragments of
a progressive series of civilization, and that the human race has always
been, and still is, steadily advancing in civilization.’[47]

Enquiry into the origin and early development of the material arts, as
judged of by comparing the various stages at which they are found
existing, leads to a corresponding result. Not to take this argument up
in its full range, a few typical details may serve to show its general
character. Amongst the various stages of the arts, it is only a minority
which show of themselves by mere inspection whether they are in the line
of progress or of decline. Most such facts may be compared to an
Indian’s canoe, stem and stern alike, so that one cannot tell by looking
at it which way it is set to go. But there are some which, like our own
boats, distinctly point in the direction of their actual course. Such
facts are pointers in the study of civilization, and in every branch of
the enquiry should be sought out. A good example of these pointer-facts
is recorded by Mr. Wallace. In Celebes, where the bamboo houses are apt
to lean with the prevalent west wind, the natives have found out that if
they fix some crooked timbers in the sides of the house, it will not
fall. They choose such accordingly, the crookedest they can find, but
they do not know the rationale of the contrivance, and have not hit on
the idea that straight poles fixed slanting would have the same effect
in making the structure rigid.[48] In fact, they have gone half-way
toward inventing what builders call a ‘strut.’ but have stopped short.
Now the mere sight of such a house would show that the plan is not a
remnant of higher architecture, but a half-made invention. This is a
fact in the line of progress, but not of decline. I have mentioned
elsewhere a number of similar cases; thus the adaptation of a cord to
the fire-drill is obviously an improvement on the simpler instrument
twirled by hand, and the use of the spindle for making thread is an
improvement on the clumsier art of hand-twisting;[49] but to reverse
this position, and suppose the hand-drill to have come into use by
leaving off the use of the cord of the cord-drill, or that people who
knew the use of the spindle left it off and painfully twisted their
thread by hand, is absurd. Again, the appearance of an art in a
particular locality where it is hard to account for it as borrowed from
elsewhere, and especially if it concerns some special native product, is
evidence of its being a native invention. Thus, what people can claim
the invention of the hammock, or the still more admirable discovery of
the extraction of the wholesome cassava from the poisonous manioc, but
the natives of the South American and West Indian districts to which
these things belong? As the isolated possession of an art goes to prove
its invention where it is found, so the absence of an art goes to prove
that it was never present. The onus probandi is on the other side; if
anyone thinks that the East African’s ancestors had the lamp and the
potter’s wheel, and that the North American Indians once possessed the
art of making beer from their maize like the Mexicans, but that these
arts have been lost, at any rate let him show cause for such an opinion.
I need not, perhaps, go so far as a facetious ethnological friend of
mine, who argues that the existence of savage tribes who do not kiss
their women is a proof of primæval barbarism, for, he says, if they had
ever known the practice they could not possibly have forgotten it.
Lastly and principally, as experience shows us that arts of civilized
life are developed through successive stages of improvement, we may
assume that the early development of even savage arts came to pass in a
similar way, and thus, finding various stages of an art among the lower
races, we may arrange these stages in a series probably representing
their actual sequence in history. If any art can be traced back among
savage tribes to a rudimentary state in which its invention does not
seem beyond their intellectual condition, and especially if it may be
produced by imitating nature or following nature’s direct suggestion,
there is fair reason to suppose the very origin of the art to have been
reached.

Professor Nilsson, looking at the remarkable similarity of the hunting
and fishing instruments of the lower races of mankind, considers them to
have been contrived instinctively by a sort of natural necessity. As an
example he takes the bow and arrow.[50] The instance seems an
unfortunate one, in the face of the fact that the supposed
bow-and-arrow-making instinct fails among the natives of Tasmania, to
whom it would have been very useful, nor have the Australians any bow of
their own invention. Even within the Papuan region, the bow so prevalent
in New Guinea is absent, or almost so, from New Caledonia. It seems to
me that Dr. Klemm, in his dissertations on Implements and Weapons, and
Colonel Lane Fox, in his lectures on Primitive Warfare, take a more
instructive line in tracing the early development of arts, not to a
blind instinct, but to a selection, imitation, and gradual adaptation
and improvement of objects and operations which Nature, the instructor
of primæval man, sets before him. Thus Klemm traces the stages by which
progress appears to have been made from the rough stick to the finished
spear or club, from the natural sharp-edged or rounded stone to the
artistically fashioned celt, spear-head, or hammer.[51] Lane Fox traces
connexion through the various types of weapons, pointing out how a form
once arrived at is repeated in various sizes, like the spear-head and
arrow-point; how in rude conditions of the arts the same instrument
serves different purposes, as where the Fuegians use their arrow-heads
also for knives, and Kafirs carve with their assagais, till separate
forms are adopted for special purposes; and how in the history of the
striking, cutting, and piercing instruments used by mankind, a
continuity may be traced, which indicates a gradual progressive
development from the rudest beginnings to the most advanced improvements
of modern skill. To show how far the early development of warlike arts
may have been due to man’s imitative faculty, he points out the
analogies in methods of warfare among animals and men, classifying as
defensive appliances hides, solid plates, jointed plates, scales; as
offensive weapons, the piercing, striking, serrated, poisoned kinds,
&c.; and under the head of stratagems, flight, concealment, leaders,
outposts, war-cries, and so forth.[52]

The manufacture of stone implements is now almost perfectly understood
by archæologists. The processes used by modern savages have been
observed and imitated. Sir John Evans, for instance, by blows with a
pebble, pressure with a piece of stag’s horn, sawing with a flint-flake,
boring with a stick and sand, and grinding on a stone surface, succeeds
in reproducing all but the finest kinds of stone implements.[53] On
thorough knowledge we are now able to refer in great measure the
remarkable similarities of the stone scrapers, flake-knives, hatchets,
spear- and arrow-heads, &c., as found in distant times and regions, to
the similarity of natural models, of materials, and of requirements
which belong to savage life. The history of the Stone Age is clearly
seen to be one of development. Beginning with the natural sharp stone,
the transition to the rudest artificially shaped stone implement is
imperceptibly gradual, and onward from this rude stage much independent
progress in different directions is to be traced, till the manufacture
at last arrives at admirable artistic perfection, by the time that the
introduction of metal is superseding it. So with other implements and
fabrics, of which the stages are known through their whole course of
development from the merest nature to the fullest art. The club is
traced from the rudest natural bludgeon up to the weapon of finished
shape and carving. Pebbles held in the hand to hammer with, and
cutting-instruments of stone shaped or left smooth at one end to be held
in the hand, may be seen in museums, hinting that the important art of
fixing instruments in handles was the result of invention, not of
instinct. The stone hatchet, used as a weapon, passes into the
battle-axe. The spear, a pointed stick or pole, has its point hardened
in the fire, and a further improvement is to fix on a sharp point of
horn, bone, or chipped stone. Stones are flung by hand, and then by the
sling, a contrivance widely but not universally known among savage
tribes. From first to last in the history of war the spear or lance is
grasped as a thrusting weapon. Its use as a missile no doubt began as
early, but it has hardly survived so far in civilization. Thus used, it
is most often thrown by the unaided arm, but a sling for the purpose is
known to various savage tribes. The short cord with an eye used in the
New Hebrides, and called a ‘becket’ by Captain Cook, and a whip-like
instrument noticed in New Zealand, are used for spear-throwing. But the
more usual instrument is a wooden handle, a foot or two long. This
spear-thrower is known across the high northern districts of North
America, among some tribes of South America, and among the Australians.
These latter, it has been asserted, could not have invented it in their
present state of barbarism. But the remarkable feature of the matter is
that the spear-thrower belongs especially to savagery, and not to
civilization. Among the higher nations the nearest approach to it seems
to have been the classic amentum, a thong attached to the middle of the
shaft of the javelin to throw it with. The highest people known to have
used the spear-thrower proper were the nations of Mexico and Central
America. Its existence among them is vouched for by representations in
the mythological pictures, by its Mexican name ‘atlatl,’ and by a
beautifully artistic specimen of the thing itself in the Christy Museum;
but we do not hear of it as in practical use after the Spanish Conquest.
In fact the history of the instrument seems in absolute opposition to
the degradation-theory, representing as it does an invention belonging
to the lower civilization, and scarcely able to survive beyond. Nearly
the same may be said of the blow-tube, which as a serious weapon
scarcely ranges above rude tribes of the East Indies and South America,
though kept up in sport at higher levels. The Australian boomerang has
been claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the
transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to be
observed in its own country, while no civilized race possesses the
weapon.

The use of spring traps of boughs, of switches to fillip small missiles
with, and of the remarkable darts of the Pelew Islands, bent and made to
fly by their own spring, indicate inventions which may have led to that
of the bow, while the arrow is a miniature form of the javelin. The
practice of poisoning arrows, after the manner of stings and serpents’
fangs, is no civilized device, but a characteristic of lower life, which
is generally discarded even at the barbaric stage. The art of
narcotizing fish, remembered but not approved by high civilization,
belongs to many savage tribes, who might easily discover it in any
forest pool where a suitable plant had fallen in. The art of setting
fences to catch fish at the ebb of the tide, so common among the lower
races, is a simple device for assisting nature quite likely to occur to
the savage, in whom sharp hunger is no mean ally of dull wit. Thus it is
with other arts. Fire-making, cooking, pottery, the textile arts, are to
be traced along lines of gradual improvement.[54] Music begins with the
rattle and the drum, which in one way or another hold their places from
end to end of civilization, while pipes and stringed instruments
represent an advanced musical art which is still developing. So with
architecture and agriculture. Complex, elaborate, and highly-reasoned as
are the upper stages of these arts, it is to be remembered that their
lower stages begin with mere direct imitation of nature, copying the
shelters which nature provides, and the propagation of plants which
nature performs. Without enumerating to the same purpose the remaining
industries of savage life, it may be said generally that their facts
resist rather than require a theory of degradation from higher culture.
They agree with, and often necessitate, the same view of development
which we know by experience to account for the origin and progress of
the arts among ourselves.

In the various branches of the problem which will henceforward occupy
our attention, that of determining the relation of the mental condition
of savages to that of civilized men, it is an excellent guide and
safeguard to keep before our minds the theory of development in the
material arts. Throughout all the manifestations of the human intellect,
facts will be found to fall into their places on the same general lines
of evolution. The notion of the intellectual state of savages as
resulting from decay of previous high knowledge, seems to have as little
evidence in its favour as that stone celts are the degenerate successors
of Sheffield axes, or earthen grave-mounds degraded copies of Egyptian
pyramids. The study of savage and civilized life alike avail us to trace
in the early history of the human intellect, not gifts of transcendental
wisdom, but rude shrewd sense taking up the facts of common life and
shaping from them schemes of primitive philosophy. It will be seen again
and again, by examining such topics as language, mythology, custom,
religion, that savage opinion is in a more or less rudimentary state,
while the civilized mind still bears vestiges, neither few nor slight,
of a past condition from which savages represent the least, and
civilized men the greatest advance. Throughout the whole vast range of
the history of human thought and habit, while civilization has to
contend not only with survival from lower levels, but also with
degeneration within its own borders, it yet proves capable of overcoming
both and taking its own course. History within its proper field, and
ethnography over a wider range, combine to show that the institutions
which can best hold their own in the world gradually supersede the less
fit ones, and that this incessant conflict determines the general
resultant course of culture. I will venture to set forth in mythic
fashion how progress, aberration, and retrogression in the general
course of culture contrast themselves in my own mind. We may fancy
ourselves looking on Civilization, as in personal figure she traverses
the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often
deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed
by long ago; but, direct or devious, her path lies forward, and if now
and then she tries a few backward steps, her walk soon falls into a
helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature, her feet were not
made to plant uncertain steps behind her, for both in her forward view
and in her onward gait she is of truly human type.

Footnote 3:

  G. W. Earl, ‘Papuans,’ p. 79; A. R. Wallace, ‘Eastern Archipelago.’

Footnote 4:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 400-480.

Footnote 5:

  Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ ch. xxxviii.

Footnote 6:

  De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 150.

Footnote 7:

  De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 15; ‘Formation des Langues,’ vol. i.
  p. 49; vol. ii. p. 32.

Footnote 8:

  Goguet, ‘Origine des Lois, des Arts,’ &c., vol. i. p. 88.

Footnote 9:

  Whately, ‘Essay on the Origin of Civilisation,’ in Miscellaneous
  Lectures, &c. His evidence is examined in detail in my ‘Early History
  of Mankind,’ ch. vii. See also W. Cooke Taylor, ‘Natural History of
  Society.’

Footnote 10:

  Goguet, vol. iii. p. 270.

Footnote 11:

  Lecret. v. 923, &c.; see Hor. Sat. i. 3.

Footnote 12:

  ‘Avesta,’ trans. Spiegel & Bleeck, vol. ii. p. 50.

Footnote 13:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 64, 128.

Footnote 14:

  Niebuhr, ‘Römische Geschichte,’ part i. p. 88: ‘Nur das haben sie
  übersehen, dasz kein einziges Beyspiel von einem wirklich wilden Volk
  aufzuweisen ist, welches frey zur Cultur übergegangen wäre.’

Footnote 15:

  Whately, ‘Essay on Origin of Civilisation.’

Footnote 16:

  Ovid. Ex Ponto, iii. 8; see Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol. xii. p.
  641.

Footnote 17:

  W. C. Taylor, ‘Nat. Hist. of Society,’ vol. i. p. 202.

Footnote 18:

  Fynes Moryson, ‘Itinerary;’ London, 1617, part iii. p. 162, &c.; J.
  Evans in ‘Archæologia,’ vol. xli. See description of hide-boiling,
  &c., among the wild Irish, about 1550, in Andrew Boorde, ‘Introduction
  of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Soc. 1870.

Footnote 19:

  Buchanan, ‘Rerum Scoticarum Historia;’ Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7. See
  ‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. p. 272.

Footnote 20:

  Martin, ‘Description of Western Islands,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p.
  639.

Footnote 21:

  Barrow, ‘Mutiny of the Bounty’; W. Brodie, ‘Pitcairn’s Island.’

Footnote 22:

  Wallace, ‘Malay Archipelago,’ vol. i. pp. 42, 471; vol. ii. pp. 11,
  43, 48; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.,’ vol. ii. pp. 492-5; D. and C.
  Livingstone, ‘Exp. to Zambesi,’ p. 45.

Footnote 23:

  Southey, ‘History of Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 422.

Footnote 24:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 189.

Footnote 25:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 359, see 91; Du Chaillu,
  ‘Ashangoland,’ p. 116; T. H. Bent, ‘Ruined Cities of Mashonaland.’

Footnote 26:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 51.

Footnote 27:

  Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. v.

Footnote 28:

  Milton and Cheadle, ‘North West Passage by Land,’ p. 241; Waitz, vol.
  iii. pp. 74-6.

Footnote 29:

  ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 187.

Footnote 30:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.,’ vol. i. p. 50.

Footnote 31:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 272.

Footnote 32:

  See G. Campbell, ‘Ethnology of India,’ in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1866
  part ii.

Footnote 33:

  J. Bailey, ‘Veddahs,’ in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. ii. p. 278; see vol. iii.
  p. 70; Knox, ‘Historical Relation of Ceylon,’ London, 1681, part iii.
  chap. i. See A. Thomson, ‘Osteology of the Veddas,’ in Journ. Anthrop.
  Inst. 1889, vol. xix. p. 125; L. de Zoysa, ‘Origin of Veddas,’ in
  Journ. Ceylon Branch Royal Asiatic Soc., vol. vii.; B. F. Hartshorne
  in Fortnightly Rev., Mar. 1876. [Note to 3rd edition.]

Footnote 34:

  Journ. Ind. Archip., vol. i. pp. 295-9; vol. ii. p. 237.

Footnote 35:

  For the connexion between the Aztec language and the Sonoran family
  extending N. W. toward the sources of the Missouri, see Buschmann,
  ‘Spuren der Aztekischen Sprache im Nördlichen Mexico,’ &c., in Abh.
  der Akad. der Wissensch, 1854; Berlin, 1859; also Tr. Eth. Soc., vol.
  ii. p. 130. For the connexion between the Natchez and Maya languages
  see Daniel G. Brinton, in ‘American Historical Magazine,’ 1867, vol.
  i. p. 16; and ‘Myths of the New World,’ p. 28.

Footnote 36:

  J. H. Lamprey, in Trans. of Prehistoric Congress, Norwich, 1868, p.
  60; J. Linton Palmer, in Journ. Eth. Soc., vol. i. 1869.

Footnote 37:

  Squier and Davis, ‘Mon. of Mississippi Valley,’ &c., in Smithsonian
  Contr., vol. i. 1848; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ chap. vii.; Waitz,
  ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 72; Bartram, ‘Creek and Cherokee Ind.,’
  in Tr. Amer. Ethnol. Soc., vol. iii. part i. See Petrie, ‘Inductive
  Metrology,’ 1877, p. 122. [Note to 3rd ed.]

Footnote 38:

  St. John, ‘Life in Forests of Far East,’ vol. ii. p. 327.

Footnote 39:

  Rafn, ‘Americas Arctiske Landes Gamle Geographic,’ pl. vii., viii.

Footnote 40:

  Lubbock (Lord Avebury), in ‘Report of British Association, 1867,’ p.
  121.

Footnote 41:

  Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ chap. xix.

Footnote 42:

  Frere, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1800.

Footnote 43:

  J. Evans, in ‘Archæologia,’ 1861; Lubbock,’Prehistoric Times,’ 2nd
  ed., p. 335.

Footnote 44:

  See ‘Early History of Mankind,’ 2nd ed. chap. viii.

Footnote 45:

  Argyll, ‘Primeval Man,’ p. 129.

Footnote 46:

  Lecret. De Rerum Natura, v. 1281.

Footnote 47:

  See Lyell, ‘Antiquity of Man,’ 3rd ed. 1863; Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric
  Times, 2nd ed. 1870; ‘Trans. of Congress of Prehistoric Archæology’
  (Norwich, 1868); Stevens, ‘Flint Chips, &c.,’ 1870; Nilsson,
  ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia’ (ed. by Lubbock, 1868);
  Falconer, ‘Palæontological Memoirs, &c.’; Lartet and Christy,
  ‘Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ’ (ed. by T. R. Jones); Keller, ‘Lake Dwellings’
  (Tr. and Ed. by J. E. Lee), &c., &c.

Footnote 48:

  Wallace, ‘Indian Archipelago,’ vol. i. p. 357.

Footnote 49:

  ‘Early History of Mankind,’ pp. 192, 243, &c., &c.

Footnote 50:

  Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 104.

Footnote 51:

  Klemm, ‘Allg. Culturwissenschaft,’ part ii., Werkzeuge und Waffen.

Footnote 52:

  Lane Fox (Pitt-Rivers), ‘Lectures on Primitive Warfare,’ Journ. United
  Service Inst., 1867-9.

Footnote 53:

  Evans in ‘Trans. of Congress of Prehistoric Archæology’ (Norwich,
  1868), p. 191; Rau in ‘Smithsonian Reports,’ 1868; Sir E. Belcher in
  Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. i. p. 129.

Footnote 54:

  See details in ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chap. vii.-ix.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

    Survival and Superstition—Children’s games—Games of
    chance—Traditional sayings—Nursery
    poems—Proverbs—Riddles—Significance and survival in Customs:
    sneezing-formula, rite of foundation-sacrifice, prejudice against
    saving a drowning man.

When a custom, an art, or an opinion is fairly started in the world,
disturbing influences may long affect it so slightly that it may keep
its course from generation to generation, as a stream once settled in
its bed will flow on for ages. This is mere permanence of culture; and
the special wonder about it is that the change and revolution of human
affairs should have left so many of its feeblest rivulets to run so
long. On the Tatar steppes, six hundred years ago, it was an offence to
tread on the threshold or touch the ropes in entering a tent, and so it
appears to be still.[55] Eighteen centuries ago Ovid mentions the vulgar
Roman objection to marriages in May, which he not unreasonably explains
by the occurrence in that month of the funeral rites of the Lemuralia:—

               ‘Nec viduæ tædis eadem nec virginis apta
                 Tempora. Quæ nupsit, non diuturna fuit.
               Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
                 Mense malas Maio nubere volgus ait.’[56]

The saying that marriages in May are unlucky survives to this day in
England, a striking example how an idea, the meaning of which has
perished for ages, may continue to exist simply because it has existed.

Now there are thousands of cases of this kind which have become, so to
speak, landmarks in the course of culture. When in the process of time
there has come general change in the condition of a people, it is usual,
notwithstanding, to find much that manifestly had not its origin in the
new state of things, but has simply lasted on into it. On the strength
of these survivals, it becomes possible to declare that the civilization
of the people they are observed among must have been derived from an
earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are
to be found; and thus collections of such facts are to be worked as
mines of historic knowledge. In dealing with such materials, experience
of what actually happens is the main guide, and direct history has to
teach us, first and foremost, how old habits hold their ground in the
midst of a new culture which certainly would never have brought them in,
but on the contrary presses hard to thrust them out. What this direct
information is like, a single example may show. The Dayaks of Borneo
were not accustomed to chop wood, as we do, by notching out V-shaped
cuts. Accordingly, when the white man intruded among them with this
among other novelties, they marked their disgust at the innovation by
levying a fine on any of their own people who should be caught chopping
in the European fashion; yet so well aware were the native wood-cutters
that the white man’s plan was an improvement on their own, that they
would use it surreptitiously when they could trust one another not to
tell.[57] The account is twenty years old, and very likely the foreign
chop may have ceased to be an offence against Dayak conservatism, but
its prohibition was a striking instance of survival by ancestral
authority in the very teeth of common sense. Such a proceeding as this
would be usually, and not improperly, described as a superstition; and,
indeed, this name would be given to a large proportion of survivals,
such for instance as may be collected by the hundred from books of
folk-lore and occult science. But the term superstition now implies a
reproach, and though this reproach may be often cast deservedly on
fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one, yet
in many cases it would be harsh, and even untrue. For the ethnographer’s
purpose, at any rate, it is desirable to introduce such a term as
‘survival,’ simply to denote the historical fact which the word
‘superstition’ is now spoiled for expressing. Moreover, there have to be
included as partial survivals the mass of cases where enough of the old
habit is kept up for its origin to be recognizable, though in taking a
new form it has been so adapted to new circumstances as still to hold
its place on its own merits.

Thus it would be seldom reasonable to call the children’s games of
modern Europe superstitions, though many of them are survivals, and
indeed remarkable ones. If the games of children and of grown-up people
be examined with an eye to ethnological lessons to be gained from them,
one of the first things that strikes us is how many of them are only
sportive imitations of the serious business of life. As children in
modern civilized times play at dining and driving horses and going to
church, so a main amusement of savage children is to imitate the
occupations which they will carry on in earnest a few years later, and
thus their games are in fact their lessons. The Esquimaux children’s
sports are shooting with a tiny bow and arrow at a mark, and building
little snow-huts, which they light up with scraps of lamp-wick begged
from their mothers.[58] Miniature boomerangs and spears are among the
toys of Australian children; and even as the fathers keep up as a
recognized means of getting themselves wives the practice of carrying
them off by violence, so playing at such Sabine marriage has been
noticed as one of the regular games of the little native boys and
girls.[59] Now it is quite a usual thing in the world for a game to
outlive the serious practice of which it is an imitation. The bow and
arrow is a conspicuous instance. Ancient and widespread in savage
culture, we trace this instrument through barbaric and classic life and
onward to a high mediæval level. But now, when we look on at an archery
meeting, or go by country lanes at the season when toy bows and arrows
are ‘in’ among the children, we see, reduced to a mere sportive
survival, the ancient weapon which among a few savage tribes still keeps
its deadly place in the hunt and the battle. The cross-bow, a
comparatively late and local improvement on the longbow, has disappeared
yet more utterly from practical use; but as a toy it is in full European
service, and likely to remain so. For antiquity and wide diffusion in
the world, through savage up to classic and mediæval times, the sling
ranks with the bow and arrow. But in the middle ages it fell out of use
as a practical weapon, and it was all in vain that the 15th century poet
commended the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier:—

             ‘Use eek the cast of stone, with slynge or honde:
               It falleth ofte, yf other shot there none is,
             Men harneysed in steel may not withstonde,
               The multitude and mighty cast of stonys;
             And stonys in effecte, are every where,
             And slynges are not noyous for to beare.’[60]

Perhaps as serious a use of the sling as can now be pointed out without
the limits of civilization is among the herdsmen of Spanish America, who
sling so cleverly that the saying is they can hit a beast on either horn
and turn him which way they will. But the use of the rude old weapon is
especially kept up by boys at play, who are here again the
representatives of remotely ancient culture.

As games thus keep up the record of primitive warlike arts, so they
reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children’s lessons,
early stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind. English
children delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth,
and New Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus
the saw hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other
instruments making their proper noises, are alike showing at its source
the imitative element so important in the formation of language.[61]
When we look into the early development of the art of counting, and see
the evidence of tribe after tribe having obtained numerals through the
primitive stage of counting on their fingers, we find a certain
ethnographic interest in the games which teach this earliest numeration.
The New Zealand game of ‘ti’ is described as played by counting on the
fingers, a number being called by one player, and he having instantly to
touch the proper finger; while in the Samoan game one player holds out
so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same instantly or lose a
point.[62] These may be native Polynesian games, or they may be our own
children’s games borrowed. In the English nursery the child learns to
say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed formula of the
game is ‘Buck, Buck, how many horns do I hold up?’ The game of one
holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match is
mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing at
the guessing-game, where one gets on another’s back and holds up
fingers, the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the
wide distribution and long permanence of these trifles in history when
we read the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the
time of Nero:—‘Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy
and bade him get up on his back. Without delay the boy climbed on
horseback on him, and slapped him on the shoulders with his hand,
laughing and calling out ‘bucca, bucca, quot sunt hic?’[63] The simple
counting-games played with the fingers must not be confounded with the
addition-game, where each player throws out a hand, and the sum of all
the fingers shown has to be called, the successful caller scoring a
point; each should call the total before he sees his adversary’s hand,
so that the skill lies especially in shrewd guessing. This game affords
endless amusement to Southern Europe, where it is known in Italian as
‘morra,’ and in French as ‘mourre,’ and it is popular in China under the
name of ts’ai mei, or ‘guess how many!’ So peculiar a game would
hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, and as the
Chinese term does not appear to be ancient, we may take it as likely
that the Portuguese merchants introduced the game into China, as they
certainly did into Japan. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures
show, used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Romans had their
finger-flashing, ‘micare digitis,’ at which butchers used to gamble with
their customers for bits of meat. It is not clear whether these were
morra or some other games.[64]

When Scotch lads, playing at the game of ‘tappie-tousie,’ take one
another by the forelock and say, ‘Will ye be my man?’[65] they know
nothing of the old symbolic manner of receiving a bondman which they are
keeping up in survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction,
which so many rude or ancient races are known to have used as their
common household instrument, and which lasts on among the modern Hindus
as the time-honoured sacred means of lighting the pure sacrificial
flame, has been found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the
children, who made fire with it in sport, much as Equimaux would have
done in earnest.[66] In Gothland it is on record that the ancient
sacrifice of the wild boar has actually been carried on into modern time
in sportive imitation, by lads in masquerading clothes with their faces
blackened and painted, while the victim was personated by a boy rolled
up in furs and placed upon a seat, with a tuft of pointed straws in his
mouth to imitate the bristles of the boar.[67] One innocent little
child’s sport of our own time is strangely mixed up with an ugly story
of about a thousand years ago. The game in question is thus played in
France:—The children stand in a ring, one lights a spill of paper and
passes it on to the next, saying, ‘petit bonhomme vit encore,’ and so on
round the ring, each saying the words and passing on the flame as
quickly as may be, for the one in whose hands the spill goes out has to
pay a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that ‘petit bonhomme est mort.’
Grimm mentions a similar game in Germany, played with a burning stick,
and Halliwell gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is
played in England:—

            ‘Jack’s alive and in very good health,
            If he dies in your hand you must look to yourself.’

Now, as all readers of Church history know, it used to be a favourite
engine of controversy for the adherents of an established faith to
accuse heretical sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mysteries of
their religion. The Pagans told these stories of the Jews, the Jews told
them of the Christians, and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence
in the art of slandering religious opponents whose moral life often
seems in fact to have been exceptionally pure. The Manichæans were an
especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect
considered as their successors—the Paulicians, whose name reappears in
the middle ages, in connexion with the Cathari. To these latter,
apparently from an expression in one of their religious formulas, was
given the name of Boni Homines, which became a recognized term for the
Albigenses. It is clear that the early Paulicians excited the anger of
the orthodox by objecting to sacred images, and calling those who
venerated them idolaters; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun, Patriarch of
Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, urging accusations of the
regular anti-Manichæan type, but with a peculiar feature which brings
his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that they
blasphemously call the orthodox ‘image-worshippers;’ that they
themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with
the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and ‘when
they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his
mother, thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him
in whose hand the child expires, as having attained to the first dignity
of the sect.’ To explain the correspondence of these atrocious details
with the nursery sport, it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not
that the game of ‘Petit Bonhomme’ keeps up a recollection of a legend of
the Boni Homines, but that the game was known to the children of the
eighth century much as it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply
accused the Paulicians of playing at it with live babes.[68]

It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as
survivals from a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though
now fallen into merited decay. Games of chance correspond so closely
with arts of divination belonging already to savage culture, that there
is force in applying to several such games the rule that the serious
practice comes first, and in time may dwindle to the sportive survival.
To a modern educated man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal
to chance, that is, to ignorance; it is committing the decision of a
question to a mechanical process, itself in no way unnatural or even
extraordinary, but merely so difficult to follow that no one can say
beforehand what will come of it. But we also know that this scientific
doctrine of chance is not that of early civilization, which has little
in common with the mathematician’s theory of probabilities, but much in
common with such sacred divination as the choice of Matthias by lot as a
twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the Moravian Brethren’s rite of
choosing wives for their young men by casting lots with prayer. It was
to no blind chance that the Maoris looked when they divined by throwing
up lots to find a thief among a suspected company;[69] or the Guinea
negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his bundle of
little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen.[70] The crowd with
uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of
Atreides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor
and help the well-greaved Greeks.[71] With prayer to the gods, and
looking up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates,
drew three lots from among the marked fruit-tree twigs scattered on a
pure white garment, and interpreted the answer from their signs.[72] As
in ancient Italy oracles gave responses by graven lots,[73] so the
modern Hindus decide disputes by casting lots in front of a temple,
appealing to the gods with cries of ‘Let justice be shown! Show the
innocent!’[74]

The uncivilized man thinks that lots or dice are adjusted in their fall
with reference to the meaning he may choose to attach to it, and
especially he is apt to suppose spiritual beings standing over the
diviner or the gambler, shuffling the lots or turning up the dice to
make them give their answers. This view held its place firmly in the
middle ages, and later in history we still find games of chance looked
on as results of supernatural operation. The general change from
mediæval to modern notions in this respect is well shown in a remarkable
work published in 1619, which seems to have done much toward bringing
the change about. Thomas Gataker, a Puritan minister, in his treatise
‘Of the Nature and Use of Lots,’ states, in order to combat them, the
following among the current objections made against games of
chance:—‘Lots may not be used but with great reverence, because the
disposition of them commeth immediately from God’ ... ‘the nature of a
Lot, which is affirmed to bee a worke of Gods speciall and immediate
providence, a sacred oracle, a divine judgement or sentence: the light
use of it therefore to be an abuse of Gods name; and so a sinne against
the third Commandement.’ Gataker, in opposition to this, argues that ‘to
expect the issue and event of it, as by ordinarie meanes from God, is
common to all actions: to expect it by an immediate and extraordinarie
worke is no more lawfull here than elsewhere, yea is indeed mere
superstition.’[75] It took time, however, for this opinion to become
prevalent in the educated world. After a lapse of forty years, Jeremy
Taylor could still bring out a remnant of the older notion, in the
course of a generally reasonable argument in favour of games of chance
when played for refreshment and not for money. ‘I have heard,’ he says,
‘from them that have skill in such things, there are such strange
chances, such promoting of a hand by fancy and little arts of geomancy,
such constant winning on one side, such unreasonable losses on the
other, and these strange contingencies produce such horrible effects,
that it is not improbable that God hath permitted the conduct of such
games of chance to the devil, who will order them so where he can do
most mischief; but, without the instrumentality of money, he could do
nothing at all.’[76] With what vitality the notion of supernatural
interference in games of chance even now survives in Europe, is well
shown by the still flourishing arts of gambler’s magic. The folk-lore of
our own day continues to teach that a Good Friday’s egg is to be carried
for luck in gaming, and that a turn of one’s chair will turn one’s
fortune; the Tyrolese knows the charm for getting from the devil the
gift of winning at cards and dice; there is still a great sale on the
continent for books which show how to discover, from dreams, good
numbers for the lottery; and the Lusatian peasant will even hide his
lottery-tickets under the altar-cloth that they may receive the blessing
with the sacrament, and so stand a better chance of winning.[77]

Arts of divination and games of chance are so similar in principle, that
the very same instrument passes from one use to the other. This appears
in the accounts, very suggestive from this point of view, of the
Polynesian art of divination by spinning the ‘niu’ or coco-nut. In the
Tongan Islands, in Mariner’s time, the principal purpose for which this
was solemnly performed was to enquire if a sick person would recover;
prayer was made aloud to the patron god of the family to direct the nut,
which was then spun, and its direction at rest indicated the intention
of the god. On other occasions, when the coco-nut was merely spun for
amusement, no prayer was made, and no credit given to the result. Here
the serious and the sportive use of this rudimentary teetotum are found
together. In the Samoan Islands, however, at a later date, the Rev. G.
Turner finds the practice passed into a different stage. A party sit in
a circle, the coco-nut is spun in the middle, and the oracular answer is
according to the person towards whom the monkey-face of the fruit is
turned when it stops; but whereas formerly the Samoans used this as an
art of divination to discover thieves, now they only keep it up as a way
of casting lots, and as a game of forfeits.[78] It is in favour of the
view of serious divination being the earlier use, to notice that the New
Zealanders, though they have no coco-nuts, keep up a trace of the time
when their ancestors in the tropical islands had them and divined with
them; for it is the well-known Polynesian word ‘niu,’ i.e. coco-nut,
which is still retained in use among the Maoris for other kinds of
divination, especially that performed with sticks. Mr. Taylor, who
points out this curiously neat piece of ethnological evidence, records
another case to the present purpose. A method of divination was to clap
the hands together while a proper charm was repeated; if the fingers
went clear in, it was favourable, but a check was an ill omen; on the
question of a party crossing the country in war-time, the locking of all
the fingers, or the stoppage of some or all, were naturally interpreted
to mean clear passage, meeting a travelling party, or being stopped
altogether. This quaint little symbolic art of divination seems now only
to survive as a game; it is called ‘puni-puni.’[79] A similar connexion
between divination and gambling is shown by more familiar instruments.
The hucklebones or astragali were used in divination in ancient Rome,
being converted into rude dice by numbering the four sides, and even
when the Roman gambler used the tali for gambling, he would invoke a god
or his mistress before he made his throw.[80] Such implements are now
mostly used for play, but, nevertheless, their use for divination was by
no means confined to the ancient world, for hucklebones are mentioned in
the 17th century among the fortune-telling instruments which young girls
divined for husbands with,[81] and Negro sorcerers still throw dice as a
means of detecting thieves.[82] Lots serve the two purposes equally
well. The Chinese gamble by lots for cash and sweetmeats, whilst they
also seriously take omens by solemn appeals to the lots kept ready for
the purpose in the temples, and professional diviners sit in the
market-places, thus to open the future to their customers.[83]
Playing-cards are still in European use for divination. That early sort
known as ‘tarots’ which the French dealer’s license to sell ‘cartes et
tarots’ still keeps in mind, is said to be preferred by fortune-tellers
to the common kind; for the tarot-pack, with its more numerous and
complex figures, lends itself to a greater variety of omens. In these
cases, direct history fails to tell us whether the use of the instrument
for omen or play came first. In this respect, the history of the Greek
‘kottabos’ is instructive. This art of divination consisted in flinging
wine out of a cup into a metal basin some distance off without spilling
any, the thrower saying or thinking his mistress’s name, and judging
from the clear or dull splash of the wine on the metal what his fortune
in love would be; but in time the magic passed out of the process, and
it became a mere game of dexterity played for a prize.[84] If this be a
typical case, and the rule be relied on that the serious use precedes
the playful, then games of chance may be considered survivals in
principle or detail from corresponding processes of magic—as divination
in sport made gambling in earnest.

Seeking more examples of the lasting on of fixed habits among mankind,
let us glance at a group of time-honoured traditional sayings, old saws
which have a special interest as cases of survival. Even when the real
signification of these phrases has faded out of men’s minds, and they
have sunk into sheer nonsense, or have been overlaid with some modern
superficial meaning, still the old formulas are handed on, often gaining
more in mystery than they lose in sense. We may hear people talk of
‘buying a pig in a poke,’ whose acquaintance with English does not
extend to knowing what a poke is. And certainly those who wish to say
that they have a great mind to something, and who express themselves by
declaring that they have ‘a month’s mind’ to it, can have no conception
of the hopeless nonsense they are making of the old term of the ‘month’s
mind,’ which was really the monthly service for a dead man’s soul,
whereby he was kept in mind or remembrance. The proper sense of the
phrase ‘sowing his wild oats’ seems generally lost in our modern use of
it. No doubt it once implied that these ill weeds would spring up in
later years, and how hard it would then be to root them out. Like the
enemy in the parable, the Scandinavian Loki, the mischief-maker, is
proverbially said in Jutland to sow his oats (‘nu saaer Lokken sin
havre’), and the name of ‘Loki’s oats’ (Lokeshavre) is given in Danish
to the wild oats (avena fatua).[85] Sayings which have their source in
some obsolete custom or tale, of course lie especially open to such
ill-usage. It has become mere English to talk of an ‘unlicked cub’ who
‘wants licking into shape,’ while few remember the explanation of these
phrases from Pliny’s story that bears are born as eyeless, hairless,
shapeless lumps of white flesh, and have afterwards to be licked into
form.[86]

Again, in relics of old magic and religion, we have sometimes to look
for a deeper sense in conventional phrases than they now carry on their
face, or for a real meaning in what now seems nonsense. How an
ethnographical record may become embodied in a popular saying, a Tamil
proverb now current in South India will show perfectly. On occasions
when A hits B, and C cries out at the blow, the bystanders will say,
‘’Tis like a Koravan eating asafœtida when his wife lies in!’ Now a
Koravan belongs to a low race in Madras, and is defined as ‘gipsy,
wanderer, ass-driver, thief, eater of rats, dweller in mat tents,
fortune-teller, and suspected character;’ and the explanation of the
proverb is, that whereas native women generally eat asafœtida as
strengthening medicine after childbirth, among the Koravans it is the
husband who eats it to fortify himself on the occasion. This, in fact,
is a variety of the world-wide custom of the ‘couvade,’ where at
childbirth the husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being
put to bed for days. It appears that the Koravans are among the races
practising this quaint custom, and that their more civilized Tamil
neighbours, struck by its oddity, but unconscious of its now-forgotten
meaning, have taken it up into a proverb.[87] Let us now apply the same
sort of ethnographical key to dark sayings in our own modern language.
The maxim, a ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ was originally neither a
metaphor nor a joke, but a matter-of-fact recipe for curing the bite of
a dog; one of the many instances of the ancient homœopathic doctrine,
that what hurts will also cure: it is mentioned in the Scandinavian
Edda, ‘Dog’s hair heals dog’s bite.’[88] The phrase ‘raising the wind’
now passes as humorous slang, but it once, in all seriousness, described
one of the most dreaded of the sorcerer’s arts, practised especially by
the Finland wizards, of whose uncanny power over the weather our sailors
have not to this day forgotten their old terror. The ancient ceremony or
ordeal of passing through a fire or leaping over burning brands has been
kept up so vigorously in the British Isles, that Jamieson’s derivation
of the phrase ‘to haul over the coals’ from this rite appears in no way
far-fetched. It is not long since an Irishwoman in New York was tried
for killing her child; she had made it stand on burning coals to find
out whether it was really her own or a changeling.[89] The English nurse
who says to a fretful child, ‘You got out of bed wrong foot foremost
this morning,’ seldom or never knows the meaning of her saying; but this
is still plain in the German folk-lore rule, that to get out of bed left
foot first will bring a bad day,[90] one of the many examples of that
simple association of ideas which connects right and left with good and
bad respectively. To conclude, the phrase ‘cheating the devil’ seems to
belong to that familiar series of legends where a man makes a compact
with the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot-free by the
interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion—such as whistling
the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to complete his
bargain at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured leaves
in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediæval
compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class
of scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting
them all run for their lives and catching the last—a story obviously
connected with another popular saying: ‘devil take the hindmost.’ But
even at this game the stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the
folk-lore of Spain and Scotland, in the legends of the Marqués de
Villano and the Earl of Southesk, who attended the Devil’s magic schools
at Salamanca and Padua. The apt scholar only leaves the master his
shadow to clutch as following hindmost in the race, and with this
unsubstantial payment the demon must needs be satisfied, while the
new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.[91]

It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source is
where it has its highest place and meaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or
saying has in one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while
elsewhere it lies at the level of the nursery, there is some ground for
treating the serious version as the more original, and the playful one
as its mere lingering survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not
to be quite overlooked. For instance, there are two poems kept in
remembrance among the modern Jews, and printed at the end of their book
of Passover services in Hebrew and English. One is that known as חד גדיא
(Chad gadyâ): it begins, ‘A kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces
of money;’ and it goes on to tell how a cat came and ate the kid, and a
dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the end.—‘Then came the Holy One,
blessed be He! and slew the angel of death, who slew the butcher, who
killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burnt
the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that
my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.’ This
composition is in the ‘Sepher Haggadah,’ and is looked on by some Jews
as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land. According
to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon the
cat; Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome,
till at last the Turks prevail in the land; but the Edomites (i.e. the
nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall
destroy the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under
the rule of Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular
interpretation, the solemnity of the ending may incline us to think that
we really have the composition here in something like its first form,
and that it was written to convey a mystic meaning. If so, then it
follows that our familiar nursery tale of the old woman who couldn’t get
her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn’t get home till midnight,
must be considered a broken-down adaptation of this old Jewish poem. The
other composition is a counting-poem, and begins thus:

    ‘Who knoweth one? I (saith Israel) know One:
      One is God, who is over heaven and earth.
    Who knoweth two? I (saith Israel) know two:
      Two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the
         heavens and the earth.’

(And so forth, accumulating up to the last verse, which is—)

    ‘Who knoweth thirteen? I (saith Israel) know thirteen: Thirteen
    divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments,
    nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision,
    seven days of the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the
    Law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant; but
    One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth.’

This is one of a family of counting-poems, apparently held in much
favour in mediæval Christian times, for they are not yet quite forgotten
in country places. An old Latin version runs: ‘Unus est Deus,’ &c., and
one of the still-surviving English forms begins, ‘One’s One all alone,
and evermore shall be so,’ thence reckoning on as far as ‘Twelve the
twelve apostles.’ Here both the Jewish and Christian forms are or have
been serious, so it is possible that the Jew may have imitated the
Christian, but the nobler form of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a
claim to be thought the earlier.[92]

The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk
are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often
as fresh, and their wisdom as pertinent, as it ever was. Beyond these
practical qualities, proverbs are instructive for the place in
ethnography which they occupy. Their range in civilization is limited;
they seem scarcely to belong to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a
settled form among some of the higher savages. The Fijians, who were
found a few years since living in what archæologists might call the
upper Stone Age, have some well-marked proverbs. They laugh at want of
forethought by the saying that ‘The Nakondo people cut the mast first’
(i.e. before they had built the canoe); and when a poor man looks
wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say, ‘Becalmed, and looking at the
fish.’[93] Among the list of the New Zealanders’ ‘whakatauki,’ or
proverbs, one describes a lazy glutton: ‘Deep throat, but shallow
sinews;’ another says that the lazy often profit by the work of the
industrious: ‘The large chips made by Hardwood fall to the share of
Sit-still;’ a third moralizes that ‘A crooked part of a stem of toetoe
can be seen; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen.’[94] Among
the Basutos of South Africa, ‘Water never gets tired of running’ is a
reproach to chatterers; ‘Lions growl while they are eating,’ means that
there are people who never will enjoy anything; ‘The sowing-month is the
headache-month,’ describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work
is to be done; ‘The thief eats thunderbolts,’ means that he will bring
down vengeance from heaven on himself.[95] West African nations are
especially strong in proverbial philosophy; so much so that Captain
Burton amused himself through the rainy season at Fernando Po in
compiling a volume of native proverbs,[96] among which there are
hundreds at about as high an intellectual level as those of Europe. ‘He
fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard,’ is as good as our ‘Out of
the frying-pan into the fire;’ and ‘He who has only his eyebrow for a
cross-bow can never kill an animal,’ is more picturesque, if less terse
than our ‘Hard words break no bones.’ The old Buddhist aphorism, that
‘He who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes to windward,
which come back to the same place and cover him all over,’ is put with
less prose and as much point in the negro saying, ‘Ashes fly back in the
face of him who throws them.’ When someone tries to settle an affair in
the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that ‘You
can’t shave a man’s head when he is not there,’ while, to explain that
the master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say,
‘The rider is not a fool because the horse is.’ Ingratitude is alluded
to in ‘The sword knows not the head of the smith’ (who made it), and yet
more forcibly elsewhere, ‘When the calabash had saved them (in the
famine), they said, let us cut it for a drinking-cup.’ The popular
contempt for poor men’s wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, ‘When a
poor man makes a proverb it does not spread,’ while the very mention of
making a proverb as something likely to happen, shows a land where
proverb-making is still a living art. Transplanted to the West Indies,
the African keeps up this art, as witness these sayings: ‘Behind dog it
is dog, but before dog it is Mr. Dog;’ and ‘Toute cabinette tini
maringouin’—‘Every cabin has its mosquito.’

The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but
has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The
proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world are to
be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-known
literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs
extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true
of their development. At the level of European culture in the middle
ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their
period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cervantes raised the
proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never surpassed; but it must not be
forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s wares were mostly heirlooms;
for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition
of society. As such, they survive among ourselves, who go on using much
the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire’s
inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly altered or made anew in
our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but
making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our
attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.

Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they
travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By
riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer
intended to be discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but
not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question
and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The
original kind, which may be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at
home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle
civilization; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient
specimens have lasted on in the modern nursery and by the cottage
fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong only to the
higher grades of savagery; their making requires a fair power of ideal
comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before
this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into
sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be
looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in
remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races,
from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental
history which the riddle occupies.

The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles,
recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the
matter:—Q. ‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they
dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ A. ‘The
teeth; we call them men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men
who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When
we say, they are “adorned with white hip-dresses,” we put that in,
that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from
them by thinking, “It is men who put on white hip-dresses,” and
continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c. Q. ‘Guess ye a
man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the morning until
the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not work by
day; he is not seen when he works?’ A. ‘The closing-poles of the
cattle-pen.’ Q. ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for
it is known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by
lamentation, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass;
and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they
say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?’ A. ‘Fire. It is
called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being
concealed by the word “man.” Men say many things, searching out the
meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is
not discernible at once,’ &c.[97] Among the Basutos, riddles are a
recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole
company of puzzled children. Q. ‘Do you know what throws itself from
the mountain top without being broken?’ A. ‘A waterfall.’ Q.
‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no
cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it?’ A. ‘The voice.’ Q. ‘Name
the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them.’ A. ‘The
fingers.’ Q. ‘Who is the little immovable dumb boy who is dressed up
warm in the day and left naked at night?’ A. ‘The bed-clothes’
peg.’[98] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example: Q.
‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ A. ‘A pineapple.’[99] From West
Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never gets
to market?’ A. ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[100] In
Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. Q. ‘There are
four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ A. ‘The
Samoan pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four
legs. Q. ‘A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to
the heavens?’ A. ‘The smoke of the oven.’ Q. ‘A man who stands
between two ravenous fish?’ A. ‘The tongue.’[101] (There is a Zulu
riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the
midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas:
Q. ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’ A. ‘The
finger-nails.’ Q. ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of
by one?’ A. ‘A shirt.’ Q. ‘What goes through a valley and drags
its entrails after it?’ A. ‘A needle.’[102]

These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature
from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting,
into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What
is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’
(the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs,
crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have
been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as
one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here
they go, there they go; Now they stand still?’ Another is the very
analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: ‘Old Mother Twitchett had but
one eye, And a long tail which she let fly; And every time she went over
a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’

So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of
thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only
inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun
Saptâsva, i.e. ‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old
German riddle asks, ‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and
seven black horses?’ (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of
the week.[103]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day
and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again:

              Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει
              Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;

and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of
rudimentary mythology:

              Εἷς ὀ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ’ ἑκάστῳ
              Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ’ ἄνδιχα εἷδος ἔχουσαι·
              Ηι μὲν λευκαὶ ἔασιν ἰδεῖν, ᾖ δ’ αὗτε μέλαιναι·
              Ἀθάνατοι δέ τ’ ἐοῦσαι ἀποφθίνουσιν ἄπασαι.

    ‘One is the father, and twelve the children, and, born unto each
       one,
    Maidens thirty, whose form in twain is parted asunder,
    White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other,
    All immortal in being, yet doomed to dwindle and perish.’[104]

Such questions as these may be fairly guessed now as in old times, and
must be distinguished from that scarcer class which require the
divination of some unlikely event to solve them. Of such the typical
example is Samson’s riddle, and there is an old Scandinavian one like
it. The story is that Gestr found a duck sitting on her nest in an ox’s
horned skull, and thereupon propounded a riddle, describing with
characteristic Northman’s metaphor the ox with its horns fancied as
already made into drinking-horns. The following translation does not
exaggerate the quaintness of the original:—‘Joying in children the
bill-goose grew, And her building-timbers together drew; The biting
grass-shearer screened her bed, With the maddening drink-stream
overhead.’[105] Many of the old oracular responses are puzzles of
precisely this kind. Such is the story of the Delphic oracle, which
ordered Temenos to find a man with three eyes to guide the army, which
injunction he fulfilled by meeting a one-eyed man on horseback.[106] It
is curious to find this idea again in Scandinavia, where Odin sets King
Heidrek a riddle, ‘Who are they two that fare to the Thing with three
eyes, ten feet, and one tail?’ the answer being, the one-eyed Odin
himself on his eight-footed horse Sleipnir.[107]

The close bearing of the doctrine of survival on the study of manners
and customs is constantly coming into view in ethnographic research. It
seems scarcely too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless
customs must be survivals, that they had a practical, or at least
ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now
fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state of
society, where their original sense has been discarded. Of course, new
customs introduced in particular ages may be ridiculous or wicked, but
as a rule they have discernible motives. Explanations of this kind, by
recourse to some forgotten meaning, seem on the whole to account best
for obscure customs which some have set down to mere outbreaks of
spontaneous folly. A certain Zimmermann, who published a heavy
‘Geographical History of Mankind’ in the 18th century, remarks as
follows on the prevalence of similar nonsensical and stupid customs in
distant countries:—‘For if two clever heads may, each for himself, hit
upon a clever invention or discovery, then it is far likelier,
considering the much larger total of fools and blockheads, that like
fooleries should be given to two far-distant lands. If, then, the
inventive fool be likewise a man of importance and influence, as is,
indeed, an extremely frequent case, then both nations adopt a similar
folly, and then, centuries after, some historian goes through it to
extract his evidence for the derivation of these two nations one from
the other.’[108]

Strong views as to the folly of mankind seem to have been in the air
about the time of the French Revolution, Lord Chesterfield was no doubt
an extremely different person from our German philosopher, but they were
quite at one as to the absurdity of customs. Advising his son as to the
etiquette of courts, the Earl writes thus to him:—‘For example, it is
respectful to bow to the King of England, it is disrespectful to bow to
the King of France; it is the rule to courtesy to the Emperor; and the
prostration of the whole body is required by Eastern Monarchs. These are
established ceremonies, and must be complied with; but why they were
established, I defy sense and reason to tell us. It is the same among
all ranks, where certain customs are received, and must necessarily be
complied with, though by no means the result of sense and reason. As for
instance, the very absurd, though almost universal custom of drinking
people’s healths. Can there be anything in the world less relative to
any other man’s health, than my drinking a glass of wine? Common sense,
certainly, never pointed it out, but yet common sense tells me I must
conform to it.’[109] Now, though it might be difficult enough to make
sense of the minor details of court etiquette, Lord Chesterfield’s
example from it of the irrationality of mankind is a singularly unlucky
one. Indeed, if any one were told to set forth in few words the
relations of the people to their rulers in different states of society,
he might answer that men grovel on their faces before the King of Siam,
kneel on one knee or uncover before a European monarch, and shake the
hand of the President of the United States as though it were a
pump-handle. These are ceremonies at once intelligible and significant.
Lord Chesterfield is more fortunate in his second instance, for the
custom of drinking healths is really of obscure origin. Yet it is
closely connected with an ancient rite, practically absurd indeed, but
done with a conscious and serious intention which lands it quite outside
the region of nonsense. This is the custom of pouring out libations and
drinking at ceremonial banquets to gods and the dead. Thus the old
Northmen drank the ‘minni’ of Thor, Odin, and Freya, and of kings
likewise at their funerals. The custom did not die out with the
conversion of the Scandinavian and Teutonic nations. Such formulas as
‘God’s minne!’ ‘a bowl to God in heaven!’ are on record, while in like
manner Christ, Mary, and the Saints were drunk to in place of heathen
gods and heroes, and the habit of drinking to the dead and the living at
the same feast and in similar terms goes far to prove here a common
origin for both ceremonies. The ‘minne’ was at once love, memory, and
the thought of the absent, and it long survived in England in the
‘minnying’ or ‘mynde’ days, on which the memory of the dead was
celebrated by services or banquets. Such evidence as this fairly
justifies the writers, older and newer, who have treated these
ceremonial drinking usages as in their nature sacrificial.[110] As for
the practice of simply drinking the health of living men, its ancient
history reaches us from several districts inhabited by Aryan nations.
The Greeks in symposium drank to one another, and the Romans adopted the
habit (προπίνειν, propinare, Græco more bibere). The Goths cried
‘hails!’ as they pledged each other, as we have it in the curious first
line of the verses ‘De conviviis barbaris’ in the Latin Anthology, which
sets down the shouts of a Gothic drinking-bout of the fifth century or
so, in words which still partly keep their sense to an English ear.

               ‘Inter eils Goticum scapiamatziaia drincan
               Non audet quisquam dignos educere versus.’

As for ourselves, though the old drinking salutation of ‘wæs hæl?’ is no
longer vulgar English, the formula remains with us, stiffened into a
noun. On the whole, there is presumptive though not conclusive evidence
that the custom of drinking healths to the living is historically
related to the religious rite of drinking to the gods and the dead.

Let us now put the theory of survival to a somewhat severe test, by
seeking from it some explanation of the existence, in practice or
memory, within the limits of modern civilized society, of three
remarkable groups of customs which civilized ideas totally fail to
account for. Though we may not succeed in giving clear and absolute
explanations of their motives, at any rate it is a step in advance to be
able to refer their origins to savage or barbaric antiquity. Looking at
these customs from the modern practical point of view, one is
ridiculous, the others are atrocious, and all are senseless. The first
is the practice of salutation on sneezing, the second the rite of laying
the foundations of a building on a human victim, the third the prejudice
against saving a drowning man.

In interpreting the customs connected with sneezing, it is needful to
recognize a prevalent doctrine of the lower races, of which a full
account will be given in another chapter. As a man’s soul is considered
to go in and out of his body, so it is with other spirits, particularly
such as enter into patients and possess them or afflict them with
disease. Among the less cultured races, the connexion of this idea with
sneezing is best shown among the Zulus, a people firmly persuaded that
kindly or angry spirits of the dead hover about them, do them good or
harm, stand visibly before them in dreams, enter into them, and cause
diseases in them. The following particulars are abridged from the native
statements taken down by Dr. Callaway:—When a Zulu sneezes, he will say,
‘I am now blessed. The Idhlozi (ancestral spirit) is with me; it has
come to me. Let me hasten and praise it, for it is it which causes me to
sneeze!’ So he praises the manes of his family, asking for cattle, and
wives, and blessings. Sneezing is a sign that a sick person will be
restored to health; he returns thanks after sneezing, saying, ‘Ye people
of ours, I have gained that prosperity which I wanted. Continue to look
on me with favour!’ Sneezing reminds a man that he should name the
Itongo (ancestral spirit) of his people without delay, because it is the
Itongo which causes him to sneeze, that he may perceive by sneezing that
the Itongo is with him. If a man is ill and does not sneeze, those who
come to him ask whether he has sneezed or not; if he has not sneezed,
they murmur, saying, ‘The disease is great!’ If a child sneezes, they
say to it, ‘Grow!’ it is a sign of health. So then, it is said, sneezing
among black men gives a man strength to remember that the Itongo has
entered into him and abides with him. The Zulu diviners or sorcerers are
very apt to sneeze, which they regard as an indication of the presence
of the spirits, whom they adore by saying, ‘Makosi!’ (i.e. lords or
masters). It is a suggestive example of the transition of such customs
as these from one religion to another, that the Amakosa, who used to
call on their divine ancestor Utixo when they sneezed, since their
conversion to Christianity say, ‘Preserver, look upon me!’ or, ‘Creator
of heaven and earth!’[111] Elsewhere in Africa, similar ideas are
mentioned. Sir Thomas Browne, in his ‘Vulgar Errors,’ made well known
the story that when the King of Monomotapa sneezed, acclamations of
blessing passed from mouth to mouth through the city; but he should have
mentioned that Godigno, from whom the original account is taken, said
that this took place when the king drank, or coughed, or sneezed.[112] A
later account from the other side of the continent is more to the
purpose. In Guinea, in the last century, when a principal personage
sneezed, all present fell on their knees, kissed the earth, clapped
their hands, and wished him all happiness and prosperity.[113] With a
different idea, the negroes of Old Calabar, when a child sneezes, will
sometimes exclaim, ‘Far from you!’ with an appropriate gesture as if
throwing off some evil.[114] Polynesia is another region where the
sneezing salutation is well marked. In New Zealand, a charm was said to
prevent evil when a child sneezed;[115] if a Samoan sneezed, the
bystanders said, ‘Life to you!’[116] while in the Tongan group a sneeze
on the starting of an expedition was a most evil presage.[117] A curious
American instance dates from Hernando de Soto’s famous expedition into
Florida, when Guachoya, a native chief, came to pay him a visit. ‘While
this was going on, the cacique Guachoya gave a great sneeze; the
gentlemen who had come with him and were lining the walls of the hall
among the Spaniards there all at once bowing their heads, opening their
arms, and closing them again, and making other gestures of great
veneration and respect, saluted him with different words, all directed
to one end, saying, “The Sun guard thee, be with thee, enlighten thee,
magnify thee, protect thee, favour thee, defend thee, prosper thee, save
thee,” and other like phrases, as the words came, and for a good space
there lingered the murmur of these words among them, whereat the
governor wondering said to the gentlemen and captains with him, “Do you
not see that all the world is one?” This matter was well noted among the
Spaniards, that among so barbarous a people should be used the same
ceremonies, or greater, than among those who hold themselves to be very
civilized. Whence it may be believed that this manner of salutation is
natural among all nations, and not caused by a pestilence, as is
vulgarly said,’ &c.[118]

In Asia and Europe the sneezing superstition extends through a wide
range of race, age, and country.[119] Among the passages relating to it
in the classic ages of Greece and Rome, the following are some of the
most characteristic,—the lucky sneeze of Telemachos in the Odyssey;[120]
the soldier’s sneeze and the shout of adoration to the god which rose
along the ranks, and which Xenophon appealed to as a favourable
omen;[121] Aristotle’s remark that people consider a sneeze as divine
(τὸν ηὲν πταρμὸν θεὸν ἡγούμεθα εἶναι), but not a cough,[122] &c.; the
Greek epigram on the man with the long nose, who did not say Ζεῦ σῶσον
when he sneezed, for the noise was too far off for him to hear;[123]
Petronius Arbiter’s mention of the custom of saying ‘Salve!’ to one who
sneezed;[124] and Pliny’s question, ‘Cur sternutamentis salutamus?’
apropos of which he remarks that even Tiberius Cæsar, that saddest of
men, exacted this observance.[125] Similar rites of sneezing have long
been observed in Eastern Asia.[126] When a Hindu sneezes, bystanders
say, ‘Live!’ and the sneezer replies, ‘With you!’ It is an ill omen, to
which among others the Thugs paid great regard on starting on an
expedition, and which even compelled them to let the travellers with
them escape.[127]

The Jewish sneezing formula is, ‘Tobim chayim!’ i.e. ‘Good life!’[128]
The Moslem says, ‘Praise to Allah!’ when he sneezes, and his friends
compliment him with proper formulas, a custom which seems to be conveyed
from race to race wherever Islam extends.[129] Lastly, the custom ranges
through mediæval into modern Europe. To cite old German examples, ‘Die
Heiden nicht endorften niesen, dâ man doch sprichet “Nu helfiu Got?”’
‘Wir sprechen, swer niuset, Got helfe dir.’[130] For a Norman French
instance in England, the following lines (A.D. 1100) may serve, which
show our old formula ‘waes hæl!’ (‘may you be well!’—‘wassail!’) used
also to avert being taken ill after a sneeze:—

                     ‘E pur une feyze esternuer
                     Tantot quident mal trouer,
                     Si uesbeil ne diez aprez.’[131]

In the ‘Rules of Civility’ (A.D. 1685, translated from the French) we
read:—‘If his lordship chances to sneeze, you are not to bawl out, “God
bless you, sir,” but, pulling off your hat, bow to him handsomely, and
make that obsecration to yourself.’[132] It is noticed that Anabaptists
and Quakers rejected these with other salutations, but they remained in
the code of English good manners among high and low till half a century
or so ago, and are so little forgotten now, that most people still see
the point of the story of the fiddler and his wife, where his sneeze and
her hearty ‘God bless you!’ brought about the removal of the fiddle
case. ‘Got hilf!’ may still be heard in Germany, and ‘Felicità!’ in
Italy.

It is not strange that the existence of these absurd customs should have
been for ages a puzzle to curious enquirers. Especially the
legend-mongers took the matter in hand, and their attempts to devise
historical explanations are on record in a group of philosophic
myths,—Greek, Jewish, Christian. Prometheus prays for the preservation
of his artificial man, when it gives the first sign of life by a sneeze;
Jacob prays that man’s soul may not, as heretofore, depart from his body
when he sneezes; Pope Gregory prays to avert the pestilence, in those
days when the air was so deadly that he who sneezed died of it; and from
these imaginary events legend declares that the use of the sneezing
formulas was handed down. It is more to our purpose to notice the
existence of a corresponding set of ideas and customs connected with
gaping. Among the Zulus, repeated yawning and sneezing are classed
together as signs of approaching spiritual possession.[133] The Hindu,
when he gapes, must snap his thumb and finger, and repeat the name of
some God, as Rama: to neglect this is a sin as great as the murder of a
Brahman.[134] The Persians ascribe yawning, sneezing, &c., to demoniacal
possession. Among the modern Moslems generally, when a man yawns, he
puts the back of his left hand to his mouth, saying, ‘I seek refuge with
Allah from Satan the accursed!’ but the act of yawning is to be avoided,
for the Devil is in the habit of leaping into a gaping mouth.[135] This
may very likely be the meaning of the Jewish proverb, ‘Open not thy
mouth to Satan!’ The other half of this idea shows itself clearly in
Josephus’ story of his having seen a certain Jew, named Eleazar, cure
demoniacs in Vespasian’s time, by drawing the demons out through their
nostrils, by means of a ring containing a root of mystic virtue
mentioned by Solomon.[136] The account of the sect of the Messalians,
who used to spit and blow their noses to expel the demons they might
have drawn in with their breath,[137] the records of the mediæval
exorcists driving out devils through the patients’ nostrils,[138] and
the custom, still kept up in the Tyrol, of crossing oneself when one
yawns, lest something evil should come into one’s mouth,[139] involve
similar ideas. In comparing the modern Kafir ideas with those of other
districts of the world, we find a distinct notion of a sneeze being due
to a spiritual presence. This, which seems indeed the key to the whole
matter, has been well brought into view by Mr. Haliburton, as displayed
in Keltic folk-lore, in a group of stories turning on the superstition
that any one who sneezes is liable to be carried off by the fairies,
unless their power be counteracted by an invocation, as ‘God bless
you!’[140] The corresponding idea as to yawning is to be found in an
Iceland folk-lore legend, where the troll, who has transformed herself
into the shape of the beautiful queen, says, ‘When I yawn a little yawn,
I am a neat and tiny maiden; when I yawn a half-yawn, then I am as a
half-troll; when I yawn a whole yawn, then am I as a whole troll.’[141]
On the whole, though the sneezing superstition makes no approach to
universality among mankind, its wide distribution is highly remarkable,
and it would be an interesting problem to decide how far this wide
distribution is due to independent growth in several regions, how far to
conveyance from race to race, and how far to ancestral inheritance. Here
it has only to be maintained that it was not originally an arbitrary and
meaningless custom, but the working out of a principle.[142] The plain
statement by the modern Zulus fits with the hints to be gained from the
superstition and folk-lore of other races, to connect the notions and
practices as to sneezing with the ancient and savage doctrine of
pervading and invading spirits, considered as good or evil, and treated
accordingly. The lingering survivals of the quaint old formulas in
modern Europe seem an unconscious record of the time when the
explanation of sneezing had not yet been given over to physiology, but
was still in the ‘theological stage.’

There is current in Scotland the belief that the Picts, to whom local
legend attributes buildings of prehistoric antiquity, bathed their
foundation-stones with human blood; and legend even tells that St.
Columba found it necessary to bury St. Oran alive beneath the foundation
of his monastery, in order to propitiate the spirits of the soil who
demolished by night what was built during the day. So late as 1843, in
Germany, when a new bridge was built at Halle, a notion was abroad among
the people that a child was wanted to be built into the foundation.
These ideas of church or wall or bridge wanting human blood or an
immured victim to make the foundation steadfast, are not only widespread
in European folk-lore, but local chronicle or tradition asserts them as
matter of historical fact in district after district. Thus, when the
broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the peasants, on the
advice to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk
and buried him there. Thuringian legend declares that to make the castle
of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money
of its mother and walled in. It was eating a cake while the masons were
at work, the story goes, and it cried out, ‘Mother, I see thee still;’
then later, ‘Mother, I see thee a little still;’ and, as they put in the
last stone, ‘Mother, now I see thee no more.’ The wall of Copenhagen,
legend says, sank as fast as it was built; so they took an innocent
little girl, set her on a chair at a table of toys and eatables, and, as
she played and ate, twelve master-masons closed a vault over her; then,
with clanging music, the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after.
Thus Italian legend tells of the bridge of Arta, that fell in and fell
in till they walled in the master-builder’s wife, and she spoke her
dying curse that the bridge should tremble like a flower-stalk
henceforth. The Slavonic chiefs founding Detinez, according to old
heathen custom, sent out men to take the first boy they met and bury him
in the foundation. Servian legend tells how three brothers combined to
build the fortress of Skadra (Scutari); but, year after year, the demon
(vila) razed by night what the three hundred masons built by day. The
fiend must be appeased by a human sacrifice, the first of the three
wives who should come bringing food to the workmen. All three brothers
swore to keep the dreadful secret from their wives; but the two eldest
gave traitorous warning to theirs, and it was the youngest brother’s
wife who came unsuspecting, and they built her in. But she entreated
that an opening should be left for her to suckle her baby through, and
for a twelve-month it was brought. To this day, Servian wives visit the
tomb of the good mother, still marked by a stream of water which
trickles, milky with lime, down the fortress wall. Lastly, there is our
own legend of Vortigern, who could not finish his tower till the
foundation-stone was wetted with the blood of a child born of a mother
without a father. As is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of
substitutes for such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb
walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church stand fast, and
the churchyard in like manner handselled by burying a live horse first.
In modern Greece an evident relic of the idea survives in the
superstition that the first passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid
will die within the year, wherefore the masons will compromise the debt
by killing a lamb or a black cock on the stone. With much the same idea
German legend tells of the bridge-building fiend cheated of his promised
fee, a soul, by the device of making a cock run first across; and thus
German folk-lore says it is well, before entering a new house, to let a
cat or dog run in.[143] From all this it seems that, with due allowance
for the idea having passed into an often-repeated and varied mythic
theme, yet written and unwritten tradition do preserve the memory of a
bloodthirsty barbaric rite, which not only really existed in ancient
times, but lingered long in European history. If now we look to less
cultured countries, we shall find the rite carried on in our own day
with a distinctly religious purpose, either to propitiate the
earth-spirits with a victim, or to convert the soul of the victim
himself into a protecting demon.

In Africa, in Galam, a boy and girl used to be buried alive before the
great gate of the city to make it impregnable, a practice once executed
on a large scale by a Bambarra tyrant; while in Great Bassam and Yarriba
such sacrifices were usual at the foundation of a house or village.[144]
In Polynesia, Ellis heard of the custom, instanced by the fact that the
central pillar of one of the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body
of a human victim.[145] In Borneo, among the Milanau Dayaks, at the
erection of the largest house a deep hole was dug to receive the first
post, which was then suspended over it; a slave girl was placed in the
excavation; at a signal the lashings were cut, and the enormous timber
descended, crushing the girl to death, a sacrifice to the spirits. St.
John saw a milder form of the rite performed, when the chief of the Quop
Dayaks set up a flagstaff near his house, a chicken being thrown in to
be crushed by the descending pole.[146] More cultured nations of
Southern Asia have carried on into modern ages the rite of the
foundation-sacrifice. A 17th century account of Japan mentions the
belief there that a wall laid on the body of a willing human victim
would be secure from accident; accordingly, when a great wall was to be
built, some wretched slave would offer himself as foundation, lying down
in the trench to be crushed by the heavy stones lowered upon him.[147]
When the gates of the new city of Tavoy, in Tenasserim, were built about
1780, as Mason relates on the evidence of an eye-witness, a criminal was
put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon. Thus it appears that
such stories as that of the human victims buried for spirit watchers
under the gates of Mandalay, of the queen who was drowned in a Burmese
reservoir to make the dyke safe, of the hero whose divided body was
buried under the fortress of Thatung to make it impregnable, are the
records, whether in historical or mythical form, of the actual customs
of the land.[148] Within our own dominion, when Rajah Sala Byne was
building the fort of Sialkot in the Punjab, the foundation of the
south-east bastion gave way so repeatedly that he had recourse to a
soothsayer, who assured him that it would never stand until the blood of
an only son was shed there, wherefore the only son of a widow was
sacrificed.[149] It is thus plain that hideous rites, of which Europe
has scarcely kept up more than the dim memory, have held fast their
ancient practice and meaning in Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, among races
who represent in grade, if not in chronology, earlier stages of
civilization.

When Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Pirate,’ tells of Bryce the pedlar
refusing to help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning,
and even remonstrating with him on the rashness of such a deed, he
states an old superstition of the Shetlanders. ‘Are you mad?’ says the
pedlar; ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of
a drowning man? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be
sure to do you some capital injury?’ Were this inhuman thought noticed
in this one district alone, it might be fancied to have had its rise in
some local idea now no longer to be explained. But when mentions of
similar superstitions are collected among the St. Kilda islanders and
the boatmen of the Danube, among French and English sailors, and even
out of Europe and among less civilized races, we cease to think of local
fancies, but look for some widely accepted belief of the lower culture
to account for such a state of things. The Hindu does not save a man
from drowning in the sacred Ganges, and the islanders of the Malay
archipelago share the cruel notion.[150] Of all people the rude
Kamchadals have the prohibition in the most remarkable form. They hold
it a great fault, says Kracheninnikow, to save a drowning man; he who
delivers him will be drowned himself.[151] Steller’s account is more
extraordinary, and probably applies only to cases where the victim is
actually drowning: he says that if a man fell by chance into the water,
it was a great sin for him to get out, for as he had been destined to
drown he did wrong in not drowning, wherefore no one would let him into
his dwelling, nor speak to him, nor give him food or a wife, but he was
reckoned for dead; and even when a man fell into the water while others
were standing by, far from helping him out, they would drown him by
force. Now these barbarians, it appears, avoided volcanoes because of
the spirits who live there and cook their food; for a like reason, they
held it a sin to bathe in hot springs; and they believed with fear in a
fish-like spirit of the sea, whom they called Mitgk.[152] This
spiritualistic belief among the Kamchadals is, no doubt, the key to
their superstition as to rescuing drowning men. There is even to be
found in modern European superstition, not only the practice, but with
it a lingering survival of its ancient spiritualistic significance. In
Bohemia, a recent account (1864) says that the fishermen do not venture
to snatch a drowning man from the waters. They fear that the ‘Waterman’
(i.e. water-demon) would take away their luck in fishing, and drown
themselves at the first opportunity.[153] This explanation of the
prejudice against saving the water-spirit’s victim may be confirmed by a
mass of evidence from various districts of the world. Thus, in
discussing the doctrine of sacrifice, it will appear that the usual
manner of making an offering to a well, river, lake, or sea, is simply
to cast property, cattle, or men into the water, which personally or by
its indwelling spirit takes possession of them.[154] That the accidental
drowning of a man is held to be such a seizure, savage and civilized
folk-lore show by many examples. Among the Sioux Indians, it is Unk-tahe
the water-monster that drowns his victims in flood or rapid;[155] in New
Zealand huge supernatural reptile-monsters, called Taniwha, live in
river-bends, and those who are drowned are said to be pulled under by
them;[156] the Siamese fears the Pnük or water-spirit that seizes
bathers and drags them under to his dwelling;[157] in Slavonic lands it
is Topielec (the ducker) by whom men are always drowned;[158] when some
one is drowned in Germany, people recollect the religion of their
ancestors, and say, ‘The river-spirit claims his yearly sacrifice,’ or,
more simply, ‘The nix has taken him:’[159]—

                   ‘Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen,
                     Am Ende Fischer und Kahn;
                   Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
                     Die Lorelei gethan.’

From this point of view it is obvious that to save a sinking man is to
snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit, a rash
defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. In the civilized
world the rude old theological conception of drowning has long been
superseded by physical explanation; and the prejudice against rescue
from such a death may have now almost or altogether disappeared. But
archaic ideas, drifted on into modern folk-lore and poetry, still bring
to our view an apparent connexion between the primitive doctrine and the
surviving custom.

As the social development of the world goes on, the weightiest thoughts
and actions may dwindle to mere survival. Original meaning dies out
gradually, each generation leaves fewer and fewer to bear it in mind,
till it falls out of popular memory, and in after-days ethnography has
to attempt, more or less successfully, to restore it by piecing together
lines of isolated or forgotten facts. Children’s sports, popular
sayings, absurd customs, may be practically unimportant, but are not
philosophically insignificant, bearing as they do on some of the most
instructive phases of early culture. Ugly and cruel superstitions may
prove to be relics of primitive barbarism, for in keeping up such Man is
like Shakespeare’s fox,

             ‘Who, ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up,
             Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’

Footnote 55:

  Will. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 46, 67, 132; Michie,
  ‘Siberian Overland Route,’ p. 96.

Footnote 56:

  Ovid. Fast. v. 487. For modern Italy and France, see Edélestane du
  Méril, ‘Études d’Archéol.’ p. 121.

Footnote 57:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ (ed. by J. R. Logan), vol. ii. p. liv.

Footnote 58:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Geschichte,’ vol. ii. p. 209.

Footnote 59:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 266; Dumont d’Urville, ‘Voy.
  de l’Astrolabe,’ vol. i. p. 411.

Footnote 60:

  Strutt, ‘Sports and Pastimes,’ book ii. chap. ii.

Footnote 61:

  Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p. 171.

Footnote 62:

  Polack, ibid.; Wilkes, ‘U. S. Exp.’ vol. i. p. 194. See the account of
  the game of liagi in Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 339; and Yate,
  ‘New Zealand,’ p. 113.

Footnote 63:

  Petron. Arbitri Satiræ rec. Büchler, p. 64 (other readings are buccæ
  or bucco).

Footnote 64:

  Compare Davis, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 317; Wilkinson, Ancient
  Egyptians, vol. i. p. 188; Facciolati, Lexicon, s.v. ‘micare’; &c.

Footnote 65:

  Jamieson, ‘Dict. of Scottish Lang.’ s.v.

Footnote 66:

  ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 244, &c.; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.,’ p.
  573.

Footnote 67:

  Grimm, ibid., p. 1200.

Footnote 68:

  Halliwell, ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p. 112; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 812. Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 106. Johannis Philosophi Ozniensis Opera
  (Aucher), Venice, 1834, pp. 78-89. ‘Infantium sanguini similam
  commiscentes illegitimam communionem deglutiunt; quo pacto porcorum
  suos fœtus immaniter vescentium exsuperant edacitatem. Quique illorum
  cadavera super tecti culmen celantes, ac sursum oculis in cœlum
  defixis respicientes, jurant alieno verbo ac sensu: _Altissimus
  novit. Solem vero deprecari volentes, ajunt: Solicule, Lucicule_;
  atque aëreos, vagosque dæmones clam invocant, juxta Manichæorum
  Simonisque incantatoris errores. Similiter et primum parientis fœminæ
  puerum de manu in manum inter eos invicem projectum, quum pessimâ
  morte occiderint, illum, in cujus manu exspiraverit puer, ad primam
  sectæ dignitatem provectum venerantur; atque per utriusque nomen
  audent insane jurare; Juro, dicunt, per unigenitum filium: et
  iterum: _Testem babeo tibi gloriam ejus, in cujus manum unigenitus
  filius spiritum suum tradidit_.... Contra hos [the orthodox] audacter
  evomere præsumunt impietatis suæ bilem, atque insanientes, ex mali
  spiritus blasphemiâ, Sculpticolas vocant.’

Footnote 69:

  Polack, vol. i. p. 270.

Footnote 70:

  Bosman, ‘Guinese Kust,’ letter x.; Eng. Trans. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi.
  p. 399.

Footnote 71:

  Homer, Iliad, vii. 171; Pindar, Pyth. iv. 338.

Footnote 72:

  Tacit. Germania. 10.

Footnote 73:

  Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.,’ arts. ‘oraculum,’ ‘sortes.’

Footnote 74:

  Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 163.

Footnote 75:

  Gataker, pp. 91, 141; see Lecky, ‘History of Rationalism,’ vol. i. p.
  307.

Footnote 76:

  Jeremy Taylor, ‘Ductor Dubitantium,’ in Works, vol. xiv. p. 337.

Footnote 77:

  See Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 95, 115, 178.

Footnote 78:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. ii. p. 239; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p.
  214; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 228. Compare Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p.
  231.

Footnote 79:

  R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 206, 348, 387.

Footnote 80:

  Smith’s Dic., art. ‘talus.’

Footnote 81:

  Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. ii. p. 412.

Footnote 82:

  D. & C. Livingstone, ‘Exp. to Zambesi,’ p. 51.

Footnote 83:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 108, 285-7; see 384; Bastian,
  ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 76, 125.

Footnote 84:

  Smith’s Dic., art. ‘cottabos.’

Footnote 85:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 222.

Footnote 86:

  Plin. viii. 54.

Footnote 87:

  From a letter of Mr. H. J. Stokes, Negapatam, to Mr. F. M. Jennings.
  General details of the Couvade in ‘Early History of Mankind.’ p. 293.

Footnote 88:

  Hâvamâl, 138.

Footnote 89:

  Jamieson, ‘Scottish Dictionary,’ s.v. ‘coals’; R. Hunt, ‘Popular
  Romances,’ 1st ser. p. 83.

Footnote 90:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 131.

Footnote 91:

  Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube und Brauch,’ vol. i. p. 120; R. Chambers,
  ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland,’ Miscellaneous; Grimm, pp. 969, 976;
  Wuttke, p. 115.

Footnote 92:

  Mendes, ‘Service for the First Nights of Passover,’ London, 1862 (in
  the Jewish interpretation the word sbunra,—‘cat,’ is compared with
  sbinâr). Halliwell, ‘Nursery Rhymes,’ p. 288; ‘Popular Rhymes,’ p.
  6.

Footnote 93:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 110.

Footnote 94:

  Shortland, ‘Traditions of N. Z.’ p. 196.

Footnote 95:

  Casalis, ‘Études sur la langue Séchuana.’

Footnote 96:

  R. F. Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa.’ See also Waitz, vol.
  ii. p. 245.

Footnote 97:

  Callaway, ‘Nursery Tales, &c. of Zulus,’ vol. i. p. 364, &c.

Footnote 98:

  Casalis, ‘Etudes sur la langue Séchuana,’ p. 91; ‘Basutos,’ p. 337.

Footnote 99:

  Steere, ‘Swahili Tales,’ p. 418.

Footnote 100:

  Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 212.

Footnote 101:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 216. See Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. p.
  171.

Footnote 102:

  Sahagun, ‘Historia de Nueva España,’ in Kingsborough’s ‘Antiquities,
  of Mexico,’ vol. vii. p. 178.

Footnote 103:

  Grimm, p. 699.

Footnote 104:

  Diog. Laert. i. 91; Athenagoras. x, 451.

Footnote 105:

  Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr. für Deutsche Mythologie,’ vol. iii. p. 2, &c.:

                      ‘Nóg er forthun nösgás vaxin,
                      Barngiorn su er bar bútimbr saman;
                      Hlifthu henni halms bitskálmir,
                      Thó lá drykkjar drynhrönn yfir.’

Footnote 106:

  See Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 107:

  Mannhardt’s ‘Zeitschr.’ l.c.

Footnote 108:

  E. A. W. Zimmermann, ‘Geographische Geschichte des Menschen,’ &c.,
  1778-83, vol. iii. See Professor Rolleston’s Inaugural Address,
  British Association, 1870.

Footnote 109:

  Earl of Chesterfield, ‘Letters to his Son,’ vol. ii. No. lxviii.

Footnote 110:

  See Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i. pp. 161-70 Grimm,
  pp. 52-5, 1201; Brand, vol. ii. pp. 314, 325, &c.

Footnote 111:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 64, 222-5, 263.

Footnote 112:

  Godignus, ‘Vita Patris Gonzali Sylveriæ.’ Col. Agripp. 1616; lib. ii.
  c. x.

Footnote 113:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xviii. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 478.

Footnote 114:

  Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 373.

Footnote 115:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 131.

Footnote 116:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 348; see also Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p.
  250.

Footnote 117:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. i. p. 456.

Footnote 118:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Hist. de la Florida,’ vol. iii. ch. xli.

Footnote 119:

  Among dissertations on the subject, see especially Sir Thos. Browne
  ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ (Vulgar Errors), book iv. chap. ix.; Brand
  ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. iii. p. 119, &c.; R. G. Haliburton, ‘New
  Materials for the History of Man.’ Halifax, N. S. 1863; ‘Encyclopædia
  Britannica,’ (5th ed.) art. ‘sneezing,’ Wernsdorf, ‘De Ritu
  Sternutantibus bene precandi.’ Leipzig, 1741; see also Grimm, D. M. p.
  1070, note.

Footnote 120:

  Homer, Odyss. xvii. 541.

Footnote 121:

  Xenophon, Anabasis, iii. 2, 9.

Footnote 122:

  Aristot. Problem. xxxiii. 7.

Footnote 123:

  Anthologia Græca, Brunck, vol. iii. p. 95.

Footnote 124:

  Petron. Arb. Sat. 98.

Footnote 125:

  Plin. xxviii. 5.

Footnote 126:

  Noel, ‘Dic. des Origines;’ Migne, ‘Dic. des Superstitions,’ &c.;
  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 129.

Footnote 127:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 142; Dubois, ‘Peuples de l’Inde,’ vol. i.
  p. 465; Sleeman, ‘Ramaseeana,’ p. 120.

Footnote 128:

  Buxtorf, ‘Lexicon Chaldaicum;’ Tendlau, ‘Sprichwörter, &c.
  Deutsch-Jüdischer Vorzeit.’ Frankf. a. M., 1860, p. 142.

Footnote 129:

  Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 282. See Grant, in ‘Tr. Eth.
  Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90.

Footnote 130:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1070, 1110.

Footnote 131:

  ‘Manuel des Pecchés,’ in Wedgwood, ‘Dic. English Etymology,’ s.v.,
  ‘wassail.’

Footnote 132:

  Brand, vol. iii. p. 126.

Footnote 133:

  Callaway, p. 263.

Footnote 134:

  Ward, l.c.

Footnote 135:

  ‘Pend-Nameh,’ tr. de Sacy, ch. lxiii.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., p. 302;
  Lane, l.c.

Footnote 136:

  G. Brecher, ‘Das Transcendentale im Talmud,’ p. 168; Joseph. Ant. Jud.
  viii. 2, 5.

Footnote 137:

  Migne, ‘Dic. des Hérésies,’ s.v.

Footnote 138:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 115, 322.

Footnote 139:

  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 137.

Footnote 140:

  Haliburton, op. cit.

Footnote 141:

  Powell and Magnussen, ‘Legends of Iceland,’ 2nd ser. p. 448.

Footnote 142:

  The cases in which a sneeze is interpreted under special conditions,
  as with reference to right and left, early morning, &c. (see Plutarch,
  De Genio Socratis, &c.), are not considered here, as they belong to
  ordinary omen-divination.

Footnote 143:

  W. Scott, ‘Minstrelsy of Scottish Border;’ Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races
  of Scotland,’ vol. i. pp. 194, 487; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Mythologie,’ pp.
  972, 1095; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 92, 407, vol. iii. pp. 105,
  112; Bowring, ‘Servian Popular Poetry,’ p. 64. A review of the First
  Edition of the present work in ‘Nature,’ June 15, 1871, contains the
  following:—‘It is not, for example, many years since the present Lord
  Leigh was accused of having built an obnoxious person—one account, if
  we remember right, said eight obnoxious persons—into the foundation of
  a bridge at Stoneleigh. Of course so preposterous a charge carried on
  its face its own sufficient refutation; but the fact that it was
  brought at all is a singular instance of the almost incredible
  vitality of old traditions.’

Footnote 144:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 197.

Footnote 145:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 346; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p.
  39.

Footnote 146:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 46; see Bastian, vol. ii. p. 407. I
  am indebted to Mr. R. K. Douglas for a perfect example of one meaning
  of the foundation-sacrifice, from the Chinese book, ‘Yūh hea ke’
  (‘Jewelled Casket of Divination’): ‘Before beginning to build, the
  workmen should sacrifice to the gods of the neighbourhood, of the
  earth and wood. Should the carpenters be very apprehensive of the
  building falling, they, when fixing a post, should take something
  living and put it beneath, and lower the post on it, and to liberate
  [the evil influences] they should strike the post with an axe and
  repeat—

                         “It is well, it is well,
                         May those who live within
                         Be ever warm and well fed.”’

Footnote 147:

  Caron, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 623.

Footnote 148:

  F. Mason, ‘Burmah,’ p. 100; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. pp. 193,
  214; vol. ii. pp. 91, 270; vol. iii. p. 16; Roberts, ‘Oriental
  Illustrations,’ p. 283.

Footnote 149:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 107. A modern Arnaut story is given by
  Prof. Liebrecht in ‘Philologus,’ vol. xxiii. (1865), p. 682.

Footnote 150:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 210; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 318.

Footnote 151:

  Kracheninnikow, ‘Descr. du Kamchatka, Voy. en Sibérie,’ vol. iii. p.
  72.

Footnote 152:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 274.

Footnote 153:

  J. V. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen,’ p. 12.

Footnote 154:

  Chap. XVIII.

Footnote 155:

  Eastman, ‘Dacotah,’ pp. 118, 125.

Footnote 156:

  R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 48.

Footnote 157:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 34.

Footnote 158:

  Hanusch, ‘Wissenschaft des Slawischen Mythus,’ p. 299.

Footnote 159:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth,’ p. 462.

SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (continued).

    Occult Sciences—Magical powers attributed by higher to lower
    races—Magical processes based on Association of Ideas—Omens—Augury,
    &c.—Oneiromancy—Haruspication, Scapulimancy, Chiromancy,
    &c.—Cartomancy, &c.—Rhabdomancy, Dactyliomancy, Coscinomancy,
    &c.—Astrology—Intellectual conditions accounting for the persistence
    of Magic—Survival passes into Revival—Witchcraft, originating in
    savage culture, continues in barbaric civilization; its decline in
    early mediæval Europe followed by revival; its practices and
    counter-practices belong to earlier culture—Spiritualism has its
    source in early stages of culture, in close connexion with
    witchcraft—Spirit-rapping and Spirit-writing—Rising in the
    air—Performances of tied mediums—Practical bearing of the study of
    Survival.

In examining the survival of opinions in the midst of conditions of
society becoming gradually estranged from them, and tending at last to
suppress them altogether, much may be learnt from the history of one of
the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind, the belief in
Magic. Looking at Occult Science from this ethnographic point of view, I
shall instance some of its branches as illustrating the course of
intellectual culture. Its place in history is briefly this. It belongs
in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization, and
the lower races, who have not partaken largely of the education of the
world, still maintain it in vigour. From this level it may be traced
upward, much of the savage art holding its place substantially
unchanged, and many new practices being in course of time developed,
while both the older and newer developments have lasted on more or less
among modern cultured nations. But during the ages in which progressive
races have been learning to submit their opinions to closer and closer
experimental tests, occult science has been breaking down into the
condition of a survival, in which state we mostly find it among
ourselves.

The modern educated world, rejecting occult science as a contemptible
superstition, has practically committed itself to the opinion that magic
belongs to a lower level of civilization. It is very instructive to find
the soundness of this judgment undesignedly confirmed by nations whose
education has not advanced far enough to destroy their belief in magic
itself. In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering
survivor of an older nationality, is liable to the reputation of
sorcery. It is thus with the Lavas of Burma, supposed to be the
broken-down remains of an ancient cultured race, and dreaded as
man-tigers;[160] and with the Budas of Abyssinia, who are at once the
smiths and potters, sorcerers and were-wolves, of their district.[161]
But the usual and suggestive state of things is that nations who believe
with the sincerest terror in the reality of the magic art, at the same
time cannot shut their eyes to the fact that it more essentially belongs
to, and is more thoroughly at home among, races less civilized than
themselves. The Malays of the Peninsula, who have adopted Mohammedan
religion and civilization, have this idea of the lower tribes of the
land, tribes more or less of their own race, but who have remained in
their early savage condition. The Malays have enchanters of their own,
but consider them inferior to the sorcerers or poyangs belonging to the
rude Mintira; to these they will resort for the cure of diseases and the
working of misfortune and death to their enemies. It is, in fact, the
best protection the Mintira have against their stronger Malay
neighbours, that these are careful not to offend them for fear of their
powers of magical revenge. The Jakuns, again, are a rude and wild race,
whom the Malays despise as infidels and little higher than animals, but
whom at the same time they fear extremely. To the Malay the Jakun seems
a supernatural being, skilled in divination, sorcery, and fascination,
able to do evil or good according to his pleasure, whose blessing will
be followed by the most fortunate success, and his curse by the most
dreadful consequences; he can turn towards the house of an enemy, at
whatever distance, and beat two sticks together till that enemy will
fall sick and die; he is skilled in herbal physic; he has the power of
charming the fiercest wild beasts. Thus it is that the Malays, though
they despise the Jakuns, refrain, in many circumstances, from
ill-treating them.[162] In India, in long-past ages, the dominant Aryans
described the rude indigenes of the land by the epithets of ‘possessed
of magical powers,’ ‘changing their shape at will.’[163] To this day,
Hindus settled in Chota-Nagpur and Singbhum firmly believe that the
Mundas have powers of witchcraft, whereby they can transform themselves
into tigers and other beasts of prey to devour their enemies, and can
witch away the lives of man and beast; it is to the wildest and most
savage of the tribe that such powers are generally ascribed.[164] In
Southern India, again, we hear in past times of Hinduized Dravidians,
the Sudras of Canara, living in fear of the demoniacal powers of the
slave-caste below them.[165] In our own day, among Dravidian tribes of
the Nilagiri district, the Todas and Badagas are in mortal dread of the
Kurumbas, despised and wretched forest outcasts, but gifted, it is
believed, with powers of destroying men and animals and property by
witchcraft.[166] Northern Europe brings the like contrast sharply into
view. The Finns and Lapps, whose low Tatar barbarism was characterized
by sorcery such as flourishes still among their Siberian kinsfolk, were
accordingly objects of superstitious fear to their Scandinavian
neighbours and oppressors. In the middle ages the name of Finn was, as
it still remains among sea-faring men, equivalent to that of sorcerer,
while Lapland witches had a European celebrity as practitioners of the
black art. Ages after the Finns had risen in the social scale, the Lapps
retained much of their old half-savage habit of life, and with it
naturally their witchcraft, so that even the magic-gifted Finns revered
the occult powers of a people more barbarous than themselves. Rühs
writes thus early in the last century: ‘There are still sorcerers in
Finland, but the skilfullest of them believe that the Lapps far excel
them; of a well-experienced magician they say, “That is quite a Lapp,”
and they journey to Lapland for such knowledge.’[167] All this is of a
piece with the survival of such ideas among the ignorant elsewhere in
the civilized world. Many a white man in the West Indies and Africa
dreads the incantations of the Obi-man, and Europe ascribes powers of
sorcery to despised outcast ‘races maudites,’ Gypsies and Cagots. To
turn from nations to sects, the attitude of Protestants to Catholics in
this matter is instructive. It was remarked in Scotland: ‘There is one
opinion which many of them entertain, ... that a popish priest can cast
out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no
such power.’ So Bourne says of the Church of England clergy, that the
vulgar think them no conjurers, and say none can lay spirits but popish
priests.[168] These accounts are not recent, but in Germany the same
state of things appears to exist still. Protestants get the aid of
Catholic priests and monks to help them against witchcraft, to lay
ghosts, consecrate herbs, and discover thieves;[169] thus with
unconscious irony judging the relation of Rome toward modern
civilization.

The principal key to the understanding of Occult Science is to consider
it as based on the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the
very foundation of human reason, but in no small degree of human
unreason also. Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come
to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to
conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in
reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events
by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal
significance. By a vast mass of evidence from savage, barbaric, and
civilized life, magic arts which have resulted from thus mistaking an
ideal for a real connexion, may be clearly traced from the lower culture
which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in.[170] Such
are the practices whereby a distant person is to be affected by acting
on something closely associated with him—his property, clothes he has
worn, and above all cuttings of his hair and nails. Not only do savages
high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians like
the nations of Guinea, live in deadly terror of this spiteful craft—not
only have the Parsis their sacred ritual prescribed for burying their
cut hair and nails, lest demons and sorcerers should do mischief with
them, but the fear of leaving such clippings and parings about lest
their former owner should be harmed through them, has by no means died
out of European folk-lore, and the German peasant, during the days
between his child’s birth and baptism, objects to lend anything out of
the house, lest witchcraft should be worked through it on the yet
unconsecrated baby.[171] As the negro fetish-man, when his patient does
not come in person, can divine by means of his dirty cloth or cap
instead,[172] so the modern clairvoyant professes to feel
sympathetically the sensations of a distant person, if communication be
made through a lock of his hair or any object that has been in contact
with him.[173] The simple idea of joining two objects with a cord,
taking for granted that this communication will establish connexion or
carry influence, has been worked out in various ways in the world. In
Australia, the native doctor fastens one end of a string to the ailing
part of the patient’s body, and by sucking at the other end pretends to
draw out blood for his relief.[174] In Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets
down a ball of thread through her enemy’s roof to reach his body, that
by putting the other end in her own mouth she may suck his blood.[175]
When a reindeer is sacrificed at a sick Ostyak’s tent door, the patient
holds in his hand a cord attached to the victim offered for his
benefit.[176] Greek history shows a similar idea, when the citizens of
Ephesus carried a rope seven furlongs from their walls to the temple of
Artemis, thus to place themselves under her safeguard against the attack
of Crœsus; and in the yet more striking story of the Kylonians, who tied
a cord to the statue of the goddess when they quitted the asylum, and
clung to it for protection as they crossed unhallowed ground; but by
ill-fate the cord of safety broke and they were mercilessly put to
death.[177] And in our own day, Buddhist priests in solemn ceremony put
themselves in communication with a sacred relic, by each taking hold of
a long thread fastened near it and around the temple.[178]

Magical arts in which the connexion is that of mere analogy or symbolism
are endlessly numerous throughout the course of civilization. Their
common theory may be readily made out from a few typical cases, and
thence applied confidently to the general mass. The Australian will
observe the track of an insect near a grave, to ascertain the direction
where the sorcerer is to be found, by whose craft the man died.[179] The
Zulu may be seen chewing a bit of wood, in order, by this symbolic act,
to soften the heart of the man he wants to buy oxen from, or of the
woman he wants for a wife.[180] The Obi-man of West Africa makes his
packet of grave-dust, blood, and bones, that this suggestive
representation of death may bring his enemy to the grave.[181] The Khond
sets up the iron arrow of the War-god in a basket of rice, and judges
from its standing upright that war must be kept up also, or from its
falling that the quarrel may be let fall too; and when he tortures human
victims sacrificed to the Earth-goddess, he rejoices to see them shed
plentiful tears, which betoken copious showers to fall upon his
land.[182] These are fair examples of the symbolic magic of the lower
races, and they are fully rivalled in superstitions which still hold
their ground in Europe. With quaint simplicity, the German cottager
declares that if a dog howls looking downward, it portends a death; but
if upward, then a recovery from sickness.[183] Locks must be opened and
bolts drawn in a dying man’s house, that his soul may not be held
fast.[184] The Hessian lad thinks that he may escape the conscription by
carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket—a symbolic way of repudiating
manhood.[185] Modern Servians, dancing and singing, lead about a little
girl dressed in leaves and flowers, and pour bowls of water over her to
make the rain come.[186] Sailors becalmed will sometimes whistle for a
wind; but in other weather they hate whistling at sea, which raises a
whistling gale.[187] Fish, says the Cornishman, should be eaten from the
tail towards the head, to bring the other fishes’ heads towards the
shore, for eating them the wrong way turns them from the coast.[188] He
who has cut himself should rub the knife with fat, and as it dries, the
wound will heal; this is a lingering survival from days when recipes for
sympathetic ointment were to be found in the Pharmacopœia.[189] Fanciful
as these notions are, it should be borne in mind that they come fairly
under definite mental law, depending as they do on a principle of ideal
association, of which we can quite understand the mental action, though
we deny its practical results. The clever Lord Chesterfield, too clever
to understand folly, may again be cited to prove this. He relates in one
of his letters that the king had been ill, and that people generally
expected the illness to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the Tower,
about the king’s age, had just died. ‘So wild and capricious is the
human mind,’ he exclaims, by way of comment. But indeed the thought was
neither wild nor capricious, it was simply such an argument from analogy
as the educated world has at length painfully learnt to be worthless;
but which, it is not too much to declare, would to this day carry
considerable weight to the minds of four-fifths of the human race.

A glance at those magical arts which have been systematized into
pseudo-sciences, shows the same underlying principle. The art of taking
omens from seeing and meeting animals, which includes augury, is
familiar to such savages as the Tupis of Brazil[190] and the Dayaks of
Borneo,[191] and extends upward through classic civilization. The Maoris
may give a sample of the character of its rules: they hold it unlucky if
an owl hoots during a consultation, but a council of war is encouraged
by prospect of victory when a hawk flies overhead; a flight of birds to
the right of the war-sacrifice is propitious if the villages of the
tribe are in that quarter, but if the omen is in the enemy’s direction
the war will be given up.[192] Compare these with the Tatar rules, and
it is obvious that similar thoughts lie at the source of both. Here a
certain little owl’s cry is a sound of terror, although there is a white
owl which is lucky; but of all birds the white falcon is most prophetic,
and the Kalmuk bows his thanks for the good omen when one flies by on
the right, but seeing one on the left turns away his face and expects
calamity.[193] So to the negro of Old Calabar, the cry of the great
kingfisher bodes good or evil, according as it is heard on the right or
left.[194] Here we have the obvious symbolism of the right and left
hand, the foreboding of ill from the owl’s doleful note, and the
suggestion of victory from the fierce swooping hawk, a thought which in
old Europe made the bird of prey the warrior’s omen of conquest. Meaning
of the same kind appears in the ‘Angang,’ the omens taken from meeting
animals and people, especially on first going out in the morning, as
when the ancient Slaves held meeting a sick man or an old woman to bode
ill-luck. Any one who takes the trouble to go into this subject in
detail, and to study the classic, mediæval, and oriental codes of rules,
will find that the principle of direct symbolism still accounts for a
fair proportion of them, though the rest may have lost their early
significance, or may have been originally due to some other reason, or
may have been arbitrarily invented (as a considerable proportion of such
devices must necessarily be) to fill up the gaps in the system. It is
still plain to us why the omen of the crow should be different on the
right or left hand, why a vulture should mean rapacity, a stork concord,
a pelican piety, an ass labour, why the fierce conquering wolf should be
a good omen, and the timid hare a bad one, why bees, types of an
obedient nation, should be lucky to a king, while flies, returning
however often they are driven off, should be signs of importunity and
impudence.[195] And as to the general principle that animals are ominous
to those who meet them, the German peasant who says a flock of sheep is
lucky but a herd of swine unlucky to meet, and the Cornish miner who
turns away in horror when he meets an old woman or a rabbit on his way
to the pit’s mouth, are to this day keeping up relics of early savagery
as genuine as any flint implement dug out of a tumulus.

The doctrine of dreams, attributed as they are by the lower and
middle races to spiritual intercourse, belongs in so far rather to
religion than to magic. But oneiromancy, the art of taking omens
from dreams by analogical interpretation, has its place here. Of the
leading principle of such mystical explanation, no better types
could be chosen than the details and interpretations of Joseph’s
dreams (Genesis xxxvii., xl., xli.), of the sheaves and the sun and
moon and eleven stars, of the vine and the basket of meats, of the
lean and fat kine, and the thin and full corn-ears. Oneiromancy,
thus symbolically interpreting the things seen in dreams, is not
unknown to the lower races. A whole Australian tribe has been known
to decamp because one of them dreamt of a certain kind of owl, which
dream the wise men declared to forebode an attack from a certain
other tribe.[196] The Kamchadals, whose minds ran much on dreams,
had special interpretations of some; thus to dream of lice or dogs
betokened a visit of Russian travellers, &c.[197] The Zulus,
experience having taught them the fallacy of expecting direct
fulfilment of dreams, have in some cases tried to mend matters by
rushing to the other extreme. If they dream of a sick man that he is
dead, and they see the earth poured into the grave, and hear the
funeral lamentation, and see all his things destroyed, then they
say, ‘Because we have dreamt of his death he will not die.’ But if
they dream of a wedding-dance, it is a sign of a funeral. So the
Maoris hold that a kinsman dreamt of as dying will recover, but to
see him well is a sign of death.[198] Both races thus work out, by
the same crooked logic that guided our own ancestors, the axiom that
‘dreams go by contraries.’ It could not be expected, in looking over
the long lists of precepts of classic, oriental, and modern popular
dream-interpretation, to detect the original sense of all their
readings. Many must turn on allusions intelligible at the time, but
now obscure. The Moslem dream-interpretation of eggs as concerning
women, because of a saying of Mohammed about women being like an egg
hidden in a nest, is an example which will serve as well as a score
to show how dream-rules may turn on far-fetched ideas, not to be
recognized unless the key happens to have been preserved. Many rules
must have been taken at random to fill up lists of omens, and of
contingencies to match them. Why should a dream of roasting meat
show the dreamer to be a back-biter, or laughter in sleep presage
difficult circumstances, or a dream of playing on the clavicord the
death of relatives? But the other side of the matter, the still
apparent nonsensical rationality of so many dream omens, is much
more remarkable. It can only be considered that the same symbolism
that lay at the root of the whole delusion, favoured the keeping up
and new making of such rules as carried obvious meaning. Take the
Moslem ideas that it is a good omen to dream of something white or
green, or of water, but bad to dream of black or red, or of fire;
that a palm-tree indicates an Arab, and a peacock a king; that he
who dreams of devouring the stars will live free at some great man’s
table. Take the classic rules as in the ‘Oneirocritica’ of
Artemidorus, and pass on through the mediæval treatises down to such
a dream-dictionary as servant-maids still buy in penny chap-books at
the fair, and it will be seen that the ancient rules still hold
their places to a remarkable extent, while half the mass of precepts
still show their original mystic significance, mostly direct, but
occasionally according to the rule of contraries. An offensive odour
signifies annoyance; to wash the hands denotes release from
anxieties; to embrace one’s best beloved is very fortunate; to have
one’s feet cut off prevents a journey; to weep in sleep is a sign of
joy; he who dreams he hath lost a tooth shall lose a friend; and he
that dreams that a rib is taken out of his side shall ere long see
the death of his wife; to follow bees, betokens gain; to be married
signifies that some of your kinsfolk are dead; if one sees many
fowls together, that shall be jealousy and chiding; if a snake
pursue him, let him be on his guard against evil women; to dream of
death, denotes happiness and long life; to dream of swimming and
wading in the water is good, so that the head be kept above water;
to dream of crossing a bridge, denotes you will leave a good
situation to seek a better; to dream you see a dragon is a sign that
you shall see some great lord your master, or a magistrate.[199]

Haruspication belongs, among the lower races, especially to the Malays
and Polynesians,[200] and to various Asiatic tribes.[201] It is
mentioned as practised in Peru under the Incas.[202] Captain Burton’s
account from Central Africa perhaps fairly displays its symbolic
principle. He describes the mganga or sorcerer taking an ordeal by
killing and splitting a fowl and inspecting its inside: if blackness or
blemish appears about the wings, it denotes the treachery of children
and kinsmen; the backbone convicts the mother and grandmother; the tail
shows that the criminal is the wife, &c.[203] In ancient Rome, where the
art held so great a place in public affairs, the same sort of
interpretation was usual, as witness the omen of Augustus, where the
livers of the victims were found folded, and the diviners prophesied him
accordingly a doubled empire.[204] Since then, haruspication has died
out more completely than almost any magical rite, yet even now a
characteristic relic of it may be noticed in Brandenburg; when a pig is
killed and the spleen is found turned over, there will be another
overthrow, namely a death in the family that year.[205] With
haruspication may be classed the art of divining by bones, as where
North American Indians would put in the fire a certain flat bone of a
porcupine, and judge from its colour if the porcupine hunt would be
successful.[206] The principal art of this kind is divination by a
shoulder-blade, technically called scapulimancy or omoplatoscopy. This
art, related to the old Chinese divination by the cracks of a
tortoise-shell on the fire, is especially found in vogue in Tartary. Its
simple symbolism is well shown in the elaborate account with diagrams
given by Pallas. The shoulder-blade is put on the fire till it cracks in
various directions, and then a long split lengthwise is reckoned as the
‘way of life,’ while cross-cracks on the right and left stand for
different kinds and degrees of good and evil fortune; or if the omen is
only taken as to some special event, then lengthwise splits mean going
on well, but crosswise ones stand for hindrance, white marks portend
much snow, black ones a mild winter, &c.[207] To find this quaint art
lasting on into modern times in Europe, we can hardly go to a better
place than our own country; a proper English term for it is ‘reading the
speal-bone’ (speal = espaule). In Ireland, Camden describes the
looking through the blade-bone of a sheep, to find a dark spot which
foretells a death, and Drayton thus commemorates the art in his
Polyolbion:—

      ‘By th’ shoulder of a ram from off the right side par’d,
      Which usually they boile, the spade-bone being bar’d,
      Which when the wizard takes, and gazing therupon
      Things long to come foreshowes, as things done long agone.’[208]

Chiromancy, or palmistry, seems much like this, though it is also mixed
up with astrology. It flourished in ancient Greece and Italy as it still
does in India, where to say, ‘It is written on the palms of my hands,’
is a usual way of expressing a sense of inevitable fate. Chiromancy
traces in the markings of the palm a line of fortune and a line of life,
finds proof of melancholy in the intersections on the saturnine mount,
presages sorrow and death from black spots in the finger-nails, and at
last, having exhausted the powers of this childish symbolism, it
completes its system by details of which the absurdity is no longer
relieved by even an ideal sense. The art has its modern votaries not
merely among Gypsy fortune-tellers, but in what is called ‘good
society.’[209]

It may again and again thus be noticed in magic arts, that the
association of ideas is obvious up to a certain point. Thus when the New
Zealand sorcerer took omens by the way his divining sticks (guided by
spirits) fell, he quite naturally said it was a good omen if the stick
representing his own tribe fell on top of that representing the enemy,
and vice versâ. Zulu diviners still work a similar process with their
magical pieces of stick, which rise to say yes and fall to say no, jump
upon the head or stomach or other affected part of the patient’s body to
show where his complaint is, and lie pointing towards the house of the
doctor who can cure him. So likewise, where a similar device was
practised ages ago in the Old World, the responses were taken from
staves which (by the operation of demons) fell backward or forward, to
the right or left.[210] But when processes of this kind are developed to
complexity, the system has, of course, to be completed by more arbitrary
arrangements. This is well shown in one of the divinatory arts mentioned
in the last chapter for their connexion with games of chance. In
cartomancy, the art of fortune-telling with packs of cards, there is a
sort of nonsensical sense in such rules as that two queens mean
friendship and four mean chattering, or that the knave of hearts
prophesies a brave young man who will come into the family to be useful,
unless his purpose be reversed by his card being upside down. But of
course the pack can only furnish a limited number of such comparatively
rational interpretations, and the rest must be left to such arbitrary
fancy as that the seven of diamonds means a prize in the lottery, and
the ten of the same suit an unexpected journey.[211]

A remarkable group of divining instruments illustrates another
principle. In South-East Asia, the Sgau Karens, at funeral feasts, hang
a bangle or metal ring by a thread over a brass basin, which the
relatives of the dead approach in succession and strike on the edge with
a bit of bamboo; when the one who was most beloved touches the basin,
the dead man’s spirit responds by twisting and stretching the string
till it breaks and the ring falls into the cup, or at least till it
rings against it.[212] Nearer Central Asia, in the north-east corner of
India, among the Bodo and Dhimal, the professional exorcist has to find
out what deity has entered into a patient’s body to punish him for some
impiety by an attack of illness; this he discovers by setting thirteen
leaves round him on the ground to represent the gods, and then holding a
pendulum attached to his thumb by a string, till the god in question is
persuaded by invocation to declare himself, making the pendulum swing
towards his representative leaf.[213] These mystic arts (not to go into
the question how these tribes came to use them) are rude forms of the
classical dactyliomancy, of which so curious an account is given in the
trial of the conspirators Patricius and Hilarius, who worked it to find
out who was to supplant the emperor Valens. A round table was marked at
the edge with the letters of the alphabet, and with prayers and mystic
ceremonies a ring was held suspended over it by a thread, and by
swinging or stopping towards certain letters gave the responsive words
of the oracle.[214] Dactyliomancy has dwindled in Europe to the art of
finding out what o’clock it is by holding a ring hanging inside a
tumbler by a thread, till, without conscious aid by the operator, it
begins to swing and strikes the hour. Father Schott, in his ‘Physica
Curiosa’ (1662), refrains with commendable caution from ascribing this
phenomenon universally to demoniac influence. It survives among
ourselves in child’s play, and though we are ‘no conjurers,’ we may
learn something from the little instrument, which remarkably displays
the effects of insensible movement. The operator really gives slight
impulses till they accumulate to a considerable vibration, as in ringing
a church-bell by very gentle pulls exactly timed. That he does, though
unconsciously, cause and direct the swings, may be shown by an attempt
to work the instrument with the operator’s eyes shut, which will be
found to fail, the directing power being lost. The action of the famous
divining-rod with its curiously versatile sensibility to water, ore,
treasure, and thieves, seems to belong partly to trickery by
professional Dousterswivels, and partly to more or less conscious
direction by honester operators. It is still known in England, and in
Germany they are apt to hide it in a baby’s clothes, and so get it
baptized for greater efficiency.[215] To conclude this group of
divinatory instruments, chance or the operator’s direction may determine
the action of one of the most familiar of classic and mediæval ordeals,
the so-called coscinomancy, or, as it is described in Hudibras, ‘th’
oracle of sieve and shears, that turns as certain as the spheres.’ The
sieve was held hanging by a thread, or by the points of a pair of shears
stuck into its rim, and it would turn, or swing, or fall, at the mention
of a thief’s name, and give similar signs for other purposes. Of this
ancient rite, the Christian ordeal of the Bible and key, still in
frequent use, is a variation: the proper way to detect a thief by this
is to read the 50th Psalm to the apparatus, and when it hears the verse,
‘When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him,’ it will turn
to the culprit.[216]

Count de Maistre, with his usual faculty of taking an argument up at the
wrong end, tells us that judicial astrology no doubt hangs to truths of
the first order, which have been taken from us as useless or dangerous,
or which we cannot recognize under their new forms.[217] A sober
examination of the subject may rather justify the contrary opinion, that
it is on an error of the first order that astrology depends, the error
of mistaking ideal analogy for real connexion. Astrology, in the
immensity of its delusive influence on mankind, and by the comparatively
modern period to which it remained an honoured branch of philosophy, may
claim the highest rank among the occult sciences. It scarcely belongs to
very low levels of civilization, although one of its fundamental
conceptions, namely, that of the souls or animating intelligences of the
celestial bodies, is rooted in the depths of savage life. Yet the
following Maori specimen of astrological reasoning is as real an
argument as could be found in Paracelsus or Agrippa, nor is there reason
to doubt its being home-made. When the siege of a New Zealand ‘pa’ is
going on, if Venus is near the moon, the natives naturally imagine the
two as enemy and fortress; if the planet is above, the foe will have the
upper hand; but if below, then the men of the soil will be able to
defend themselves.[218] Though the early history of astrology is
obscure, its great development and elaborate systematization were
undoubtedly the work of civilized nations of the ancient and mediæval
world. As might be well supposed, a great part of its precepts have lost
their intelligible sense, or never had any, but the origin of many
others is still evident. To a considerable extent they rest on direct
symbolism. Such are the rules which connect the sun with gold, with the
heliotrope and pæony, with the cock which heralds day, with magnanimous
animals, such as the lion and bull; and the moon with silver, and the
changing chamæleon, and the palm-tree, which was considered to send out
a monthly shoot. Direct symbolism is plain in that main principle of the
calculation of nativities, the notion of the ‘ascendant’ in the
horoscope, which reckons the part of the heavens rising in the east at
the moment of a child’s birth as being connected with the child itself,
and prophetic of its future life.[219] It is an old story, that when two
brothers were once taken ill together, Hippokrates the physician
concluded from the coincidence that they were twins, but Poseidonios the
astrologer considered rather that they were born under the same
constellation: we may add, that either argument would be thought
reasonable by a savage. One of the most instructive astrological
doctrines which has kept its place in modern popular philosophy, is that
of the sympathy of growing and declining nature with the waxing and
waning moon. Among classical precepts are these: to set eggs under the
hen at new moon, but to root up trees when the moon is on the wane, and
after midday. The Lithuanian precept to wean boys on a waxing, but girls
on a waning moon, no doubt to make the boys sturdy and the girls slim
and delicate, is a fair match for the Orkney islanders’ objection to
marrying except with a growing moon, while some even wish for a flowing
tide. The following lines, from Tusser’s ‘Five Hundred Points of
Husbandry,’ show neatly in a single case the two contrary lunar
influences:—

           ‘Sowe peason and beans in the wane of the moone
           Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soone:
           That they, with the planet, may rest and rise,
           And flourish with bearing, most plentiful wise.’[220]

The notion that the weather changes with the moon’s quarterings is still
held with great vigour in England. Yet the meteorologists, with all
their eagerness to catch at any rule which at all answers to facts,
quite repudiate this one, which indeed appears to be simply a maxim
belonging to popular astrology. Just as the growth and dwindling of
plants became associated with the moon’s wax and wane, so changes of
weather became associated with changes of the moon, while, by
astrologer’s logic, it did not matter whether the moon’s change were
real, at new and full, or imaginary, at the intermediate quarters. That
educated people to whom exact weather records are accessible should
still find satisfaction in the fanciful lunar rule, is an interesting
case of intellectual survival.

In such cases as these, the astrologer has at any rate a real analogy,
deceptive though it be, to base his rule upon. But most of his
pseudo-science seems to rest on even weaker and more arbitrary
analogies, not of things, but of names. Names of stars and
constellations, of signs denoting regions of the sky and periods of days
and years, no matter how arbitrarily given, are materials which the
astrologer can work upon, and bring into ideal connexion with mundane
events. That astronomers should have divided the sun’s course into
imaginary signs of the zodiac, was enough to originate astrological
rules that these celestial signs have an actual effect on real earthly
rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins. A child born under the sign of the
Lion will be courageous; but one born under the Crab will not go forward
well in life; one born under the Waterman is likely to be drowned, and
so forth. Towards 1524, Europe was awaiting in an agony of prayerful
terror a second deluge, prophesied for February in that year. As the
fatal month drew nigh, dwellers by the waterside moved in crowds to the
hills, some provided boats to save them, and the President Aurial, at
Toulouse, built himself a Noah’s Ark. It was the great astrologer
Stoefler (the originator, it is said, of the weather-prophecies in our
almanacks) who foretold this cataclysm, and his argument has the
advantage of being still perfectly intelligible—at the date in question,
three planets would be together in the aqueous sign of Pisces. Again,
simply because astronomers chose to distribute among the planets the
names of certain deities, the planets thereby acquired the characters of
their divine namesakes. Thus it was that the planet Mercury became
connected with travel, trade, and theft, Venus with love and mirth, Mars
with war, Jupiter with power and ‘joviality.’ Throughout the East,
astrology even now remains a science in full esteem. The condition of
mediæval Europe may still be perfectly realized by the traveller in
Persia, where the Shah waits for days outside the walls of his capital
till the constellations allow him to enter, and where on the days
appointed by the stars for letting blood, it literally flows in streams
from the barbers’ shops into the street. Professor Wuttke declares that
there are many districts in Germany where the child’s horoscope is still
regularly kept with the baptismal certificate in the family chest. We
scarcely reach this pitch of conservatism in England, but I happen to
myself live within a mile of an astrologer, and I lately saw a grave
paper on nativities, offered in all good faith to the British
Association. The piles of ‘Zadkiel’s Almanack’ in the bookseller’s
windows in country towns about Christmas are a symptom how much yet
remains to be done in popular education. As a specimen at once of the
survival and of the meaning of astrologic reasoning, I cannot do better
than quote a passage from a book published in London in 1861, and
entitled ‘The Hand-Book of Astrology, by Zadkiel Tao-Sze.’ At page 72 of
his first volume, the astrologer relates as follows: ‘The Map of the
heavens given at page 45 was drawn on the occasion of a young lady
having been arrested on a charge of the murder of her infant brother.
Having read in a newspaper, at twenty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd
July, 1860, that Miss C. K. had been arrested on a charge of the murder
of her young brother, the author felt desirous to ascertain whether she
were guilty or not, and drew the map accordingly. Finding the moon in
the twelfth house, she clearly signifies the prisoner. The moon is in a
moveable sign, and moves in the twenty-four hours, 14° 17´. She is,
therefore, swift in motion. These things indicated that the prisoner
would be very speedily released. Then we find a moveable sign in the
cusp of the twelfth, and its ruler, ♀, in a moveable sign, a further
indication of speedy release. Hence it was judged and declared to many
friends that the prisoner would be immediately released, which was the
fact. We looked to see whether the prisoner were guilty of the deed or
not, and finding the Moon in Libra, a humane sign, and having just past
the ⚹ aspect of the Sun and ♃, both being on the M. C. we felt assured
that she was a humane, feeling, and honourable girl, and that it was
quite impossible she could be guilty of any such atrocity. We declared
her to be perfectly innocent, and as the Moon was so well aspected from
the tenth house, we declared that her honour would be very soon
perfectly established.’ Had the astrologer waited a few months longer,
to have read the confession of the miserable Constance Kent, he would
perhaps have put a different sense on his moveable signs, just balances,
and sunny and jovial aspects. Nor would this be a difficult task, for
these fancies lend themselves to endless variety of new interpretation.
And on such fancies and such interpretations, the great science of the
stars has from first to last been based.

Looking at the details here selected as fair samples of symbolic magic,
we may well ask the question, is there in the whole monstrous farrago no
truth or value whatever? It appears that there is practically none, and
that the world has been enthralled for ages by a blind belief in
processes wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, and which might
as well have been taken just the opposite way. Pliny justly saw in magic
a study worthy of his especial attention, ‘for the very reason that,
being the most fraudulent of arts, it had prevailed throughout the world
and through so many ages’ (eo ipso quod fraudulentissima artium plurimum
in toto terrarum orbe plurimisque seculis valuit). If it be asked how
such a system could have held its ground, not merely in independence but
in defiance of its own facts, a fair answer does not seem hard to give.
In the first place, it must be borne in mind that occult science has not
existed entirely in its own strength. Futile as its arts may be, they
are associated in practice with other proceedings by no means futile.
What are passed off as sacred omens, are often really the cunning man’s
shrewd guesses at the past and future. Divination serves to the sorcerer
as a mask for real inquest, as when the ordeal gives him invaluable
opportunity of examining the guilty, whose trembling hands and
equivocating speech betray at once their secret and their utter belief
in his power of discerning it. Prophecy tends to fulfil itself, as where
the magician, by putting into a victim’s mind the belief that fatal arts
have been practised against him, can slay him with this idea as with a
material weapon. Often priest as well as magician, he has the whole
power of religion at his back; often a man in power, always an
unscrupulous intriguer, he can work witchcraft and statecraft together,
and make his left hand help his right. Often a doctor, he can aid his
omens of life or death with remedy or poison, while what we still call
‘conjurers’ tricks’ of sleight of hand have done much to keep up his
supernatural prestige. From the earliest known stages of civilization,
professional magicians have existed, who live by their craft, and keep
it alive. It has been said, that if somebody had endowed lecturers to
teach that two sides of a triangle are together equal to the third, the
doctrine would have a respectable following among ourselves. At any
rate, magic, with an influential profession interested in keeping it in
credit and power, did not depend for its existence on mere evidence.

And in the second place, as to this evidence. Magic has not its origin
in fraud, and seems seldom practised as an utter imposture. The sorcerer
generally learns his time-honoured profession in good faith, and retains
his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and
cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a
hypocrite. Had occult science been simply framed for purposes of
deception, mere nonsense would have answered the purpose, whereas, what
we find is an elaborate and systematic pseudo-science. It is, in fact, a
sincere but fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human
intellect by processes still in great measure intelligible to our own
minds, and it had thus an original standing-ground in the world. And
though the evidence of fact was dead against it, it was but lately and
gradually that this evidence was brought fatally to bear. A general
survey of the practical working of the system may be made somewhat thus.
A large proportion of successful cases belong to natural means disguised
as magic. Also, a certain proportion of cases must succeed by mere
chance. By far the larger proportion, however, are what we should call
failures; but it is a part of the magician’s profession to keep these
from counting, and this he does with extraordinary resource of
rhetorical shift and brazen impudence. He deals in ambiguous phrases,
which give him three or four chances for one. He knows perfectly how to
impose difficult conditions, and to lay the blame of failure on their
neglect. If you wish to make gold, the alchemist in Central Asia has a
recipe at your service, only, to use it, you must abstain three days
from thinking of apes; just as our English folk-lore says, that if one
of your eyelashes comes out, and you put it on your thumb, you will get
anything you wish for, if you can only avoid thinking of foxes’ tails at
the fatal moment. Again, if the wrong thing happens, the wizard has at
least a reason why. Has a daughter been born when he promised a son,
then it is some hostile practitioner who has turned the boy into a girl;
does a tempest come just when he is making fine weather, then he calmly
demands a larger fee for stronger ceremonies, assuring his clients that
they may thank him as it is, for how much worse it would have been had
he not done what he did. And even setting aside all this accessory
trickery, if we look at honest but unscientific people practising occult
science in good faith, and face to face with facts, we shall see that
the failures which condemn it in our eyes carry comparatively little
weight in theirs. Part escape under the elastic pretext of a ‘little
more or less,’ as the loser in the lottery consoles himself that his
lucky number came within two of a prize, or the moon-observer points out
triumphantly that a change of weather has come within two or three days
before or after a quarter, so that his convenient definition of near a
moon’s quarter applies to four or six days out of every seven. Part
escape through incapacity to appreciate negative evidence, which allows
one success to outweigh half-a-dozen failures. How few there are even
among the educated classes now, who have taken in the drift of that
memorable passage in the beginning of the ‘Novum Organum:’—‘The human
understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from
general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces
everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although most
cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does
not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some
distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice
the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him who
was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had
escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would
then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, “But where are the
portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows?”’[221]

On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the middle ages and
into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but not a mysterious fact. A
once-established opinion, however delusive, can hold its own from age to
age, for belief can propagate itself without reference to its reasonable
origin, as plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising from
the seed.

The history of survival in cases like those of the folk-lore and occult
arts which we have been considering, has for the most part been a
history of dwindling and decay. As men’s minds change in progressing
culture, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and
uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new
life around them. But this is so far from being a law without exception,
that a narrow view of history may often make it seem to be no law at
all. For the stream of civilization winds and turns upon itself, and
what seems the bright onward current of one age may in the next spin
round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp.
Studying with a wide view the course of human opinion, we may now and
then trace on from the very turning-point the change from passive
survival into active revival. Some well-known belief or custom has for
centuries shown symptoms of decay, when we begin to see that the state
of society, instead of stunting it, is favouring its new growth, and it
bursts forth again with a vigour often as marvellous as it is unhealthy.
And though the revival be not destined to hold on indefinitely, and
though when opinion turns again its ruin may be more merciless than
before, yet it may last for ages, make its way into the inmost
constitution of society, and even become a very mark and characteristic
of its time.

Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we are wiser and
better than our ancestors, dwell willingly on the history of witchcraft
between the middle and modern ages. They can quote Martin Luther,
apropos of the witches who spoil the farmers’ butter and eggs, ‘I would
have no pity on these witches; I would burn them all.’ They can show the
good Sir Matthew Hale hanging witches in Suffolk, on the authority of
scripture and the consenting wisdom of all nations; and King James
presiding at the torture of Dr. Fian for bringing a storm against the
king’s ship on its course from Denmark, by the aid of a fleet of witches
in sieves, who carried out a christened cat to sea. In those dreadful
days, to be a blear-eyed wizened cripple was to be worth twenty
shillings to a witch-finder; for a woman to have what this witch-finder
was pleased to call the devil’s mark on her body was presumption for
judicial sentence of death; and not to bleed or shed tears or sink in a
pond was torture first and then the stake. Reform of religion was no
cure for the disease of men’s minds, for in such things the Puritan was
no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better. Papist and Protestant
fought with one another, but both turned against that enemy of the human
race, the hag who had sold herself to Satan to ride upon a broomstick,
and to suck children’s blood, and to be for life and death of all
creatures the most wretched. But with new enlightenment there came in
the very teeth of law and authority a change in European opinion. Toward
the end of the seventeenth century the hideous superstition was breaking
down among ourselves; Richard Baxter, of the ‘Saint’s Rest,’ strove with
fanatic zeal to light again at home the witch-fires of New England, but
he strove in vain. Year by year the persecution of witches became more
hateful to the educated classes, and though it died hard, it died at
last down to a vestige. In our days, when we read of a witch being burnt
at Camargo in 1860, we point to Mexico as a country miserably in the
rear of civilization. And if in England it still happens that village
boors have to be tried at quarter-sessions for ill-using some poor old
woman, who they fancy has dried a cow or spoiled a turnip crop, we
comment on the tenacity with which the rustic mind clings to exploded
follies, and cry out for more schoolmasters.

True as all this is, the ethnographer must go wider and deeper in his
enquiry, to do his subject justly. The prevailing belief in witchcraft
that sat like a nightmare on public opinion from the 13th to the 17th
centuries, far from being itself a product of mediævalism, was a revival
from the remote days of primæval history. The disease that broke out
afresh in Europe had been chronic among the lower races for how many
ages we cannot tell. Witchcraft is part and parcel of savage life. There
are rude races of Australia and South America whose intense belief in it
has led them to declare that if men were never bewitched, and never
killed by violence, they would not die at all. Like the Australians, the
Africans will inquire of their dead what sorcerer slew them by his
wicked arts, and when they have satisfied themselves of this, blood must
atone for blood. In West Africa, it has been boldly asserted that the
belief in witchcraft costs more lives than the slave trade ever did. In
East Africa, Captain Burton, a traveller apt to draw his social sketches
in a few sharp lines, remarks that what with slavery and what with
black-magic, life is precarious among the Wakhutu, and ‘no one,
especially in old age, is safe from being burnt at a day’s notice;’ and,
travelling in the country of the Wazaramo, he tells us of meeting every
few miles with heaps of ashes and charcoal, now and then such as seemed
to have been a father and mother, with a little heap hard by that was a
child.[222] Even in districts of British India a state of mind ready to
produce horrors like these is well known to exist, and to be kept down
less by persuasion than by main force. From the level of savage life, we
trace witchcraft surviving throughout the barbarian and early civilized
world. It was existing in Europe in the centuries preceding the 10th,
but with no especial prominence, while laws of Rothar and Charlemagne
are actually directed against such as should put men or women to death
on the charge of witchcraft. In the 11th century, ecclesiastical
influence was discouraging the superstitious belief in sorcery. But now
a period of reaction set in. The works of the monastic legend and
miracle-mongers more and more encouraged a baneful credulity as to the
supernatural. In the 13th century, when the spirit of religious
persecution had begun to possess all Europe with a dark and cruel
madness, the doctrine of witchcraft revived with all its barbaric
vigour.[223] That the guilt of thus bringing down Europe intellectually
and morally to the level of negro Africa lies in the main upon the Roman
Church, the records of Popes Gregory IX. and Innocent VIII., and the
history of the Holy Inquisition, are conclusive evidence to prove. To us
here the main interest of mediæval witchcraft lies in the extent and
accuracy with which the theory of survival explains it. In the very
details of the bald conventional accusations that were sworn against the
witches, there may be traced tradition often hardly modified from
barbarous and savage times. They raised storms by magic rites, they had
charms against the hurt of weapons, they had their assemblies on wild
heath and mountain-top, they could ride through the air on beasts and
even turn into witch-cats and were-wolves themselves, they had familiar
spirits, they had intercourse with incubi and succubi, they conveyed
thorns, pins, feathers and such things into their victims’ bodies, they
caused disease by demoniacal possession, they could bewitch by spells
and the evil eye, by practising on images and symbols, on food and
property. Now all this is sheer survival from præ-Christian ages, ‘in
errore paganorum revolvitur,’ as Burchard of Worms said of the
superstition of his time.[224] Two of the most familiar devices used
against the mediæval witches may serve to show the place in civilization
of the whole craft. The Oriental jinn are in such deadly terror of iron,
that its very name is a charm against them; and so in European folk-lore
iron drives away fairies and elves, and destroys their power. They are
essentially, it seems, creatures belonging to the ancient Stone Age, and
the new metal is hateful and hurtful to them. Now as to iron, witches
are brought under the same category as elves and nightmares. Iron
instruments keep them at bay, and especially iron horseshoes have been
chosen for this purpose, as half the stable doors in England still
show.[225] Again, one of the best known of English witch ordeals is the
trial by ‘fleeting’ or swimming. Bound hand and foot, the accused was
flung into deep water, to sink if innocent and swim if guilty, and in
the latter case, as Hudibras has it, to be hanged only for not being
drowned. King James, who seems to have had a notion of the real
primitive meaning of this rite, says in his Dæmonology, ‘It appears that
God hath appointed for a supernatural signe of the monstrous impietie of
witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that
have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism,’ &c. Now, in early
German history this same trial by water was well known, and its meaning
recognized to be that the conscious element rejects the guilty (si aqua
illum velut innoxium receperit—innoxii submerguntur aqua, culpabiles
supernatant). Already in the 9th century the laws were prohibiting this
practice as a relic of superstition. Lastly, the same trial by water is
recognized as one of the regular judicial ordeals in the Hindu code of
Manu; if the water does not cause the accused to float when plunged into
it, his oath is true. As this ancient Indian body of laws was itself no
doubt compiled from materials of still earlier date, we may venture to
take the correspondence of the water-ordeal among the European and
Asiatic branches of the Aryan race as carrying back its origin to a
period of remote antiquity.[226]

Let us hope that if the belief in present witchcraft, and the
persecution necessarily ensuing upon such belief, once more come into
prominence in the civilized world, they may appear in a milder shape
than heretofore, and be kept down by stronger humanity and tolerance.
But any one who fancies from their present disappearance that they have
necessarily disappeared for ever, must have read history to little
purpose, and has yet to learn that ‘revival in culture’ is something
more than an empty pedantic phrase. Our own time has revived a group of
beliefs and practices which have their roots deep in the very stratum of
early philosophy where witchcraft makes its first appearance. This group
of beliefs and practices constitutes what is now commonly known as
Spiritualism.

Witchcraft and Spiritualism have existed for thousands of years in a
closeness of union not unfairly typified in this verse from John Bale’s
16th-century Interlude concerning Nature, which brings under one head
the art of bewitching vegetables and poultry, and causing supernatural
movement of stools and crockery.

                       ‘Theyr wells I can up drye,
                       Cause trees and herbes to dye,
                       And slee all pulterye,
                         Whereas men doth me move:
                       I can make stoles to daunce
                       And earthen pottes to praunce,
                       That none shall them enhaunce,
                         And do but cast my glove.’

The same intellectual movement led to the decline of both witchcraft and
spiritualism, till, early in the last century, men thought that both
were dying or all but dead together. Now, however, not only are
spiritualists to be counted by tens of thousands in America and England,
but there are among them several men of distinguished mental power. I am
well aware that the problem of the so-called ‘spirit-manifestations’ is
one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct
opinion how far it may be concerned with facts insufficiently
appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition,
delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful
observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on
some most interesting psychological questions. But though it lies beyond
my scope to examine the spiritualistic evidence for itself, the
ethnographic view of the matter has, nevertheless, its value. This shows
modern spiritualism to be in great measure a direct revival from the
regions of savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore. It is not a simple
question of the existence of certain phenomena of mind and matter. It is
that, in connexion with these phenomena, a great philosophic-religious
doctrine, flourishing in the lower culture but dwindling in the higher,
has re-established itself in full vigour. The world is again swarming
with intelligent and powerful disembodied spiritual beings, whose direct
action on thought and matter is again confidently asserted, as in those
times and countries where physical science had not as yet so far
succeeded in extruding these spirits and their influences from the
system of nature.

Apparitions have regained the place and meaning which they held from the
level of the lower races to that of mediæval Europe. The regular
ghost-stories, in which spirits of the dead walk visibly and have
intercourse with corporeal men, are now restored and cited with new
examples as ‘glimpses of the night-side of nature,’ nor have these
stories changed either their strength to those who are disposed to
believe them, or their weakness to those who are not. As of old, men
live now in habitual intercourse with the spirits of the dead.
Necromancy is a religion, and the Chinese manes-worshipper may see the
outer barbarians come back, after a heretical interval of a few
centuries, into sympathy with his time-honoured creed. As the sorcerers
of barbarous tribes lie in bodily lethargy or sleep while their souls
depart on distant journeys, so it is not uncommon in modern
spiritualistic narratives for persons to be in an insensible state when
their apparitions visit distant places, whence they bring back
information, and where they communicate with the living. The spirits of
the living as well as of the dead, the souls of Strauss and Carl Vogt as
well as of Augustine and Jerome, are summoned by mediums to distant
spirit-circles. As Dr. Bastian remarks, if any celebrated man in Europe
feels himself at some moment in a melancholy mood, he may console
himself with the idea that his soul has been sent for to America, to
assist at the ‘rough fixings’ of some backwoodsman. Fifty years ago, Dr.
Macculloch, in his ‘Description of the Western Islands of Scotland,’
wrote thus of the famous Highland second-sight: ‘In fact it has
undergone the fate of witchcraft; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased
to exist.’ Yet a generation later he would have found it reinstated in a
far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances of
learning and material prosperity. Among the influences which have
combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissance, a prominent
place may, I think, be given to the effect produced on the religious
mind of Europe and America by the intensely animistic teachings of
Emanuel Swedenborg, in the 18th century. The position of this remarkable
visionary as to some of the particular spiritualistic doctrines may be
judged of by the following statements from ‘The True Christian
Religion.’ A man’s spirit is his mind, which lives after death in
complete human form, and this spirit may be conveyed from place to place
while the body remains at rest, as on some occasions happened to
Swedenborg himself. ‘I have conversed,’ he says, ‘with all my relations
and friends, likewise with kings and princes, and men of learning, after
their departure out of this life, and this now for twenty-seven years
without interruption.’ And foreseeing that many who read his ‘Memorable
Relations’ will believe them to be fictions of imagination, he protests
in truth they are not fictions, but were really seen and heard; not seen
and heard in any state of mind in sleep, but in a state of complete
wakefulness.[227]

I shall have to speak elsewhere of some of the doctrines of modern
spiritualism, where they seem to fall into their places in the study of
Animism. Here, as a means of illustrating the relation of the newer to
the older spiritualistic ideas, I propose to glance over the ethnography
of two of the most popular means of communicating with the spirit-world
by rapping and writing, and two of the prominent spirit-manifestations,
the feat of rising in the air, and the trick of the Davenport Brothers.

The elf who goes knocking and routing about the house at night, and
whose special German name is the ‘Poltergeist,’ is an old and familiar
personage in European folk-lore.[228] From of old, such unexplained
noises have been ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more
often than not are considered human souls. The modern Dayaks, Siamese,
and Singhalese agree with the Esths as to such routing and rapping being
caused by spirits.[229] Knockings may be considered mysterious but
harmless, like those which in Swabia and Franconia are expected during
Advent on the Anklöpferleins-Nächte, or ‘Little Knockers’ Nights.’[230]
Or they may be useful, as when the Welsh miners think that the
‘knockers’ they hear underground are indicating the rich veins of lead
and silver.[231] Or they may be simply annoying, as when, in the ninth
century, a malignant spirit infested a parish by knocking at the walls
as if with a hammer, but being overcome with litanies and holy water,
confessed itself to be the familiar of a certain wicked priest, and to
have been in hiding under his cloak. Thus, in the seventeenth century,
the famous demon-drummer of Tedworth, commemorated by Glanvil in the
‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ thumped about the doors and the outside of the
house, and ‘for an hour together it would beat _Roundheads and
Cuckolds, the Tat-too, and several other Points of War_, as well as
any Drummer.’[232] But popular philosophy has mostly attached to such
mysterious noises a foreboding of death, the knock being held as a
signal or summons among spirits as among men. The Romans considered that
the genius of death thus announced his coming. Modern folk-lore holds
either that a knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of a death
about to happen, or that dying persons themselves announce their
dissolution to their friends in such strange sounds. The English rule
takes in both cases: ‘Three loud and distinct knocks at the bed’s head
of a sick person, or at the bed’s head or door of any of his relations,
is an omen of his death.’ We happen to have a good means of testing the
amount of actual correspondence between omen and event necessary to
establish these rules: the illogical people who were (and still are)
able to discover a connexion between the ticking of the ‘death-watch’
beetle and an ensuing death in the house, no doubt found it equally easy
to give a prophetic interpretation to any other mysterious knocks.[233]
There is a story, dated 1534, of a ghost that answered questions by
knocking in the Catholic church of Orleans, and demanded the removal of
the provost’s Lutheran wife, who had been buried there; but the affair
proved to be a trick of a Franciscan friar.[234] The system of working
an alphabet by counted raps is a device familiar to prison-cells, where
it has long been at once the despair of gaolers and an evidence of the
diffusion of education even among the criminal classes. Thus when, in
1847, the celebrated rappings began to trouble the township of Arcadia
in the State of New York, the Fox family of Rochester, founders of the
modern spiritual movement, had on the one hand only to revive the
ancient prevalent belief in spirit-rappings, which had almost fallen
into the limbo of discredited superstitions, while, on the other hand,
the system of communication with the spirits was ready made to their
hand. The system of a rapping-alphabet remains in full use, and
numberless specimens of messages thus received are in print, possibly
the longest being a novel, of which I can only give the title, ‘Juanita,
Nouvelle par une Chaise. À l’Imprimerie du Gouvernement, Basse Terre
(Guadeloupe), 1853.’ In the recorded communications, names, dates, &c.,
are often alleged to have been stated under remarkable circumstances,
while the style of thought, language, and spelling fits with the
intellectual quality of the medium. A large proportion of the
communications being obviously false and silly, even when the ‘spirit’
has announced itself in the name of some great statesman, moralist, or
philosopher of the past, the theory has been adopted by spiritualists
that foolish or lying spirits are apt to personate those of higher
degree, and give messages in their names.

Spirit-writing is of two kinds, according as it is done with or without
a material instrument. The first kind is in full practice in China,
where, like other rites of divination, it is probably ancient. It is
called ‘descending of the pencil,’ and is especially used by the
literary classes. When a Chinese wishes to consult a god in this way, he
sends for a professional medium. Before the image of the god are set
candles and incense, and an offering of tea or mock money. In front of
this, on another table, is placed an oblong tray of dry sand. The
writing instrument is a V-shaped wooden handle, two or three feet long,
with a wooden tooth fixed at its point. Two persons hold this
instrument, each grasping one leg of it, and the point resting in the
sand. Proper prayers and charms induce the god to manifest his presence
by a movement of the point in the sand, and thus the response is
written, and there only remains the somewhat difficult and doubtful task
of deciphering it. To what state of opinion the rite belongs may be
judged from this: when the sacred apricot-tree is to be robbed of a
branch to make the spirit-pen an apologetic inscription is scratched
upon the trunk.[235] Notwithstanding theological differences between
China and England, the art of spirit-writing is much the same in the two
countries. A kind of ‘planchette’ seems to have been known in Europe in
the seventeenth century.[236] The instrument, which may now be bought at
the toy-shops, is a heart-shaped board some seven inches long, resting
on three supports, of which the two at the wide end are castors, and the
third at the pointed end is a pencil thrust through a hole in the board.
The instrument is placed on a sheet of paper, and worked by two persons
laying their fingers lightly on it, waiting till, without conscious
effort of the operators, it moves and writes answers to questions. It is
not everybody who has the faculty of spirit-writing, but a powerful
medium will write alone. Such mediums sometimes consider themselves
acted on by some power separate from themselves, in fact, possessed.

Ecclesiastical history commemorates a miracle at the close of the Nicene
Council. Two bishops, Chrysanthus and Mysonius, had died during its
sitting, and the remaining crowd of Fathers brought the acts, signed by
themselves, to the tomb, addressed the deceased bishops as if still
alive, and left the document. Next day, returning, they found the two
signatures added, to this effect:—‘We, Chrysanthus and Mysonius,
consenting with all the Fathers in the holy first and œcumenical Nicene
Synod, although translated from the body, have also signed the volume
with our own hands.’[237] Such spirit-writing without material
instrument has lately been renewed by the Baron de Guldenstubbé. This
writer confirms by new evidence the truth of the tradition of all
peoples as to souls of the dead keeping up their connexion with their
mortal remains, and haunting the places where they dwelt ‘during their
terrestrial incarnation.’ Thus Francis I. manifests himself principally
at Fontainebleau, while Louis XV. and Marie-Antoinette roam about the
Trianons. Moreover, if pieces of blank paper be set out in suitable
places, the spirits, enveloped in their ethereal bodies, will
concentrate by their force of will electric currents on the paper, and
so form written characters. The Baron publishes, in his ‘Pneumatologie
Positive,’ a mass of facsimiles of spirit-writings thus obtained. Julius
and Augustus Cæsar give their names near their statues in the Louvre;
Juvenal produces a ludicrous attempt at a copy of verses; Héloise at
Père-la-Chaise informs the world, in modern French, that Abelard and she
are united and happy; St. Paul writes himself ελζιστος αποστολον
(meaning, we may suppose, ελαχιστος αποστολων); and Hippokrates the
physician (who spells himself Hippōkratĕs) attended M. de Guldenstubbé
at his lodgings in Paris, and gave him a signature which of itself cured
a sharp attack of rheumatism in a few minutes.[238]

The miracle of rising and floating in the air is one fully recognized in
the literature of ancient India. The Buddhist saint of high ascetic rank
attains the power called ‘perfection’ (irdhi), whereby he is able to
rise in the air, as also to overturn the earth and stop the sun. Having
this power, the saint exercises it by the mere determination of his
will, his body becoming imponderous, as when a man in the common human
state determines to leap, and leaps. Buddhist annals relate the
performance of the miraculous suspension by Gautama himself, as well as
by other saints, as, for example, his ancestor Maha Sammata, who could
thus seat himself in the air without visible support. Even without this
exalted faculty, it is considered possible to rise and move in the air
by an effort of ecstatic joy (udwega prîti). A remarkable mention of
this feat, as said to be performed by the Indian Brahmans, occurs in the
third-century biography of Apollonius of Tyana; these Brahmans are
described as going about in the air some two cubits from the ground, not
for the sake of miracle (such ambition they despised), but for its being
more suitable to solar rites.[239] Foreign conjurers were professing to
exhibit this miracle among the Greeks in the second century, as witness
Lucian’s jocular account of the Hyperborean conjurer:—‘Thou art joking,
said Kleodemos, but I was once more incredulous than thou about such
things, for I thought nothing could have persuaded me to believe them;
but when I first saw that foreign barbarian flying—he was of the
Hyperboreans, he said—I believed, and was overcome in spite of my
resistance. For what was I to do, when I saw him carried through the air
in daylight, and walking on the water, and passing leisurely and slowly
through the fire? What? (said his interlocutor), you saw the Hyperborean
man flying, and walking on the water? To be sure, said he, and he had on
undressed leather brogues as they generally wear them; but what’s the
use of talking of such trifles, considering what other manifestations he
showed us,—sending loves, calling up demons, raising the dead, and
bringing in Hekate herself visibly, and drawing down the moon?’
Kleodemos then goes on to relate how the conjurer first had his four
minæ down for sacrificial expenses, and then made a clay Cupid, and sent
it flying through the air to fetch the girl whom Glaukias had fallen in
love with, and presently, lo and behold, there she was knocking at the
door! The interlocutor, however, comments in a sceptical vein on the
narrative. It was scarce needful, he says, to have taken the trouble to
send for the girl with clay, and a magician from the Hyperboreans, and
even the moon, considering that for twenty drachmas she would have let
herself be taken to the Hyperboreans themselves; and she seems,
moreover, to have been affected in quite an opposite way to spirits, for
whereas these beings take flight if they hear the noise of brass or
iron, Chrysis no sooner hears the chink of silver anywhere, but she
comes toward the sound.[240] Another early instance of the belief in
miraculous suspension is in the life of Iamblichus, the great
Neo-Platonist mystic. His disciples says Eunapius, told him they had
heard a report from his servants, that while in prayer to the gods he
had been lifted more than ten cubits from the ground, his body and
clothes changing to a beautiful golden colour, but after he ceased from
prayer his body became as before, and then he came down to the ground
and returned to the society of his followers. They entreated him
therefore, ‘Why, O most divine teacher, why dost thou do such things by
thyself, and not let us partake of the more perfect wisdom?’ Then
Iamblichus, though not given to laughter, laughed at this story, and
said to them, ‘It was no fool who tricked you thus, but the thing is not
true.’[241]

After a while, the prodigy which the Platonist disclaimed, became a
usual attribute of Christian saints. Thus St. Richard, then chancellor
to St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, one day softly opening the
chapel door, to see why the archbishop did not come to dinner, saw him
raised high in the air, with his knees bent and his arms stretched out;
falling gently to the ground, and seeing the chancellor, he complained
that he had hindered him of great spiritual delight and comfort. So St.
Philip Neri used to be sometimes seen raised several yards from the
ground during his rapturous devotions, with a bright light shining from
his countenance. St. Ignatius Loyola is declared to have been raised
about two feet under the same circumstances, and similar legends of
devout ascetics being not only metaphorically but materially ‘raised
above the earth’ are told in the lives of St. Dominic, St. Dunstan, St.
Theresa, and other less-known saints. In the last century, Dom Calmet
speaks of knowing a good monk who rises sometimes from the ground and
remains involuntarily suspended, especially on seeing some devotional
image or hearing some devout prayer, and also a nun who has often seen
herself raised in spite of herself to a certain distance from the earth.
Unfortunately the great commentator does not specify any witnesses as
having seen the monk and nun rise in the air. If they only thought
themselves thus elevated, their stories can only rank with that of the
young man mentioned by De Maistre, who so often seemed to himself to
float in the air, that he came to suspect that gravitation might not be
natural to man.[242] The hallucination of rising and floating in the air
is extremely common, and ascetics of all religions are especially liable
to it.

Among modern accounts of diabolic possession, also, the rising in the
air is described as taking place not subjectively but objectively. In
1657, Richard Jones, a sprightly lad of twelve years old, living at
Shepton Mallet, was bewitched by one Jane Brooks; he was seen to rise in
the air and pass over a garden wall some thirty yards, and at other
times was found in a room with his hands flat against a beam at the top
of the room, and his body two or three feet from the ground, nine people
at a time seeing him in this latter position. Jane Brooks was
accordingly condemned and executed at Chard Assizes in March, 1658.
Richard, the Surrey demoniac of 1689, was hoisted up in the air and let
down by Satan; at the beginning of his fits he was, as it were, blown or
snatched or borne up suddenly from his chair, as if he would have flown
away, but that those who held him hung to his arms and legs and clung
about him. One account (not the official medical one) of the demoniacal
possessions at Morzine in Savoy, in 1864, relates that a patient was
held suspended in the air by an invisible force during some seconds or
minutes above the cemetery, in the presence of the archbishop.[243]
Modern spiritualists claim this power as possessed by certain
distinguished living mediums, who, indeed, profess to rival in sober
fact the aerostatic miracles of Buddhist and Catholic legend. The force
employed is of course considered to be that of the spirits.

The performances of tied mediums have been specially represented in
England by the Davenport Brothers, who ‘are generally recognized by
Spiritualists as genuine media, and attribute the reverse opinion so
deeply rooted in the public mind, to the untruthfulness of the London
and many other newspapers.’ The performers were bound fast and shut by
themselves in a dark cabinet, with musical instruments, whence not only
musical sounds proceeded, but the coats of the mediums were taken off
and replaced; yet on inspection their bodies were discovered still
bound. The spirits would also release the bound mediums from their
cords, however carefully tied about them.[244] Now the idea of
supernatural unbinding is very ancient, vouched for as it is by no less
a personage than the crafty Odysseus himself, in his adventure on board
the ship of the Thesprotians:

             ‘Me on the well-benched vessel, strongly bound,
             They leave, and snatch their meal upon the beach.
             But to my help the gods themselves unwound
             My cords with ease, though firmly twisted round.’

In early English chronicle, we find it in a story told by the Venerable
Bede. A certain Imma was found all but dead on the field of battle, and
taken prisoner, but when he began to recover and was put in bonds to
prevent his escaping, no sooner did his binders leave him but he was
loose again. The earl who owned him enquired whether he had about him
such ‘loosening letters’ (literas solutorias) as tales were told of; the
man replied that he knew naught of such arts; yet when his owner sold
him to another master, there was still no binding him. The received
explanation of this strange power was emphatically a spiritual one. His
brother had sought for his dead body, and finding another like him,
buried it and proceeded to say masses for his brother’s soul, by the
celebration whereof it came to pass that no one could fasten him, for he
was out of bonds again directly. So they sent him home to Kent, whence
he duly returned his ransom, and his story, it is related, stimulated
many to devotion, who understood by it how salutary are masses to the
redemption both of soul and body. Again, there prevailed in Scotland up
to the 18th century this notion: when the lunatics who had been brought
to St. Fillan’s Pool to be bathed, were laid bound in the neighbouring
church next night, if they were found loose in the morning their
recovery was expected, but if at dawn they were still bound, their cure
was doubtful.

The untying trick performed among savages is so similar to that of our
mountebanks, that when we find the North American Indian jugglers doing
both this and the familiar trick of breathing fire, we are at a loss to
judge whether they inherited these two feats from their savage
ancestors, or borrowed them from the white men. The point is not,
however, the mere performance of the untying trick, but its being
attributed to the help of spiritual beings. This notion is thoroughly at
home in savage culture. It comes out well in the Esquimaux’ accounts
which date from early in the 18th century. Cranz thus describes the
Greenland angekok setting out on his mystic journey to heaven and hell.
When he has drummed awhile and made all sorts of wondrous contortions,
he is himself bound with a thong by one of his pupils, his head between
his legs, and his hands behind his back. All the lamps in the house are
put out, and the windows darkened, for no one must see him hold
intercourse with his spirit, no one must move or even scratch his head,
that the spirit may not be interfered with—or rather, says the
missionary, that no one may catch him at his trickery, for there is no
going up to heaven in broad daylight. At last, after strange noises have
been heard, and a visit has been received or paid to the torngak or
spirit, the magician reappears unbound, but pale and excited, and gives
an account of his adventures. Castrén’s account of the similar
proceedings of the Siberian shamans is as follows: ‘They are practised’
he says, ‘in all sorts of conjuring-tricks, by which they know how to
dazzle the simple crowd, and inspire greater trust in themselves. One of
the most usual juggleries of the shamans in the Government of Tomsk
consists of the following hocus-pocus, a wonder to the Russians as well
as to the Samoieds. The shaman sits down on the wrong side of a dry
reindeer-hide spread in the middle of the floor. There he lets himself
be bound hand and foot by the assistants. The shutters are closed, and
the shaman begins to invoke his ministering spirits. All at once there
arises a mysterious ghostliness in the dark space. Voices are heard from
different parts, both within and without the yurt, while on the dry
reindeer skin there is a rattling and drumming in regular time. Bears
growl, snakes hiss, and squirrels leap about in the room. At last this
uncanny work ceases, and the audience impatiently await the result of
the game. A few moments pass in this expectation, and behold, the shaman
walks in free and unbound from outside. No one doubts that it was the
spirits who were drumming, growling, and hissing, who released the
shaman from his bonds, and who carried him by secret ways out of the
yurt.’[245]

On the whole, the ethnography of spiritualism bears on practical opinion
somewhat in this manner. Beside the question of the absolute truth or
falsity of the alleged possessions, names-oracles, doubles, brain-waves,
furniture movings, and floatings in the air, there remains the history
of spiritualistic belief as a matter of opinion. Hereby it appears that
the received spiritualistic theory of the alleged phenomena belongs to
the philosophy of savages. As to such matters as apparitions or
possessions this is obvious, and it holds in more extreme cases. Suppose
a wild North American Indian looking on at a spirit-séance in London. As
to the presence of disembodied spirits, manifesting themselves by raps,
noises, voices, and other physical actions, the savage would be
perfectly at home in the proceedings, for such things are part and
parcel of his recognized system of nature. The part of the affair really
strange to him would be the introduction of such arts as spelling and
writing, which do belong to a different state of civilization from his.
The issue raised by the comparison of savage, barbaric, and civilized
spiritualism, is this: Do the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar
necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the
possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import,
which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two
centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are
habitually boasting of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a
decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of
degeneration, and the savages whom some ethnographers look on as
degenerate from a higher civilization, may turn on their accusers and
charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge.

Throughout the whole of this varied investigation, whether of the
dwindling survival of old culture, or of its bursting forth afresh in
active revival, it may perhaps be complained that its illustrations
should be chosen so much among things worn out, worthless, frivolous, or
even bad with downright harmful folly. It is in fact so, and I have
taken up this course of argument with full knowledge and intent. For,
indeed, we have in such enquiries continual reason to be thankful for
fools. It is quite wonderful, even if we hardly go below the surface of
the subject, to see how large a share stupidity and unpractical
conservatism and dogged superstition have had in preserving for us
traces of the history of our race, which practical utilitarianism would
have remorselessly swept away. The savage is firmly, obstinately
conservative. No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence to the
great precedent-makers of the past; the wisdom of his ancestors can
control against the most obvious evidence his own opinions and actions.
We listen with pity to the rude Indian as he maintains against civilized
science and experience the authority of his rude forefathers. We smile
at the Chinese appealing against modern innovation to the golden
precepts of Confucius, who in his time looked back with the same
prostrate reverence to sages still more ancient, counselling his
disciples to follow the seasons of Hea, to ride in the carriage of Yin,
to wear the ceremonial cap of Chow.

The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific
culture, is to honour the dead without grovelling before them, to profit
by the past without sacrificing the present to it. Yet even the modern
civilized world has but half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced
survey may lead us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist
rather by being old than by being good. Now in dealing with hurtful
superstitions, the proof that they are things which it is the tendency
of savagery to produce, and of higher culture to destroy, is accepted as
a fair controversial argument. The mere historical position of a belief
or custom may raise a presumption as to its origin which becomes a
presumption as to its authenticity. Dr. Middleton’s celebrated Letter
from Rome shows cases in point. He mentions the image of Diana at
Ephesus which fell from the sky, thereby damaging the pretensions of the
Calabrian image of St. Dominic, which, according to pious tradition, was
likewise brought down from heaven. He notices that as the blood of St.
Januarius now melts miraculously without heat, so ages ago the priests
of Gnatia tried to persuade Horace, on his road to Brundusium, that the
frankincense in their temple had the habit of melting in like manner:

                               ‘... dehinc Gnatia lymphis
               Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque;
               Dum flamma sine thura liquescere limine sacro,
               Persuadere cupit: credat Judæus Apella;
               Non ego.’[246]

Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at
times find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness
against themselves.

Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general laws of
intellectual movement, there is practical gain in being able to study
them rather among antiquarian relics of no intense modern interest, than
among those seething problems of the day on which action has to be taken
amid ferment and sharp strife. Should some moralist or politician speak
contemptuously of the vanity of studying matters without practical
moment, it will generally be found that his own mode of treatment will
consist in partizan diatribes on the questions of the day, a proceeding
practical enough, especially in confirming those who agree with him
already, but the extreme opposite to the scientific way of eliciting
truth. The ethnographer’s course, again, should be like that of the
anatomist who carries on his studies if possible rather on dead than on
living subjects; vivisection is nervous work, and the humane
investigator hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student of
culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded
controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-superseded
inventions, he is gladly seeking his evidence rather in such dead old
history, than in the discussions where he and those he lives among are
alive with intense party feeling, and where his judgment is biassed by
the pressure of personal sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain
or loss. So, from things which perhaps never were of high importance,
things which have fallen out of popular significance, or even out of
popular memory, he tries to elicit general laws of culture, often to be
thus more easily and fully gained than in the arena of modern philosophy
and politics.

But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are not to be left
lying where they were shaped. It is no more reasonable to suppose the
laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and in England, in the
time of the cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron
houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of
one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are of another now. The
thing that has been will be; and we are to study savages and old nations
to learn the laws that under new circumstances are working for good or
ill in our own development. If it is needful to give an instance of the
directness with which antiquity and savagery bear upon our modern life,
let it be taken in the facts just brought forward on the relation of
ancient sorcery to the belief in witchcraft which was not long since one
of the gravest facts of European history, and of savage spiritualism to
beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now. No one who can see
in these cases, and in many others to be brought before him in these
volumes, how direct and close the connexion may be between modern
culture and the condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to accuse
students who spend their labour on even the lowest and most trifling
facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in the satisfaction of a
frivolous curiosity.

Footnote 160:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 119.

Footnote 161:

  ‘Life of Nath. Pearce,’ ed. by J. J. Halls, vol. i. p. 286.

Footnote 162:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 328; vol. ii. p. 273; see vol. iv. p.
  425.

Footnote 163:

  Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. p. 435.

Footnote 164:

  Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 6; see p. 16.

Footnote 165:

  Jas. Gardner, ‘Faiths of the World,’ s.v. ‘Exorcism.’

Footnote 166:

  Shortt, ‘Tribes of Neilgherries,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. pp.
  247, 277; Sir W. Elliot in ‘Trans. Congress of Prehistoric
  Archæology,’ 1868, p. 253.

Footnote 167:

  F. Rühs, ‘Finland,’ p. 296; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 202.

Footnote 168:

  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp. 81-3; see p. 313.

Footnote 169:

  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 128; see p. 239.

Footnote 170:

  For an examination of numerous magical arts, mostly coming under this
  category, see ‘Early History of Mankind,’ chaps. vi. and x.

Footnote 171:

  Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Victoria,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 299;
  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 364; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ p.
  215; Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol. i. p. 124; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche
  Volksaberglaube,’ p. 195; general references in ‘Early History of
  Mankind,’ p. 129.

Footnote 172:

  Burton, ‘W. and W. from West Africa,’ p. 411.

Footnote 173:

  W. Gregory, ‘Letters on Animal Magnetism,’ p. 128.

Footnote 174:

  Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 361; Collins, ‘New South Wales,’ vol.
  i. pp. 561, 594.

Footnote 175:

  Shortt, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 278.

Footnote 176:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 117.

Footnote 177:

  See Grote, vol. iii. pp. 113, 351.

Footnote 178:

  Hardy, ‘Eastern Monachism,’ p. 241.

Footnote 179:

  Oldfield, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 246.

Footnote 180:

  Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 134.

Footnote 181:

  See specimen and description in the Christy Museum.

Footnote 182:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 130, 363.

Footnote 183:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 31.

Footnote 184:

  R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. of W. of England,’ 2nd ser. p. 165; Brand, ‘Pop.
  Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 231.

Footnote 185:

  Wuttke, p. 100.

Footnote 186:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 560.

Footnote 187:

  Brand, vol. iii. p. 240.

Footnote 188:

  Hunt, ibid. p. 148.

Footnote 189:

  Wuttke, p. 165; Brand, vol. iii. p. 305.

Footnote 190:

  Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 125; D’Orbigny, vol. ii. p. 168.

Footnote 191:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 202; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii.
  p. 357.

Footnote 192:

  Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 90; Polack, vol. i. p. 248.

Footnote 193:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 202.

Footnote 194:

  Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,’ p. 381.

Footnote 195:

  See Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occulta Philosophia,’ i. 53; ‘De Vanitate
  Scient.’ 37; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1073; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 285;
  Brand, vol. iii. pp. 184-227.

Footnote 196:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 241.

Footnote 197:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 279.

Footnote 198:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ pp. 236, 241; R. Taylor, ‘N. Z.’ p. 334.

Footnote 199:

  Artemidorus, ‘Oneirocritica;’ Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms, &c., of Early
  England,’ vol. iii.; Seafield, ‘Literature, &c., of Dreams;’ Brand,
  vol. iii.; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes, &c.,’ p. 217, &c., &c.

Footnote 200:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 74, 115; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol.
  iv. p. 150; Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. i. p. 255.

Footnote 201:

  Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. p. 281; Hooker, ‘Himalayan
  Journals,’ vol. i. p. 135; ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 27; Latham, ‘Descr.
  Eth.’ vol. i. p. 61.

Footnote 202:

  Cieza de Leon, p. 289; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 183.

Footnote 203:

  Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 32; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 417, 518.

Footnote 204:

  Plin. xi. 73. See Cic. de Divinatione, ii. 12.

Footnote 205:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 32.

Footnote 206:

  Le Jeune, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. i. p. 90.

Footnote 207:

  J. H. Plath, ‘Rel. d. alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 89; Klemm, ‘Cultur.
  Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 109, 199; vol. iv. p. 221; Rubruquis, in
  Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 65; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1067; R. F. Burton,
  ‘Sindh,’ p. 189; M. A. Walker, ‘Macedonia,’ p. 169.

Footnote 208:

  Brand, vol. iii. p. 339; Forbes Leslie, vol. ii. p. 491.

Footnote 209:

  Maury, ‘Magie, &c.’, p. 74; Brand, vol. iii. p. 348, &c. See figure in
  Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Occult. Philosoph.,’ ii. 27.

Footnote 210:

  R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 205; Shortland, p. 139; Callaway,
  ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 330, &c.; Theophylact. in Brand, vol. iii.
  p. 332. Compare mentions of similar devices; Herodot. iv. 67
  (Scythia); Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 350.

Footnote 211:

  Migne’s ‘Dic. des Sciences Occultes.’

Footnote 212:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 200;
  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 146.

Footnote 213:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 170. See Macpherson, p. 106 (Khonds).

Footnote 214:

  Ammian. Marcellin. xxix. 1.

Footnote 215:

  Chevreul, ‘De la Baguette Divinatoire, du Pendule dit Explorateur et
  des Tables Tournantes,’ Paris, 1854; Brand, vol. iii. p. 332; Grimm,
  ‘D. M.’ p. 926; H. B. Woodward, in ‘Geological Mag.,’ Nov. 1872;
  Wuttke, p. 94.

Footnote 216:

  Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De Speciebus Magiæ,’ xxi.; Brand, vol. iii. p.
  351; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1062.

Footnote 217:

  De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St. Petersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 212.

Footnote 218:

  Shortland, ‘Trads., &c. of New Zealand,’ p. 138.

Footnote 219:

  See Cicero, ‘De Div.’ i.; Lucian, ‘De Astrolog.’; Cornelius Agrippa,
  ‘De Occulta Philosophia;’ Sibly, ‘Occult Sciences;’ Brand, vol. iii.

Footnote 220:

  Plin. xvi. 75; xviii. 75; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 676; Brand, vol. ii. p.
  169; vol. iii. p. 144.

Footnote 221:

  Bacon, ‘Novum Organum.’ The original story is that of Diagoras; see
  Cicero, ‘De Natura Deorum,’ iii. 37; Diog. Laërt. lib. vi., Diogenes,
  6.

Footnote 222:

  Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ pp. 428, 435; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol.
  i. pp. 57, 113, 121.

Footnote 223:

  See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxxiv.; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism,’ vol. i.
  chap. i.; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek;’ Raynald, ‘Annales
  Ecclesiastici,’ vol. ii., Greg. IX. (1233), xli.-ii.; Innoc. VIII.
  (1484), lxxiv.

Footnote 224:

  See also Dasent, ‘Introd. to Norse Tales;’ Maury, ‘Magie, &c.,’ ch.
  vii.

Footnote 225:

  Lane, ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. i. p. 30; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp.
  435, 465, 1056; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 265, 287; vol. iii. p.
  204; D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Annals of Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 126;
  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 15, 20, 122, 220.

Footnote 226:

  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp. 1-43; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p.
  50; Grimm, ‘Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,’ p. 923; Pictet, ‘Origines
  Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 459; Manu, viii., 114-5; see Plin. vii. 2.

Footnote 227:

  Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ London, 1855, Nos. 156,
  157, 281, 851.

Footnote 228:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth,’ pp. 473, 481.

Footnote 229:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 82; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 111;
  ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. pp. 232, 259, 288; Boecler, ‘Ehsten
  Aberglaube,’ p. 147.

Footnote 230:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 74.

Footnote 231:

  Brand, vol. ii. p. 486.

Footnote 232:

  Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii. The invisible drummer
  appears to have been one William Drury; see ‘Pepys’ Diary,’ vol. i. p.
  227.

Footnote 233:

  Brand, vol. iii. pp. 225, 233; Grimm, pp. 801, 1089, 1141; Wuttke, pp.
  38-9, 208; Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 137 (ominous ticking
  of insect, doubtful whether idea native, or introduced by foreigners).

Footnote 234:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 393.

Footnote 235:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 112; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol.
  iii. p. 252; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

Footnote 236:

  Toehla, ‘Aurifontina Chymica,’ cited by K. R. H. Mackenzie, in
  ‘Spiritualist,’ Mar. 15, 1870.

Footnote 237:

  Nicephor. Callist. Ecclesiast. Hist. viii. 23; Stanley, ‘Eastern
  Church,’ p. 172.

Footnote 238:

  ‘Pneumatologie Positive et Expérimentale; La Réalité des Esprits et le
  Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe démontrés,’ par le
  Baron L. de Guldenstubbé. Paris, 1857.

Footnote 239:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 38, 126, 150; ‘Eastern Monachism,’ pp.
  272, 285, 382; Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. p. 412; Bastian,
  ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 390; Philostrati Vita Apollon. Tyan. iii.
  15. See the mention among the Saadhs of India (17th century), by
  Trant, in ‘Missionary Register,’ July, 1820, pp. 294-6.

Footnote 240:

  Lucian, Philopseudes, 13.

Footnote 241:

  Eunapius in Iambl.

Footnote 242:

  Alban Butler, ‘Lives of the Saints,’ vol. i. p. 674; Calmet, ‘Diss.
  sur les Apparitions, &c.,’ chap. xxi.; De Maistre, ‘Soirées de St.
  Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. pp. 158, 175. See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.
  ii. p. 578; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 159.

Footnote 243:

  Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part ii.; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’
  p. 161.

Footnote 244:

  ‘Spiritualist,’ Feb. 15, 1870. Orrin Abbott, ‘The Davenport Brothers,’
  New York, 1864.

Footnote 245:

  Homer, Odyss. xiv. 345 (Worsley’s Trans.); Beda, ‘Historia
  Ecclesiastica,’ iv. 22; Grimm, ‘D. M.,’ p. 1180 (an old German
  loosing-charm is given from the Merseburg MS.); J. Y. Simpson, in
  ‘Proc. Ant. Soc. Scotland,’ vol. iv.; Keating, ‘Long’s Exp. to St.
  Peter’s River,’ vol. ii. p. 159; Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 189; Cranz,
  ‘Grönland,’ p. 269; Castrén, ‘Reiseberichte,’ 1845-9, p. 173.

Footnote 246:

  Conyers Middleton, ‘A Letter from Rome,’ 1729; Hor. Sat. I. v. 98.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

    Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent
    correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of
    Language—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—Emotional
    Tone—Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and
    pitch, consonants—Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody,
    Recitative—Sound-Words—Interjections—Calls to Animals—Emotional
    Cries—Sense-Words formed from Interjections—Affirmative and Negative
    particles, &c.

In carrying on the enquiry into the development of culture, evidence of
some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing
the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of
civilization, it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated
man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only
expanded and improved in the working out of details. It is true that the
languages of the Tasmanian and the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the
Greek, differ variously in structure; but this is a secondary
difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in method, namely, the
expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually allotted to them.
Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some articulate
sounds of a directly natural and directly intelligible kind. These are
sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their
meaning not by inheritance from parents or adoption from foreigners, but
by being taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of
sense. Like pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their
meaning of themselves, without reference to the particular language they
are used in connexion with. From the observation of these, there have
arisen speculations as to the origin of language, treating such
expressive sounds as the fundamental constituents of language in
general, and considering those of them which are still plainly
recognizable as having remained more or less in their original state,
long courses of adaptation and variation having produced from such the
great mass of words in all languages, in which no connexion between idea
and sound can any longer be certainly made out. Thus grew up doctrines
of a ‘natural’ origin of language, which, dating from classic times,
were developed in the eighteenth century into a system by that powerful
thinker, the President Charles de Brosses, and in our own time have been
expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom Mr.
Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent.[247] These theories have no
doubt been incautiously and fancifully worked. No wonder that students
who found in nature real and direct sources of articulate speech, in
interjectional sounds like ah! ugh! h’m! sh! and in imitative
sounds like purr, whiz, tomtom, cuckoo, should have thought that
the whole secret of language lay within their grasp, and that they had
only to fit the keys thus found into one hole after another to open
every lock. When a philosopher has a truth in his hands, he is apt to
stretch it farther than it will bear. The magic umbrella must spread and
spread till it becomes a tent wide enough to shelter the king’s army.
But it must be borne in mind that what criticism touches in these
opinions is their exaggeration, not their reality. That interjections
and imitative words are really taken up to some extent, be it small or
large, into the very body and structure of language, no one denies. Such
a denial, if anyone offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories
might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither be
pooh-poohed nor hooted down. It may be shown within the limits of
the most strict and sober argument, that the theory of the origin of
language in natural and directly expressive sounds does account for a
considerable fraction of the existing copia verborum, while it raises a
presumption that, could we trace the history of words more fully, it
would account for far more.

In here examining interjectional and imitative sounds with their
derivative words, as well as certain other parts of language of a more
or less cognate character, I purpose to bring forward as far as possible
new evidence derived from the languages of savage and barbarous races.
By so doing it becomes practicable to use a check which in great measure
stops the main source of uncertainty and error in such enquiries, the
habit of etymologizing words off-hand from expressive sounds, by the
unaided and often flighty fancy of a philologer. By simply enlarging the
survey of language, the province of the imagination is brought within
narrower limits. If several languages, which cannot be classed as
distinctly of the same family, unite in expressing some notion by a
particular sound which may fairly claim to be interjectional or
imitative, their combined authority will go far to prove the claim a
just one. For if it be objected that such words may have passed into the
different languages from a common source, of which the trace is for the
most part lost, this may be answered by the question, Why is there not a
proportionate agreement between the languages in question throughout the
far larger mass of words which cannot pretend to be direct sound-words?
If several languages have independently chosen like words to express
like meanings, then we may reasonably suppose that we are not deluding
ourselves in thinking such words highly appropriate to their purpose.
They are words which answered the conditions of original language,
conforming as they do to the saying of Thomas Aquinas, that the names of
things ought to agree with their natures, ‘nomina debent naturis rerum
congruere.’ Applied in such comparison, the languages of the lower races
contribute evidence of excellent quality to the problem. It will at the
same time and by the same proofs appear, that savages possess in a high
degree the faculty of uttering their minds directly in emotional tones
and interjections, of going straight to nature to furnish themselves
with imitative sounds, including reproductions of their own direct
emotional utterances, as means of expression of ideas, and of
introducing into their formal language words so produced. They have
clearly thus far the means and power of producing language. In so far as
the theories under consideration account for the original formation of
language, they countenance the view that this formation took place among
mankind in a savage state, and even, for anything appearing to the
contrary, in a still lower stage of culture than has survived to our
day.[248]

The first step in such investigation is to gain a clear idea of the
various elements of which spoken language is made up. These may be
enumerated as gesture, expression of feature, emotional tone, emphasis,
force, speed, &c. of utterance, musical rhythm and intonation, and the
formation of the vowels and consonants which are the skeleton of
articulate speech.

In the common intercourse of men, speech is habitually accompanied by
gesture, the hands, head, and body aiding and illustrating the spoken
phrase. So far as we can judge, the visible gesture and the audible word
have been thus used in combination since times of most remote antiquity
in the history of our race. It seems, however, that in the daily
intercourse of the lower races, gesture holds a much more important
place than we are accustomed to see it fill, a position even encroaching
on that which articulate speech holds among ourselves. Mr. Bonwick
confirms by his experience Dr. Milligan’s account of the Tasmanians as
using ‘signs to eke out the meaning of monosyllabic expressions, and to
give force, precision, and character to vocal sounds.’ Captain Wilson
remarks on the use of gesticulation in modifying words in the Chinook
Jargon. There is confirmation to Spix and Martius’ description of low
Brazilian tribes completing by signs the meaning of their scanty
sentences, thus making the words ‘wood-go’ serve to say ‘I will go into
the wood,’ by pointing the mouth like a snout in the direction meant.
The Rev. J. L. Wilson, describing the Grebo language of West Africa,
remarks that they have personal pronouns, but seldom use them in
conversation, leaving it to gesture to determine whether a verb is to be
taken in the first or second person; thus the words ‘ni ne’ will mean ‘I
do it,’ or ‘you do it,’ according to the significant gestures of the
speaker.[249] Beside such instances, it will hereafter be noticed that
the lower races, in counting, habitually use gesture-language for a
purpose to which higher races apply word-language. To this prominent
condition of gesture as a means of expression among rude tribes, and to
the development of pantomime in public show and private intercourse
among such peoples as the Neapolitans of our own day, the most extreme
contrast may be found in England, where, whether for good or ill,
suggestive pantomime is now reduced to so small a compass in social
talk, and even in public oratory.

Changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine gradations
with changes of the feelings, comprise conditions of the surface of the
body, postures of the limbs, and also especially those expressive
attitudes of the face to which our attention is particularly directed
when we notice one another. The visible expression of the features is a
symptom which displays the speaker’s state of mind, his feelings of
pleasure or disgust, of pride or humility, of faith or doubt, and so
forth. Not that there is between the emotion and its bodily expression
any originally intentional connexion. It is merely that a certain action
of our physical machinery shows symptoms which we have learnt by
experience to refer to a mental cause, as we judge by seeing a man sweat
or limp that he is hot or footsore. Blushing is caused by certain
emotions, and among Europeans it is a visible expression or symptom of
them; not so among South American Indians, whose blushes, as Mr. David
Forbes points out, may be detected by the hand or a thermometer, but
being concealed by the dark skin cannot serve as a visible sign of
feeling.[250] By turning these natural processes to account, men
contrive to a certain extent to put on particular physical expressions,
frowning or smiling for instance, in order to simulate the emotions
which would naturally produce such expressions, or merely to convey the
thought of such emotions to others. Now it is well known to every one
that physical expression by feature, &c., forming a part of the
universal gesture-language, thus serves as an important adjunct to
spoken language. It is not so obvious, but on examination will prove to
be true, that such expression by feature itself acts as a formative
power in vocal language. Expression of countenance has an action beyond
that of mere visible gesture. The bodily attitude brought on by a
particular state of mind affects the position of the organs of speech,
both the internal larynx, &c., and the external features whose change
can be watched by the mere looker-on. Even though the expression of the
speaker’s face may not be seen by the hearer, the effect of the whole
bodily attitude of which it forms part is not thereby done away with.
For on the position thus taken by the various organs concerned in
speech, depends what I have here called ‘emotional tone,’ whereby the
voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s feeling.

The ascertaining of the precise physical mode in which certain attitudes
of the internal and external face come to correspond to certain moods of
mind, is a physiological problem as yet little understood; but the fact
that particular expressions of face are accompanied by corresponding and
dependent expressions of emotional tone, only requires an observer or a
looking-glass to prove it. The laugh made with a solemn, contemptuous,
or sarcastic face, is quite different from that which comes from a
joyous one; the ah! oh! ho! hey! and so on, change their modulations
to match the expression of countenance. The effect of the emotional tone
does not even require fitness in the meaning of the spoken words, for
nonsense or an unknown tongue may be made to convey, when spoken with
expressive intonation, the feelings which are displayed upon the
speaker’s face. This expression may even be recognized in the dark by
noticing the tone it gives forth, while the forced character given by
the attempt to bring out a sound not matching even the outward play of
the features can hardly be hidden by the most expert ventriloquist, and
in such forcing, the sound perceptibly drags the face into the attitude
that fits with it. The nature of communication by emotional tone seems
to me to be somewhat on this wise. It does not appear that particular
tones at all belong directly and of themselves to particular emotions,
but that their action depends on the vocal organs of the speaker and
hearer. Other animals, having vocal organs different from man’s, have
accordingly, as we know, a different code of emotional tones. An
alteration in man’s vocal organs would bring a corresponding alteration
in the effect of tone in expressing feeling; the tone which to us
expresses surprise or anger might come to express pleasure, and so
forth. As it is, children learn by early experience that such and such a
tone indicates such and such an emotion, and this they make out partly
by finding themselves uttering such tones when their feelings have
brought their faces to the appropriate attitudes, and partly by
observing the expression of voice in others. At three or four years old
they are to be seen in the act of acquiring this knowledge, turning
round to look at the speaker’s face and gesture to make sure of the
meaning of the tone. But in later years this knowledge becomes so
familiar that it is supposed to have been intuitive. Then, when men talk
together, the hearer receives from each emotional tone an indication, a
signal, of the speaker’s attitude of body, and through this of his state
of mind. These he can recognize, and even reproduce in himself, as the
operator at one end of a telegraphic wire can follow, by noticing his
needles, the action of his colleague at the other. In watching the
process which thus enables one man to take a copy of another’s emotions
through their physical effects on his vocal tone, we may admire the
perfection with which a means so simple answers an end so complex, and
apparently so remote.

By eliminating from speech all effects of gesture, of expression of
face, and of emotional tone, we go far toward reducing it to that system
of conventional articulate sounds which the grammarian and the
comparative philologist habitually consider as language. These
articulate sounds are capable of being roughly set down in signs
standing for vowels and consonants, with the aid of accents and other
significant marks; and they may then again be read aloud from these
written signs, by any one who has learnt to give its proper sound to
each letter.

What vowels are, is a matter which has been for some years well
understood.[251] They are compound musical tones such as, in the vox
humana stop of the organ, are sounded by reeds (vibrating tongues)
fitted to organ-pipes of particular construction. The manner of
formation of vowels by the voice is shortly this. There are situated in
the larynx a pair of vibrating membranes called the vocal chords, which
may be rudely imitated by stretching a piece of sheet india-rubber over
the open end of a tube, so as to form two half-covers to it, ‘like the
parchment of a drum split across the middle;’ when the tube is blown
through, the india-rubber flaps will vibrate as the vocal chords do in
the larynx, and give out a sound. In the human voice, the musical effect
of the vibrating chords is increased by the cavity of the mouth, which
acts as a resonator or sounding-box, and which also, by its shape at any
moment, modifies the musical ‘quality’ or ‘timbre’ of the sound
produced. This, not the less felt because its effects are not registered
in musical notation, depends on the harmonic overtones accompanying the
fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of. It makes
the difference between the same note on two instruments, flute and piano
for instance, while some instruments, as the violin, can give to one
note a wide variation of quality. To such quality the formation of
vowels is due. This is perfectly shown by the common Jew’s harp, which
when struck can be made to utter the vowels a, e, i, o, u, &c., by
simply putting the mouth in the proper position for speaking these
vowels. In this experiment the player’s voice emits no sound, but the
vibrating tongue of the Jew’s harp placed in front of the mouth acts as
a substitute for the vocal chords, and the vowel-sounds are produced by
the various positions of the cavity of the mouth, modifying the quality
of the note, by bringing out with different degrees of strength the
series of harmonic tones of which it is composed. As to musical theory,
emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an emotional tone
may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality is that
produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular state
of feeling.

Europeans, while using modulation of musical pitch as affecting the
force of words in a sentence, know nothing of making it alter the
dictionary-meaning of a word. But this device is known elsewhere,
especially in South-East Asia, where rises and falls of tone, to some
extent like those which serve us in conveying emphasis, question and
answer, &c., actually give different signification. Thus in Siamese,
háto seek, hãpestilence, hà=five. The consequence of this
elaborate system of tone-accentuation is the necessity of an
accumulation of expletive particles, to supply the place of the
oratorical or emphatic intonation, which being thus given over to the
dictionary is lost for the grammar. Another consequence is, that the
system of setting poetry to music becomes radically different from ours;
to sing a Siamese song to a European tune makes the meaning of the
syllables alter according to their rise and fall in pitch, and turns
their sense into the wildest nonsense.[252] In West Africa, again, the
same device appears: thus in Dahoman sostick, sóhorse,
sòthunder; Yoruba, báwith, bà=bend.[253] For practical purposes,
this linguistic music is hardly to be commended, but theoretically it is
interesting, as showing that man does not servilely follow an intuitive
or inherited scheme of language, but works out in various ways the
resources of sound as a means of expression.

The theory of consonants is much more obscure than that of vowels. They
are not musical vibrations as vowels are, but noises accompanying them.
To the musician such noises as the rushing of the wind from the
organ-pipe, the scraping of the violin, the sputtering of the flute, are
simply troublesome as interfering with his musical tones, and he takes
pains to diminish them as much as may be. But in the art of language
noises of this kind, far from being avoided, are turned to immense
account by being used as consonants, in combination with the musical
vowels. As to the positions and movements of the vocal organs in
producing consonants, an excellent account with anatomical diagrams is
given in Professor Max Müller’s second series of Lectures. For the
present purpose of passing in review the various devices by which the
language-maker has contrived to make sound a means of expressing
thought, perhaps no better illustration of their nature can be mentioned
than Sir Charles Wheatstone’s account of his speaking machine;[254] for
one of the best ways of studying difficult phenomena is to see them
artificially imitated. The instrument in question pronounced Latin,
French, and Italian words well: it could say, ‘Je vous aime de tout mon
cœur,’ ‘Leopoldus Secundus Romanorum Imperator,’ and so forth, but it
was not so successful with German. As to the vowels, they were of course
simply sounded by suitable reeds and pipes. To affect them with
consonants, contrivances were arranged to act like the human organs.
Thus p was made by suddenly removing the operator’s hand from the
mouth of the figure, and b in the same way, except that the mouth was
not quite covered, while an outlet like the nostrils was used in forming
m; f and v were rendered by modifying the shape of the mouth by a
hand; air was made to rush through small tubes to produce the sibilants
s and sh; and the liquids r and l were sounded by the action of
tremulous reeds. As Wheatstone remarks, the most important use of such
ingenious mechanical imitations of speech may be to fix and preserve an
accurate register of the pronunciation of different languages. A
perfectly arranged speaking machine would in fact represent for us that
framework of language which consists of mere vowels and consonants,
though without most of those expressive adjuncts which go to make up the
conversation of speaking men.

Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is
able to pronounce and distinguish an enormous variety. But this great
stock of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each
language or dialect of the world is found in practice to select a
limited series of definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable
exactness to each, and thus choosing what we may call its phonetic
alphabet. Neglecting such minor differences as occur in the speech of
individuals or small communities, each dialect of the world may be said
to have its own phonetic system, and these phonetic systems vary widely.
Our vowels, for instance, differ much from those of French and Dutch.
French knows nothing of either of the sounds which we write as th in
thin and that, while the Castilian lisped c, the so-called
ceceo, is a third consonant which we must again make shift to write as
th, though it is quite distinct in sound from both our own. It is
quite a usual thing for us to find foreign languages wanting letters
even near in sound to some of ours, while possessing others unfamiliar
to ourselves. Among such cases are the Chinese difficulty in pronouncing
r, and the want of s and f in Australian dialects. When foreigners
tried to teach the Mohawks, who have no labials in their language, to
pronounce words with p and b in them, they protested that it was too
ridiculous to expect people to shut their mouths to speak; and the
Portuguese discoverers of Brazil, remarking that the natives had neither
f, l, nor r in their language, neatly described them as a people
with neither fé, ley, nor rey, neither faith, law, nor king. It
may happen, too, that sounds only used by some nations as interjectional
noises, unwritten and unwriteable, shall be turned to account by others
in their articulate language. Something of this kind occurs with the
noises called ‘clicks.’ Such sounds are familiar to us as interjections;
thus the lateral click made in the cheek (and usually in the left cheek)
is continually used in driving horses, while varieties of the dental and
palatal click made with the tongue against the teeth and the roof of the
mouth, are common in the nursery as expressions of surprise, reproof, or
satisfaction. Thus, too, the natives of Tierra del Fuego express ‘no’ by
a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the
gesture of throwing back the head; and it appears from the accounts of
travellers that the clicks of surprise and admiration among the natives
of Australia are much like those we hear at home. But though here these
clicking noises are only used interjectionally, it is well known that
South African races have taken such sounds up into their articulate
speech and have made, as we may say, letters of them. The very name of
Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other kindred tribes, appears to
be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a rude imitative word
coined by the Dutch to express the clicking ‘hot en tot,’ and the
term Hottentotism has been thence adopted as a medical description of
one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another
district of the world distinguished for the production of strange
clucking, gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to
European voices. Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used
in articulate speech, varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and
sucking noises, of which some are familiar to our own use as calls to
animals, or interjectional noises of contempt or surprise, but which no
tribe is known to have brought into their alphabet. With all the vast
phonetic variety of known languages, the limits of possible utterance
are far from being reached.

Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided
the various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various
alphabets; ease of utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness
of effect to the hearer, have been undoubtedly among the principal of
the selecting causes. We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of
men’s organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which
prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and
which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion
of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But
while we thus account by physical similarity for the existence of a kind
of natural alphabet common to mankind, we must look to other causes to
determine the selection of sounds used in different languages, and to
account for those remarkable courses of change which go on in languages
of a common stock, producing in Europe such variations of one original
word as pater, father, vater, or in the islands of Polynesia
offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms of lima,
rima, dima, nima, and hima. Changes of this sort have acted so
widely and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm’s law their
study has become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as
yet so obscure, we may at least argue that such wide and definite
operations cannot be due to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the
result of laws as wide and definite as themselves.

Let us now suppose a book to be written with a tolerably correct
alphabet, for instance an ordinary Italian book, or an English one in
some good system of phonetic letters. To suppose English written in the
makeshift alphabet which we still keep in use, would be of course to
complicate the matter in hand with a new and needless difficulty. If,
then, the book be written in a sufficient alphabet, and handed to a
reader, his office will by no means stop short at rendering back into
articulate sounds the vowels and consonants before him, as though he
were reading over proofs for the press. For the emotional tone just
spoken of has dropped out in writing down the words in letters, and it
will be the reader’s duty to guess from the meaning of the words what
this tone should be, and to put it in again accordingly. He has moreover
to introduce emphasis, whether by accent or stress, on certain syllables
or words, thereby altering their effect in the sentence; if he says, for
example, ‘I never sold you that horse,’ an emphasis on any one of these
six words will alter the import of the whole phrase. Now, in emphatic
pronunciation two distinct processes are to be remarked. The effect
produced by changes in loudness and duration of words is directly
imitative; it is a mere gesture made with the voice, as we may notice by
the way in which any one will speak of ‘a short sharp answer,’ ‘a
long weary year,’ ‘a loud burst of music,’ ‘a gentle gliding
motion,’ as compared with the like manner in which the gesture-language
would adapt its force and speed to the kind of action to be represented.
Written language can hardly convey but by the context the striking
effects which our imitative faculty adds to spoken language, in our
continual endeavour to make the sound of each word we speak a sort of
echo to its sense. We see this in the difference between writing and
telling the little story of the man who was worried by being talked to
about ‘good books.’ ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, speaking shortly with a
face of strong firm approval, ‘good books?’ ‘or,’ with a drawl and a
fatuous-benevolent simper, ‘goo-d books?’ Musical accent
(accentus,[255] musical tone) is turned to account as a means of
emphasis, as when we give prominence to a particular syllable or word in
a sentence by raising or depressing it a semi-tone or more. The reader
has to divide his sentences with pauses, being guided in this to some
extent by stops; the rhythmic measure in which he will utter prose as
well as poetry is not without its effect; and he has again to introduce
music by speaking each sentence to a kind of imperfect melody. Professor
Helmholtz endeavours to write down in musical notes how a German with a
bass voice, speaking on B flat, might say, ‘Ich bin spatzieren
gegangen.—Bist du spatzieren gegangen?’ falling a fourth (to F) at the
end of the affirmative sentence, and rising a fifth (to f) in asking the
question, thus ranging through an octave.[256] When an English speaker
tries to illustrate in his own language the rising and falling tones of
Siamese vowels, he compares them with the English ones of question and
answer, as in ‘Will you go? Yes.’[257] The rules of this imperfect
musical intonation in ordinary conversation have been as yet but little
studied. But as a means of giving solemnity and pathos to language, it
has been more fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of
melody, and we thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the
less conventional half-singing so often to be heard in religious
meetings, and on the other the ancient and modern theatrical recitative.
By such intermediate stages we may cross the wide interval from spoken
prose, with the musical pitch of its vowels so carelessly kept, and so
obscured by consonants as to be difficult even to determine, to full
song, in which the consonants are as much as possible suppressed, that
they may not interfere with the precise and expressive music of the
vowels.

Proceeding now to survey such parts of the vocabulary of mankind as
appear to have an intelligible origin in the direct expression of sense
by sound, let us first examine Interjections. When Horne Tooke spoke, in
words often repeated since, of ‘the brutish inarticulate Interjection,’
he certainly meant to express his contempt for a mode of expression
which lay outside his own too narrow view of language. But the epithets
are in themselves justifiable enough. Interjections are undoubtedly to a
certain extent ‘brutish’ in their analogy to the cries of animals; and
the fact gives them an especial interest to modern observers, who are
thus enabled to trace phenomena belonging to the mental state of the
lower animals up into the midst of the most highly cultivated human
language. It is also true that they are ‘inarticulate,’ so far at least
that the systems of consonants and vowels recognized by grammarians
break down more hopelessly than elsewhere in the attempt to write down
interjections. Alphabetic writing is far too incomplete and clumsy an
instrument to render their peculiar and variously-modulated sounds, for
which a few conventionally-written words do duty poorly enough. In
reading aloud, and sometimes even in the talk of those who have learnt
rather from books than from the living world, we may hear these awkward
imitations, ahem! hein! tush! tut! pshaw! now carrying the
unquestioned authority of words printed in a book, and reproduced letter
for letter with a most amusing accuracy. But when Horne Tooke fastens
upon an unfortunate Italian grammarian and describes him as ‘The
industrious and exact Cinonio, who does not appear ever to have had a
single glimpse of reason,’ it is not easy to see what the pioneer of
English philology could find to object to in Cinonio’s obviously true
assertion, that a single interjection, ah! or ahi! is capable of
expressing more than twenty different emotions or intentions, such as
pain, entreaty, threatening, sighing, disdain, according to the tone in
which it is uttered.[258] The fact that interjections do thus utter
feelings is quite beyond dispute, and the philologist’s concern with
them is on the one hand to study their action in expressing emotion, and
on the other to trace their passage into more fully-formed words, such
as have their place in connected syntax and form part of logical
propositions.

In the first place, however, it is necessary to separate from proper
interjections the many sense-words which, often kept up in a mutilated
or old-fashioned guise, come so close to them both in appearance and in
use. Among classic examples are φέρε! δεῦτε! age! macte! Such a word
is hail! which as the Gothic Bible shows, was originally an adjective,
‘whole, hale, prosperous,’ used vocatively, just as the Italians cry
bravo! brava! bravi! brave! When the African negro cries out in
fear or wonder mámá! mámá![259] he might be thought to be uttering a
real interjection, ‘a word used to express some passion or emotion of
the mind,’ as Lindley Murray has it, but in fact he is simply calling,
grown-up baby as he is, for his mother; and the very same thing has been
noticed among Indians of Upper California, who as an expression of pain
cry, aná! that is ‘mother.’[260] Other exclamations consist of a pure
interjection combined with a pronoun, as οἴμοι! oimè! ah me! or with
an adjective, as alas! hélas! (ah weary!) With what care
interjections should be sifted, to avoid the risk of treating as
original elementary sounds of language what are really nothing but
sense-words, we may judge from the way in which the common English
exclamation well! well! approaches the genuine interjectional sound in
the Coptic expression ‘to make ouelouele,’ which signifies to wail,
Latin ululare. Still better, we may find a learned traveller in the
18th century quite seriously remarking, apropos of the old Greek
battle-shout, ἀλαλά! ἀλαλά! that the Turks to this day call out _Allah!
Allah! Allah!_ upon the like occasion.[261]

The calls to animals customary in different countries[262] are to a
great extent interjectional in their use, but to attempt to explain them
as a whole is to step upon as slippery ground as lies within the range
of philology. Sometimes they may be in fact pure interjections, like the
schû schû! mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should
say sh sh!, or the aá! with which the Indians of Brazil call their
dogs. Or they may be set down as simple imitations of the animal’s own
cries, as the clucking to call fowls in our own farm-yards, or the
Austrian calls of pi pi! or tiet tiet! to chickens, or the Swabian
kauter kaut! to turkeys, or the shepherd’s baaing to call sheep in
India. In other cases, however, they may be sense-words more or less
broken down, as when the creature is spoken to by a sound which seems
merely taken from its own common name. If an English countryman meets a
stray sheep-dog, he will simply call to him ship! ship! So _schäp
schäp! is an Austrian call to sheep, and köss kuhel köss!_ to cows. In
German districts gus gus! gusch gusch! gös gös! are set down as
calls to geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant calls
husy! to them, we remember that the name for goose in his language is
husa, a word familiar to English ears in the name of John Huss. The
Bohemian, again, will call to his dog ps ps! but then pes means
‘dog.’ Other sense-words addressed to animals break down by long
repetition into mutilated forms. When we are told that the to to! with
which a Portuguese calls a dog is short for toma toma! (i.e., ‘take
take!’) which tells him to come and take his food, we admit the
explanation as plausible; and the coop coop! which a cockney might so
easily mistake for a pure interjection, is only ‘Come up! come up!’

                ‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,
                Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,
                  Jetty, to the milking shed.’

But I cannot offer a plausible guess at the origin of such calls as _hüf
hüf! to horses, hühl hühl! to geese, deckel deckel!_ to sheep. It is
fortunate for etymologists that such trivial little words have not an
importance proportioned to the difficulty of clearing up their origin.
The word puss! raises an interesting philological problem. An English
child calling puss puss! is very likely keeping up the trace of the
old Keltic name for the cat, Irish pus, Erse pusag, Gaelic puis.
Similar calls are known elsewhere in Europe (as in Saxony, pûs pûs!),
and there is some reason to think that the cat, which came to us from
the East, brought with it one of its names, which is still current
there, Tamil pûsei! Afghan pusha, Persian pushak, &c. Mr. Wedgwood
finds an origin for the call in an imitation of the cat’s spitting, and
remarks that the Servians cry pis! to drive a cat away, while the
Albanians use a similar sound to call it. The way in which the cry of
puss! has furnished a name for the cat itself, comes out curiously in
countries where the animal has been lately introduced by Englishmen.
Thus boosi is the recognized word for cat in the Tonga Islands, no
doubt from Captain Cook’s time. Among Indian tribes of North-West
America, pwsh, pish-pish, appear in native languages with the
meaning of cat; and not only is the European cat called a puss puss in
the Chinook Jargon, but in the same curious dialect the word is applied
to a native beast, the cougar, now called ‘hyas puss-puss,’ i.e.,
‘great cat.’[263]

The derivation of names of animals in this manner from calls to them,
may perhaps not have been unfrequent. It appears that huss! is a cry
used in Switzerland to set dogs on to fight, as s—s! might be in
England, and that the Swiss call a dog huss or hauss, possibly from
this. We know the cry of dill! dilly! as a recognized call to ducks
in England, and it is difficult to think it a corruption of any English
word or phrase, for the Bohemians also call dlidli! to their ducks.
Now, though dill or dilly may not be found in our dictionaries as
the name for a duck, yet the way in which Hood can use it as such in one
of his best-known comic poems, shows perfectly the easy and natural step
by which such transitions can be made:—

                   ‘For Death among the water-lilies,
                   Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’

In just the same way, because gee! is a usual call of the English
waggoner to his horses, the word gee-gee has become a familiar nursery
noun meaning a horse. And neither in such nursery words, nor in words
coined in jest, is the evidence bearing on the origin of language to be
set aside as worthless; for it may be taken as a maxim of ethnology,
that what is done among civilized men in jest, or among civilized
children in the nursery, is apt to find its analogue in the serious
mental effort of savage, and therefore of primæval tribes.

Drivers’ calls to their beasts, such as this gee! gee-ho! to urge on
horses, and weh! woh! to stop them, form part of the vernacular of
particular districts. The geho! perhaps came to England in the
Norman-French, for it is known in France, and appears in the Italian
dictionary as gio! The traveller who has been hearing the drivers in
the Grisons stop their horses with a long br-r-r! may cross a pass and
hear on the other side a hü-ü-ü! instead. The ploughman’s calls to
turn the leaders of the team to right and left have passed into proverb.
In France they say of a stupid clown ‘Il n’entend ni à dia! ni à
hurhaut!’ and the corresponding Platt-Deutsch phrase is ‘He weet nich
hutt! noch hoh!’ So there is a regular language to camels, as
Captain Burton remarks on his journey to Mekka: ikh ikh! makes them
kneel, yáhh yáhh! urges them on, hai hai! induces caution, and so
forth. In the formation of these quaint expressions, two causes have
been at work. The sounds seem sometimes thoroughly interjectional, as
the Arab hai! of caution, or the French hue! North German jö!
Whatever their origin, they may be made to carry their sense by
imitative tones expressive to the ear of both horse and man, as any one
will say who hears the contrast between the short and sharp high-pitched
hüp! which tells the Swiss horse to go faster, and the long-drawn
hü-ü-ü-ü! which brings him to a stand. Also, the way in which common
sense-words are taken up into calls like gee-up! woh-back! shows
that we may expect to find various old broken fragments of formal
language in the list, and such on inspection we find accordingly. The
following lines are quoted by Halliwell from the Micro-Cynicon (1599):—

              ‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,
              Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,
              With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,
              Who with a hey and ree the beasts command.’

This ree! is equivalent to ‘right’ (riddle-me-ree = riddle me right),
and tells the leader of the team to bear to the right hand. The hey!
may correspond with heit! or camether! which call him to bear
‘hither,’ i.e., to the left. In Germany har! här! har-üh! are
likewise the same as ‘her,’ ‘hither, to the left.’ So swude!
schwude! zwuder! ‘to the left,’ are of course simply ‘zuwider,’ ‘on
the contrary way.’ Pairs of calls for ‘right’ and ‘left’ in
German-speaking countries are hot!—har! and hott!—wist! This
wist! is an interesting example of the keeping up of ancient words in
such popular tradition. It is evidently a mutilated form of an old
German word for the left hand, winistrâ, Anglo-Saxon winstre, a name
long since forgotten by modern High German, as by our own modern
English.[264]

As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I have met
with, is in the great French Encyclopædia,[265] which gives a minute
description of the hunter’s craft, and prescribes exactly what is to be
cried to the hounds under all possible contingencies of the chase. If
the creatures understood grammar and syntax, the language could not be
more accurately arranged for their ears. Sometimes we have what seem
pure interjectional cries. Thus, to encourage the hounds to work, the
huntsman is to call to them hà halle halle halle! while to bring them
up before they are uncoupled it is prescribed that he shall call _hau
hau! or hau tahaut!_ and when they are uncoupled he is to change his
cry to hau la y la la y la tayau! a call which suggests the Norman
original of the English tally-ho! With cries of this kind plain French
words are intermixed, hà bellement là ila, là ila, hau valet!—_hau
l’ami, tau tau après après, à route à route!_ and so on. And sometimes
words have broken down into calls whose sense is not quite gone, like
the ‘vois le ci’ and the ‘vois le ce l’est’ which are still to be
distinguished in the shout which is to tell the hunters that the stag
they have been chasing has made a return, vauleci revari vaulecelez!
But the drollest thing in the treatise is the grave set of English words
(in very Gallic shape) with which English dogs are to be spoken to,
because, as the author says, ‘there are many English hounds in France,
and it is difficult to get them to work when you speak to them in an
unknown tongue, that is, in other terms than they have been trained to.’
Therefore, to call them, the huntsman is to cry here do-do ho ho! to
get them back to the right track he is to say houpe boy, houpe boy!
when there are several on ahead of the rest of the pack, he is to ride
up to them and cry saf me boy! saf me boy! and lastly, if they are
obstinate and will not stop, he is to make them go back with a shout of
cobat, cobat!

How far the lower animals may attach any inherent meaning to
interjectional sounds is a question not easy to answer. But it is plain
that in most of the cases mentioned here they only understand them as
recognized signals which have a meaning by regular association, as when
they remember that they are fed with one noise and driven away with
another, and they also pay attention to the gestures which accompany the
cries. Thus the well-known Spanish way of calling the cat is miz miz!
while zape zape! is used to drive it away; and the writer of an old
dictionary maintains that there can be no real difference between these
words except by custom, for, he declares, he has heard that in a certain
monastery where they kept very handsome cats, the brother in charge of
the refectory hit upon the device of calling zape zape! to them when
he gave them their food, and then he drove them away with a stick,
crying angrily miz miz; and this of course prevented any stranger from
calling and stealing them, for only he and the cats knew the
secret![266] To philologists, the manner in which such calls to animals
become customary in particular districts illustrates the consensus by
which the use of words is settled. Each case of the kind indicates that
a word has prevailed by selection among a certain society of men, and
the main reasons of words holding their ground within particular limits,
though it is so difficult to assign them exactly in each case, are
probably inherent fitness in the first place, and traditional
inheritance in the second.

When the ground has been cleared of obscure or mutilated sense-words,
there remains behind a residue of real sound-words, or pure
interjections. It has long and reasonably been considered that the place
in history of these expressions is a very primitive one. Thus De Brosses
describes them as necessary and natural words, common to all mankind,
and produced by the combination of man’s conformation with the interior
affections of his mind. One of the best means of judging the relation
between interjectional utterances and the feelings they express, is to
compare the voices of the lower animals with our own. To a considerable
extent there is a similarity. As their bodily and mental structure has
an analogy with our own, so they express their minds by sounds which
have to our ears a certain fitness for what they appear to mean. It is
so with the bark, the howl, and the whine of the dog, the hissing of
geese, the purring of cats, the crowing and clucking of cocks and hens.
But in other cases, as with the hooting of owls and the shrieks of
parrots and many other birds, we cannot suppose that these sounds are
intended to utter anything like the melancholy or pain which such cries
from a human being would be taken to convey. There are many animals that
never utter any cry but what, according to our notions of the meaning of
sounds, would express rage or discomfort; how far are the roars and
howls of wild beasts to be thus interpreted? We might as well imagine
the tuning violin to be in pain, or the moaning wind to express sorrow.
The connexion between interjection and emotion depending on the physical
structure of the animal which utters or hears the sound, it follows that
the general similarity of interjectional utterance among all the
varieties of the human race is an important manifestation of their close
physical and intellectual unity.

Interjectional sounds uttered by man for the expression of his own
feelings serve also as signs indicating these feelings to another. A
long list of such interjections, common to races speaking the most
widely various languages, might be set down in a rough way as
representing the sighs, groans, moans, cries, shrieks, and growls by
which man gives utterance to various of his feelings. Such for instance,
are some of the many sounds for which ah! oh! ahi! aie! are the
inexpressive written representatives; such is the sigh which is written
down in the Wolof language of Africa as hhihhe! in English as
heigho! in Greek and Latin as ἒ ἒ! ἒ ἒ! heu! eheu! Thus the
open-mouthed wah wah! of astonishment, so common in the East,
reappears in America in the hwah! hwah-wa! of the Chinook Jargon;
and the kind of groan which is represented in European languages by
weh! ouais! οὐαί! vae! is given in Coptic by ouae! in Galla by
wayo! in the Ossetic of the Caucasus by voy! among the Indians of
British Columbia by woī! Where the interjections taken down in the
vocabularies of other languages differ from those recognized in our own,
we at any rate appreciate them and see how they carry their meaning.
Thus with the Malagasy u-u! of pleasure, the North-American Indian’s
often-described guttural ugh! the kwish! of contempt in the Chinook
Jargon, the Tunguz yo yo! of pain, the Irish wb wb! of distress, the
native Brazilian’s teh teh! of wonder and reverence, the hai-yah! so
well known in the Pigeon-English of the Chinese ports, and even, to take
an extreme case, the interjections of surprise among the Algonquin
Indians, where men say tiau! and women nyau! It is much the same
with expressions which are not uttered for the speaker’s satisfaction,
but are calls addressed to another. Thus the Siamese call of hē! the
Hebrew he! ha! for ‘lo! behold!’ the hói! of the Clallam Indians for
‘stop!’ the Lummi hái! for ‘hold, enough!’—these and others like them
belong just as much to English. Another class of interjections are such
as any one conversant with the gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes
would recognize as being themselves gesture signs, made with vocal
sound, in short, voice-gestures. The sound m’m, m’n, made with the
lips closed, is the obvious expression of the man who tries to speak,
but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child, though he cannot hear the
sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show that he is dumb, that
he is mu mu, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would say. To the
speaking man, the sound which we write as mum! says plainly enough
‘hold your tongue!’ ‘mum’s the word!’ and in accordance with this
meaning has served to form various imitative words, of which a type is
Tahitian mamu, to be silent. Often made with a slight effort which
aspirates it, and with more or less continuance, this sound becomes what
may be indicated as ‘m, ‘n, h’m, h’n, &c., interjections which
are conventionally written down as words, hem! ahem! hein! Their
primary sense seems in any case that of hesitation to speak, of ‘humming
and hawing,’ but this serves with a varied intonation to express such
hesitation or refraining from articulate words as belongs either to
surprise, doubt or enquiry, approbation or contempt. In the vocabulary
of the Yorubas of West Africa, the nasal interjection huñ is rendered,
just as it might be in English, as ‘fudge!’ Rochefort describes the
Caribs listening in reverent silence to their chief’s discourse, and
testifying their approval with a hun-hun! just as in his time (17th
century) an English congregation would have saluted a popular
preacher.[267] The gesture of blowing, again, is a familiar expression
of contempt and disgust, and when vocalized gives the labial
interjections which are written pah! bah! pugh! pooh! in Welsh
pw! in Low Latin puppup! and set down by travellers among the
savages in Australia as pooh! These interjections correspond with the
mass of imitative words which express blowing, such as Malay puput, to
blow. The labial gestures of blowing pass into those of spitting, of
which one kind gives the dental interjection t’ t’ t’! which is
written in English or Dutch tut tut! and that this is no mere fancy, a
number of imitative verbs of various countries will serve to show,
Tahitian tutua, to spit, being a typical instance.

The place of interjectional utterance in savage intercourse is well
shown in Cranz’s description. The Greenlanders, he says, especially the
women, accompany many words with mien and glances, and he who does not
well apprehend this may easily miss the sense. Thus when they affirm
anything with pleasure they suck down air by the throat with a certain
sound, and when they deny anything with contempt or horror, they turn up
the nose and give a slight sound through it. And when they are out of
humour, one must understand more from their gestures than their
words.[268] Interjection and gesture combine to form a tolerable
practical means of intercourse, as where the communication between
French and English troops in the Crimea is described as ‘consisting
largely of such interjectional utterances, reiterated with expressive
emphasis and considerable gesticulation.’[269] This description well
brings before us in actual life a system of effective human intercourse,
in which there has not yet arisen the use of those articulate sounds
carrying their meaning by tradition, which are the inherited words of
the dictionary.

When, however, we look closely into these inherited sense-words
themselves, we find that interjectional sounds have actually had more or
less share in their formation. Not stopping short at the function
ascribed to them by grammarians, of standing here and there outside a
logical sentence, the interjections have also served as radical sounds
out of which verbs, substantives, and other parts of speech have been
shaped. In tracing the progress of interjections upward into fully
developed language, we begin with sounds merely expressing the speaker’s
actual feelings. When, however, expressive sounds like ah! ugh!
pooh! are uttered not to exhibit the speaker’s actual feelings at the
moment, but only in order to suggest to another the thought of
admiration or disgust, then such interjections have little or nothing to
distinguish them from fully formed words. The next step is to trace the
taking up of such sounds into the regular forms of ordinary grammar.
Familiar instances of such formations may be found among ourselves in
nursery language, where to woh is found in use with the meaning of to
stop, or in that real though hardly acknowledged part of the English
language to which belong such verbs as to boo-hoo. Among the most
obvious of such words are those which denote the actual utterance of an
interjection, or pass thence into some closely allied meaning. Thus the
Fijian women’s cry of lamentation oile! becomes the verb oile ‘to
bewail,’ oile-taka ‘to lament for’ (the men cry ule!); now this is
in perfect analogy with such words as ululare, to wail. With
different grammatical terminations, another sound produces the Zulu verb
gigiteka and its English equivalent to giggle. The Galla iya, ‘to
cry, scream, give the battle-cry’ has its analogues in Greek ἰά, ἰή, ‘a
cry,’ ἰήïος ‘wailing, mournful,’ &c. Good cases may be taken from a
curious modern dialect with a strong propensity to the use of obvious
sound-words, the Chinook Jargon of North-West America. Here we find
adopted from an Indian dialect the verb to kish-kish, that is, ‘to
drive cattle or horses’; humm stands for the word ‘stink,’ verb or
noun; and the laugh, heehee, becomes a recognized term meaning fun or
amusement, as in mamook heehee, ‘to amuse’ (i.e., ‘to make
heehee’) and heehee house, ‘a tavern.’ In Hawaii, aa is ‘to
insult;’ in the Tonga Islands, úi! is at once the exclamation ‘fie!’
and the verb ‘to cry out against.’ In New Zealand, hé! is an
interjection denoting surprise at a mistake, hé as a noun or verb
meaning ‘error, mistake, to err, to go astray.’ In the Quiché language
of Guatemala, the verbs ay, oy, boy, express the idea of ‘to call’
in different ways. In the Carajas language of Brazil, we may guess an
interjectional origin in the adjective ei, ‘sorrowful,’ and can scarcely
fail to see a derivation from expressive sound in the verb hai-hai ‘to
run away’ (the word aie-aie, used to mean ‘an omnibus’ in modern
French slang, is said to be a comic allusion to the cries of the
passengers whose toes are trodden on). The Camacan Indians, when they
wish to express the notion of ‘much’ or ‘many,’ hold out their fingers
and say hi. As this is an ordinary savage gesture expressing
multitude, it seems likely that the hi is a mere interjection,
requiring the visible sign to convey the full meaning.[270] In the
Quichua language of Peru, alalau! is an interjection of complaint at
cold, whence the verb alalauñini, ‘to complain of the cold.’ At the
end of each strophe of the Peruvian hymns to the Sun was sung the
triumphant exclamation haylli! and with this sound are connected the
verbs hayllini ‘to sing,’ hayllicuni, ‘to celebrate a victory.’ The
Zulu halala! of exultation, which becomes also a verb ‘to shout for
joy,’ has its analogues in the Tibetan alala! of joy, and the Greek
ἀλαλά, which is used as a noun meaning the battle-cry and even the onset
itself, ἀλαλάζω, ‘to raise the war-cry,’ as well as Hebrew hillel, ‘to
sing praise,’ whence hallelujah! a word which the believers in the
theory that the Red Indians were the Lost Tribes naturally recognized in
the native medicine-man’s chant of hi-le-li-lah! The Zulu makes his
panting ha! do duty as an expression of heat, when he says that the
hot weather ‘says ha ha’; his way of pitching a song by a ha! ha! is
apparently represented in the verb haya, ‘to lead a song,’ hayo ‘a
starting song, a fee given to the singing-leader for the haya’; and
his interjectional expression bà bà! ‘as when one smacks his lips from
a bitter taste,’ becomes a verb-root meaning ‘to be bitter or sharp to
the taste, to prick, to smart.’ The Galla language gives some good
examples of interjections passing into words, as where the verbs
birr-djeda (to say brr!) and birēfada (to make brr!) have the
meaning ‘to be afraid.’ Thus o! being the usual answer to a call, and
also a cry to drive cattle, there are formed from it by the addition of
verbal terminations, the verbs oada, ‘to answer,’ and ofa, ‘to
drive.’

If the magnific and honorific o of Japanese grammar can be assigned to
an interjectional origin, its capabilities in modifying signification
become instructive.[271] It is used before substantives as a prefix of
honour; couni, ‘country,’ thus becoming ocouni. When a man is
talking to his superiors, he puts o before the names of all objects
belonging to them, while these superiors drop the o in speaking of
anything of their own, or an inferior’s; among the higher classes,
persons of equal rank put o before the names of each other’s things,
but not before their own; it is polite to say o before the names of
all women, and well-bred children are distinguished from little peasants
by the way in which they are careful to put it even before the nursery
names of father and mother, o toto, o caca, which correspond to the
papa and mama of Europe. A distinction is made in written language
between o, which is put to anything royal, and oo which means great,
as may be instanced in the use of the word mets’ké or ‘spy’ (literally
‘eye-fixer’); o mets’ké is a princely or imperial spy, while _oo
mets’ké is the spy in chief. This interjectional adjective oo_, great,
is usually prefixed to the name of the capital city, which it is
customary to call oo Yedo in speaking to one of its inhabitants, or
when officials talk of it among themselves. And lastly, the o of
honour is prefixed to verbs in all their forms of conjugation, and it is
polite to say ominahai matse, ‘please to see,’ instead of the mere
plebeian minahai matse. Now an English child of six years old would at
once understand these formations if taken as interjectional; and if we
do not incorporate in our grammar the o! of admiration and reverential
embarrassment, it is because we have not chosen to take advantage of
this rudimentary means of expression. Another exclamation, the cry of
io! has taken a place in etymology. When added by the German to his
cry of ‘Fire!’ ‘Murder!’ Feuerio! Mordio! it remains indeed as mere
an interjection as the o! in our street cries of ‘Pease-o!’
‘Dust-o!’ or the â! in old German wafenâ! ‘to arms!’ ‘hilfâ!
‘help!’ But the Iroquois of North America makes a fuller use of his
materials, and carries his io! of admiration into the very formation
of compound words, adding it to a noun to say that it is beautiful or
good; thus, in Mohawk, garonta means a tree, garontio a beautiful
tree; in like manner, Ohio means ‘river-beautiful;’ and Ontario,
‘hill-rock-beautiful,’ is derived in the same way. When, in the old
times of the French occupation of Canada, there was sent over a
Governor-General of New France, Monsieur de Montmagny, the Iroquois
rendered his name from their word ononte, ‘mountain,’ translating him
into Onontio, or ‘Great Mountain,’ and thus it came to pass that the
name of Onontio was handed down long after, like that of Cæsar, as the
title of each succeeding governor, while for the King of France was
reserved the yet higher style of ‘the great Onontio.’[272]

The quest of interjectional derivations for sense-words is apt to lead
the etymologist into very rash speculations. One of his best safeguards
is to test forms supposed to be interjectional, by ascertaining whether
anything similar has come into use in decidedly distinct languages. For
instance, among the familiar sounds which fall on the traveller’s ear in
Spain is the muleteer’s cry to his beasts, arre! arre! From this
interjection, a family of Spanish words are reasonably supposed to be
derived; the verb arrear, ‘to drive mules,’ arriero, the name for
the ‘muleteer’ himself, and so forth.[273] Now is this arre! itself a
genuine interjectional sound? It seems likely to be so, for Captain
Wilson found it in use in the Pelew Islands, where the paddlers in the
canoes were kept up to their work by crying to them arree! arree!
Similar interjections are noticed elsewhere with a sense of mere
affirmation, as in an Australian dialect where a-ree! is set down as
meaning ‘indeed,’ and in the Quichua language where ari! means ‘yes!’
whence the verb ariñi, ‘to affirm.’ Two other cautions are desirable
in such enquiries. These are, not to travel too far from the absolute
meaning expressed by the interjection, unless there is strong
corroborative evidence, and not to override ordinary etymology by
treating derivative words as though they were radical. Without these
checks, even sound principle breaks down in application, as the
following two examples may show. It is quite true that h’m! is a
common interjectional call, and that the Dutch have made a verb of it,
hemmen, ‘to hem after a person.’ We may notice a similar call in West
Africa, in the mma! which is translated ‘hallo! stop!’ in the language
of Fernando Po. But to apply this as a derivation for German hemmen,
‘to stop, check, restrain,’ to hem in, and even to the hem of a
garment, as Mr. Wedgwood does without even a perhaps,[274] is travelling
too far beyond the record. Again, it is quite true that sounds of
clicking and smacking of the lips are common expressions of satisfaction
all over the world, and words may be derived from these sounds, as where
a vocabulary of the Chinook language of North-West America expresses
‘good’ as t’k-tok-te, or e-tok-te, sounds which we cannot doubt to
be derived from such clicking noises, if the words are not in fact
attempts to write down the very clicks themselves. But it does not
follow that we may take such words as deliciæ, delicatus, out of a
highly organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same
etymologist does, to an interjectional utterance of satisfaction,
dlick![275] To do this, is to ignore altogether the composition of
words; we might as well explain Latin dilectus or English delight as
direct formations from expressive sound. In concluding these remarks on
interjections, two or three groups of words may be brought forward as
examples of the application of collected evidence from a number of
languages, mostly of the lower races.

The affirmative and negative particles, which bear in language such
meanings as ‘yes!’ ‘indeed!’ and ‘no!’ ‘not,’ may have their derivations
from many different sources. It is thought that the Australian dialects
all belong to a single stock, but so unlike are the sounds they use for
‘no!’ and ‘yes!’ that tribes are actually named from these words as a
convenient means of distinction. Thus the tribes known as Gureang,
Kamilaroi, Kogai, Wolaroi, Wailwun, Wiratheroi, have their
names from the words they use for ‘no,’ these being gure, kamil,
ko, wol, wail, wira, respectively; and on the other hand the
Pikambul are said to be so called from their word pika, ‘yes.’ The
device of naming tribes, thus invented by the savages of Australia, and
which perhaps recurs in Brazil in the name of the Cocatapuya tribe
(coca ‘no,’ tapuya ‘man’) is very curious in its similarity to the
mediæval division of Langue d’oc and Langue d’oïl, according to the
words for ‘yes!’ which prevailed in Southern and Northern France: oc!
is Latin hoc, as we might say ‘that’s it!’ while the longer form _hoc
illud was reduced to oïl! and thence to oui!_ Many other of the
words for ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ may be sense-words, as, again, the French and
Italian si! is Latin sic. But on the other hand there is reason to
think that many of these particles in use in various languages are not
sense-words, but sound-words of a purely interjectional kind; or, what
comes nearly to the same thing, a feeling of fitness of the sound to the
meaning may have affected the choice and shaping of sense-words—a remark
of large application in such enquiries as the present. It is an old
suggestion that the primitive sound of such words as non is a nasal
interjection of doubt or dissent.[276] It corresponds in sound with the
visible gesture of closing the lips, while a vowel-interjection, with or
without aspiration, belongs rather to open-mouthed utterance. Whether
from this or some other cause, there is a remarkable tendency among most
distant and various languages of the world, on the one hand to use
vowel-sounds, with soft or hard breathing, to express ‘yes!’ and on the
other hand to use nasal consonants to express ‘no!’ The affirmative form
is much the commoner. The guttural i-i! of the West Australian, the
ēē! of the Darien, the a-ah! of the Clallam, the é! of the Yakama
Indians, the e! of the Basuto, and the ai! of the Kanuri, are some
examples of a wide group of forms, of which the following are only part
of those noted down in Polynesian and South American districts—ii!
é! ia! aio! io! ya! ey! &c., h’! heh! he-e! hü!
hoehah! ah-ha! &c. The idea has most weight where pairs of words for
‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ are found both conforming. Thus in the very suggestive
description by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America, for
‘yes!’ the men and youths say héé! the women say háá! and the old
men give a grunt; while for ‘no’ they all say yna! and make the
loudness of the sound indicate the strength of the negation. Dr.
Martius’s collection of vocabularies of Brazilian tribes, philologically
very distinct, contains several such pairs of affirmatives and
negatives, the equivalents of ‘yes!’—‘no!’ being in Tupi ayé—_aan!
aani!; in Guato ii!—mau!; in Jumana, aeae!—mäiu!_; in Miranha
ha ú!—nani! The Quichua of Peru affirms by y! hu! and expresses
‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘not at all,’ by ama! manan! &c., making from the
latter the verb manamñi, ‘to deny.’ The Quiché of Guatemala has e or
ve for the affirmative, ma, man, mana, for the negative. In
Africa, again, the Galla language has ee! for ‘yes!’ and hn, hin,
hm, for ‘not!’; the Fernandian ee! for ‘yes!’ and ‘nt for ‘not;’
while the Coptic dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin ‘sane’) as
eie, ie, and the negative by a long list of nasal sounds such as
an, emmen, en, mmn, &c. The Sanskrit particles hi! ‘indeed,
certainly,’ na, ‘not,’ exemplify similar forms in Indo-European
languages, down to our own aye! and no![277] There must be some
meaning in all this, for otherwise I could hardly have noted down
incidentally, without making any attempt at a general search, so many
cases from such different languages, only finding a comparatively small
number of contradictory cases.[278]

De Brosses maintained that the Latin stare, to stand, might be
traced to an origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it
an organic radical sign designating fixity, and could thus explain why
st! should be used as a call to make a man stand still. Its
connexion with these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and
one imaginative German philologer describes their origin among primæval
men as vividly as though he had been there to see. A man stands
beckoning in vain to a companion who does not see him, till at last his
effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal nerves, and
involuntarily there breaks from him the sound st! Now the other hears
the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he is
called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action
comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiar st!
and thus sta becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to
stand![279] This is a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately
nothing more. It would be at any rate strengthened, though not
established, if its supporters could prove that the st! used to call
people in Germany, pst! in Spain, is itself a pure interjectional
sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call has not yet
been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family of
languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits,
an opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the very
sta! (‘stay! stop!’) for which the theory proposes it as an
origin.[280]

That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely
interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may
be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found
among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to
rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple
sibilants, s! sh! h’sh! used especially to scare birds, and among
men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of
Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each
putting his hand over his mouth with a hush-sh; and when he himself
wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a Mandan lodge, he was
called to refrain by the same hush-sh! Among ourselves the sibilant
interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is
meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for
him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes
in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of
Ceylon, iss! is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern
Europe; and the verb shârak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like
sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan reverence is
expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook remarked that the
natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like
geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most unequivocal
marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as
they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’[281] Among other
sibilant interjections, are Turkish sûsâ! Ossetic ss! sos!
‘silence!’ Fernandian sia! ‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yoruba sió! ‘pshaw!’
Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one
linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is
there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in
our verb to hush, which has passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to
sleep’ (adjectively, ‘as hush as death’), metaphorically to hush up
a matter, or Greek σίζω ‘to hush, say hush! command silence.’ Even Latin
silere and Gothic silan, ‘to be silent,’ may with some plausibility
be explained as derived from the interjectional s! of silence.

Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state
their own interjectional derivation; such are hûñkâra (hûm-making),
‘the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hûm!’ and
çiççabda (çiç-sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations,
the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in
the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than
those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock.
In ru, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and in kakh, ‘to laugh,’ we have the
simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a
sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new
stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of
interjections of loathing and aversion, such as pooh! fie! &c., with
that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and
fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs pûy, ‘to become foul, to stink’ and
piy, pîy, ‘to revile, to hate.’[282] Further evidence may be here
adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use
the sound pu to express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat
says pu’ (inyama iti pu), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has
poöp ‘putrid;’ the Quiché language has puh, poh ‘corruption, pus,’
pohir ‘to turn bad, rot,’ puz ‘rottenness, what stinks;’ the Tupi
word for nasty, puxi, may be compared with the Latin putidus, and
the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’ o-pun-pun, with similar names
of stinking animals, Sanskrit pûtikâ ‘civet-cat,’ and French putois
‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjection fi! words have long been
formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy;
in mediæval French ‘maistre fi-fi’ was a recognized term for a
scavenger, and fi-fi books are not yet extinct.

There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what
may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate
origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their
transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of
language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even
as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the
earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the
school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our
Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much
the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the
same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists,
from De Brosses onward, embody a sound principle, and that much of the
evidence collected as to emotional and other directly expressive words,
is of the highest value in the argument. But in working out the details
of such word-formation, it must be remembered that no department of
philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on the
etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the
derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy.
(Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio
prædicatur.)

Footnote 247:

  C. de Brosses, ‘Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues,’ &c.
  (1st ed. 1765); Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language’ (1866); ‘Dic. of
  English Etymology’ (1859, 2nd ed. 1872); Farrar, ‘Chapters on
  Language’ (1865).

Footnote 248:

  Among the principal savage and barbaric languages here used for
  evidence, are as follows:—Africa: Galla (Tutschek, Gr. and Dic.),
  Yoruba (Bowen, Gr. and Dic.), Zulu (Döhne, Dic.). Polynesia, &c.:
  Maori (Kendall, Vocab., Williams, Dic.), Tonga (Mariner, Vocab.), Fiji
  (Hazlewood, Dic.), Melanesia (Gabelentz, Melan. Spr.). Australia
  (Grey, Moore, Schürmann, Oldfield, Vocabs.). N. America: Pima, Yakama,
  Clallam, Lummi, Chinuk, Mohawk, Micmac (Smithson. Contr. vol. iii.),
  Chinook Jargon (Gibbs, Dic.), Quiché (Brasseur, Gr. and Dic.). S.
  America: Tupi (Diaz, Dic.), Carib (Rochefort, Vocab.), Quichua
  (Markham, Gr. and Dic.), Chilian (Febres, Dic.), Brazilian tribes
  (Martius, ‘Glossaria linguarum Brasiliensium’). Many details in Pott,
  ‘Doppelung,’ &c.

Footnote 249:

  Bonwick, ‘Daily Life of Tasmanians,’ p. 140; Capt. Wilson, in ‘Tr.
  Eth. Soc.,’ vol. iv. p. 322, &c.; J. L. Wilson, in ‘Journ. Amer.
  Oriental Soc.,’ vol. i. 1849, No. 4; also Cranz., ‘Grönland,’ p. 279
  (cited below, p. 186). For other accounts, see ‘Early Hist. of
  Mankind,’ p. 77.

Footnote 250:

  Forbes, ‘Aymara Indians,’ in Journ. Eth. Soc. 1870, vol. ii. p. 208.

Footnote 251:

  See Helmholtz, ‘Tonempfindungen,’ 2nd ed. p. 163; McKendrick, Text
  Book of Physiology, p. 681, &c., 720, &c.; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd
  series, p. 95, &c.

Footnote 252:

  See Pallegoix, ‘Gramm. Ling. Thai.’; Bastian, in ‘Monatsb. Berlin.
  Akad.’ June 6, 1867, and ‘Roy. Asiatic Soc.,’ June, 1867.

Footnote 253:

  Burton, in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.,’ vol. i. p. 313; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr.
  and Dic.’ p. 5; see J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 461.

Footnote 254:

  C. W., in ‘London and Westminster Review,’ Oct. 1837.

Footnote 255:

  ‘Accentus est etiam in dicendo cantus obscurior.’—Cic. de Orat.

Footnote 256:

  Helmholtz, p. 364.

Footnote 257:

  Caswell, in Bastian, ‘Berlin. Akad.’ l.c.

Footnote 258:

  Horne Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ 2nd ed. London, 1798, pt. i. pp.
  60-3.

Footnote 259:

  R. F. Burton, ‘Lake Regions of Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 333;
  Livingstone, ‘Missionary Tr. in S. Africa,’ p. 298; ‘Gr. of Mpongwe
  lang,’ A. B. C. F. Missions, Rev. J. L. Wilson, p. 27. See Callaway,
  ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 59.

Footnote 260:

  Arroyo de la Cuesta, ‘Gr. of Mutsun Lang.’ p. 39, in Smithsonian
  Contr., vol. iii.; Neapolitan mamma mia! exclamation of wonder, &c.,
  Liebrecht in Götting. Gel. Anz. 1872, p. 1287.

Footnote 261:

  Shaw, ‘Travels in Barbary,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xv. p. 669.

Footnote 262:

  Some of the examples here cited, will be found in Grimm, ‘Deutsche
  Gr.’ vol. iii. p. 308; Pott, ‘Doppelung.’ p. 27; Wedgwood, ‘Origin of
  Language.’

Footnote 263:

  See Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part i. p. 382; Caldwell, ‘Gr. of
  Dravidian Langs.’ p. 465; Wedgwood, Dic. s.v. ‘puss,’ &c.; Mariner,
  ‘Tonga Is. (Vocab.)’; Gibbs, ‘Dic. of Chinook Jargon,’ Smithsonian
  Coll. No. 161; Pandosy, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yakama,’ Smithson. Contr.
  vol. iii.; compare J. L. Wilson, ‘Mpongwe Gr.’ p. 57. The Hindu
  child’s call to the cat mun mun! may be from Hindust. mâno = cat.
  It. micio, Fr. mite, minon, Ger. mieze, &c. = ‘cat,’ and Sp.
  miz! Ger. minz! &c. = ‘puss!’ are from imitations of a mew.

Footnote 264:

  For lists of drivers’ words, see Grimm, l.c.; Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p.
  261; Halliwell, ‘Dic. of Archaic and Provincial English,’ s.v. ‘ree;’
  Brand, vol. ii. p. 15; Pictet, part ii. p. 489.

Footnote 265:

  ‘Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, &c.’ Recueil de
  Planches, Paris, 1763, art. ‘Chasses.’ The traditional cries are still
  more or less in use. See ‘A Week in a French Country-house.’

Footnote 266:

  Aldrete, ‘Lengua Castellana,’ Madrid, 1673, s.vv. harre, exe.

Footnote 267:

  ‘There prevailed in those days an indecent custom; when the preacher
  touched any favourite topick in a manner that delighted his audience,
  their approbation was expressed by a loud hum, continued in proportion
  to their zeal or pleasure. When Burnet preached, part of his
  congregation hummed so loudly and so long, that he sat down to enjoy
  it, and rubbed his face with his handkerchief. When Sprat preached, he
  likewise was honoured with the like animating hum, but he stretched
  out his hand to the congregation, and cried, “Peace, peace; I pray
  you, peace.”’ Johnson, ‘Life of Sprat.’

Footnote 268:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 279.

Footnote 269:

  D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ p. 65.

Footnote 270:

  Compare, in the same district, Camé ii, Cotoxó biebie, eubiähiä,
  multus, -a, -um.

Footnote 271:

  J. H. Donker Curtius, ‘Essai de Grammaire Japonaise,’ p. 34, &c. 199.
  In former editions of the present work, the directly interjectional
  character of the o is held in an unqualified manner. Reference to
  the grammars of Prof. B. H. Chamberlain and others, where this
  particle (on, o) is connected with other forms implying a common
  root, leaves the argument to depend wholly or partly on the
  supposition of an interjectional source for this root. [Note to 3rd
  ed.]

Footnote 272:

  Bruyas, ‘Mohawk Lang.,’ p. 16, in Smithson. Contr. vol. iii.
  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ Part iii. p. 328, 502, 507. Charlevoix,
  ‘Nouv. France,’ vol. i. p. 350.

Footnote 273:

  The arre! may have been introduced into Europe by the Moors, as it
  is used in Arabic, and its use in Europe corresponds nearly with the
  limits of the Moorish conquest, in Spain arre! in Provence arri!

Footnote 274:

  Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 92.

Footnote 275:

  Ibid., p. 72.

Footnote 276:

  De Brosses, vol. i. p. 203. See Wedgwood.

Footnote 277:

  Also Oraon hae—ambo; Micmac é—mw.

Footnote 278:

  A double contradiction in Carib anhan!  ‘yes!’ oua!  ‘no!’
  Single contradictions in Catoquina hang! Tupi eém! Botocudo
  hemhem! Yoruba eñ! for ‘yes!’ Culino aiy! Australian yo! for
  ‘no!’ &c. How much these sounds depend on peculiar intonation, we, who
  habitually use h’m! either for ‘yes!’ or ‘no!’ can well understand.

Footnote 279:

  (Charles de Brosses) ‘Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues,
  &c.’ Paris, An. ix., vol. i. p. 238; vol. ii. p. 313. Lazarus and
  Steinthal, ‘Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,’ &c., vol. i. p. 421.
  Heyse, ‘System der Sprachwissenschaft,’ p. 73. Farrar, ‘Chapters on
  Language,’ p. 202.

Footnote 280:

  Similar sounds are used to command silence, to stop speaking as well
  as to stop going. English husht! whist! hist! Welsh ust!
  French chut! Italian zitto! Swedish tyst! Russian st’! and the
  Latin st! so well described in the curious old line quoted by Mr.
  Farrar, which compares it with the gesture of the finger on the lips:—

              ‘Isis, et Harpocrates digito qui significat st!’

  This group of interjections, again, has not been proved to be in use
  outside Aryan limits.

Footnote 281:

  Catlin, ‘North American Indians,’ vol. i. pp. 221, 39, 151, 162.
  Bailey in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.,’ vol. ii. p. 318. Job xxvii. 23. (The verb
  shârak also signifies to call by a hiss, ‘and he will hiss unto them
  from the end of the earth, and behold, they shall come with speed,’
  Is. v. 26; Jer. xix. 8.) Alcock, ‘The Capital of the Tycoon,’ vol. i.
  p. 394. Cook, ‘2nd Voy.’ vol. ii. p. 36. Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 234.

Footnote 282:

  Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 83, ‘Dictionary,’ Introd. p. xlix.
  and s.v. ‘foul.’ Prof. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 92,
  protests against the indiscriminate derivation of words directly from
  such cries and interjections, without the intervention of determinate
  roots. As to the present topic, he points out that Latin pus,
  putridus, Gothic fuls, English foul, follow Grimm’s law as if
  words derived from a single root. Admitting this, however, the
  question has to be raised, how far pure interjections and their direct
  derivatives, being self-expressive and so to speak living sounds, are
  affected by phonetic changes such as that of Grimm’s law, which act on
  articulate sounds no longer fully expressive in themselves, but handed
  down by mere tradition. Thus p and f occur in one and the same
  dialect in interjections of disgust and aversion, puh! fi! being
  used in Venice or Paris, just as similar sounds would be in London. In
  tracing this group of words from early Aryan forms, it must also be
  noticed that Sanskrit is a very imperfect guide, for its alphabet has
  no f, and it can hardly give the rule in this matter to languages
  possessing both p and f, and thus capable of nicer appreciation of
  this class of interjections.

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued).

    Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names from
    cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words modified to
    adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of vowels to express
    distance and difference—Children’s Language—Sound-words as related
    to Sense-words—Language an original product of the lower Culture.

From the earliest times of language to our own day, it is unlikely that
men ever quite ceased to be conscious that some of their words were
derived from imitation of the common sounds heard about them. In our own
modern English, for instance, results of such imitation are evident;
flies buzz, bees hum, snakes hiss, a cracker or a bottle of
ginger-beer pops, a cannon or a bittern booms. In the words for
animals and for musical instruments in the various languages of the
world, the imitation of their cries and tones is often to be plainly
heard, as in the names of the hoopoe, the ai-ai sloth, the kaka
parrot, the Eastern tomtom, which is a drum, the African ulule,
which is a flute, the Siamese khong-bong, which is a wooden
harmonicon, and in like manner through a host of other words. But these
evident cases are far from representing the whole effects of imitation
on the growth of language. They form, indeed, the easy entrance to a
philological region, which becomes less penetrable the farther it is
explored.

The operations of which we see the results before us in the actual
languages of the world seem to have been somewhat as follows. Men have
imitated their own emotional utterances or interjections, the cries of
animals, the tones of musical instruments, the sounds of shouting,
howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are
all day coming to their ears, and out of these imitations many current
words indisputably have their source. But these words, as we find them
in use, differ often widely, often beyond all recognition, from the
original sounds they sprang from. In the first place, man’s voice can
only make a very rude copy of most sounds his ear receives; his possible
vowels are very limited in their range compared with natural tones, and
his possible consonants still more helpless as a means of imitating
natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to use a part even
of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language for its own
convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and consonants,
to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming
conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative
accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than
those which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary
alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down
these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian
imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as toop; to the Zulu,
when a calabash is beaten, it says boo; the Karens hear the flitting
ghosts of the dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, _re, re, ro,
ro_; the old traveller, Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia
sneered at Timur and his Tartars, with their arrows that went ter ter;
certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when
it boils it says chichitá, chitichita, a symptom of vitality which
occasioned much theological controversy as to drinking cold and warm
water. Lastly, sound-words taken up into the general inventory of a
language have to follow its organic changes, and in the course of
phonetic transition, combination, decay, and mutilation, to lose ever
more and more their original shape. To take a single example, the French
huer ‘to shout’ (Welsh hwa) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet
when it passes into modern English hue and cry, our changed
pronunciation of the vowel destroys all imitation of the call. Now to
the language-makers all this was of little account. They merely wanted
recognized words to express recognized thought, and no doubt arrived by
repeated trials at systems which were found practically to answer this
purpose. But to the modern philologist, who is attempting to work out
the converse of the problem, and to follow backward the course of words
to original imitative sound, the difficulty is most embarrassing. It is
not only that thousands of words really derived from such imitation may
now by successive change have lost all safe traces of their history;
such mere deficiency of knowledge is only a minor evil. What is far
worse is that the way is thrown open to an unlimited number of false
solutions, which yet look on the face of them fully as like truth as
others which we know historically to be true. One thing is clear, that
it is of no use to resort to violent means, to rush in among the words
of language, explaining them away right and left as derived each from
some remote application of an imitative noise. The advocate of the
Imitative Theory who attempts this, trusting in his own powers of
discernment, has indeed taken in hand a perilous task, for, in fact, of
all judges of the question at issue, he has nourished and trained
himself up to become the very worst. His imagination is ever suggesting
to him what his judgment would like to find true; like a witness
answering the questions of the counsel on his own side, he answers in
good faith, but with what bias we all know. It was thus with De Brosses,
to whom this department of philology owes so much. It is nothing to say
that he had a keen ear for the voice of Nature; she must have positively
talked to him in alphabetic language, for he could hear the sound of
hollowness in the sk of σκάπτω ‘to dig,’ of hardness in the cal of
callosity, the noise of insertion of a body between two others in the
tr of trans, intra. In enquiries so liable to misleading fancy, no
pains should be spared in securing impartial testimony, and it
fortunately happens that there are available sources of such evidence,
which, when thoroughly worked, will give to the theory of imitative
words as near an approach to accuracy as has been attained to in any
other wide philological problem. By comparing a number of languages,
widely apart in their general system and materials, and whose agreement
as to the words in question can only be accounted for by similar
formation of words from similar suggestion of sound, we obtain groups of
words whose imitative character is indisputable. The groups here
considered consist in general of imitative words of the simpler kind,
those directly connected with the special sound they are taken from, but
their examination to some extent admits of words being brought in, where
the connexion of the idea expressed with the sound imitated is more
remote. This, lastly, opens the far wider and more difficult problem,
how far imitation of sounds is the primary cause of the great mass of
words in the vocabularies of the world, between whose sound and sense no
direct connexion appears.

Words which express human actions accompanied with sound form a very
large and intelligible class. In remote and most different languages, we
find such forms as pu, puf, bu, buf, fu, fuf, in use with
the meaning of puffing, fuffing; or blowing; Malay puput; Tongan
buhi; Maori pupui; Australian bobun, bwa-bun; Galla bufa,
afufa; Zulu futa, punga, pupuza (fu, pu, used as expressive
particles); Quiché puba; Quichua puhuni; Tupi ypeû; Finnish
puhkia; Hebrew puach; Danish puste; Lithuanian púciu; and in
numbers of other languages;[283] here, grammatical adjuncts apart, the
significant force lies in the imitative syllable. Savages have named the
European musket when they saw it, by the sound pu, describing not the
report, but the puff of smoke issuing from the muzzle. The Society
Islanders supposed at first that the white men blew through the barrel
of the gun, and they called it accordingly pupuhi, from the verb
puhi to blow, while the New Zealanders more simply called it a pu.
So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it umpu, from the imitative sound
pu! The Chinook Jargon of North-West America uses the phrase _mamook
poo (make poo_) for a verb ‘to shoot,’ and a six-chambered revolver is
called tohum poo, i.e., a ‘six-poo.’ When a European uses the word
puff to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to the
smoke blown out, as he would speak of a puff of wind, or even a
powder-puff or a puff-ball; and when a pistol is called in
colloquial German a puffer, the meaning of the word matches that used
for it in French Argot, a ‘soufflant.’ It has often been supposed that
the puff imitates the actual sound, the bang of the gun, and this
has been brought forward to show by what extremely different words one
and the same sound may be imitated, but this is a mistake.[284] These
derivations of the name of the gun from the notion of blowing correspond
with those which give names to the comparatively noiseless blow-tube of
the bird-hunter, called by the Indians of Yucatan a pub, in South
America by the Chiquitos a pucuna, by the Cocamas a puna. Looking
into vocabularies of languages which have such verbs ‘to blow,’ it is
usual to find with them other words apparently related to them, and
expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian poo-yu, puyu
‘smoke;’ Quichua puhucuni ‘to light a fire,’ punquini ‘to swell,’
puyu, puhuyu ‘a cloud;’ Maori puku ‘to pant,’ puka ‘to swell;’
Tupi púpú, pupúre ‘to boil;’ Galla bube ‘wind,’ bubiza ‘to cool
by blowing;’ Kanuri (root fu) fungin ‘to blow, swell,’ furúdu ‘a
stuffed pad or bolster,’ &c., bubute ‘bellows’ (bubute fungin ‘I
blow the bellows’); Zulu (dropping the prefixes) puku, pukupu
‘frothing, foam,’ whence pukupuku ‘an empty frothy fellow,’ pupuma
‘to bubble, boil,’ fu ‘a cloud,’ fumfu ‘blown about like high grass
in the wind,’ whence fumfuta ‘to be confused, thrown into disorder,’
futo ‘bellows,’ fuba ‘the breast, chest,’ then figuratively ‘bosom,
conscience.’

The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which mum,
mumming, mumble are among the many forms belonging to European
languages,[285] are worked out in like manner among the lower races—Vei
mu mu ‘dumb’; Mpongwe imamu ‘dumb’; Zulu momata (from moma, ‘a
motion with the mouth as in mumbling’) ‘to move the mouth or lips,’
mumata ‘to close the lips as with a mouthful of water,’ mumuta,
mumuza ‘to eat mouthfuls of corn, &c., with the lips shut;’ Tahitian
mamu ‘to be silent,’ omumu ‘to murmur;’ Fijian, nomo, nomo-nomo
‘to be silent;’ Chilian, ñomn ‘to be silent;’ Quiché, mem ‘mute,’
whence memer ‘to become mute;’ Quichua, amu ‘dumb, silent,’
amullini ‘to have something in the mouth,’ amul-layacuni simicta ‘to
mutter, to grumble.’ The group represented by Sanskrit t’hût’hû ‘the
sound of spitting,’ Persian thu kerdan (make thu) ‘to spit,’ Greek
πτύω, may be compared with Chinook mamook toh, tooh, (make toh,
tooh); Chilian tuvcùtun (make tuv); Tahitian tutua; Galla twu;
Yoruba tu. Among the Sanskrit verb-roots, none carries its imitative
nature more plainly than kshu ‘to sneeze;’ the following analogous
forms are from South America:—Chilian, echiun; Quichua, achhini; and
from various languages of Brazilian tribes, techa-ai, haitschu,
atchian, natschun, aritischune, &c. Another imitative verb is well
shown in the Negro-English dialect of Surinam, njam ‘to eat’ (pron.
nyam), njam-njam ‘food’ (‘en hem njanjam ben de sprinkhan nanga
boesi-honi’—‘and his meat was locusts and wild honey’). In Australia the
imitative verb ‘to eat’ reappears as g’nam-ang. In Africa the Susu
language has nimnim, ‘to taste,’ and a similar formation is observed
in the Zulu nambita ‘to smack the lips after eating or tasting, and
thence to be tasteful, to be pleasant to the mind.’ This is an excellent
instance of the transition of mere imitative sound to the expression of
mental emotion, and it corresponds with the imitative way in which the
Yakama language, in speaking of little children or pet animals,
expresses the verb ‘to love’ as nem-no-sha (to make n’m-n’). In more
civilized countries these forms are mostly confined to baby-language.
The Chinese child’s word for eating is nam, in English nurseries nim
is noticed as answering the same purpose, and the Swedish dictionary
even recognizes namnam ‘a tid-bit.’

As for imitative names of animals derived from their cries or noises,
they are to be met with in every language from the Australian twonk
‘frog,’ the Yakama rol-rol ‘lark,’ to the Coptic eeiō ‘ass,’ the
Chinese maou ‘cat,’ and the English cuckoo and peewit. Their
general principle of formation being acknowledged, their further
philological interest turns mostly on cases where corresponding words
have thus been formed independently in distant regions, and those where
the imitative name of the creature, or its habitual sound, passes to
express some new idea suggested by its character. The Sanskrit name of
the kâka crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in British
Columbia, the káh-káh; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a
bumberoo, like Sanskrit bambharâli ‘fly,’ Greek βομ-βύλιος, and our
bumble-bee. Analogous to the name of the tse-tse fly, the terror of
African travellers, is ntsintsi, the word for ‘fly’ among the Basutos,
which also, by a simple metaphor, serves to express the idea of ‘a
parasite.’ Mr. H. W. Bates’s description seems to settle the dispute
among naturalists, whether the toucan had its name from its cry or
not. He speaks of its loud, shrill, yelping cries having ‘a vague
resemblance to the syllables tocáno, tocáno, and hence the Indian name
of this genus of birds.’ Granting this, we can trace this sound-word
into a very new meaning; for it appears that the bird’s monstrous bill
has suggested a name for a certain large-nosed tribe of Indians, who are
accordingly called Tucanos.[286] The cock, gallo quiquiriqui, as the
Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of names from
various languages which in various ways imitate his crowing; in Yoruba
he is called koklo, in Ibo okoko, akoka, in Zulu kuku, in
Finnish kukko, in Sanskrit kukkuta, and so on. He is mentioned in
the Zend-Avesta in a very curious way, by a name which elaborately
imitates his cry, but which the ancient Persians seem to have held
disrespectful to their holy bird, who rouses men from sleep to good
thought, word, and work:—

       ‘The bird who bears the name of Parôdars, O holy Zarathustra;
       Upon whom evil-speaking men impose the name Kabrkataç.’[287]

The crowing of the cock (Malay kâluruk, kukuk) serves to mark a
point of time, cockcrow. Other words originally derived from such
imitation of crowing have passed into other curiously transformed
meanings: Old French cocart ‘vain;’ modern French coquet ‘strutting
like a cock, coquetting, a coxcomb;’ cocarde ‘a cockade’ (from
its likeness to a cock’s comb); one of the best instances is
coquelicot, a name given for the same reason to the wild poppy, and
even more distinctly in Languedoc, where cacaracá means both the
crowing and the flower. The hen in some languages has a name
corresponding to that of the cock, as in Kussa kukuduna ‘cock,’
kukukasi ‘hen;’ Ewe koklo-tsu ‘cock,’ koklo-no ‘hen;’ and her
cackle (whence she has in Switzerland the name of gugel, güggel)
has passed into language as a term for idle gossip and chatter of women,
caquet, caqueter, gackern, much as the noise of a very different
creature seems to have given rise not only to its name, Italian
cicala, but to a group of words represented by cicalar ‘to chirp,
chatter, talk sillily.’ The pigeon is a good example of this kind,
both for sound and sense. It is Latin pipio, Italian pippione,
piccione, pigione, modern Greek πιπίνιον, French pipion (old),
pigeon; its derivation is from the young bird’s peep, Latin
pipire, Italian pipiare, pigiolare, modern Greek πιπινίζω, to
chirp; by an easy metaphor, a pigeon comes to mean ‘a silly young
fellow easily caught,’ to pigeon ‘to cheat,’ Italian pipione ‘a
silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,’ pippionare ‘to
pigeon, to gull one.’ In an entirely different family of languages, Mr.
Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of derivation; Magyar
pipegni, pipelni ‘to peep or cheep;’ pipe, pipök ‘a chicken,
gosling;’ pipe-ember (chicken-man), ‘a silly young fellow,
booby.’[288] The derivation of Greek βοῦς, Latin bos, Welsh bu, from
the ox’s lowing, or booing as it is called in the north country, has
been much debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a
general Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit go, old German
chuo, English cow, with these words, on the unusual and forced
assumption of a change from guttural to labial.[289] The direct
derivation from sound, however, is favoured by other languages,
Cochin-Chinese bo, Hottentot bou. The beast may almost answer for
himself in the words of that Spanish proverb which remarks that people
talk according to their nature: ‘Habló el buey, y dijó bu!’ ‘The ox
spoke, and he said boo!’

Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following:—the
shee-shee-quoi, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an
imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian shak-shak, the
shook-shook of the Arawaks, the Chinook shugh (whence
shugh-opoots, rattletail, i.e., ‘rattlesnake;’)—the drum, called
ganga in Haussa, gañgañ in the Yoruba country, gunguma by the
Gallas, and having its analogue in the Eastern gong;—the bell, called
in Yakama (N. Amer.) kwa-lal-kwa-lal, in Yalof (W. Afr.) walwal, in
Russian kolokol. The sound of the horn is imitated in English
nurseries as toot-toot, and this is transferred to express the
‘omnibus’ of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to
be classed the Peruvian name for the ‘shell-trumpet,’ pututu, and the
Gothic thuthaurn (thut-horn), which is even used in the Gothic Bible
for the last trumpet of the day of judgement,—‘In spêdistin thuthaúrna,
thuthaúrneith auk jah daúthans ustandand’ (I Cor. xv. 52). How such
imitative words, when thoroughly taken up into language, suffer change
of pronunciation in which the original sound-meaning is lost, may be
seen in the English word tabor, which we might not recognize as a
sound-word at all, did we not notice that it is French tabour, a word
which in the form tambour obviously belongs to a group of words for
drums, extending from the small rattling Arabic tubl to the Indian
dundhubi and the tombe, the Moqui drum made of a hollowed log. The
same group shows the transfer of such imitative words to objects which
are like the instrument, but have nothing to do with its sound; few
people who talk of tambour-work, and fewer still who speak of a
footstool as a tabouret, associate these words with the sound of a
drum, yet the connexion is clear enough. When these two processes go on
together, and a sound-word changes its original sound on the one hand,
and transfers its meaning to something else on the other, the result may
soon leave philological analysis quite helpless, unless by accident
historical evidence is forthcoming. Thus with the English word pipe.
Putting aside the particular pronunciation which we give the word, and
referring it back to its mediæval Latin or French sound in pipa,
pipe, we have before us an evident imitative name of a musical
instrument, derived from a familiar sound used also to represent the
chirping of chickens, Latin pipire, English to peep, as in the
translation of Isaiah viii. 19: ‘Seek ... unto wizards that peep, and
that mutter.’ The Algonquin Indians appear to have formed from this
sound pib (with a grammatical suffix) their name for the pib-e-gwun
or native flute. Now just as tuba, tubus, ‘a trumpet’ (itself very
likely an imitative word) has given a name for any kind of tube, so
the word pipe has been transferred from the musical instrument to
which it first belonged, and is used to describe tubes of various sorts,
gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in general. There is nothing unusual
in these transitions of meaning, which are in fact rather the rule than
the exception. The chibouk was originally a herdsman’s pipe or flute
in Central Asia. The calumet, popularly ranked with the tomahawk and
the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian words, is only the name for
a shepherd’s pipe (Latin calamus) in the dialect of Normandy,
corresponding with the chalumeau of literary French; for when the
early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange
operation of smoking, ‘with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a
pipe,’ as Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native
tobacco-pipe the name of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now
changes of sound and of sense like this of the English word pipe must
have been in continual operation in hundreds of languages where we have
no evidence to follow them by, and where we probably may never obtain
such evidence. But what little we do know must compel us to do justice
to the imitation of sound as a really existing process, capable of
furnishing an indefinitely large supply of words for things and actions
which have no necessary connexion at all with that sound. Where the
traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of words which
are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less fitted
for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for
recognized ideas.

The claim of the Eastern tomtom to have its name from a mere imitation
of its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what
various languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by
something like tum, tumb, tump, tup, as in Javan tumbuk,
Coptic tmno, ‘to pound in a mortar,’ it becomes evident that the
admission involves more than at first sight appears. In Malay, timpa,
tampa, is ‘to beat out, hammer, forge;’ in the Chinook Jargon
tum-tum is ‘the heart,’ and by combining the same sound with the
English word ‘water,’ a name is made for ‘waterfall,’ tum-wâta. The
Gallas of East Africa declare that a box on the ear seems to them to
make a noise like tub, for they call its sound tubdjeda, that is,
‘to say tub.’ In the same language, tuma is ‘to beat,’ whence
tumtu, ‘a workman, especially one who beats, a smith.’ With the aid of
another imitative word, bufa ‘to blow,’ the Gallas can construct this
wholly imitative sentence, tumtun bufa bufti, ‘the smith blows with
bellows,’ as an English child might say, ‘the tumtum puffs the
puffer.’ This imitative sound seems to have obtained a footing among
the Aryan verb-roots, as in Sanskrit tup, tubh ‘to smite,’ while in
Greek, tup, tump, has the meaning of ‘to beat, to thump,’
producing for instance τύμπανον, tympanum, ‘a drum or tomtom.’
Again, the verb to crack has become in modern English as thorough a
root-word as the language possesses. The mere imitation of the sound of
breaking has passed into a verb to break; we speak of a cracked cup or
a cracked reputation without a thought of imitation of sound; but we
cannot yet use the German krachen or French craquer in this way, for
they have not developed in meaning as our word has, but remain in their
purely imitative stage. There are two corresponding Sanskrit words for
the saw, kra-kara, kra-kacha, that is to say, the ‘kra-maker,
kra-crier;’ and it is to be observed that all such terms, which
expressly state that they are imitations of sound, are particularly
valuable evidence in these enquiries, for whatever doubt there may be as
to other words being really derived from imitative sound, there can, of
course, be none here. Moreover, there is evidence of the same sound
having given rise to imitative words in other families of language,
Dahoman kra-kra, ‘a watchman’s rattle;’ Grebo grikâ ‘a saw;’ Aino
chacha ‘to saw;’ Malay graji ‘a saw,’ karat ‘to gnash the teeth,’
karot ‘to make a grating noise;’ Coptic khrij ‘to gnash the
teeth,’ khrajrej ‘to grate.’ Another form of the imitation is given
in the descriptive Galla expression cacakdjeda, i.e., ‘to say
cacak,’ ‘to crack, krachen.’ With this sound corresponds a whole
family of Peruvian words, of which the root seems to be the guttural
cca, coming from far back in the throat; ccallani, ‘to break,’
ccatatani, ‘to gnash the teeth,’ ccacñiy, ‘thunder,’ and the
expressive words for ‘a thunder-storm,’ ccaccaccahay, which carries
the imitative process so much farther than such European words as
thunder-clap, donner-klapf. In Maori, pata is ‘to patter as
water dropping, drops of rain.’ The Manchu language describes the noise
of fruits falling from the trees as pata pata (so Hindustani
bhadbhad); this is like our word pat, and we should say in the same
manner that the fruit comes pattering down, while French patatra is
a recognized imitation of something falling. Coptic potpt is ‘to
fall,’ and the Australian badbadin (or patpatin) is translated into
almost literal English as pitpatting. On the strength of such
non-Aryan languages, are we to assign an imitative origin to the
Sanskrit verb-root pat, ‘to fall,’ and to Greek πίπτω?

Wishing rather to gain a clear survey of the principles of
language-making than to plunge into obscure problems, it is not
necessary for me to discuss here questions of intricate detail. The
point which continually arises is this,—granted that a particular kind
of transition from sound to sense is possible in the abstract, may it be
safely claimed in a particular case? In looking through the vocabularies
of the world, it appears that most languages offer words which, by
obvious likeliness or by their correspondence with similar forms
elsewhere, may put forward a tolerable claim to be considered imitative.
Some languages, as Aztec or Mohawk, offer singularly few examples, while
in others they are much more numerous. Take Australian cases: walle,
‘to wail;’ bung-bung-ween, ‘thunder;’ wirriti, ‘to blow, as wind;’
wirrirriti, ‘to storm, rage, as in fight;’ wirri, bwirri, ‘the
native throwing club,’ seemingly so called from its whir through the
air; kurarriti, ‘to hum, buzz;’ kurrirrurriri, ‘round about,
unintelligible,’ &c.; pitata, ‘to knock, pelt, as rain,’ pitapitata,
‘to knock;’ wiiti, ‘to laugh, rejoice’—as in our own ‘Turnament of
Tottenham’:—

                    ‘“We te he!” quoth Tyb, and lugh,
                    “Ye er a dughty man!”’

The so-called Chinook Jargon of British Columbia is a language crowded
with imitative words, sometimes adopted from the native Indian
languages, sometimes made on the spot by the combined efforts of the
white man and the Indian to make one another understand. Samples of its
quality are hóh-hoh, ‘to cough,’ kó-ko, ‘to knock,’
kwa-lal-kwa-lal, ‘to gallop,’ muck-a-muck, ‘to eat,’ chak-chak,
‘the bald eagle’ (from its scream), mamook tsish (make tsish), ‘to
sharpen on the grindstone.’ It has been remarked by Prof. Max Müller
that the peculiar sound made in blowing out a candle is not a favourite
in civilized languages, but it seems to be recognized here, for no doubt
it is what the compiler of the vocabulary is doing his best to write
down when he gives mamook poh (make poh) as the Chinook expression
for ‘to blow out or extinguish as a candle.’ This jargon is in great
measure of new growth within the last seventy or eighty years, but its
imitative words do not differ in nature from those of the more ordinary
and old-established languages of the world. Thus among Brazilian tribes
there appear Tupi cororóng, cururuc, ‘to snore’ (compare Coptic
kherkher, Quichua ccorcuni (ccor)), whence it appears that an
imitation of a snore may perhaps serve the Carajás Indians to express
‘to sleep’ as arourou-cré, as well as the related idea of ‘night,’
roou. Again Pimenteira ebaung, ‘to bruise, beat,’ compares with
Yoruba gba, ‘to slap,’ gbã (gbang) ‘to sound loudly, to bang,’ and
so forth. Among African languages, the Zulu seems particularly rich in
imitative words. Thus bibiza, ‘to dribble like children, drivel in
speaking’ (compare English bib); babala, ‘the larger bush-antelope’
(from the baa of the female); boba, ‘to babble, chatter, be
noisy,’ bobi, ‘a babbler;’ boboni, ‘a throstle’ (cries bo! bo!
compare American bobolink); bomboloza, ‘to rumble in the bowels, to
have a bowel-complaint;’ bubula, ‘to buzz like bees,’ bubulela, ‘a
swarm of bees, a buzzing crowd of people;’ bubuluza, ‘to make a
blustering noise, like frothing beer or boiling fat.’ These examples,
from among those given under one initial letter in one dictionary of one
barbaric language, may give an idea of the amount of the evidence from
the languages of the lower races bearing on the present problem.

For the present purpose of giving a brief series of examples of the sort
of words in which imitative sound seems fairly traceable, the strongest
and most manageable evidence is of course found among such words as
directly describe sounds or what produces them, such as cries of and
names for animals, the terms for action accompanied by sound, and the
materials and objects so acted upon. In further investigation it becomes
more and more requisite to isolate the sound-type or root from the
modifications and additions to which it has been subjected for
grammatical and phonetical adaptation. It will serve to give an idea of
the extent and intricacy of this problem, to glance at a group of words
in one European language, and notice the etymological network which
spreads round the German word klapf, in Grimm’s dictionary, klappen,
klippen, klopfen, kläffen, klimpern, klampern, klateren,
kloteren, klitteren, klatzen, klacken, and more, to be matched
with allied forms in other languages. Setting aside the consideration of
grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to notice that
man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to making
direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon
ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make
their sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a
flood of adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those
which are neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but
partly both. How words, while preserving, so to speak, the same
skeleton, may be made to follow the variation of sound, of force, of
duration, of size, an imitative group more or less connected with the
last will show—crick, creak, crack, crash, crush, crunch,
craunch, scrunch, scraunch. It does not at all follow that because
a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be, like
this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound
more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing
grape-shot, the patterero? Yet the etymology of the word appears in
the Spanish form pedrero, French perrier; it means simply an
instrument for throwing stones (piedra, pierre), and it was only
when the Spanish word was adopted in England that the imitative faculty
caught and transformed it into an apparent sound-word, resembling the
verb to patter. The propensity of language, especially in slang, to
make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an
appropriate meaning has been often dwelt upon by philologists, but the
propensity to alter words into something with an appropriate sound has
produced results immensely more important. The effects of symbolic
change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost boundless. The verb
to waddle has a strong imitative appearance, and so in German we can
hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do with the
difference between wandern and wandeln; but all these verbs belong
to a family represented by Sanskrit vad, to go, Latin vado, and to
this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative
origin, the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them.
Thus, again, to stamp with the foot, which has been claimed as an
imitation of sound, seems only a ‘coloured’ word. The root sta, ‘to
stand,’ Sanskrit sthâ, forms a causative stap, Sanskrit sthâpay,
‘to make to stand,’ English to stop, and a foot-step is when the
foot comes to a stand, a foot-stop. But we have Anglo-Saxon stapan,
stæpan, steppan, English to step, varying to express its meaning
by sound in to staup, to stamp, to stump, and to stomp,
contrasting in their violence or clumsy weight with the foot on the
Dorset cottage-sill in Barnes’s poem:—

               ‘Where love do seek the maïden’s evenèn vloor,
               Wi’ stip-step light, an tip-tap slight
                                   Ageän the door.’

By expanding, modifying, or, so to speak, colouring, sound is able to
produce effects closely like those of gesture-language, expressing
length or shortness of time, strength or weakness of action, and then
passing into a further stage to describe greatness or smallness of size
or of distance, and thence making its way into the widest fields of
metaphor. And it does all this with a force which is surprising when we
consider how childishly simple are the means employed. Thus the Bachapin
of Africa call a man with the cry héla! but according as he is far or
farther off the sound of the hêela! hê-ê-la! is lengthened out. Mr.
Macgregor in his ‘Rob Roy on the Jordan,’ graphically describes this
method of expression, ‘“But where is Zalmouda?”... Then with rough
eagerness the strongest of the Dowana faction pushes his long forefinger
forward, pointing straight enough—but whither? and with a volley of
words ends, Ah-ah-a-a-a——a-a. This strange expression had long before
puzzled me when first heard from a shepherd in Bashan.... But the simple
meaning of this long string of “ah’s” shortened, and quickened, and
lowered in tone to the end, is merely that the place pointed to is a
“very great way off.”’ The Chinook Jargon, as usual representing
primitive developments of language, uses a similar device in lengthening
the sound of words to indicate distance. The Siamese can, by varying the
tone-accent, make the syllable non, ‘there,’ express a near,
indefinite, or far distance, and in like manner can modify the meaning
of such a word as ny, ‘little.’ In the Gaboon, the strength with which
such a word as mpolu, ‘great,’ is uttered serves to show whether it is
great, very great, or very very great, and in this way, as Mr. Wilson
remarks in his Mpongwe Grammar, ‘the comparative degrees of greatness,
smallness, hardness, rapidity, and strength, &c., may be conveyed with
more accuracy and precision than could readily be conceived.’ In
Madagascar ratchi means ‘bad,’ but râtchi is ‘very bad.’ The natives
of Australia, according to Oldfield, show the use of this process in
combination with that of symbolic reduplication: among the Watchandie
tribe jir-rie signifies ‘already or past,’ jir-rie jir-rie indicates
‘a long time ago,’ while jie-r-rie jirrie (the first syllable being
dwelt on for some time) signifies ‘an immense time ago.’ Again,
boo-rie is ‘small,’ boo-rie-boo-rie ‘very small,’ and _b-o-rie
boorie_ ‘exceedingly small.’ Wilhelm von Humboldt notices the habit of
the southern Guarani dialect of South America of dwelling more or less
time on the suffix of the perfect tense, yma, y—ma, to indicate the
length or shortness of the distance of time at which the action took
place; and it is curious to observe that a similar contrivance is made
use of among the aboriginal tribes of India, where the Ho language forms
a future tense by adding á to the root, and prolonging its sound,
kajee ‘to speak,’ Amg kajēēá ‘I will speak.’ As might be expected,
the languages of very rude tribes show extremely well how the results of
such primitive processes pass into the recognized stock of language.
Nothing could be better for this than the words by which one of the
rudest of living races, the Botocudos of Brazil, express the sea. They
have a word for a stream, ouatou, and an adjective which means great,
ijipakijiou; thence the two words ‘stream-great,’ a little
strengthened in the vowels, will give the term for a river,
ouatou-ijiipakiiijou, as it were, ‘stream-grea-at,’ and this,
to express the immensity of the ocean, is amplified into
ouatou-iijipakiijou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou. Another tribe of the same family
works out the same result more simply; the word ouatou, ‘stream,’
becomes ouatou-ou-ou-ou, ‘the sea.’ The Chavantes very naturally
stretch the expression rom-o-wodi, ‘I go a long way,’ into
rom-o-o-o-o-wodi, ‘I go a very long way indeed,’ and when they are
called upon to count beyond five they say it is ka-o-o-oki, by which
they evidently mean it is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one
vocabulary are described as saying lawauugabi for four, and drawling
out the same word for five, as if to say ‘a long four,’ in somewhat the
same way as the Aponegicrans, whose word for six is itawuna, can
expand this into a word for seven, itawuūna, obviously thus meaning a
‘long six.’ In their earlier and simpler stages nothing can be more easy
to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial modifications of words.
It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics and capitals,
ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every child can
see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning and
school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their
imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try
to follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to
trace and appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The
language of the Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words
which is far from clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have
a way of making a kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the n
in a word to l; thus twinwt means ‘tailless,’ but to indicate
particular smallness, or to express contempt, they make this into
twilwt, pronounced with an appropriate change of tone; and again,
wana means ‘river,’ but this is made into a diminutive wala by
‘changing n into l, giving the voice a different tone, putting the
lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the jaw.’ Here
we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at least
how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is
less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an
affirmative into a negative verb by ‘an intonation upon, or prolongation
of the radical vowel,’ tŏnda, to love, tŏnda, not to love; tŏndo,
to be loved, tŏndo, not to be loved. So Yoruba, bába, ‘a great
thing,’ bàba, ‘a small thing,’ contrasted in a proverb, ‘Baba bo,
baba molle’—‘A great matter puts a smaller out of sight.’ Language is,
in fact, full of phonetic modifications which justify a suspicion that
symbolic sound had to do with their production, though it may be hard to
say exactly how.

Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or
modified, which produces such forms as murmur, pitpat,
helterskelter. This action, though much restricted in literary
dialects, has such immense scope in the talk of children and savages
that Professor Pott’s treatise on it[290] has become incidentally one of
the most valuable collections of facts ever made with relation to early
stages of language. Now up to a certain point any child can see how and
why such doubling is done, and how it always adds something to the
original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise intensify words, as
in Polynesia loa ‘long,’ lololoa ‘very long’; Mandingo ding ‘a
child,’ dingding ‘a very little child.’ It makes plurals, as Malay
raja-raja ‘princes,’ orang-orang ‘people.’ It adds numerals, as
Mosquito walwal ‘four’ (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic _ouai
ouai_ ‘singly’ (one-one). These are cases where the motive of doubling
is comparatively easy to make out. As an example of cases much more
difficult to comprehend may be taken the familiar reduplication of the
perfect tense, Greek γέγραφα from γράφω, Latin momordi from mordeo,
Gothic haihald from haldan, ‘to hold.’ Reduplication is habitually
used in imitative words to intensify them, and still more, to show that
the sound is repeated or continuous. From the immense mass of such words
we may take as instances the Botocudo hou-hou-hou-gitcha ‘to suck’
(compare Tongan hūhū ‘breast’), kiaku-käck-käck, ‘a butterfly’;
Quichua chiuiuiuiñichi ‘wind whistling in the trees’; Maori haruru
‘noise of wind’; hohoro ‘hurry’; Dayak kakakkaka ‘to go on laughing
loud’; Aino shiriushiriukanni ‘a rasp’; Tamil murumuru ‘to
murmur’; Akra ewiewiewiewie ‘he spoke repeatedly and continually’;
and so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world.

The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a
graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological
interest, from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the
language-makers in most distant regions of the world, working out in
various ways a similar ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A
typical series is the Javan: iki ‘this’ (close by) ika ‘that’ (at
some distance); iku ‘that’ (farther off). It is not likely that the
following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases in the
languages of the world, for about half the number have been incidentally
noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely in the
course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races.[291]

    Javan ... iki, this; ika, that (intermediate); iku, that.

    Malagasy ... ao, there (at a short distance); eo, there (at a
    shorter distance); io, there (close at hand). atsy, there (not
    far off); etsy, there (nearer); itsy, this or these.

    Japanese ... ko, here; ka, there. korera, these; karera,
    they (those).

    Canarese ... ivanu, this; uvanu, that (intermediate); avanu,
    that.

    Tamul ... î, this; â, that.

    Rajmahali ... îh, this; âh, that.

    Dhimal ... isho, ita, here; usho, uta, there. iti,
    idong, this; uti, udong, that (of things and persons
    respectively).

    Abchasian ... abri, this; ubri, that.

    Ossetic ... am, here; um, there.

    Magyar ... ez, this; az, that.

    Zulu ... apa, here; apo, there. lesi, leso, lesiya; abu,
    abo, abuya; &c. = this, that, that (in the distance).

    Yoruba ... na, this; ni, that.

    Fernandian ... olo, this; ole, that.

    Tumale ... re, this; ri, that. ngi, I; ngo, thou; ngu, he.

    Greenlandish ... uv, here, there (where one points to); iv,
    there, up there.

    Sujelpa (Coleville Ind.) ... aa, this; ii, that.

    Sahaptin ... kina, here; kuna, there.

    Mutsun ... ne, here; nu, there.

    Tarahumara ... ibe, here; abe, there.

    Guarani ... nde, ne, thou; ndi, ni, he.

    Botocudo ... ati, I; oti, thou, you, (prep.) to.

    Carib ... ne, thou; ni, he.

    Chilian ... tva, vachi, this; tvey, veychi, that.

It is obvious on inspection of this list of pronouns and adverbs that
they have in some way come to have their vowels contrasted to match the
contrast of here and there, this and that. Accident may sometimes
account for such cases. For instance it is well known to philologists
that our own this and that are pronouns partly distinct in their
formation, thi-s being probably two pronouns run together, but yet the
Dutch neuters dit ‘this,’ and dat ‘that,’ have taken the appearance
of a single form with contrasted vowels.[292] But accident cannot
account for the frequency of such words in pairs, and even in sets of
three, in so many different languages. There must have been some common
intention at work, and there is evidence that some of these languages do
resort to a change of sound as a means of expressing change of distance.
Thus the language of Fernando Po can not only express ‘this’ and ‘that’
by olo, ole, but it can even make a change of the pronunciation of
the vowel distinguish between o boehe ‘this month,’ and oh boehe,
‘that month.’ In the same way the Grebo can make the difference between
‘I’ and ‘thou,’ ‘we,’ and ‘you,’ ‘solely by the intonation of the voice,
which the final h of the second persons mâh and ăh is intended to
express.’

                   mâ di, I eat; mâh di, thou eatest;
                   ă di, we eat; ăh di, ye eat.

The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of
near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use
shows how thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus
not only say nansi, ‘here is,’ nanso, ‘there is,’ nansiya, ‘there
is in the distance,’ but they even express the greatness of this
distance by the emphasis and prolongation of the ya. If we could
discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a corresponding
gradation of distance throughout our list, the whole matter would be
easier to explain; but it is not so, the i-words for instance, are
sometimes nearer and sometimes farther off than the a-words. We can
only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a
most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in use in
the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this
simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call
contrasted or ‘differential’ words.

How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to
distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max
Müller’s: ‘The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such
a manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to
the more or less obscure sound of vowels. Ukko, in Finnic, is an old
man; akka, an old woman.... In Mandshu chacha is mas. ... cheche,
femina. Again, ama, in Mandshu, is father; eme, mother; amcha,
father-in-law, emche, mother-in-law.’[293] The Coretú language of
Brazil has another curiously contrasted pair of words tsáackö,
‘father,’ tsaacko ‘mother,’ while the Carib has baba for father, and
bibi for mother, and the Ibu of Africa has nna for father and nne
for mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from the female
by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the process of
formation which can be traced among such words as those for father and
mother. Their consideration leads into a very interesting philological
region, that of ‘Children’s language.’

If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand for ‘father’ and
‘mother’ in very different and distant languages—papa and mama;
Welsh, tad (dad) and mam; Hungarian, atya and anya; Mandingo,
fa and ba; Lummi (N. America), man and tan; Catoquina (S.
America), payú and nayú; Watchandie (Australia), amo and
ago—their contrast seems to lie in their consonants, while many other
pairs differ totally, like Hebrew ab and im; Kuki, p’ha and noo;
Kayan, amay and inei; Tarahumara, nono and jeje. Words of the
class of papa and mama, occurring in remote parts of the world, were
once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the languages in
which they were found alike. But Professor Buschmann’s paper on
‘Nature-Sound,’ published in 1853,[294] effectually overthrew this
argument, and settled the view that such coincidence might arise again
and again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue
that Carib and English were allied because the word papa, ‘father,’
belongs to both, or Hottentot and English because both use mama for
‘mother,’ seeing that these childish articulations may be used in just
the opposite way, for the Chilian word for mother is papa, and the
Tlatskanai for father is mama. Yet the choice of easy little words for
‘father’ and ‘mother’ does not seem to have been quite indiscriminate.
The immense list of such words collected by Buschmann shows that the
types pa and ta, with the similar forms ap and at, preponderate
in the world as names for ‘father,’ while ma and na, am and an,
preponderate as names for ‘mother.’ His explanation of this state of
things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the
father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but
it must not be pushed too far. It cannot be, for instance, the same
principle of symbolism which leads the Welshmen to say tad for
‘father’ and mam for ‘mother,’ and the Indian of British Columbia to
say maan, ‘father’ and taan, ‘mother,’ or the Georgian to say mama
‘father’ and deda ‘mother.’ Yet I have not succeeded in finding
anywhere our familiar papa and mama exactly reversed in one and the
same language; the nearest approach to it that I can give is from the
island of Meang, where mama meant ‘father, man,’ and babi, ‘mother,
woman.’[295]

Between the nursery words papa and mama and the more formal father
and mother there is an obvious resemblance in sound. What, then, is
the origin of these words father and mother? Up to a certain point
their history is clear. They belong to the same group of organized words
with vater and mutter, pater and mater, πατήρ and μήτηρ, pitar
and mâtar, and other similar forms through the Indo-European family of
languages. There is no doubt that all these pairs of names are derived
from an ancient and common Aryan source, and when they are traced back
as far as possible towards that source, they appear to have sprung from
a pair of words which may be roughly called patar and matar, and
which were formed by adding tar, the suffix of the actor, to the
verb-roots pa and ma. There being two appropriate Sanskrit verbs
pâ and mâ, it is possible to etymologize the two words as patar,
‘protector,’ and matar, ‘producer.’ Now this pair of Aryan words must
have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from
which forms parallel to our English father and mother passed into
Greek and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type through
the eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these
words are, they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of
the children’s language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans
did without baby-words for father and mother until they had an organized
system of adding suffixes to verb-roots to express such notions as
‘protector’ or ‘producer.’ Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere
accident that the root-words thus chosen happened to be the very sounds
pa and ma, whose types so often occur in the remotest parts of the
world as names for ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ Prof. Adolphe Pictet makes
shift to account for the coincidence thus: he postulates first the pair
of forms pâ and mâ as Aryan verb-roots of unknown origin, meaning
‘to protect’ and ‘to create,’ next another pair of forms pa and ma,
children’s words commonly used to denote father and mother, and lastly
he combines the two by supposing that the root-verbs pâ and mâ were
chosen to form the Indo-European words for parents, because of their
resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in use. This circuitous
process at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables, the Sanskrit
verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those who
remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in
one particular language of the world at one particular period of its
development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly.
It is a fair guess that the ubiquitous pa and ma of the children’s
language were the original forms; that they were used in an early period
of Aryan speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our
modern English, which so often reproduces the most rudimentary
linguistic processes, can form from the noun ‘father’ a verb ‘to
father;’ and that lastly they became verb-roots, whence the words
patar and matar were formed by the addition of the suffix.[296]

The baby-names for parents must not be studied as though they stood
alone in language. They are only important members of a great class of
words, belonging to all times and countries within our experience, and
forming a children’s language, whose common character is due to its
concerning itself with the limited set of ideas in which little children
are interested, and expressing these ideas by the limited set of
articulations suited to the child’s first attempts to talk. This
peculiar language is marked quite characteristically among the low
savage tribes of Australia; mamman ‘father,’ ngangan ‘mother,’ and
by metaphor ‘thumb,’ ‘great toe’ (as is more fully explained in
jinnamamman ‘great toe,’ i.e. foot’s father), tammin ‘grandfather or
grandmother,’ bab-ba ‘bad, foolish, childish,’ bee-bee, beep
‘breast,’ pappi ‘father,’ pappa ‘young one, pup, whelp,’ (whence
is grammatically formed the verb papparniti ‘to become a young one, to
be born.’) Or if we look for examples from India, it does not matter
whether we take them from non-Hindu or Hindu languages, for in
baby-language all races are on one footing. Thus Tamil appâ ‘father,’
ammâ ‘mother,’ Bodo aphâ ‘father,’ âyâ ‘mother;’ the Kocch group
nânâ and nâni ‘paternal grandfather and grandmother,’ mâmâ
‘uncle,’ dâdâ ‘cousin,’ may be set beside Sanskrit tata ‘father,’
nanâ ‘mother,’ and the Hindustani words of the same class, of which
some are familiar to the English ear by being naturalized in
Anglo-Indian talk, bâbâ ‘father,’ bâbû ‘child, prince, Mr.,’ bîbî
‘lady,’ dadâ ‘nurse’ (âyâ ‘nurse’ seems borrowed from Portuguese).
Such words are continually coming fresh into existence everywhere, and
the law of natural selection determines their fate. The great mass of
the nana’s and dada’s of the nursery die out almost as soon as made.
Some few take more root and spread over large districts as accepted
nursery words, and now and then a curious philologist makes a collection
of them. Of such, many are obvious mutilations of longer words, as
French faire dodo ‘to sleep’ (dormir), Brandenburg wiwi, a common
cradle lullaby (wiegen). Others, whatever their origin, fall, in
consequence of the small variety of articulations out of which they must
be chosen, into a curiously indiscriminate and unmeaning mass, as Swiss
bobo ‘a scratch;’ bambam ‘all gone;’ Italian bobò ‘something to
drink,’ gogo ‘little boy,’ for dede ‘to play.’ These are words
quoted by Pott, and for English examples nana ‘nurse,’ tata!
‘good-bye!’ may serve. But all baby-words, as this very name proves,
do not stop short even at this stage of publicity. A small proportion of
them establish themselves in the ordinary talk of grown-up men and
women, and when they have once made good their place as constituents of
general language, they may pass on by inheritance from age to age. Such
examples as have been here quoted of nursery words give a clue to the
origin of a mass of names in the most diverse languages, for father,
mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll, &c. The negro of
Fernando Po who uses the word bubboh for ‘a little boy,’ is on equal
terms with the German who uses bube; the Congo-man who uses tata for
‘father’ would understand how the same word could be used in classic
Latin for ‘father,’ and in mediæval Latin for ‘pedagogue;’ the Carib and
the Caroline Islander agree with the Englishman that papa is a
suitable word to express ‘father,’ and then it only remains to carry on
the word, and make the baby-language name the priests of the Eastern
Church and the great Papa of the Western. At the same time the
evidence explains the indifference with which, out of the small stock of
available materials, the same sound does duty for the most different
ideas; why mama means here ‘mother,’ there ‘father,’ there ‘uncle,’
maman here ‘mother,’ there ‘father-in-law,’ dada here ‘father,’
there ‘nurse,’ there ‘breast,’ tata here ‘father,’ there ‘son.’ A
single group of words may serve to show the character of this peculiar
region of language: Blackfoot Indian ninnah ‘father;’ Greek νέννος
‘uncle,’ νέννα ‘aunt;’ Zulu nina, Sangir nina, Malagasy nini
‘mother;’ Javan nini ‘grandfather or grandmother;’ Vayu nini
‘paternal aunt;’ Darien Indian ninah ‘daughter;’ Spanish niño,
niña ‘child;’ Italian ninna ‘little girl;’ Milanese ninin ‘bed;’
Italian ninnare ‘to rock the cradle.’

In this way a dozen easy child’s articulations, ba’s and na’s,
ti’s and de’s, pa’s and ma’s, serve almost as indiscriminately
to express a dozen child’s ideas as though they had been shaken in a bag
and pulled out at random to express the notion that came first, doll or
uncle, nurse or grandfather. It is obvious that among words cramped to
such scanty choice of articulate sounds, speculations as to derivation
must be more than usually unsafe. Looked at from this point of view,
children’s language may give a valuable lesson to the philologist. He
has before him a kind of language, formed, under peculiar conditions,
and showing the weak points of his method of philological research, only
exaggerated into extraordinary distinctness. In ordinary language, the
difficulty of connecting sound with sense lies in great measure in the
inability of a small and rigid set of articulations to express an
interminable variety of tones and noises. In children’s language, a
still more scanty set of articulations fails yet more to render these
distinctly. The difficulty of finding the derivation of words lies in
great measure in the use of more or less similar root-sounds for most
heterogeneous purposes. To assume that two words of different meanings,
just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common
origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology.
But in children’s language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down.
Few would venture to assert, for instance, that papa and pap have a
common derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of
connexion between them is that they are words related by common
acceptance in the nursery language. As such, they are well marked in
ancient Rome as in modern England: papas ‘nutricius, nutritor,’
pappus ‘senex;’ ‘cum cibum et potum buas ac papas dicunt, et
matrem mammam, patrem tatam (or papam).’[297]

From children’s language, moreover, we have striking proof of the power
of consensus of society, in establishing words in settled use without
their carrying traces of inherent expressiveness. It is true that
children are intimately acquainted with the use of emotional and
imitative sound, and their vocal intercourse largely consists of such
expression. The effects of this are in some degree discernible in the
class of words we are considering. But it is obvious that the leading
principle of their formation is not to adopt words distinguished by the
expressive character of their sound, but to choose somehow a fixed word
to answer a given purpose. To do this, different languages have chosen
similar articulations to express the most diverse and opposite ideas.
Now in the language of grown-up people, it is clear that social
consensus has worked in the same way. Even if the extreme supposition be
granted, that the ultimate origin of every word of language lies in
inherently expressive sound, this only partly affects the case, for it
would have to be admitted that, in actual languages, most words have so
far departed in sound or sense from this originally expressive stage,
that to all intents and purposes they might at first have been
arbitrarily chosen. The main principle of language has been, not to
preserve traces of original sound-signification for the benefit of
future etymologists, but to fix elements of language to serve as
counters for practical reckoning of ideas. In this process much original
expressiveness has no doubt disappeared beyond all hope of recovery.

Such are some of the ways in which vocal sounds seem to have commended
themselves to the mind of the word-maker as fit to express his meaning,
and to have been used accordingly. I do not think that the evidence here
adduced justifies the setting-up of what is called the Interjectional
and Imitative Theory as a complete solution of the problem of original
language. Valid as this theory proves itself within limits, it would be
incautious to accept a hypothesis which can perhaps satisfactorily
account for a twentieth of the crude forms in any language, as a certain
and absolute explanation of the nineteen-twentieths whose origin remains
doubtful. A key must unlock more doors than this, to be taken as the
master-key. Moreover, some special points which have come under
consideration in these chapters tend to show the positive necessity of
such caution in theorizing. Too narrow a theory of the application of
sound to sense may fail to include the varied devices which the
languages of different regions turn to account. It is thus with the
distinction in meaning of a word by its musical accent, and the
distinction of distance by graduated vowels. These are ingenious and
intelligible contrivances, but they hardly seem directly emotional or
imitative in origin. A safer way of putting the theory of a natural
origin of language is to postulate the original utterance of ideas in
what may be called self-expressive sounds, without defining closely
whether their expression lay in emotional tone, imitative noise,
contrast of accent or vowel or consonant, or other phonetic quality.
Even here, exception of unknown and perhaps enormous extent must be made
for sounds chosen by individuals to express some notion, from motives
which even their own minds failed to discern, but which sounds
nevertheless made good their footing in the language of the family, the
tribe, and the nation. There may be many modes even of recognizable
phonetic expression, unknown to us as yet. So far, however, as I have
been able to trace them here, such modes have in common a claim to
belong not exclusively to the scheme of this or that particular dialect,
but to wide-ranging principles of formation of language. Their examples
are to be drawn with equal cogency from Sanskrit or Hebrew, from the
nursery-language of Lombardy, or the half-Indian, half-European jargon
of Vancouver’s Island; and wherever they are found, they help to furnish
groups of sound-words—words which have not lost the traces of their
first expressive origin, but still carry their direct significance
plainly stamped upon them. In fact, the time has now come for a
substantial basis to be laid for Generative Philology. A classified
collection of words with any strong claim to be self-expressive should
be brought together out of the thousand or so of recognized languages
and dialects of the world. In such a Dictionary of Sound-Words, half the
cases cited might very likely be worthless, but the collection would
afford the practical means of expurgating itself; for it would show on a
large scale what particular sounds have manifested their fitness to
convey particular ideas, by having been repeatedly chosen among
different races to convey them.

Attempts to explain as far as may be the primary formation of speech, by
tracing out in detail such processes as have been here described, are
likely to increase our knowledge by sure and steady steps wherever
imagination does not get the better of sober comparison of facts. But
there is one side of this problem of the Origin of Language on which
such studies have by no means an encouraging effect. Much of the popular
interest in such matters is centred in the question, whether the known
languages of the world have their source in one or many primæval
tongues. On this subject the opinions of the philologists who have
compared the greatest number of languages are utterly at variance, nor
has any one brought forward a body of philological evidence strong and
direct enough to make anything beyond mere vague opinion justifiable.
Now such processes as the growth of imitative or symbolic words form a
part, be it small or large, of the Origin of Language, but they are by
no means restricted to any particular place or period, and are indeed
more or less in activity now. Their operation on any two dialects of one
language will be to introduce in each a number of new and independent
words, and words even suspected of having been formed in this direct way
become valueless as proof of genealogical connexion between the
languages in which they are found. The test of such genealogical
connexion must, in fact, be generally narrowed to such words or
grammatical forms as have become so far conventional in sound and sense,
that we cannot suppose two tribes to have arrived at them independently,
and therefore consider that both must have inherited them from a common
source. Thus the introduction of new sound-words tends to make it
practically of less and less consequence to a language what its original
stock of words at starting may have been; and the philologist’s
extension of his knowledge of such direct formations must compel him to
strip off more and more of any language, as being possibly of later
growth, before he can set himself to argue upon such a residuum as may
have come by direct inheritance from times of primæval speech.

In concluding this survey, some general considerations suggest
themselves as to the nature and first beginnings of language. In
studying the means of expression among men in stages of mental culture
far below our own, one of our first needs is to clear our minds of the
kind of superstitious veneration with which articulate speech has so
commonly been treated, as though it were not merely the principal but
the sole means of uttering thought. We must cease to measure the
historical importance of emotional exclamations, of gesture-signs, and
of picture-writing, by their comparative insignificance in modern
civilized life, but must bring ourselves to associate the articulate
words of the dictionary in one group with cries and gestures and
pictures, as being all of them means of manifesting outwardly the inward
workings of the mind. Such an admission, it must be observed, is far
from being a mere detail of scientific classification. It has really a
most important bearing on the problem of the Origin of Language. For as
the reasons are mostly dark to us, why particular words are currently
used to express particular ideas, language has come to be looked upon as
a mystery, and either occult philosophical causes have been called in to
explain its phenomena, or else the endowment of man with the faculties
of thought and utterance has been deemed insufficient, and a special
revelation has been demanded to put into his mouth the vocabulary of a
particular language. In the debate which has been carried on for ages
over this much-vexed problem, the saying in the ‘Kratylos’ comes back to
our minds again and again, where Sokrates describes the etymologists who
release themselves from their difficulties as to the origin of words by
saying that the first words were divinely made, and therefore right,
just as the tragedians, when they are in perplexity, fly to their
machinery and bring in the gods.[298] Now I think that those who soberly
contemplate the operation of cries, groans, laughs, and other emotional
utterances, as to which some considerations have been here brought
forward, will admit that, at least, our present crude understanding of
this kind of expression would lead us to class it among the natural
actions of man’s body and mind. Certainly, no one who understands
anything of the gesture-language or of picture-writing would be
justified in regarding either as due to occult causes, or to any
supernatural interference with the course of man’s intellectual
development. Their cause evidently lies in natural operations of the
human mind, not such as were effective in some long-past condition of
humanity and have since disappeared, but in processes existing amongst
us, which we can understand and even practise for ourselves. When we
study the pictures and gestures with which savages and the deaf-and-dumb
express their minds, we can mostly see at a glance the direct relation
between the outward sign and the inward thought which it makes manifest.
We may see the idea of ‘sleep’ shown in gesture by the head with shut
eyes, leant heavily against the open hand; or the idea of ‘running’ by
the attitude of the runner, with chest forward, mouth half open, elbows
and shoulders well back; or ‘candle’ by the straight forefinger held up,
and as it were blown out; or ‘salt’ by the imitated act of sprinkling it
with thumb and finger. The figures of the child’s picture-book, the
sleeper and the runner, the candle and the salt-cellar, show their
purport by the same sort of evident relation between thought and sign.
We so far understand the nature of these modes of utterance, that we are
ready ourselves to express thought after thought by such means, so that
those who see our signs shall perceive our meaning.

When, however, encouraged by our ready success in making out the nature
and action of these ruder methods, we turn to the higher art of speech,
and ask how such and such words have come to express such and such
thoughts, we find ourselves face to face with an immense problem, as yet
but in small part solved. The success of investigation has indeed been
enough to encourage us to push vigorously forward in the research, but
the present explorations have not extended beyond corners and patches of
an elsewhere unknown field. Still the results go far to warrant us in
associating expression by gestures and pictures with articulate language
as to principles of original formation, much as men associate them in
actual life by using gesture and word at once. Of course, articulate
speech, in its far more complex and elaborate development, has taken up
devices to which the more simple and rude means of communication offer
nothing comparable. Still, language, so far as its constitution is
understood, seems to have been developed like writing or music, like
hunting or fire-making, by the exercise of purely human faculties in
purely human ways. This state of things by no means belongs exclusively
to rudimentary philological operations, such as the choosing expressive
sounds to name corresponding ideas by. In the higher departments of
speech, where words already existing are turned to account to express
new meanings and shade off new distinctions, we find these ends attained
by contrivances ranging from extreme dexterity down to utter clumsiness.
For a single instance, one great means of giving new meaning to old
sound is metaphor, which transfers ideas from hearing to seeing, from
touching to thinking, from the concrete of one kind to the abstract of
another, and can thus make almost anything in the world help to describe
or suggest anything else. What the German philosopher described as the
relation of a cow to a comet, that both have tails, is enough and more
than enough for the language-maker. It struck the Australians, when they
saw a European book, that it opened and shut like a mussel-shell, and
they began accordingly to call books ‘mussels’ (mūyūm). The sight of a
steam engine may suggest a whole group of such transitions in our own
language; the steam passes along ‘fifes’ or ‘trumpets,’ that is, pipes
or tubes, and enters by ‘folding-doors’ or valves, to push a
‘pestle’ or piston up and down in a ‘roller’ or cylinder, while the
light pours from the furnace in ‘staves’ or ‘poles,’ that is, in rays
or beams. The dictionaries are full of cases compared with which such
as these are plain and straightforward. Indeed, the processes by which
words have really come into existence may often enough remind us of the
game of ‘What is my thought like?’ When one knows the answer, it is easy
enough to see what junketting and cathedral canons have to do with
reeds; Latin juncus ‘a reed,’ Low Latin juncata, ‘cheese made in a
reed-basket,’ Italian giuncata ‘cream cheese in a rush frail,’ French
joncade and English junket, which are preparations of cream, and
lastly junketting parties where such delicacies are eaten; Greek
κάννη, ‘reed, cane,’ κανῶν, ‘measure, rule,’ thence canonicus, ‘a
clerk under the ecclesiastical rule or canon.’ But who could guess the
history of these words, who did not happen to know these intermediate
links?

Yet there is about this process of derivation a thoroughly human
artificial character. When we know the whole facts of any case, we can
generally understand it at once, and see that we might have done the
same ourselves had it come in our way. And the same thing is true of the
processes of making sound-words detailed in these chapters. Such a view
is, however, in no way inconsistent with the attempt to generalize upon
these processes, and to state them as phases of the development of
language among mankind. If certain men under certain circumstances
produce certain results, then we may at least expect that other men much
resembling these and placed under roughly similar circumstances will
produce more or less like results; and this has been shown over and over
again in these pages to be what really happens. Now Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s view that language is an ‘organism’ has been considered a
great step in philological speculation; and so far as it has led
students to turn their minds to the search after general laws, no doubt
it has been so. But it has also caused an increase of vague thinking and
talking, and thereby no small darkening of counsel. Had it been meant to
say that human thought, language, and action generally, are organic in
their nature, and work under fixed laws, this would be a very different
matter; but this is distinctly not what is meant, and the very object of
calling language an organism is to keep it apart from mere human arts
and contrivances. It was a hateful thing to Humboldt’s mind to ‘bring
down speech to a mere operation of the understanding.’ ‘Man,’ he says,
‘does not so much form language, as discern with a kind of joyous wonder
its developments, coming forth as of themselves.’ Yet, if the practical
shifts by which words are shaped or applied to fit new meanings are not
devised by an operation of the understanding, we ought consistently to
carry the stratagems of the soldier in the field, or the contrivances of
the workman at his bench, back into the dark regions of instinct and
involuntary action. That the actions of individual men combine to
produce results which may be set down in those general statements of
fact which we call laws, may be stated once again as one of the main
propositions of the Science of Culture. But the nature of a fact is not
altered by its being classed in common with others of the same kind, and
a man is not less the intelligent inventor of a new word or a new
metaphor, because twenty other intelligent inventors elsewhere may have
fallen on a similar expedient.

The theory that the original forms of language are to be referred to a
low or savage condition of culture among the remotely ancient human
race, stands in general consistency with the known facts of philology.
The causes which have produced language, so far as they are understood,
are notable for that childlike simplicity of operation which befits the
infancy of human civilization. The ways in which sounds are in the first
instance chosen and arranged to express ideas, are practical expedients
at the level of nursery philosophy. A child of five years old could
catch the meaning of imitative sounds, interjectional words, symbolism
of sex or distance by contrast of vowels. Just as no one is likely to
enter into the real nature of mythology who has not the keenest
appreciation of nursery tales, so the spirit in which we guess riddles
and play at children’s games is needed to appreciate the lower phases of
language. Such a state of things agrees with the opinion that such
rudimentary speech had its origin among men while in a childlike
intellectual condition, and thus the self-expressive branch of savage
language affords valuable materials for the problem of primitive speech.
If we look back in imagination to an early period of human intercourse,
where gesture and self-expressive utterance may have had a far greater
comparative importance than among ourselves, such a conception
introduces no new element into the problem, for a state of things more
or less answering to this is described among certain low savage tribes.
If we turn from such self-expressive utterance, to that part of
articulate language which carries its sense only by traditional and
seemingly arbitrary custom, we shall find no contradiction to the
hypothesis. Sound carrying direct meaning may be taken up as an element
of language, keeping its first significance recognizable to nations yet
unborn. But it may far more probably become by wear of sound and shift
of sense an expressionless symbol, such as might have been chosen in
pure arbitrariness—a philological process to which the vocabularies of
savage dialects bear full witness. In the course of the development of
language, such traditional words with merely an inherited meaning have
in no small measure driven into the background the self-expressive
words, just as the Eastern figures 2, 3, 4, which are not
self-expressive, have driven into the background the Roman numerals II,
III, IIII, which are—this, again, is an operation which has its place in
savage as in cultivated speech. Moreover, to look closely at language as
a practical means of expressing thought, is to face evidence of no
slight bearing on the history of civilization. We come back to the fact,
so full of suggestion, that the languages of the world represent
substantially the same intellectual art, the higher nations indeed
gaining more expressive power than the lowest tribes, yet doing this not
by introducing new and more effective central principles, but by mere
addition and improvement in detail. The two great methods of naming
thoughts and stating their relation to one another, viz., metaphor and
syntax, belong to the infancy of human expression, and are as thoroughly
at home in the language of savages as of philosophers. If it be argued
that this similarity in principles of language is due to savage tribes
having descended from higher culture, carrying down with them in their
speech the relics of their former excellence, the answer is that
linguistic expedients are actually worked out with as much originality,
and more extensively if not more profitably, among savages than among
cultured men. Take for example the Algonquin system of compounding
words, and the vast Esquimaux scheme of grammatical inflexion. Language
belongs in essential principle both to low grades and high of
civilization; to which should its origin be attributed? An answer may be
had by comparing the methods of language with the work it has to do.
Take language all in all over the world, it is obvious that the
processes by which words are made and adapted have far less to do with
systematic arrangement and scientific classification, than with mere
rough and ready ingenuity and the great rule of thumb. Let any one whose
vocation it is to realize philosophical or scientific conceptions and to
express them in words, ask himself whether ordinary language is an
instrument planned for such purposes. Of course it is not. It is hard to
say which is the more striking, the want of scientific system in the
expression of thought by words, or the infinite cleverness of detail by
which this imperfection is got over, so that he who has an idea does
somehow make shift to get it clearly in words before his own and other
minds. The language by which a nation with highly developed art and
knowledge and sentiment must express its thoughts on these subjects, is
no apt machine devised for such special work, but an old barbaric engine
added to and altered, patched and tinkered into some sort of capability.
Ethnography reasonably accounts at once for the immense power and the
manifest weakness of language as a means of expressing modern educated
thought, by treating it as an original product of low culture, gradually
adapted by ages of evolution and selection, to answer more or less
sufficiently the requirements of modern civilization.

Footnote 283:

  Mpongwe punjina; Basuto foka; Carib phoubäe; Arawac appüdün
  (ignem sufflare). Other cases are given by Wedgwood, ‘Or. of Lang.’ p.
  83.

Footnote 284:

  See Wedgwood, ‘Dic.’ Introd. p. viii.

Footnote 285:

  See Wedgwood, Dic., s.v. ‘mum,’ &c.

Footnote 286:

  Bates, ‘Naturalist on the Amazons,’ 2nd ed., p. 404; Markham in ‘Tr.
  Eth. Soc.,’ vol. iii. p. 143.

Footnote 287:

  ‘Avesta,’ Farg. xviii. 34-5.

Footnote 288:

  Wedgwood, Dic., s.v. ‘pigeon;’ Diez, ‘Etym. Wörterb.,’ s.v.
  ‘piccione.’

Footnote 289:

  Bopp, ‘Gloss. Sanscr.,’ s.v. ‘go.’ See Pott, ‘Wurzel-Wörterb. der
  Indo-Germ. Spr.,’ s.v. ‘gu,’ ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 227.

Footnote 290:

  Pott, ‘Doppelung (Reduplication, Gemination) als eines der wichtigsten
  Bildungsmittel der Sprache,’ 1862. Frequent use has been here made of
  this work.

Footnote 291:

  For authorities see especially Pott, ‘Doppelung,’ p. 30, 47-49; W. v.
  Humboldt, ‘Kawi-Spr.’ vol. ii. p. 36; Max Müller in Bunsen, ‘Philos.
  of Univ. Hist.’ vol. i. p. 329; Latham, ‘Comp. Phil.’ p. 200; and the
  grammars and dictionaries of the particular languages. The Guarani and
  Carib on authority of D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 268;
  Dhimal of Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 69, 79, 115; Colville Ind. of
  Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 331; Botocudo of Martius,
  ‘Gloss. Brasil.’

Footnote 292:

  Also Old High German diz and daz.

Footnote 293:

  Max Müller, l.c.

Footnote 294:

  J. C. E. Buschmann, ‘Ueber den Naturlaut,’ Berlin, 1853; and in ‘Abh.
  der K. Akad. d. Wissensch,’ 1852. An English trans. in ‘Proc.
  Philological Society,’ vol. vi. See De Brosses, ‘Form. des L.,’ vol.
  i. p. 211.

Footnote 295:

  One family of languages, the Athapascan, contains both appá and
  mama as terms for ‘father,’ in the Tahkali and Tlatskanai.

Footnote 296:

  See Pott, ‘Indo-Ger. Wurzelwörterb.’ s.v. ‘pâ’; Böhtlingk and Roth,
  ‘Sanskrit-Wörterb.’ s.v. mâtar; Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.,’ part
  ii. p. 349; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 212.

Footnote 297:

  Facciolati, ‘Lexicon;’ Varro, ap. Nonn., ii. 97.

Footnote 298:

  Plato, ‘Cratylus’, 90.

THE ART OF COUNTING.

    Ideas of Number derived from experience—State of Arithmetic among
    uncivilized races—Small extent of Numeral-words among low
    tribes—Counting by fingers and toes—Hand-numerals show derivation of
    Verbal reckoning from Gesture-counting—Etymology of
    Numerals—Quinary, Decimal, and Vigesimal notations of the world
    derived from counting on fingers and toes—Adoption of foreign
    Numeral-words—Evidence of development of Arithmetic from a low
    original level of Culture.

Mr. J. S. Mill, in his ‘System of Logic,’ takes occasion to examine the
foundations of the art of arithmetic. Against Dr. Whewell, who had
maintained that such propositions as that two and three make five are
‘necessary truths,’ containing in them an element of certainty beyond
that which mere experience can give, Mr. Mill asserts that ‘two and one
are equal to three’ expresses merely ‘a truth known to us by early and
constant experience: an inductive truth; and such truths are the
foundation of the science of Number. The fundamental truths of that
science all rest on the evidence of sense; they are proved by showing to
our eyes and our fingers that any given number of objects, ten balls for
example, may by separation and re-arrangement exhibit to our senses all
the different sets of numbers the sum of which is equal to ten. All the
improved methods of teaching arithmetic to children proceed on a
knowledge of this fact. All who wish to carry the child’s mind along
with them in learning arithmetic; all who wish to teach numbers, and not
mere ciphers—now teach it through the evidence of the senses, in the
manner we have described.’ Mr. Mill’s argument is taken from the mental
conditions of people among whom there exists a highly advanced
arithmetic. The subject is also one to be advantageously studied from
the ethnographer’s point of view. The examination of the methods of
numeration in use among the lower races not only fully bears out Mr.
Mill’s view, that our knowledge of the relations of numbers is based on
actual experiment, but it enables us to trace the art of counting to its
source, and to ascertain by what steps it arose in the world among
particular races, and probably among all mankind.

In our advanced system of numeration, no limit is known either to
largeness or smallness. The philosopher cannot conceive the formation of
any quantity so large or of any atom so small but the arithmetician can
keep pace with him, and can define it in a simple combination of written
signs. But as we go downwards in the scale of culture, we find that even
where the current language has terms for hundreds and thousands, there
is less and less power of forming a distinct notion of large numbers,
the reckoner is sooner driven to his fingers, and there increases among
the most intelligent that numerical indefiniteness that we notice among
children—if there were not a thousand people in the street there were
certainly a hundred, at any rate there were twenty. Strength in
arithmetic does not, it is true, vary regularly with the level of
general culture. Some savage or barbaric peoples are exceptionally
skilled in numeration. The Tonga Islanders really have native numerals
up to 100,000. Not content even with this, the French explorer
Labillardière pressed them farther and obtained numerals up to 1000
billions, which were duly printed, but proved on later examination to be
partly nonsense-words and partly indelicate expressions,[299] so that
the supposed series of high numerals forms at once a little vocabulary
of Tongan indecency, and a warning as to the probable results of taking
down unchecked answers from question-worried savages. In West Africa, a
lively and continual habit of bargaining has developed a great power of
arithmetic, and little children already do feats of computation with
their heaps of cowries. Among the Yorubas of Abeokuta, to say ‘you don’t
know nine times nine’ is actually an insulting way of saying ‘you are a
dunce.’[300] This is an extraordinary proverb, when we compare it with
the standard which our corresponding European sayings set for the limits
of stupidity: the German says, ‘he can scarce count five’; the Spaniard,
‘I will tell you how many make five’ (cuantos son cinco); and we have
the same saw in England:—

                            ‘... as sure as I’m alive,
                    And knows how many beans make five.’

A Siamese law-court will not take the evidence of a witness who cannot
count or reckon figures up to ten; a rule which reminds us of the
ancient custom of Shrewsbury, where a person was deemed of age when he
knew how to count up to twelve pence.[301]

Among the lowest living men, the savages of the South American forests
and the deserts of Australia, 5 is actually found to be a number which
the languages of some tribes do not know by a special word. Not only
have travellers failed to get from them names for numbers above 2, 3, or
4, but the opinion that these are the real limits of their numeral
series is strengthened by the use of their highest known number as an
indefinite term for a great many. Spix and Martius say of the low tribes
of Brazil, ‘They count commonly by their finger joints, so up to three
only. Any larger number they express by the word “many.”’[302] In a Puri
vocabulary the numerals are given as 1. omi; 2. curiri; 3. prica,
‘many’: in a Botocudo vocabulary, 1. mokenam; 2. uruhú, ‘many.’ The
numeration of the Tasmanians is, according to Jorgensen, 1. parmery;
2. calabawa; more than 2, cardia; as Backhouse puts it, they count
‘one, two, plenty;’ but an observer who had specially good
opportunities, Dr. Milligan, gives their numerals up to 5, puggana,
which we shall recur to.[303] Mr. Oldfield (writing especially of
Western tribes) says, ‘The New Hollanders have no names for numbers
beyond two. The Watchandie scale of notation is co-ote-on (one),
u-tau-ra (two), bool-tha (many), and bool-tha-bat (very many). If
absolutely required to express the numbers three or four, they say
u-tar-ra coo-te-oo to indicate the former number, and _u-tar-ra
u-tar-ra_ to denote the latter.’ That is to say, their names for one,
two, three, and four, are equivalent to ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘two-one,’
‘two-two.’ Dr. Lang’s numerals from Queensland are just the same in
principle, though the words are different: 1. ganar; 2. burla; 3.
burla-ganar, ‘two-one’; 4. burla-burla, ‘two-two’; korumba, ‘more
than four, much, great.’ The Kamilaroi dialect, though with the same 2
as the last, improves upon it by having an independent 3, and with the
aid of this it reckons as far as 6: 1. mal; 2. bularr; 3. guliba;
4. bularr-bularr, ‘two-two’; 5. bulaguliba, ‘two-three’; 6.
guliba-guliba ‘three-three.’ These Australian examples are at least
evidence of a very scanty as well as clumsy numeral system among certain
tribes.[304] Yet here again higher forms will have to be noticed, which
in one district at least carry the native numerals up to 15 or 20.

It is not to be supposed, because a savage tribe has no current words
for numbers above 3 or 5 or so, that therefore they cannot count beyond
this. It appears that they can and do count considerably farther, but it
is by falling back on a lower and ruder method of expression than
speech—the gesture-language. The place in intellectual development held
by the art of counting on one’s fingers, is well marked in the
description which Massieu, the Abbé Sicard’s deaf-and-dumb pupil, gives
of his notion of numbers in his comparatively untaught childhood: ‘I
knew the numbers before my instruction, my fingers had taught me them. I
did not know the ciphers; I counted on my fingers, and when the number
passed 10 I made notches on a bit of wood.’[305] It is thus that all
savage tribes have been taught arithmetic by their fingers. Mr.
Oldfield, after giving the account just quoted of the capability of the
Watchandie language to reach 4 by numerals, goes on to describe the
means by which the tribe contrive to deal with a harder problem in
numeration.

‘I once wished to ascertain the exact number of natives who had been
slain on a certain occasion. The individual of whom I made the enquiry,
began to think over the names ... assigning one of his fingers to each,
and it was not until after many failures, and consequent fresh starts,
that he was able to express so high a number, which he at length did by
holding up his hand three times, thus giving me to understand that
fifteen was the answer to this most difficult arithmetical question.’ Of
the aborigines of Victoria, Mr. Stanbridge says: ‘They have no name for
numerals above two, but by repetition they count to five; they also
record the days of the moon by means of the fingers, the bones and
joints of the arms and the head.’[306] The Bororos of Brazil reckon: 1.
couai; 2. macouai; 3. ouai; and then go on counting on their
fingers, repeating this ouai.[307] Of course it no more follows among
savages than among ourselves that, because a man counts on his fingers,
his language must be wanting in words to express the number he wishes to
reckon. For example it was noticed that when natives of Kamchatka were
set to count, they would reckon all their fingers, and then all their
toes, so getting up to 20, and then would ask, ‘What are we to do next?’
Yet it was found on examination that numbers up to 100 existed in their
language.[308] Travellers notice the use of finger-counting among tribes
who can, if they choose, speak the number, and who either silently count
it upon their fingers, or very usually accompany the word with the
action; nor indeed are either of these modes at all unfamiliar in modern
Europe. Let Father Gumilla, one of the early Jesuit missionaries in
South America, describe for us the relation of gesture to speech in
counting, and at the same time bring to our minds very remarkable
examples (to be paralleled elsewhere) of the action of consensus,
whereby conventional rules become fixed among societies of men, even in
so simple an art as that of counting on one’s fingers. ‘Nobody among
ourselves,’ he remarks, ‘except incidentally, would say for instance
“one,” “two,” &c., and give the number on his fingers as well, by
touching them with the other hand. Exactly the contrary happens among
Indians. They say, for instance, “give me one pair of scissors,” and
forthwith they raise one finger; “give me two,” and at once they raise
two, and so on. They would never say “five” without showing a hand,
never “ten” without holding out both, never “twenty” without adding up
the fingers, placed opposite to the toes. Moreover, the mode of showing
the numbers with the fingers differs in each nation. To avoid prolixity,
I give as an example the number “three.” The Otomacs to say “three”
unite the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, keeping the others down.
The Tamanacs show the little finger, the ring finger, and the middle
finger, and close the other two. The Maipures, lastly, raise the fore,
middle, and ring fingers, keeping the other two hidden.’[309] Throughout
the world, the general relation between finger-counting and
word-counting may be stated as follows. For readiness and for ease and
apprehension of numbers, a palpable arithmetic, such as is worked on
finger-joints or fingers,[310] or heaps of pebbles or beans, or the more
artificial contrivances of the rosary or the abacus, has so great an
advantage over reckoning in words as almost necessarily to precede it.
Thus not only do we find finger-counting among savages and uneducated
men, carrying on a part of their mental operations where language is
only partly able to follow it, but it also retains a place and an
undoubted use among the most cultured nations, as a preparation for and
means of acquiring higher arithmetical methods.

Now there exists valid evidence to prove that a child learning to count
upon its fingers does in a way reproduce a process of the mental history
of the human race; that in fact men counted upon their fingers before
they found words for the numbers they thus expressed; that in this
department of culture, Word-language not only followed Gesture-language,
but actually grew out of it. The evidence in question is principally
that of language itself, which shows that, among many and distant
tribes, men wanting to express 5 in words called it simply by their name
for the hand which they held up to denote it, that in like manner they
said two hands or half a man to denote 10, that the word foot
carried on the reckoning up to 15, and to 20, which they described in
words as in gesture by the hands and feet together, or as one man,
and that lastly, by various expressions referring directly to the
gestures of counting on the fingers and toes, they gave names to these
and intermediate numerals. As a definite term is wanted to describe
significant numerals of this class, it may be convenient to call them
‘hand-numerals’ or ‘digit-numerals.’ A selection of typical instances
will serve to make it probable that this ingenious device was not, at
any rate generally, copied from one tribe by another or inherited from a
common source, but that its working out with original character and
curiously varying detail displays the recurrence of a similar but
independent process of mental development among various races of man.

Father Gilij, describing the arithmetic of the Tamanacs on the Orinoco,
gives their numerals up to 4: when they come to 5, they express it by
the word amgnaitòne, which being translated means ‘a whole hand;’ 6 is
expressed by a term which translates the proper gesture into words,
itaconò amgnaponà tevinitpe ‘one of the other hand,’ and so on up to
9. Coming to 10, they give it in words as amgna aceponàre ‘both
hands.’ To denote 11 they stretch out both the hands, and adding the
foot they say puittaponà tevinitpe ‘one to the foot,’ and thus up to
15, which is iptaitòne ‘a whole foot.’ Next follows 16, ‘one to the
other foot,’ and so on to 20, tevin itòto, ‘one Indian;’ 21, _itaconò
itòto jamgnàr bonà tevinitpe_ ‘one to the hands of the other Indian;’
40, acciachè itòto, ‘two Indians;’ thence on to 60, 80, 100, ‘three,
four, five Indians,’ and beyond if needful. South America is remarkably
rich in such evidence of an early condition of finger-counting recorded
in spoken language. Among its many other languages which have
recognizable digit-numerals, the Cayriri, Tupi, Abipone, and Carib rival
the Tamanac in their systematic way of working out ‘hand,’ ‘hands,’
‘foot,’ ‘feet,’ &c. Others show slighter traces of the same process,
where, for instance, the numerals 5 or 10 are found to be connected with
words for ‘hand,’ &c., as when the Omagua uses pua, ‘hand,’ for 5, and
reduplicates this into upapua for 10. In some South American languages
a man is reckoned by fingers and toes up to 20, while in contrast to
this, there are two languages which display a miserably low mental
state, the man counting only one hand, thus stopping short at 5; the
Juri ghomen apa ‘one man,’ stands for 5; the Cayriri ibichó is used
to mean both ‘person’ and 5. Digit-numerals are not confined to tribes
standing, like these, low or high within the limits of savagery. The
Muyscas of Bogota were among the more civilized native races of America,
ranking with the Peruvians in their culture, yet the same method of
formation which appears in the language of the rude Tamanacs is to be
traced in that of the Muyscas, who, when they came to 11, 12, 13,
counted quihicha ata, bosa, mica, i.e., ‘foot one, two,
three.’[311] To turn to North America, Cranz, the Moravian missionary,
thus describes about a century ago the numeration of the Greenlanders.
‘Their numerals,’ he says, ‘go not far, and with them the proverb holds
that they can scarce count five, for they reckon by the five fingers and
then get the help of the toes on their feet, and so with labour bring
out twenty,’ The modern Greenland grammar gives the numerals much as
Cranz does, but more fully. The word for 5 is tatdlimat, which there
is some ground for supposing to have once meant ‘hand;’ 6 is
arfinek-attausek, ‘on the other hand one,’ or more shortly
arfinigdlit, ‘those which have on the other hand;’ 7 is
arfinek-mardluk, ‘on the other hand two;’ 13 is arkanck-pingasut,
‘on the first foot three;’ 18 is arfersanek-pingasut, ‘on the other
foot three;’ when they reach 20, they can say inuk nâvdlugo, ‘a man
ended,’ or inûp avatai nâvdlugit,’ the man’s outer members ended;’ in
this way by counting several men they reach higher numbers, thus
expressing, for example, 53 as inûp pinga-jugsâne arkanek-pingasut,
‘on the third man on the first foot three.’[312] If we pass from the
rude Greenlanders to the comparatively civilized Aztecs, we shall find
on the Northern as on the Southern continent traces of early
finger-numeration surviving among higher races. The Mexican names for
the first four numerals are as obscure in etymology as our own. But when
we come to 5 we find this expressed by macuilli; and as ma (ma-itl)
means ‘hand,’ and cuiloa ‘to paint or depict,’ it is likely that the
word for 5 may have meant something like ‘hand-depicting.’ In 10,
matlactli, the word ma, ‘hand,’ appears again, while tlactli means
half, and is represented in the Mexico picture-writings by the figure of
half a man from the waist upward; thus it appears that the Aztec 10
means the ‘hand-half’ of a man, just as among the Towka Indians of South
America 10 is expressed as ‘half a man,’ a whole man being 20. When the
Aztecs reach 20 they call it cempoalli, ‘one counting,’ with evidently
the same meaning as elsewhere, one whole man, fingers and toes.

Among races of the lower culture elsewhere, similar facts are to be
observed. The Tasmanian language again shows the man stopping short
at the reckoning of himself when he has held up one hand and counted
its fingers; this appears by Milligan’s list before mentioned, which
ends with puggana, ‘man,’ standing for 5. Some of the West
Australian tribes have done much better than this, using their word
for ‘hand,’ marh-ra; marh-jin-bang-ga, ‘half the hands,’ is 5;
marh-jin-bang-ga-gudjir-gyn, ‘half the hands and one,’ is 6, and
so on; marh-jin-belli-belli-gudjir-jina-bang-ga, ‘the hand on
either side and half the feet,’ is 15.[313] As an example from the
Melanesian languages the Maré will serve; it reckons 10 as _ome re
rue tubenine_, apparently ‘the two sides’ (i.e. both hands), 20 as
sa re ngome,’one man,’ &c.; thus in John v. 5 ‘which had an
infirmity thirty and eight years,’ the numeral 38 is expressed by
the phrase, ‘one man and both sides five and three.’[314] In the
Malayo-Polynesian languages, the typical word for 5 is lima or
rima, ‘hand,’ and the connexion is not lost by the phonetic
variations among different branches of this family of languages, as
in Malagasy dimy, Marquesan fima, Tongan nima, but while
lima and its varieties mean 5 in almost all Malayo-Polynesian
dialects, its meaning of ‘hand’ is confined to a much narrower
district, showing that the word became more permanent by passing
into the condition of a traditional numeral. In languages of the
Malayo-Polynesian family, it is usually found that 6, &c., are
carried on with words whose etymology is no longer obvious, but the
forms lima-sa, lima-zua ‘hand-one,’ ‘hand-two,’ have been found
doing duty for 6 and 7.[315] In West Africa, Kölle’s account of the
Vei language gives a case in point. These negroes are so dependent
on their fingers that some can hardly count without, and their toes
are convenient as the calculator squats on the ground. The Vei
people and many other African tribes, when counting, first count the
fingers of their left hand, beginning, be it remembered, from the
little one, then in the same manner those of the right hand, and
afterwards the toes. The Vei numeral for 20, mō bánde, means
obviously ‘a person (mo) is finished (bande),’ and similarly 40, 60,
80, &c. ‘two men, three men, four men, &c., are finished,’ It is an
interesting point that the negroes who used these phrases had lost
their original descriptive sense—the words have become mere numerals
to them.[316] Lastly, for bringing before our minds a picture of a
man counting upon his fingers, and being struck by the idea that if
he describes his gestures in words, these words may become an actual
name for the number, perhaps no language in the world surpasses the
Zulu. The Zulu counting on his fingers begins in general with the
little finger of his left hand. When he comes to 5, this he may call
edesanta ‘finish hand;’ then he goes on to the thumb of the right
hand, and so the word tatisitupa ‘taking the thumb’ becomes a
numeral for 6. Then the verb komba ‘to point,’ indicating the
forefinger, or ‘pointer,’ makes the next numeral, 7. Thus, answering
the question ‘How much did your master give you?’ a Zulu would say
‘U kombile’ ‘He pointed with his forefinger,’ i.e., ‘He gave me
seven,’ and this curious way of using the numeral verb is shown in
such an example as ‘amahasi akombile’ ‘the horses have pointed,’
i.e., ‘there were seven of them.’ In like manner, Kijangalobili
‘keep back two fingers,’ i.e. 8, and Kijangalolunje ‘keep back
one finger,’ i.e. 9, lead on to kumi, 10; at the completion of
each ten the two hands with open fingers are clapped together.[317]

The theory that man’s primitive mode of counting was palpable reckoning
on his hands, and the proof that many numerals in present use are
actually derived from such a state of things, is a great step towards
discovering the origin of numerals in general. Can we go farther, and
state broadly the mental process by which savage men, having no numerals
as yet in their language, came to invent them? What was the origin of
numerals not named with reference to hands and feet, and especially of
the numerals below five, to which such a derivation is hardly
appropriate? The subject is a peculiarly difficult one. Yet as to
principle it is not altogether obscure, for some evidence is forthcoming
as to the actual formation of new numeral words, these being made by
simply pressing into the service names of objects or actions in some way
appropriate to the purpose.

People possessing full sets of inherited numerals in their own languages
have nevertheless sometimes found it convenient to invent new ones. Thus
the scholars of India, ages ago, selected a set of words from a memoria
technica in order to record dates and numbers. These words they chose
for reasons which are still in great measure evident; thus ‘moon’ or
‘earth’ expressed 1, there being but one of each; 2 might be called
‘eye,’ ‘wing,’ ‘arm,’ ‘jaw,’ as going in pairs; for 3 they said ‘Rama,’
‘fire,’ or ‘quality,’ there being considered to be three Ramas, three
kinds of fire, three qualities (guna); for 4 were used ‘veda’, ‘age,’ or
‘ocean,’ there being four of each recognized; ‘season’ for 6, because
they reckoned six seasons; ‘sage’ or ‘vowel’ for 7, from the seven sages
and the seven vowels; and so on with higher numbers, ‘sun’ for 12,
because of his twelve annual denominations, or ‘zodiac’ from its twelve
signs, and ‘nail’ for 20, a word incidentally bringing in a finger
notation. As Sanskrit is very rich in synonyms, and as even the numerals
themselves might be used, it becomes very easy to draw up phrases or
nonsense-verses to record series of numbers by this system of artificial
memory. The following is a Hindu astronomical formula, a list of numbers
referring to the stars of the lunar constellations. Each word stands as
the mnemonic equivalent of the number placed over it in the English
translation. The general principle on which the words are chosen to
denote the numbers is evident without further explanation:—

                 ‘Vahni tri rtvishu gunendu kritâgnibhûta
                 Bânâsvinetra çara bhûku yugabdhi râmâh
                 Rudrâbdhirâmagunavedaçatâ dviyugma
                 Dantâ budhairabhihitâh kramaço bhatârâh.’

              3     3       6      5       3      1
            ‘Fire, three, season, arrow, quality, moon,

                   4            3       5
             four-side of die, fire, element,

               5      2     2     5      1      1     4     4      3
              Arrow, Asvin, eye, arrow, earth, earth, age, ocean, Rama,

      11      4     3      3       4      100    2      2
    Rudra, ocean, Rama, quality, Veda, hundred, two, couple,

      32
    Teeth: by the wise have been set forth in order the mighty
       lords.’[318]

It occurred to Wilhelm von Humboldt, in studying this curious system of
numeration, that he had before his eyes the evidence of a process very
like that which actually produced the regular numeral words denoting
one, two, three, &c., in the various languages of the world. The
following passage in which, more than sixty years ago, he set forth this
view, seems to me to contain a nearly perfect key to the theory of
numeral words. ‘If we take into consideration the origin of actual
numerals, the process of their formation appears evidently to have been
the same as that here described. The latter is nothing else than a wider
extension of the former. For when 5 is expressed, as in several
languages of the Malay family, by “hand” (lima), this is precisely the
same thing as when in the description of numbers by words, 2 is denoted
by “wing.” Indisputably there lie at the root of all numerals such
metaphors as these, though they cannot always be now traced. But people
seem early to have felt that the multiplicity of such signs for the same
number was superfluous, too clumsy, and leading to misunderstandings.’
Therefore, he goes on to argue, synonyms of numerals are very rare. And
to nations with a deep sense of language, the feeling must soon have
been present, though perhaps without rising to distinct consciousness,
that recollections of the original etymology and descriptive meaning of
numerals had best be allowed to disappear, so as to leave the numerals
themselves to become mere conventional terms.

The most instructive evidence I have found bearing on the formation of
numerals, other than digit-numerals, among the lower races, appears in
the use on both sides of the globe of what may be called numeral-names
for children. In Australia a well-marked case occurs. With all the
poverty of the aboriginal languages in numerals, 3 being commonly used
as meaning ‘several or many,’ the natives in the Adelaide district have
for a particular purpose gone far beyond this narrow limit, and possess
what is to all intents a special numeral system, extending perhaps to 9.
They give fixed names to their children in order of age, which are set
down as follows by Mr. Eyre: 1. Kertameru; 2. Warritya; 3. Kudnutya; 4.
Monaitya; 5. Milaitya; 6. Marrutya; 7. Wangutya; 8. Ngarlaitya; 9.
Pouarna. These are the male names, from which the female differ in
termination. They are given at birth, more distinctive appellations
being soon afterwards chosen.[319] A similar habit makes its appearance
among the Malays, who in some districts are reported to use a series of
seven names in order of age, beginning with 1. Sulung (‘eldest’); 2.
Awang (‘friend, companion’), and ending with Kechil (‘little one’),
or Bongsu (‘youngest’). These are for sons; daughters have Meh
prefixed, and nicknames have to be used for practical distinction.[320]
In Madagascar, the Malay connexion manifests itself in the appearance of
a similar set of appellations given to children in lieu of proper names,
which are, however, often substituted in after years. Males; Lahimatoa
(‘first male’), Lah-ivo (‘intermediate male’); Ra-fara-lahy (‘last
born male’). Females; Ramatoa (‘eldest female’), Ra-ivo
(‘intermediate’), Ra-fara-vavy (‘last born female’).[321] The system
exists in North America. There have been found in use among the Dacotas
the following two series of names for sons and daughters in order of
birth. Eldest son, Chaské; second, Haparm; third, Ha-pe-dah;
fourth, Chatun; fifth Harka. Eldest daughter, Wenonah; second,
Harpen; third, Harpstenah; fourth, Waska; fifth, We-harka. These
mere numeral appellations they retain through childhood, till their
relations or friends find occasion to replace them by bestowing some
more distinctive personal name.[322] Africa affords further
examples.[323]

As to numerals in the ordinary sense, Polynesia shows remarkable cases
of new formation. Besides the well-known system of numeral words
prevalent in Polynesia, exceptional terms have from time to time grown
up. Thus the habit of altering words which sounded too nearly like a
king’s name, has led the Tahitians on the accession of new chiefs to
make several new words for numbers. Thus, wanting a new term for 2
instead of the ordinary rua, they for obvious reasons took up the word
piti, ‘together,’ and made it a numeral, while to get a new word for 5
instead of rima, ‘hand,’ which had to be discontinued, they
substituted pae, ‘part, division,’ meaning probably division of the
two hands. Such words as these, introduced in Polynesia for ceremonial
reasons, are expected to be dropped again and the old ones replaced,
when the reason for their temporary exclusion ceases, yet the new 2 and
5, piti and pae, became so positively the proper numerals of the
language, that they stand instead of rua and rima in the Tahitian
translation of the Gospel of St. John made at the time. Again, various
special habits of counting in the South Sea Islands have had their
effect on language. The Marquesans, counting fish or fruit by one in
each hand, have come to use a system of counting by pairs instead of by
units. They start with tauna, ‘a pair,’ which thus becomes a numeral
equivalent to 2; then they count onward by pairs, so that when they talk
of takau or 10, they really mean 10 pair or 20. For bread-fruit, as
they are accustomed to tie them up in knots of four, they begin with the
word pona, ‘knot,’ which thus becomes a real numeral for 4, and here
again they go on counting by knots, so that when they say takau or 10,
they mean 10 knots or 40. The philological mystification thus caused in
Polynesian vocabularies is extraordinary; in Tahitian, &c., rau and
mano, properly meaning 100 and 1,000, have come to signify 200 and
2,000, while in Hawaii a second doubling in their sense makes them
equivalent to 400 and 4,000. Moreover, it seems possible to trace the
transfer of suitable names of objects still farther in Polynesia in the
Tongan and Maori word tekau, 10, which seems to have been a word for
‘parcel’ or ‘bunch,’ used in counting yams and fish, as also in
tefuhi, 100, derived from fuhi, ‘sheaf or bundle.’[324]

In Africa, also, special numeral formations are to be noticed. In the
Yoruba language, 40 is called ogodzi, ‘a string,’ because cowries are
strung by forties, and 200 is igba, ‘a heap,’ meaning again a heap of
cowries. Among the Dahomans in like manner, 40 cowries make a kade or
‘string,’ 50 strings make one afo or ‘head;’ these words becoming
numerals for 40 and 2,000. When the king of Dahome attacked Abeokuta, it
is on record that he was repulsed with the heavy loss of ‘two heads,
twenty strings, and twenty cowries’ of men, that is to say, 4,820.[325]

Among cultured nations, whose languages are most tightly bound to the
conventional and unintelligible numerals of their ancestors, it is
likewise usual to find other terms existing which are practically
numerals already, and might drop at once into the recognized places of
such, if by any chance a gap were made for them in the traditional
series. Had we room, for instance, for a new word instead of two, then
either pair (Latin par, ‘equal’) or couple (Latin copula, ‘bond
or tie,’) is ready to fill its place. Instead of twenty, the good
English word score, ‘notch,’ will serve our turn, while, for the same
purpose, German can use stiege, possibly with the original sense of ‘a
stall full of cattle, a sty;’ Old Norse drôtt, ‘a company,’ Danish,
snees. A list of such words used, but not grammatically classed as
numerals in European languages, shows great variety: examples are, Old
Norse, flockr (flock), 5; sveit, 6; drôtt (party), 20; thiodh
(people), 30; fölk (people), 40; öld (people), 80; her (army),
100; Sleswig, schilk, 12 (as though we were to make a numeral out of
‘shilling’); Middle High-German, rotte, 4; New High-German, mandel,
15; schock (sheaf), 60. The Letts give a curious parallel to
Polynesian cases just cited. They throw crabs and little fish three at a
time in counting them, and therefore the word mettens, ‘a throw,’ has
come to mean 3; while flounders being fastened in lots of thirty, the
word kahlis, ‘a cord,’ becomes a term to express this number.[326]

In two other ways, the production of numerals from merely descriptive
words may be observed both among lower and higher races. The Gallas have
no numerical fractional terms, but they make an equivalent set of terms
from the division of the cakes of salt which they use as money. Thus
tchabnana, ‘a broken piece’ (from tchaba, ‘to break,’ as we say ‘a
fraction’), receives the meaning of one-half; a term which we may
compare with Latin dimidium, French demi. Ordinal numbers are
generally derived from cardinal numbers, as third, fourth, fifth,
from three, four, five. But among the very low ones there is to be
seen evidence of independent formation quite unconnected with a
conventional system of numerals already existing. Thus the Greenlander
did not use his ‘one’ to make ‘first,’ but calls it sujugdlek,
‘foremost,’ nor ‘two’ to make ‘second,’ which he calls aipâ, ‘his
companion;’ it is only at ‘third’ that he takes to his cardinals, and
forms pingajuat in connexion with pingasut, 3. So, in Indo-European
languages, the ordinal prathamas, πρῶτος, primus, first, has
nothing to do with a numerical ‘one,’ but with the preposition pra,
‘before,’ as meaning simply ‘foremost;’ and although Greeks and Germans
call the next ordinal δεύτερος, zweite, from δυό, zwei, we call it
second, Latin secundus, ‘the following’ (sequi), which is again a
descriptive sense-word.

If we allow ourselves to mix for a moment what is with what might be, we
can see how unlimited is the field of possible growth of numerals by
mere adoption of the names of familiar things. Following the example of
the Sleswigers we might make shilling a numeral for 12, and go on to
express 4 by groat; week would provide us with a name for 7, and
clover for 3. But this simple method of description is not the only
available one for the purpose of making numerals. The moment any series
of names is arranged in regular order in our minds, it becomes a
counting-machine. I have read of a little girl who was set to count
cards, and she counted them accordingly, January, February, March,
April. She might, of course, have reckoned them as Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday. It is interesting to find a case coming under the same class
in the language of grown people. We know that the numerical value of the
Hebrew letters is given with reference to their place in the alphabet,
which was arranged for reasons that can hardly have had anything to do
with arithmetic. The Greek alphabet is modified from a Semitic one, but
instead of letting the numeral value of their letters follow throughout
their newly-arranged alphabet, they reckon α, β, γ, δ, ε, properly, as
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then put in σ for 6, and so manage to let ι stand for 10,
as י does in Hebrew, where it is really the 10th letter. Now, having
this conventional arrangement of letters made, it is evident that a
Greek who had to give up the regular 1, 2, 3,—εἷς, δύο, τρεῖς, could
supply their places at once by adopting the names of the letters which
had been settled to stand for them, thus calling 1 alpha, 2 bēta, 3
gamma, and so onward. The thing has actually happened; a remarkable
slang dialect of Albania, which is Greek in structure, though full of
borrowed and mystified words and metaphors and epithets understood only
by the initiated, has, as its equivalent for ‘four’ and ‘ten,’ the words
δέλτα and ἰῶτα.[327]

While insisting on the value of such evidence as this in making out the
general principles of the formation of numerals, I have not found it
profitable to undertake the task of etymologizing the actual numerals of
the languages of the world, outside the safe limits of the systems of
digit-numerals among the lower races, already discussed. There may be in
the languages of the lower races other relics of the etymology of
numerals, giving the clue to the ideas according to which they were
selected for an arithmetical purpose, but such relics seem scanty and
indistinct.[328] There may even exist vestiges of a growth of numerals
from descriptive words in our Indo-European languages, in Hebrew and
Arabic, in Chinese. Such etymologies have been brought forward,[329] and
they are consistent with what is known of the principles on which
numerals or quasi-numerals are really formed. But so far as I have been
able to examine the evidence, the cases all seem so philologically
doubtful, that I cannot bring them forward in aid of the theory before
us, and, indeed, think that if they succeed in establishing themselves,
it will be by the theory supporting them, rather than by their
supporting the theory. This state of things, indeed, fits perfectly with
the view here adopted, that when a word has once been taken up to serve
as a numeral, and is thenceforth wanted as a mere symbol, it becomes the
interest of language to allow it to break down into an apparent
nonsense-word, from which all traces of original etymology have
disappeared.

Etymological research into the derivation of numeral words thus hardly
goes with safety beyond showing in the languages of the lower culture
frequent instances of digit-numerals, words taken from direct
description of the gestures of counting on fingers and toes. Beyond
this, another strong argument is available, which indeed covers almost
the whole range of the problem. The numerical systems of the world, by
the actual schemes of their arrangement, extend and confirm the opinion
that counting on fingers and toes was man’s original method of
reckoning, taken up and represented in language. To count the fingers on
one hand up to 5, and then go on with a second five, is a notation by
fives, or as it is called, a quinary notation. To count by the use of
both hands to 10, and thence to reckon by tens, is a decimal notation.
To go on by hands and feet to 20, and thence to reckon by twenties, is a
vigesimal notation. Now though in the larger proportion of known
languages, no distinct mention of fingers and toes, hands and feet, is
observable in the numerals themselves, yet the very schemes of quinary,
decimal, and vigesimal notation remain to vouch for such
hand-and-foot-counting having been the original method on which they
were founded. There seems no doubt that the number of the fingers led to
the adoption of the not especially suitable number 10 as a period in
reckoning, so that decimal arithmetic is based on human anatomy. This is
so obvious, that it is curious to see Ovid in his well-known lines
putting the two facts close together, without seeing that the second was
the consequence of the first.

              ‘Annus erat, decimum cum luna receperat orbem.
                Hic numerus magno tune in honore fuit.
              Seu quia tot digiti, per quos numerare solemus:
                Seu quia bis quino femina mense parit:
              Seu quod adusque decem numero crescente venitur,
                Principium spatiis sumitur inde novis.’[330]

In surveying the languages of the world at large, it is found that among
tribes or nations far enough advanced in arithmetic to count up to five
in words, there prevails, with scarcely an exception, a method founded
on hand-counting, quinary, decimal, vigesimal, or combined of these. For
perfect examples of the quinary method, we may take a Polynesian series
which runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5·1, 5·2, &c.; or a Melanesian series which
may be rendered as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2nd 1, 2nd 2, &c. Quinary leading into
decimal is well shown in the Fellata series 1 ... 5, 5·1 ... 10, 10·1
...10·5, 10·5·1 ... 20, ... 30, ... 40, &c. Pure decimal may be
instanced from Hebrew 1, 2 ... 10, 10·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... &c. Pure
vigesimal is not usual, for the obvious reason that a set of independent
numerals to 20 would be inconvenient; but it takes on from quinary, as
in Aztec, which may be analyzed as 1, 2 ... 5, 5·1 ... 10, 10·1 ...
10·5, 10·5·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... 20·10, 20·10·1 ... 40, &c.; or from
decimal, as in Basque, 1 ... 10, 10·1 ... 20, 20·1 ... 20·10, 20·10·1
... 40 &c.[331] It seems unnecessary to bring forward here the mass of
linguistic details required for any general demonstration of these
principles of numeration among the races of the world. Prof. Pott, of
Halle, has treated the subject on elaborate philological evidence, in a
special monograph,[332] which is incidentally the most extensive
collection of details relating to numerals, indispensable to students
occupied with such enquiries. For the present purpose the following
rough generalization may suffice, that the quinary system is frequent
among the lower races, among whom also the vigesimal system is
considerably developed, but the tendency of the higher nations has been
to avoid the one as too scanty, and the other as too cumbrous, and to
use the intermediate decimal system. These differences in the usage of
various tribes and nations do not interfere with, but rather confirm,
the general principle which is their common cause, that man originally
learnt to reckon from his fingers and toes, and in various ways
stereotyped in language the result of this primitive method.

Some curious points as to the relation of these systems may be noticed
in Europe. It was observed of a certain deaf-and-dumb boy, Oliver
Caswell, that he learnt to count as high as 50 on his fingers, but
always ‘fived,’ reckoning, for instance, 18 objects as ‘both hands, one
hand, three fingers.’[333] The suggestion has been made that the Greek
use of πεμπάζειν, ‘to five,’ as an expression for counting, is a trace
of rude old quinary numeration (compare Finnish lokket ‘to count,’
from lokke ‘ten’). Certainly, the Roman numerals I, II, ... V, VI ...
X, XI ... XV, XVI, &c., form a remarkably well-defined written quinary
system. Remains of vigesimal counting are still more instructive.
Counting by twenties is a strongly marked Keltic characteristic. The
cumbrous vigesimal notation could hardly be brought more strongly into
view in any savage race than in such examples as Gaelic _aon deug is da
fhichead ‘one, ten, and two twenties,’ i.e., 51; or Welsh unarbymtheg
ar ugain ‘one and fifteen over twenty,’ i.e., 36; or Breton unnek ha
triugent_ ‘eleven and three twenties,’ i.e., 71. Now French, being a
Romance language, has a regular system of Latin tens up to 100;
cinquante, soixante, septante, huitante, nonante, which are to
be found still in use in districts within the limits of the French
language, as in Belgium. Nevertheless, the clumsy system of reckoning by
twenties has broken out through the decimal system in France. The
septante is to a great extent suppressed, soixante-quatorze, for
instance, standing for 74; quatre-vingts has fairly established itself
for 80, and its use continues into the nineties, quatre-vingt-treize
for 93; in numbers above 100 we find six-vingts, sept-vingts,
huit-vingts, for 120, 140, 160, and a certain hospital has its name of
Les Quinze-vingts from its 300 inmates. It is, perhaps, the most
reasonable explanation of this curious phenomenon, to suppose the
earlier Keltic system of France to have held its ground, modelling the
later French into its own ruder shape. In England, the Anglo-Saxon
numeration is decimal, hund-seofontig, 70; hund-eahtatig, 80;
hund-nigontig, 90; hund-teontig, 100; hund-enlufontig, 110;
hund-twelftig, 120. It may be here also by Keltic survival that the
vigesimal reckoning by the ‘score,’ threescore and ten, _fourscore and
thirteen_, &c., gained a position in English which it has not yet
totally lost.[334]

From some minor details in numeration, ethnological hints may be gained.
Among rude tribes with scanty series of numerals, combination to make
out new numbers is very soon resorted to. Among Australian tribes
addition makes ‘two-one,’ ‘two-two,’ express 3 and 4; in Guachi
‘two-two’ is 4; in San Antonio ‘four and two-one’ is 7. The plan of
making numerals by subtraction is known in North America, and is well
shown in the Aino language of Yesso, where the words for 8 and 9
obviously mean ‘two from ten,’ ‘one from ten.’ Multiplication appears,
as in San Antonio, ‘two-and-one-two,’ and in a Tupi dialect ‘two-three,’
to express 6. Division seems not known for such purposes among the lower
races, and quite exceptional among the higher. Facts of this class show
variety in the inventive devices of mankind, and independence in their
formation of language. They are consistent at the same time with the
general principles of hand-counting. The traces of what might be called
binary, ternary, quaternary, senary reckoning, which turn on 2, 3, 4, 6,
are mere varieties, leading up to, or lapsing into, quinary and decimal
methods.

The contrast is a striking one between the educated European, with his
easy use of his boundless numeral series, and the Tasmanian, who reckons
3, or anything beyond 2, as ‘many,’ and makes shift by his whole hand to
reach the limit of ‘man,’ that is to say, 5. This contrast is due to
arrest of development in the savage, whose mind remains in the childish
state which the beginning of one of our nursery number-rhymes
illustrates curiously. It runs—

                         ‘One’s none,
                         Two’s some,
                         Three’s a many,
                         Four’s a penny,
                         Five’s a little hundred.’

To notice this state of things among savages and children raises
interesting points as to the early history of grammar. W. von Humboldt
suggested the analogy between the savage notion of 3 as ‘many’ and the
grammatical use of 3 to form a kind of superlative, in forms of which
‘trismegistus,’ ‘ter felix,’ ‘thrice blest,’ are familiar instances. The
relation of single, dual, and plural is well shown pictorially in the
Egyptian hieroglyphics, where the picture of an object, a horse for
instance, is marked by a single line | if but one is meant, by two lines
| | if two are meant, by three lines | | | if three or an indefinite
plural number are meant. The scheme of grammatical number in some of the
most ancient and important languages of the world is laid down on the
same savage principle. Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek,
Gothic, are examples of languages using singular, dual, and plural
number; but the tendency of higher intellectual culture has been to
discard the plan as inconvenient and unprofitable, and only to
distinguish singular and plural. No doubt the dual held its place by
inheritance from an early period of culture, and Dr. D. Wilson seems
justified in his opinion that it ‘preserves to us the memorial of that
stage of thought when all beyond two was an idea of indefinite
number.’[335]

When two races at different levels of culture come into contact, the
ruder people adopt new art and knowledge, but at the same time their own
special culture usually comes to a standstill, and even falls off. It is
thus with the art of counting. We may be able to prove that the lower
race had actually been making great and independent progress in it, but
when the higher race comes with a convenient and unlimited means of not
only naming all imaginable numbers, but of writing them down and
reckoning with them by means of a few simple figures, what likelihood is
there that the barbarian’s clumsy methods should be farther worked out?
As to the ways in which the numerals of the superior race are grafted on
the language of the inferior, Captain Grant describes the native slaves
of Equatorial Africa occupying their lounging hours in learning the
numerals of their Arab masters.[336] Father Dobrizhoffer’s account of
the arithmetical relations between the native Brazilians and the Jesuits
is a good description of the intellectual contact between savages and
missionaries. The Guaranis, it appears, counted up to 4 with their
native numerals, and when they got beyond, they would say ‘innumerable.’
‘But as counting is both of manifold use in common life, and in the
confessional absolutely indispensable in making a complete confession,
the Indians were daily taught at the public catechising in the church to
count in Spanish. On Sundays the whole people used to count with a loud
voice in Spanish, from 1 to 1,000.’ The missionary, it is true, did not
find the natives use the numbers thus learnt very accurately—‘We were
washing at a blackamoor,’ he says.[337] If, however, we examine the
modern vocabularies of savage or low barbarian tribes, they will be
found to afford interesting evidence how really effective the influence
of higher on lower civilization has been in this matter. So far as the
ruder system is complete and moderately convenient, it may stand, but
where it ceases or grows cumbrous, and sometimes at a lower limit than
this, we can see the cleverer foreigner taking it into his own hands,
supplementing or supplanting the scanty numerals of the lower race by
his own. The higher race, though advanced enough to act thus on the
lower, need not be itself at an extremely high level. Markham observes
that the Jivaras of the Marañon, with native numerals up to 5, adopt for
higher numbers those of the Quichua, the language of the Peruvian
Incas.[338] The cases of the indigenes of India are instructive. The
Khonds reckon 1 and 2 in native words, and then take to borrowed Hindi
numerals. The Oraon tribes, while belonging to a race of the Dravidian
stock, and having had a series of native numerals accordingly, appear to
have given up their use beyond 4, or sometimes even 2, and adopted Hindi
numerals in their place.[339] The South American Conibos were observed
to count 1 and 2 with their own words, and then to borrow Spanish
numerals, much as a Brazilian dialect of the Tupi family is noticed in
the last century as having lost the native 5, and settled down into
using the old native numerals up to 3, and then continuing in
Portuguese.[340] In Melanesia, the Annatom language can only count in
its own numerals to 5, and then borrows English siks, seven, eet,
nain, &c. In some Polynesian islands, though the native numerals are
extensive enough, the confusion arising from reckoning by pairs and
fours as well as units, has induced the natives to escape from
perplexity by adopting huneri and tausani.[341] And though the
Esquimaux counting by hands, feet, and whole men, is capable of
expressing high numbers, it becomes practically clumsy even when it gets
among the scores, and the Greenlander has done well to adopt untrîte
and tusinte from his Danish teachers. Similarity of numerals in two
languages is a point to which philologists attach great and deserved
importance in the question whether they are to be considered as sprung
from a common stock. But it is clear that so far as one race may have
borrowed numerals from another, this evidence breaks down. The fact that
this borrowing extends as low as 3, and may even go still lower for all
we know, is a reason for using the argument from connected numerals
cautiously, as tending rather to prove intercourse than kinship.

At the other end of the scale of civilization, the adoption of numerals
from nation to nation still presents interesting philological points.
Our own language gives curious instances, as second and million. The
manner in which English, in common with German, Dutch, Danish, and even
Russian, has adopted Mediæval Latin dozena (from duodecim) shows how
convenient an arrangement it was found to buy and sell by the dozen,
and how necessary it was to have a special word for it. But the
borrowing process has gone farther than this. If it were asked how many
sets of numerals are now in use among English-speaking people in
England, the probable reply would be one set, the regular one, two,
three, &c. There exist, however, two borrowed sets as well. One is the
well-known dicing-set, ace, deuce, tray, cater, cinque,
size; thus size-ace is ‘6 and one,’ cinques or sinks, ‘double
five.’ These came to us from France, and correspond with the common
French numerals, except ace, which is Latin as, a word of great
philological interest, meaning ‘one.’ The other borrowed set is to be
found in the Slang Dictionary. It appears that the English street-folk
have adopted as a means of secret communication a set of Italian
numerals from the organ-grinders and image-sellers, or by other ways
through which Italian or Lingua Franca is brought into the low
neighbourhoods of London. In so doing, they have performed a
philological operation not only curious, but instructive. By copying
such expressions as, Italian due soldi, tre soldi, as equivalent to
‘twopence,’ ‘threepence,’ the word saltee became a recognized slang
term for ‘penny,’ and pence are reckoned as follows:—

    Oney saltee ...                         1d. uno soldo.
    Dooe saltee ...                         2d. due soldi.
    Tray saltee ...                         3d. tre soldi.
    Quarterer saltee ...                    4d. quattro soldi.
    Chinker saltee  ...                     5d. cinque soldi.
    Say saltee         ...                  6d. sei soldi.
    Say oney saltee or setter saltee ...    7d. sette soldi.
    Say dooe saltee or otter saltee   ...   8d. otto soldi.
    Say tray saltee or nobba saltee   ...   9d. nove soldi.
    Say quarterer saltee or dacha saltee ...      10d. dieci soldi.
    Say chinker saltee or dacha oney saltee ...   11d. undici soldi.
    Oney beong ...                                1s.
    A beong say saltee ...                        1s. 6d.
    Dooe beong say saltee or madza caroon ... 2s. 6d. (half crown,
       mezza corona.)[342]

One of these series simply adopts Italian numerals decimally. But the
other, when it has reached 6, having had enough of novelty, makes 7 by
‘six-one,’ and so continues. It is for no abstract reason that 6 is thus
made the turning-point, but simply because the costermonger is adding
pence up to the silver sixpence, and then adding pence again up to the
shilling. Thus our duodecimal coinage has led to the practice of
counting by sixes, and produced a philological curiosity, a real senary
notation.

On evidence such as has been brought forward in this essay, the apparent
relations of savage to civilized culture, as regards the Art of
Counting, may now be briefly stated in conclusion. The principal methods
to which the development of the higher arithmetic are due, lie outside
the problem. They are mostly ingenious plans of expressing numerical
relation by written symbols. Among them are the Semitic scheme, and the
Greek derived from it, of using the alphabet as a series of numerical
symbols, a plan not quite discarded by ourselves, at least for ordinals,
as in schedules A, B, &c.; the use of initials of numeral words as
figures for the numbers themselves, as in Greek Π and Δ for 5 and 10,
Roman C and M for 100 and 1,000; the device of expressing fractions,
shown in a rudimentary stage in Greek γ’, δ’, for 1/3, 1/4, γδ for 3/4;
the introduction of the cipher or zero, by means of which the Arabic or
Indian numerals have their value according to their position in a
decimal order corresponding to the succession of the rows of the abacus;
and lastly, the modern notation of decimal fractions by carrying down
below the unit the proportional order which for ages had been in use
above it. The ancient Egyptian and the still-used Roman and Chinese
numeration are indeed founded on savage picture-writing,[343] while the
abacus and the swan-pan, the one still a valuable school-instrument, and
the other in full practical use, have their germ in the savage counting
by groups of objects, as when South Sea Islanders count with coco-nut
stalks, putting a little one aside every time they come to 10, and a
large one when they come to 100, or when African negroes reckon with
pebbles or nuts, and every time they come to 5 put them aside in a
little heap.[344]

We are here especially concerned with gesture-counting on the fingers,
as an absolutely savage art still in use among children and peasants,
and with the system of numeral words, as known to all mankind, appearing
scantily among the lowest tribes, and reaching within savage limits to
developments which the highest civilization has only improved in detail.
These two methods of computation by gesture and word tell the story of
primitive arithmetic in a way that can be hardly perverted or
misunderstood. We see the savage who can only count to 2 or 3 or 4 in
words, but can go farther in dumb show. He has words for hands and
fingers, feet and toes, and the idea strikes him that the words which
describe the gesture will serve also to express its meaning, and they
become his numerals accordingly. This did not happen only once, it
happened among different races in distant regions, for such terms as
‘hand’ for 5, ‘hand-one’ for 6, ‘hands’ for 10, ‘two on the foot’ for
12, ‘hands and feet’ or ‘man’ for 20, ‘two men’ for 40, &c., show such
uniformity as is due to common principle, but also such variety as is
due to independent working-out. These are ‘pointer-facts’ which have
their place and explanation in a development-theory of culture, while a
degeneration-theory totally fails to take them in. They are distinct
records of development, and of independent development, among savage
tribes to whom some writers on civilization have rashly denied the very
faculty of self-improvement. The original meaning of a great part of the
stock of numerals of the lower races, especially of those from 1 to 4,
not suited to be named as hand-numerals, is obscure. They may have been
named from comparison with objects, in a way which is shown actually to
happen in such forms as ‘together’ for 2, ‘throw’ for 3, ‘knot’ for 4;
but any concrete meaning we may guess them to have once had seems now by
modification and mutilation to have passed out of knowledge.

Remembering how ordinary words change and lose their traces of original
meaning in the course of ages, and that in numerals such breaking down
of meaning is actually desirable, to make them fit for pure arithmetical
symbols, we cannot wonder that so large a proportion of existing
numerals should have no discernible etymology. This is especially true
of the 1, 2, 3, 4, among low and high races alike, the earliest to be
made, and therefore the earliest to lose their primary significance.
Beyond these low numbers the languages of the higher and lower races
show a remarkable difference. The hand-and-foot numerals, so prevalent
and unmistakable in savage tongues like Esquimaux and Zulu, are scarcely
if at all traceable in the great languages of civilization, such as
Sanskrit and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. This state of things is quite
conformable to the development-theory of language. We may argue that it
was in comparatively recent times that savages arrived at the invention
of hand-numerals, and that therefore the etymology of such numerals
remains obvious. But it by no means follows from the non-appearance of
such primitive forms in cultured Asia and Europe, that they did not
exist there in remote ages; they may since have been rolled and battered
like pebbles by the stream of time, till their original shapes can no
longer be made out. Lastly, among savage and civilized races alike, the
general framework of numeration stands throughout the world as an
abiding monument of primæval culture. This framework, the all but
universal scheme of reckoning by fives, tens, and twenties, shows that
the childish and savage practice of counting on fingers and toes lies at
the foundation of our arithmetical science. Ten seems the most
convenient arithmetical basis offered by systems founded on
hand-counting, but twelve would have been better, and duodecimal
arithmetic is in fact a protest against the less convenient decimal
arithmetic in ordinary use. The case is the not uncommon one of high
civilization bearing evident traces of the rudeness of its origin in
ancient barbaric life.

Footnote 299:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. ii. p. 390.

Footnote 300:

  Crowther, ‘Yoruba Vocab.’; Burton, ‘W. & W. from W. Africa,’ p. 253.
  ‘O daju danu, o ko mo essan messan.—You (may seem) very clever, (but)
  you can’t tell 9 × 9.’

Footnote 301:

  Low in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 408; ‘Year-Books Edw. I.’
  (xx.-i.) ed. Horwood, p. 220.

Footnote 302:

  Spix and Martius, ‘Reise in Brazilien,’ p. 387.

Footnote 303:

  ‘Tasmanian Journal,’ vol. i.; Backhouse, ‘Narr.’ p. 104; Milligan in
  ‘Papers, &c., Roy. Soc. Tasmania,’ vol. iii. part ii. 1859.

Footnote 304:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’; vol. iii. p. 291; Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p.
  433; ‘Latham, Comp. Phil.’ p. 352. Other terms in Bonwick, l. c.

Footnote 305:

  Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes pour l’Instruction des Sourds-Muets,’ vol.
  ii. p. 634.

Footnote 306:

  Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 304.

Footnote 307:

  Martius, ‘Gloss. Brasil,’ p. 15.

Footnote 308:

  Kracheninnikow, ‘Kamtchatka,’ p. 17.

Footnote 309:

  Gumilla, ‘Historia del Orenoco,’ vol. iii. ch. xlv.; Pott,
  ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 16.

Footnote 310:

  The Eastern brokers have used for ages, and still use, the method of
  secretly indicating numbers to one another in bargaining, ‘by snipping
  fingers under a cloth.’ ‘Every joynt and every finger hath his
  signification,’ as an old traveller says, and the system seems a more
  or less artificial development of ordinary finger-counting, the thumb
  and little finger stretched out, and the other fingers closed,
  standing for 6 or 60, the addition of the fourth finger making 7 or
  70, and so on. It is said that between two brokers settling a price by
  thus snipping with the fingers, cleverness in bargaining, offering a
  little more, hesitating, expressing an obstinate refusal to go
  farther, &c., comes out just as in chaffering in words.

Footnote 311:

  Gilij; ‘Saggio di Storia Americana,’ vol. ii. p. 332 (Tamanac,
  Maypure). Martius, ‘Gloss. Brasil,’ (Cayriri, Tupi, Carib, Omagua,
  Juri, Guachi, Coretu, Cherentes, Maxuruna, Caripuna, Cauixana,
  Carajás, Coroado, &c.); Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 168;
  Humboldt, ‘Monumens,’ pl. xliv. (Muysca).

Footnote 312:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 286; Kleinschmidt, ‘Gr. der Grönl. Spr.;’ Rae in
  ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 145.

Footnote 313:

  Milligan, l. c.; G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. W. Australia.’ Compare a series
  of quinary numerals to 9, from Sydney, in Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 46.

Footnote 314:

  Gabelentz, ‘Melanesiche Sprachen,’ p. 183.

Footnote 315:

  W. v. Humboldt, ‘Kawi-Spr.’ vol. ii. p. 308; corroborated by ‘As.
  Res.’ vol. vi. p. 90; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 182, &c.

Footnote 316:

  Kölle, ‘Gr. of Vei Lang.’ p. 27.

Footnote 317:

  Schreuder, ‘Gr. for Zulu Sproget,’ p. 30; Döhne, ‘Zulu Dic.’; Grout,
  ‘Zulu Gr.’ See Hahn, ‘Gr. des Herero.’

Footnote 318:

  Sir W. Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. 1790, p. 296; E. Jacquet in ‘Nouv.
  Journ. Asiat.’ 1835; W. v. Humboldt, ‘Kawi-Spr.’ vol. i. p. 19. This
  system of recording dates, &c., extended as far as Tibet and the
  Indian Archipelago. Many important points of Oriental chronology
  depend on such formulas. Unfortunately their evidence is more or less
  vitiated by inconsistencies in the use of words for numbers.

Footnote 319:

  Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 324; Schürmann, ‘Vocab. of Parnkalla
  Lang,’ gives forms partially corresponding.

Footnote 320:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ New Ser. vol. ii. 1858, p. 118 (Sulong, Awang,
  Itam (‘black’), Puteh (‘white’), Allang, Pendeh, Kechil or Bongsu);
  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 494. The details are imperfectly
  given, and seem not all correct.

Footnote 321:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 154. Also Andriampaivo, or
  Lahi-Zandrina, for last male; Andrianivo for intermediate male.
  Malagasy lahy, ‘male’ Malay laki; Malagasy vavy, ‘female’ 
  Tongan fafine, Maori wahine, ‘woman;’ comp. Malay bâtina,
  ‘female.’

Footnote 322:

  M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux,’ p. xxv.

Footnote 323:

  ‘Journ. Ethnol. Soc.’ vol. iv. (Akra); Ploss, ‘Das Kind,’ vol. i. p.
  139 (Elmina).

Footnote 324:

  H. Hale, ‘Ethnography and Philology,’ vol. vi. of Wilkes, U.S.
  Exploring Exp., Philadelphia, 1846, pp. 172, 289. (N.B.—The ordinary
  editions do not contain this important volume.)

Footnote 325:

  Bowen, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yoruba.’ Burton in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.,’ vol.
  i. p. 314.

Footnote 326:

  See Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ pp. 78, 99, 124, 161; Grimm, ‘Deutsche
  Rechtsalterthümer,’ ch. v.

Footnote 327:

  Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ p. 483.

Footnote 328:

  Of evidence of this class, the following deserves
  attention:—Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 169, gives
  geyenkñatè, ‘ostrich-toes,’ as the numeral for 4, their ostrich
  having three toes before and one behind, and neènhalek, ‘a
  five-coloured spotted hide,’ as the numeral 5. D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme
  Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 163, remarks:—‘Les Chiquitos ne savent compter
  que jusqu’à un (tama), n’ayant plus ensuite que des termes de
  comparaison.’ Kölle, ‘Gr. of Vei Lang.,’ notices that féra means
  both ‘with’ and 2, and thinks the former meaning original (compare the
  Tah. piti, ‘together,’ thence 2). Quichua chuncu, ‘heap,’
  chunca, 10, may be connected. Aztec, ce, 1, cen-tli, ‘grain,’
  may be connected. On possible derivations of 2 from hand, &c.,
  especially Hottentot, t’koam, ‘hand, 2,’ see Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p.
  29.

Footnote 329:

  See Farrar, ‘Chapters on Language,’ p. 223. Benloew, ‘Recherches sur
  l’Origine des Noms de Nombre;’ Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii.
  ch. ii.; Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 128, &c.; A. v. Humboldt’s plausible
  comparison between Skr. pancha, 5, and Pers. penjeh, ‘the palm of
  the hand with the fingers spread out; the outspread foot of a bird,’
  as though 5 were called pancha from being like a hand, is erroneous.
  The Persian penjeh is itself derived from the numeral 5, as in Skr.
  the hand is called panchaçâkha, ‘the five-branched.’ The same
  formation is found in English; slang describes a man’s hand as his
  ‘fives,’ or ‘bunch of fives,’ thence the name of the game of fives,
  played by striking the ball with the open hand, a term which has made
  its way out of slang into accepted language. Burton describes the
  polite Arab at a meal, calling his companion’s attention to a grain of
  rice fallen into his beard. ‘The gazelle is in the garden,’ he says,
  with a smile. ‘We will hunt her with the five,’ is the reply.

Footnote 330:

  Ovid, Fast. iii. 121.

Footnote 331:

  The actual word-numerals of the two quinary series are given as
  examples. Triton’s Bay, 1, samosi; 2, roëeti; 3, touwroe; 4,
  faat; 5, rimi; 6, rim-samos; 7, rim-roëeti; 8, rim-touwroe;
  9, rim-faat; 10, woetsja. Lifu, 1, pacha; 2, lo; 3, kun; 4,
  thack; 5, thabumb; 6, lo-acha; 7, lo-a-lo; 8, lo-kunn; 9,
  lo-thack; 10, te-bennete.

Footnote 332:

  A. F. Pott, ‘Die Quinäre und Vigesimale Zählmethode bei Völkern aller
  Welttheile,’ Halle, 1847; supplemented in ‘Festgabe zur xxv.
  Versammlung Deutscher Philologen, &c., in Halle’ (1867).

Footnote 333:

  ‘Account of Laura Bridgman,’ London, 1845, p. 159.

Footnote 334:

  Compare the Rajmahali tribes adopting Hindi numerals, yet reckoning by
  twenties. Shaw, l.c. The use of a ‘score’ as an indefinite number in
  England, and similarly of 20 in France, of 40 in the Hebrew of the Old
  Testament and the Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights, may be among
  other traces of vigesimal reckoning.

Footnote 335:

  D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ p. 616.

Footnote 336:

  Grant in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90.

Footnote 337:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Gesch. der Abiponer,’ p. 205; Eng. Trans. vol. ii. p.
  171.

Footnote 338:

  Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 166.

Footnote 339:

  Latham, ‘Comp. Phil.’ p. 186; Shaw in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv. p. 96;
  ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. pp. 27, 204, 251.

Footnote 340:

  St. Cricq in ‘Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog.’ 1853, p. 286; Pott,
  ‘Zählmethode,’ p. 7.

Footnote 341:

  Gabelentz, p. 89; Hale, l.c.

Footnote 342:

  J. C. Hotten, ‘Slang Dictionary,’ p. 218.

Footnote 343:

  ‘Early History of Mankind,’ p. 106.

Footnote 344:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 91; Klemm, C. G. vol. iii. p. 383.

MYTHOLOGY.

    Mythic Fancy based, like other thought, on Experience—Mythology
    affords evidence for studying laws of Imagination—Change in public
    opinion as to credibility of Myths—Myths rationalized into Allegory
    and History—Ethnological import and treatment of Myth—Myth to be
    studied in actual existence and growth among modern savages and
    barbarians—Original sources of Myth—Early doctrine of general
    animation of Nature—Personification of Sun, Moon, and Stars;
    Water-spout, Sand pillar, Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence—Analogy
    worked into Myth and Metaphor—Myths of Rain, Thunder, &c.—Effect of
    Language in formation of Myth—Material Personification primary,
    Verbal Personification secondary—Grammatical Gender, male and
    female, animate and inanimate, in relation to Myth—Proper Names of
    objects in relation to Myth—Mental State proper to promote mythic
    imagination—Doctrine of Werewolves—Phantasy and Fancy.

Among those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be
dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an almost boundless
creative power of the human imagination. The superficial student, mazed
in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to
have no reason in nature nor pattern in this material world, at first
concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the
tale-teller, and the seer. But little by little, in what seemed the most
spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry
and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that
has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from
out of which each province of the poet’s land has been shaped, and built
over, and peopled. Backward from our own times, the course of mental
history may be traced through the changes wrought by modern schools of
thought and fancy, upon an intellectual inheritance handed down to them
from earlier generations. And through remoter periods, as we recede more
nearly towards primitive conditions of our race, the threads which
connect new thought with old do not always vanish from our sight. It is
in large measure possible to follow them as clues leading back to that
actual experience of nature and life, which is the ultimate source of
human fancy. What Matthew Arnold has written of Man’s thoughts as he
floats along the River of Time, is most true of his mythic imagination:—

                 ‘As is the world on the banks
                 So is the mind of the man.

                 Only the tract where he sails
                 He wots of: only the thoughts,
                 Raised by the objects he passes, are his.’

Impressions thus received the mind will modify and work upon,
transmitting the products to other minds in shapes that often seem new,
strange, and arbitrary, but which yet result from processes familiar to
our experience, and to be found at work in our own individual
consciousness. The office of our thought is to develop, to combine, and
to derive, rather than to create; and the consistent laws it works by
are to be discerned even in the unsubstantial structures of the
imagination. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, there is to be
recognized a sequence from cause to effect, a sequence intelligible,
definite, and where knowledge reaches the needful exactness, even
calculable.

There is perhaps no better subject-matter through which to study the
processes of the imagination, than the well-marked incidents of mythical
story, ranging as they do through every known period of civilization,
and through all the physically varied tribes of mankind. Here the divine
Maui of New Zealand, fishing up the island with his enchanted hook from
the bottom of the sea, will take his place in company with the Indian
Vishnu, diving to the depth of the ocean in his avatar of the Boar, to
bring up the submerged earth on his monstrous tusks; and here Baiame the
creator, whose voice the rude Australians hear in the rolling thunder,
will sit throned by the side of Olympian Zeus himself. Starting with the
bold rough nature-myths into which the savage moulds the lessons he has
learnt from his childlike contemplation of the universe, the
ethnographer can follow these rude fictions up into times when they were
shaped and incorporated into complex mythologic systems, gracefully
artistic in Greece, stiff and monstrous in Mexico, swelled into
bombastic exaggeration in Buddhist Asia. He can watch how the mythology
of classic Europe, once so true to nature and so quick with her
ceaseless life, fell among the commentators to be plastered with
allegory or euhemerized into dull sham history. At last, in the midst of
modern civilization, he finds the classic volumes studied rather for
their manner than for their matter, or mainly valued for their
antiquarian evidence of the thoughts of former times; while relics of
structures reared with skill and strength by the myth-makers of the past
must now be sought in scraps of nursery folk-lore, in vulgar
superstitions and old dying legends, in thoughts and allusions carried
on from ancient days by the perennial stream of poetry and romance, in
fragments of old opinion which still hold an inherited rank gained in
past ages of intellectual history. But this turning of mythology to
account as a means of tracing the history of laws of mind, is a branch
of science scarcely discovered till the nineteenth century. Before
entering here on some researches belonging to it, there will be
advantage in glancing at the views of older mythologists, to show
through what changes their study has at length reached a condition in
which it has a scientific value.

It is a momentous phase of the education of mankind, when the regularity
of nature has so imprinted itself upon men’s minds that they begin to
wonder how it is that the ancient legends which they were brought up to
hear with such reverent delight, should describe a world so strangely
different from their own. Why, they ask, are the gods and giants and
monsters no longer seen to lead their prodigious lives on earth—is it
perchance that the course of things is changed since the old days? Thus
it seemed to Pausanias the historian, that the wide-grown wickedness of
the world had brought it to pass that times were no longer as of old,
when Lykaon was turned into a wolf, and Niobe into a stone, when men
still sat as guests at table with the gods, or were raised like Herakles
to become gods themselves. Up to modern times, the hypothesis of a
changed world has more or less availed to remove the difficulty of
belief in ancient wonder-tales. Yet though always holding firmly a
partial ground, its application was soon limited for these obvious
reasons, that it justified falsehood and truth alike with even-handed
favour, and utterly broke down that barrier of probability which in some
measure has always separated fact from fancy. The Greek mind found other
outlets to the problem. In the words of Mr. Grote, the ancient legends
were cast back into an undefined past, to take rank among the hallowed
traditions of divine or heroic antiquity, gratifying to extol by
rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument. Or they were
transformed into shapes more familiar to experience, as when Plutarch,
telling the tale of Theseus, begs for indulgent hearers to accept mildly
the archaic story, and assures them that he has set himself to purify it
by reason, that it may receive the aspect of history.[345] This process
of giving fable the aspect of history, this profitless art of
transforming untrue impossibilities into untrue possibilities, has been
carried on by the ancients, and by the moderns after them, especially
according to the two following methods.

Men have for ages been more or less conscious of that great mental
district lying between disbelief and belief, where room is found for all
mythic interpretation, good or bad. It being admitted that some legend
is not the real narrative which it purports to be, they do not thereupon
wipe it out from book and memory as simply signifying nothing, but they
ask what original sense may be in it, out of what older story it may be
a second growth, or what actual event or current notion may have
suggested its development into the state in which they find it? Such
questions, however, prove almost as easy to answer plausibly as to set;
and then, in the endeavour to obtain security that these off-hand
answers are the true ones, it becomes evident that the problem admits of
an indefinite number of apparent solutions, not only different but
incompatible. This radical uncertainty in the speculative interpretation
of myths is forcibly stated by Lord Bacon, in the preface to his ‘Wisdom
of the Ancients.’ ‘Neither am I ignorant,’ he says, ‘how fickle and
inconsistent a thing fiction is, as being subject to be drawn and
wrested any way, and how great the commodity of wit and discourse is,
that is able to apply things well, yet so as never meant by the first
authors.’ The need of such a caution may be judged of from the very
treatise to which Bacon prefaced it, for there he is to be seen plunging
headlong into the very pitfall of which he had so discreetly warned his
disciples. He undertakes, after the manner of not a few philosophers
before and after him, to interpret the classic myths of Greece as moral
allegories. Thus the story of Memnon depicts the destinies of rash young
men of promise; while Perseus symbolizes war, and when of the three
Gorgons he attacks only the mortal one, this means that only practicable
wars are to be attempted. It would not be easy to bring out into a
stronger light the difference between a fanciful application of a myth,
and its analysis into its real elements. For here, where the interpreter
believed himself to be reversing the process of myth-making, he was in
fact only carrying it a stage further in the old direction, and out of
the suggestion of one train of thought evolving another connected with
it by some more or less remote analogy. Any of us may practise this
simple art, each according to his own fancy. If, for instance, political
economy happens for the moment to lie uppermost in our mind, we may with
due gravity expound the story of Perseus as an allegory of trade:
Perseus himself is Labour, and he finds Andromeda, who is Profit,
chained and ready to be devoured by the monster Capital; he rescues her
and carries her off in triumph. To know anything of poetry or of
mysticism is to know this reproductive growth of fancy as an admitted
and admired intellectual process. But when it comes to sober
investigation of the processes of mythology, the attempt to penetrate to
the foundation of an old fancy will scarcely be helped by burying it yet
deeper underneath a new one.

Nevertheless, allegory has had a share in the development of myths which
no interpreter must overlook. The fault of the rationalizer lay in
taking allegory beyond its proper action, and applying it as a universal
solvent to reduce dark stories to transparent sense. The same is true of
the other great rationalizing process, founded also, to some extent, on
fact. Nothing is more certain than that real personages often have
mythic incidents tacked on to their history, and that they even figure
in tales of which the very substance is mythic. No one disbelieves in
the existence of Solomon because of his legendary adventure in the
Valley of Apes, nor of Attila because he figures in the Nibelungen Lied.
Sir Francis Drake is made not less but more real to us by the cottage
tales which tell how he still leads the Wild Hunt over Dartmoor, and
still rises to his revels when they beat at Buckland Abbey the drum that
he carried round the world. The mixture of fact and fable in traditions
of great men shows that legends containing monstrous fancy may yet have
a basis in historic fact. But, on the strength of this, the mythologists
arranged systematic methods of reducing legend to history, and thereby
contrived at once to stultify the mythology they professed to explain,
and to ruin the history they professed to develop. So far as the plan
consisted in mere suppression of the marvellous, a notion of its
trustworthiness may be obtained, as Sir G. W. Cox well puts it, in
rationalizing Jack the Giant-Killer by leaving out the giants. So far as
it treated legendary wonders as being matter-of-fact disguised in
metaphor, the mere naked statement of the results of the method is to
our minds its most cruel criticism. Thus already in classic times men
were declaring that Atlas was a great astronomer who taught the use of
the sphere, and was therefore represented with the world resting on his
shoulders. To such a pass had come the decay of myth into commonplace,
that the great Heaven-god of the Aryan race, the living personal Heaven
himself, Zeus the Almighty, was held to have been a king of Krete, and
the Kretans could show to wondering strangers his sepulchre, with the
very name of the great departed inscribed upon it. The modern
‘euhemerists’ (so called from Euhemeros of Messenia, a great professor
of the art in the time of Alexander) in part adopted the old
interpretations, and sometimes fairly left their Greek and Roman
teachers behind in the race after prosaic possibility. They inform us
that Jove smiting the giants with his thunderbolts was a king repressing
a sedition; Danae’s golden shower was the money with which her guards
were bribed; Prometheus made clay images, whence it was hyperbolically
said that he created man and woman out of clay; and when Daidalos was
related to have made figures which walked, this meant that he improved
the shapeless old statues, and separated their legs. Old men still
remember as the guides of educated opinion in their youth the learned
books in which these fancies are solemnly put forth; some of our school
manuals still go on quoting them with respect, and a few straggling
writers carry on a remnant of the once famous system of which the Abbé
Banier was so distinguished an exponent.[346] But it has of late fallen
on evil days, and mythologists in authority have treated it in so
high-handed a fashion as to bring it into general contempt. So far has
the feeling against the abuse of such argument gone, that it is now
really desirable to warn students that it has a reasonable as well as an
unreasonable side, and to remind them that some wild legends undoubtedly
do, and therefore that many others may, contain a kernel of historic
truth.

Learned and ingenious as the old systems of rationalizing myth have
been, there is no doubt that they are in great measure destined to be
thrown aside. It is not that their interpretations are proved
impossible, but that mere possibility in mythological speculation is now
seen to be such a worthless commodity, that every investigator devoutly
wishes there were not such plenty of it. In assigning origins to myths,
as in every other scientific enquiry, the fact is that increased
information, and the use of more stringent canons of evidence, have
raised far above the old level the standard of probability required to
produce conviction. There are many who describe our own time as an
unbelieving time, but it is by no means sure that posterity will accept
the verdict. No doubt it is a sceptical and a critical time, but then
scepticism and criticism are the very conditions for the attainment of
reasonable belief. Thus, where the positive credence of ancient history
has been affected, it is not that the power of receiving evidence has
diminished, but that the consciousness of ignorance has grown. We are
being trained to the facts of physical science, which we can test and
test again, and we feel it a fall from this high level of proof when we
turn our minds to the old records which elude such testing, and are even
admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be relied on.
Historical criticism becomes hard and exacting, even where the chronicle
records events not improbable in themselves; and the moment that the
story falls out of our scheme of the world’s habitual course, the ever
repeated question comes out to meet it—Which is the more likely, that so
unusual an event should have really happened, or that the record should
be misunderstood or false? Thus we gladly seek for sources of history in
antiquarian relics, in undesigned and collateral proofs, in documents
not written to be chronicles. But can any reader of geology say we are
too incredulous to believe wonders, if the evidence carry any fair
warrant of their truth? Was there ever a time when lost history was
being reconstructed, and existing history rectified, more zealously than
they are now by a whole army of travellers, excavators, searchers of old
charters, and explorers of forgotten dialects? The very myths that were
discarded as lying fables, prove to be sources of history in ways that
their makers and transmitters little dreamed of. Their meaning has been
misunderstood, but they have a meaning. Every tale that was ever told
has a meaning for the times it belongs to; even a lie, as the Spanish
proverb says, is a lady of birth (‘la mentira es hija de algo’). Thus,
as evidence of the development of thought, as records of long past
belief and usage, even in some measure as materials for the history of
the nations owning them, the old myths have fairly taken their place
among historic facts; and with such the modern historian, so able and
willing to pull down, is also able and willing to rebuild.

Of all things, what mythologic work needs is breadth of knowledge and of
handling. Interpretations made to suit a narrow view reveal their
weakness when exposed to a wide one. See Herodotus rationalizing the
story of the infant Cyrus, exposed and suckled by a bitch; he simply
relates that the child was brought up by a herdsman’s wife named Spakô
(in Greek Kynô), whence arose the fable that a real bitch rescued and
fed him. So far so good—for a single case. But does the story of Romulus
and Remus likewise record a real event, mystified in the self-same
manner by a pun on a nurse’s name, which happened to be a she-beast’s?
Did the Roman twins also really happen to be exposed, and brought up by
a foster-mother who happened to be called Lupa? Positively, the
‘Lempriere’s Dictionary’ of our youth (I quote the 16th edition of 1831)
gravely gives this as the origin of the famous legend. Yet, if we look
properly into the matter, we find that these two stories are but
specimens of a widespread mythic group, itself only a section of that
far larger body of traditions in which exposed infants are saved to
become national heroes. For other examples, Slavonic folk-lore tells of
the she-wolf and she-bear that suckled those superhuman twins, Waligora
the mountain-roller and Wyrwidab the oak-uprooter; Germany has its
legend of Dieterich, called Wolfdieterich from his foster-mother the
she-wolf; in India, the episode recurs in the tales of Satavahana and
the lioness, and Sing-Baba and the tigress; legend tells of Burta-Chino,
the boy who was cast into a lake, and preserved by a she-wolf to become
founder of the Turkish kingdom; and even the savage Yuracarés of Brazil
tell of their divine hero Tiri, who was suckled by a jaguar.[347]

Scientific myth-interpretation, on the contrary, is actually
strengthened by such comparison of similar cases. Where the effect of
new knowledge has been to construct rather than to destroy, it is found
that there are groups of myth-interpretations for which wider and deeper
evidence makes a wider and deeper foundation. The principles which
underlie a solid system of interpretation are really few and simple. The
treatment of similar myths from different regions, by arranging them in
large compared groups, makes it possible to trace in mythology the
operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity
of mental law; and thus stories of which a single instance would have
been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among well-marked and
consistent structures of the human mind. Evidence like this will again
and again drive us to admit that even as ‘truth is stranger than
fiction,’ so myth may be more uniform than history.

There lies within our reach, moreover, the evidence of races both
ancient and modern, who so faithfully represent the state of thought to
which myth-development belongs, as still to keep up both the
consciousness of meaning in their old myths, and the unstrained
unaffected habit of creating new ones. Savages have been for untold
ages, and still are, living in the myth-making stage of the human mind.
It was through sheer ignorance and neglect of this direct knowledge how
and by what manner of men myths are really made, that their simple
philosophy has come to be buried under masses of commentators’ rubbish.
Though never wholly lost, the secret of mythic interpretation was all
but forgotten. Its recovery has been mainly due to modern students who
have with vast labour and skill searched the ancient language, poetry,
and folk-lore of our own race, from the cottage tales collected by the
brothers Grimm to the Rig-Veda edited by Max Müller. Aryan language and
literature now open out with wonderful range and clearness a view of the
early stages of mythology, displaying those primitive germs of the
poetry of nature, which later ages swelled and distorted till childlike
fancy sank into superstitious mystery. It is not proposed here to
enquire specially into this Aryan mythology, of which so many eminent
students have treated, but to compare some of the most important
developments of mythology among the various races of mankind, especially
in order to determine the general relation of the myths of savage tribes
to the myths of civilized nations. The argument does not aim at a
general discussion of the mythology of the world, numbers of important
topics being left untouched which would have to be considered in a
general treatise. The topics chosen are mostly such as are fitted, by
the strictness of evidence and argument applying to them, to make a
sound basis for the treatment of myth as bearing on the general
ethnological problem of the development of civilization. The general
thesis maintained is that Myth arose in the savage condition prevalent
in remote ages among the whole human race, that it remains comparatively
unchanged among the modern rude tribes who have departed least from
these primitive conditions, while even higher and later grades of
civilization, partly by retaining its actual principles, and partly by
carrying on its inherited results in the form of ancestral tradition,
have continued it not merely in toleration but in honour.

To the human intellect in its early childlike state may be assigned the
origin and first development of myth. It is true that learned critics,
taking up the study of mythology at the wrong end, have almost
habitually failed to appreciate its childlike ideas, conventionalized in
poetry or disguised as chronicle. Yet the more we compare the mythic
fancies of different nations, in order to discern the common thoughts
which underlie their resemblances, the more ready we shall be to admit
that in our childhood we dwelt at the very gates of the realm of myth.
In mythology, the child is, in a deeper sense than we are apt to use the
phrase in, father of the man. Thus, when in surveying the quaint fancies
and wild legends of the lower tribes, we find the mythology of the world
at once in its most distinct and most rudimentary form, we may here
again claim the savage as a representative of the childhood of the human
race. Here Ethnology and Comparative Mythology go hand in hand, and the
development of Myth forms a consistent part of the development of
Culture. If savage races, as the nearest modern representatives of
primæval culture, show in the most distinct and unchanged state the
rudimentary mythic conceptions thence to be traced onward in the course
of civilization, then it is reasonable for students to begin, so far as
may be, at the beginning. Savage mythology may be taken as a basis, and
then the myths of more civilized races may be displayed as compositions
sprung from like origin, though more advanced in art. This mode of
treatment proves satisfactory through almost all the branches of the
enquiry, and eminently so in investigating those most beautiful of
poetic fictions, to which may be given the title of Nature-Myths.

First and foremost among the causes which transfigure into myths the
facts of daily experience, is the belief in the animation of all nature,
rising at its highest pitch to personification. This, no occasional or
hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound in with that
primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world
the operation of personal life and will. This doctrine of Animism will
be considered elsewhere as affecting philosophy and religion, but here
we have only to do with its bearing on mythology. To the lower tribes of
man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal
animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies,
and performing their special functions in the universe with the aid of
limbs like beasts or of artificial instruments like men; or what men’s
eyes behold is but the instrument to be used or the material to be
shaped, while behind it there stands some prodigious but yet half-human
creature, who grasps it with his hands or blows it with his breath. The
basis on which such ideas as these are built is not to be narrowed down
to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a broad
philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thoughtful,
consistent, and quite really and seriously meant.

Let us put this doctrine of universal vitality to a test of direct
evidence, lest readers new to the subject should suppose it a modern
philosophical fiction, or think that if the lower races really express
such a notion, they may do so only as a poetical way of talking. Even in
civilized countries, it makes its appearance as the child’s early theory
of the outer world, nor can we fail to see how this comes to pass. The
first beings that children learn to understand something of are human
beings, and especially their own selves; and the first explanation of
all events will be the human explanation, as though chairs and sticks
and wooden horses were actuated by the same sort of personal will as
nurses and children and kittens. Thus infants take their first step in
mythology by contriving, like Cosette with her doll, ‘se figurer que
quelque chose est quelqu’un;’ and the way in which this childlike theory
has to be unlearnt in the course of education shows how primitive it is.
Even among full-grown civilized Europeans, as Mr. Grote appositely
remarks, ‘The force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede
the acquired habit, and even an intelligent man may be impelled in a
moment of agonizing pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which
he has suffered.’ In such matters the savage mind well represents the
childish stage. The wild native of Brazil would bite the stone he
stumbled over, or the arrow that had wounded him. Such a mental
condition may be traced along the course of history, not merely in
impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law. The rude Kukis of Southern
Asia were very scrupulous in carrying out their simple law of vengeance,
life for life; if a tiger killed a Kuki, his family were in disgrace
till they had retaliated by killing and eating this tiger, or another;
but further, if a man was killed by a fall from a tree, his relatives
would take their revenge by cutting the tree down, and scattering it in
chips.[348] A modern king of Cochin-China, when one of his ships sailed
badly, used to put it in the pillory as he would any other
criminal.[349] In classical times, the stories of Xerxes flogging the
Hellespont and Cyrus draining the Gyndes occur as cases in point, but
one of the regular Athenian legal proceedings is a yet more striking
relic. A court of justice was held at the Prytaneum, to try any
inanimate object, such as an axe or a piece of wood or stone, which had
caused the death of anyone without proved human agency, and this wood or
stone, if condemned, was in solemn form cast beyond the border.[350] The
spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law
(repealed within the last reign), whereby not only a beast that kills a
man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him
and kills him, is deodand, or given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for
the poor: as Bracton says, ‘Omnia quae movent ad mortem sunt Deodanda.’
Dr. Reid comments on this law, declaring that its intention was not to
punish the ox or the cart as criminal, but ‘to inspire the people with a
sacred regard to the life of man.’[351] But his argument rather serves
to show the worthlessness of off-hand speculations on the origin of law,
like his own in this matter, unaided by the indispensable evidence of
history and ethnography. An example from modern folklore shows still at
its utmost stretch this primitive fancy that inert things are alive and
conscious. The pathetic custom of ‘telling the bees’ when the master or
mistress of a house dies, is not unknown in our own country. But in
Germany the idea is more fully worked out; and not only is the sad
message given to every bee-hive in the garden and every beast in the
stall, but every sack of corn must be touched and everything in the
house shaken, that they may know the master is gone.[352]

It will be seen presently how Animism, the doctrine of spiritual beings,
at once develops with and reacts upon mythic personification, in that
early state of the human mind which gives consistent individual life to
phenomena that our utmost stretch of fancy only avails to personify in
conscious metaphor. An idea of pervading life and will in nature far
outside modern limits, a belief in personal souls animating even what we
call inanimate bodies, a theory of transmigration of souls as well in
life as after death, a sense of crowds of spiritual beings sometimes
flitting through the air, but sometimes also inhabiting trees and rocks
and waterfalls, and so lending their own personality to such material
objects—all these thoughts work in mythology with such manifold
coincidence, as to make it hard indeed to unravel their separate
action.[353]

Such animistic origin of nature-myths shows out very clearly in the
great cosmic group of Sun, Moon, and Stars. In early philosophy
throughout the world, the Sun and Moon are alive and as it were human in
their nature. Usually contrasted as male and female, they nevertheless
differ in the sex assigned to each, as well as in their relations to one
another. Among the Mbocobis of South America, the Moon is a man and the
Sun his wife, and the story is told how she once fell down and an Indian
put her up again, but she fell a second time and set the forest blazing
in a deluge of fire.[354] To display the opposite of this idea, and at
the same time to illustrate the vivid fancy with which savages can
personify the heavenly bodies, we may read the following discussion
concerning eclipses, between certain Algonquin Indians and one of the
early Jesuit missionaries to Canada in the 17th century, Father Le
June:—‘Je leur ay demandé d’où venoit l’Eclipse de Lune et de Soleil;
ils m’ont respondu que la Lune s’éclipsoit ou paroissoit noire, à cause
qu’elle tenoit son fils entre ses bras, qui empeschoit que l’on ne vist
sa clarté. Si la Lune a un fils, elle est mariée, ou l’a été, leur
dis-je. Oüy dea, me dirent-ils, le Soleil est son mary, qui marche tout
le jour, et elle toute la nuict; et s’il s’éclipse, ou s’il s’obscurcit,
c’est qu’il prend aussi par fois le fils qu’il a eu de la Lune entre ses
bras. Oüy, mais ny la Lune ny le Soleil n’ont point de bras, leur
disois-je. Tu n’as point d’esprit; ils tiennent tousiours leurs arcs
bandés deuant eux, voilà pourquoy leurs bras ne paroissent point. Et sur
qui veulent-ils tirer? Hé qu’en scauons nous?’[355] A mythologically
important legend of the same race, the Ottawa story of Iosco, describes
Sun and Moon as brother and sister. Two Indians, it is said, sprang
through a chasm in the sky, and found themselves in a pleasant moonlit
land; there they saw the Moon approaching as from behind a hill, they
knew her at the first sight, she was an aged woman with white face and
pleasing air; speaking kindly to them, she led them to her brother the
Sun, and he carried them with him in his course and sent them home with
promises of happy life.[356] As the Egyptian Osiris and Isis were at
once brother and sister, and husband and wife, so it was with the
Peruvian Sun and Moon, Ynti and Quilla, father and mother of the Incas,
whose sister-marriage thus had in their religion at once a meaning and a
justification.[357] The myths of other countries, where such relations
of sex may not appear, carry on the same lifelike personification in
telling the ever-reiterated, never tedious tale of day and night. Thus
to the Mexicans it was an ancient hero who, when the old sun was burnt
out, and had left the world in darkness, sprang into a huge fire,
descended into the shades below, and arose deified and glorious in the
east as Tonatiuh the Sun. After him there leapt in another hero, but now
the fire had grown dim, and he arose only in milder radiance as Metztli
the Moon.[358]

If it be objected that all this may be mere expressive form of speech,
like a modern poet’s fanciful metaphor, there is evidence which no such
objection can stand against. When the Aleutians thought that if anyone
gave offence to the moon, he would fling down stones on the offender and
kill him,[359] or when the moon came down to an Indian squaw, appearing
in the form of a beautiful woman with a child in her arms, and demanding
an offering of tobacco and fur robes,[360] what conceptions of personal
life could be more distinct than these? When the Apache Indian pointed
to the sky and asked the white man, ‘Do you not believe that God, this
Sun (que Dios, este Sol), sees what we do and punishes us when it is
evil?’ it is impossible to say that this savage was talking in
rhetorical simile.[361] There was something in the Homeric contemplation
of the living personal Hêlios, that was more and deeper than metaphor.
Even in far later ages, we may read of the outcry that arose in Greece
against the astronomers, those blasphemous materialists who denied, not
the divinity only, but the very personality of the sun, and declared him
a huge hot ball. Later again, how vividly Tacitus brings to view the old
personification dying into simile among the Romans, in contrast with its
still enduring religious vigour among the German nations, in the record
of Boiocalcus pleading before the Roman legate that his tribe should not
be driven from their lands. Looking toward the sun, and calling on the
other heavenly bodies as though, says the historian, they had been there
present, the German chief demanded of them if it were their will to look
down upon a vacant soil? (Solem deinde respiciens, et caetera sidera
vocans, quasi coram interrogabat, vellentne contueri inane solum?)[362]

So it is with the stars. Savage mythology contains many a story of them,
agreeing through all other difference in attributing to them animate
life. They are not merely talked of in fancied personality, but personal
action is attributed to them, or they are even declared once to have
lived on earth. The natives of Australia not only say the stars in
Orion’s belt and scabbard are young men dancing a corroboree; they
declare that Jupiter, whom they call ‘Foot of Day’ (Ginabong-Bearp), was
a chief among the Old Spirits, that ancient race who were translated to
heaven before man came on earth.[363] The Esquimaux did not stop short
at calling the stars of Orion’s belt the Lost Ones, and telling a tale
of their being seal-hunters who missed their way home; but they
distinctly held that the stars were in old times men and animals, before
they went up into the sky.[364] So the North American Indians had more
than superficial meaning in calling the Pleiades the Dancers, and the
morning-star the Day-bringer; for among them stories are told like that
of the Iowas, of the star that an Indian had long gazed upon in
childhood, and who came down and talked with him when he was once out
hunting, weary and luckless, and led him to a place where there was much
game.[365] The Kasia of Bengal declare that the stars were once men:
they climbed to the top of a tree (of course the great heaven-tree of
the mythology of so many lands), but others below cut the trunk and left
them up there in the branches.[366] With such savage conceptions as
guides, the original meaning in the familiar classic personification of
stars can scarcely be doubted. The explicit doctrine of the animation of
stars is to be traced through past centuries, and down to our own.
Origen declares that the stars are animate and rational, moved with such
order and reason as it would be absurd to say irrational creatures could
fulfil. Pamphilius, in his apology for this Father, lays it down that
whereas some have held the luminaries of heaven to be animate and
rational creatures, while others have held them mere spiritless and
senseless bodies, no one may call another a heretic for holding either
view, for there is no open tradition on the subject, and even
ecclesiastics have thought diversely of it.[367] It is enough to mention
here the well-known mediæval doctrine of star-souls and star-angels, so
intimately mixed up with the delusions of astrology. In our own time the
theory of the animating souls of stars finds still here and there an
advocate, and De Maistre, prince and leader of reactionary philosophers,
maintains against modern astronomers the ancient doctrine of personal
will in astronomic motion, and even the theory of animated planets.[368]

Poetry has so far kept alive in our minds the old animative theory of
nature, that it is no great effort to us to fancy the waterspout a huge
giant or sea-monster, and to depict in what we call appropriate metaphor
its march across the fields of ocean. But where such forms of speech are
current among less educated races, they are underlaid by a distinct
prosaic meaning of fact. Thus the waterspouts which the Japanese see so
often off their coasts are to them long-tailed dragons, ‘flying up into
the air with a swift and violent motion,’ wherefore they call them
‘tatsmaki,’ ‘spouting dragons.’[369] Waterspouts are believed by some
Chinese to be occasioned by the ascent and descent of the dragon;
although the monster is never seen head and tail at once for clouds,
fishermen and sea-side folk catch occasional glimpses of him ascending
from the water and descending to it.[370] In the mediæval Chronicle of
John of Bromton there is mentioned a wonder which happens about once a
month in the Gulf of Satalia, on the Pamphylian coast. A great black
dragon seems to come in the clouds, letting down his head into the
waves, while his tail seems fixed to the sky, and this dragon draws up
the waves to him with such avidity that even a laden ship would be taken
up on high, so that to avoid this danger the crews ought to shout and
beat boards to drive the dragon off. However, concludes the chronicler,
some indeed say that this is not a dragon, but the sun drawing up the
water, which seems more true.[371] The Moslems still account for
waterspouts as caused by gigantic demons, such as that one described in
the ‘Arabian Nights:’—‘The sea became troubled before them, and there
arose from it a black pillar, ascending towards the sky, and approaching
the meadow ... and behold it was a Jinnee, of gigantic stature.’[372]
The difficulty in interpreting language like this is to know how far it
is seriously and how far fancifully meant. But this doubt in no way goes
against its original animistic meaning, of which there can be no
question in the following story of a ‘great sea-serpent’ current among a
barbarous East African tribe. A chief of the Wanika told Dr. Krapf of a
great serpent which is sometimes seen out at sea, reaching from the sea
to the sky, and appearing especially during heavy rain. ‘I told them,’
says the missionary, ‘that this was no serpent, but a waterspout.’[373]
Out of the similar phenomenon on land there has arisen a similar group
of myths. The Moslem fancies the whirling sand-pillar of the desert to
be caused by the flight of an evil jinn, and the East African simply
calls it a demon (p’hepo). To traveller after traveller who gazes on
these monstrous shapes gliding majestically across the desert, the
thought occurs that the well-remembered ‘Arabian Nights’’ descriptions
rest upon personifications of the sand-pillars themselves, as the
gigantic demons into which fancy can even now so naturally shape
them.[374]

Rude and distant tribes agree in the conception of the Rainbow as a
living monster. New Zealand myth, describing the battle of the Tempest
against the Forest, tells how the Rainbow arose and placed his mouth
close to Tane-mahuta, the Father of Trees, and continued to assault him
till his trunk was snapt in two, and his broken branches strewed the
ground.[375] It is not only in mere nature-myth like this, but in actual
awe-struck belief and terror, that the idea of the live Rainbow is
worked out. The Karens of Burma say it is a spirit or demon. ‘The
Rainbow can devour men.... When it devours a person, he dies a sudden or
violent death. All persons that die badly, by falls, by drowning, or by
wild beasts, die because the Rainbow has devoured their ka-la, or
spirit. On devouring persons it becomes thirsty and comes down to drink,
when it is seen in the sky drinking water. Therefore when people see the
Rainbow, they say, “The Rainbow has come to drink water. Look out, some
one or other will die violently by an evil death.” If children are
playing, their parents will say to them, “The Rainbow has come down to
drink. Play no more, lest some accident should happen to you.” And after
the Rainbow has been seen, if any fatal accident happens to anyone, it
is said the Rainbow has devoured him.’[376] The Zulu ideas correspond in
a curious way with these. The Rainbow lives with a snake, that is, where
it is there is also a snake; or it is like a sheep, and dwells in a
pool. When it touches the earth, it is drinking at a pool. Men are
afraid to wash in a large pool; they say there is a Rainbow in it, and
if a man goes in, it catches and eats him. The Rainbow, coming out of a
river or pool and resting on the ground, poisons men whom it meets,
affecting them with eruptions. Men say, ‘The Rainbow is disease. If it
rests on a man, something will happen to him.’[377] Lastly in Dahome,
Danh the Heavenly Snake, which makes the Popo beads and confers wealth
on man, is the Rainbow.[378]

To the theory of Animism belong those endless tales which all nations
tell of the presiding genii of nature, the spirits of cliffs, wells,
waterfalls, volcanoes, the elves and wood nymphs seen at times by human
eyes when wandering by moonlight or assembled at their fairy festivals.
Such beings may personify the natural objects they belong to, as when,
in a North American tale, the guardian spirit of waterfalls rushes
through the lodge as a raging current, bearing rocks and trees along in
its tremendous course, and then the guardian spirit of the islands of
Lake Superior enters in the guise of rolling waves covered with
silver-sparkling foam.[379] Or they may be guiding and power-giving
spirits of nature, like the spirit Fugamu, whose work is the cataract of
the Nguyai, and who still wanders night and day around it, though the
negroes who tell of him can no longer see his bodily form.[380] The
belief prevailing through the lower culture that the diseases which vex
mankind are brought by individual personal spirits, is one which has
produced striking examples of mythic development. Thus in Burma the
Karen lives in terror of the mad ‘la,’ the epileptic ‘la,’ and the rest
of the seven evil demons who go about seeking his life; and it is with a
fancy not many degrees removed from this early stage of thought that the
Persian sees in bodily shape the apparition of Al, the scarlet fever:—

             ‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,
             With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]

It is with this deep old spiritualistic belief clearly in view that the
ghastly tales are to be read where pestilence and death come on their
errand in weird human shape. To the mind of the Israelite, death and
pestilence took the personal form of the destroying angel who smote the
doomed.[382] When the great plague raged in Justinian’s time, men saw on
the sea brazen barks whose crews were black and headless men, and where
they landed, the pestilence broke out.[383] When the plague fell on Rome
in Gregory’s time, the saint rising from prayer saw Michael standing
with his bloody sword on Hadrian’s castle—the archangel stands there yet
in bronze, giving the old fort its newer name of the Castle of St.
Angelo. Among a whole group of stories of the pestilence seen in
personal shape travelling to and fro in the land, perhaps there is none
more vivid than this Slavonic one. ‘There sat a Russian under a
larch-tree, and the sunshine glared like fire. He saw something coming
from afar; he looked again—it was the Pest-maiden, huge of stature, all
shrouded in linen, striding towards him. He would have fled in terror,
but the form grasped him with her long outstretched hand. “Knowest thou
the Pest?” she said; “I am she. Take me on thy shoulders and carry me
through all Russia; miss no village, no town, for I must visit all. But
fear not for thyself, thou shalt be safe amid the dying.” Clinging with
her long hands, she clambered on the peasant’s back; he stepped onward,
saw the form above him as he went, but felt no burden. First he bore her
to the towns; they found there joyous dance and song; but the form waved
her linen shroud, and joy and mirth were gone. As the wretched man
looked round, he saw mourning, he heard the tolling of the bells, there
came funeral processions, the graves could not hold the dead. He passed
on, and coming near each village heard the shriek of the dying, saw all
faces white in the desolate houses. But high on the hill stands his own
hamlet: his wife, his little children are there, and the aged parents,
and his heart bleeds as he draws near. With strong gripe he holds the
maiden fast, and plunges with her beneath the waves. He sank: she rose
again, but she quailed before a heart so fearless, and fled far away to
the forest and the mountain.’[384]

Yet, if mythology be surveyed in a more comprehensive view, it is seen
that its animistic development falls within a broader generalization
still. The explanation of the course and change of nature, as caused by
life such as the life of the thinking man who gazes on it, is but a part
of a far wider mental process. It belongs to that great doctrine of
analogy, from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the
world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its
misleading results, analogy is still to us a chief means of discovery
and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was
all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancy to us were to men of
past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured
prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword
from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their
bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs
answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in
thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts
had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his
injunctions to use metaphor cautiously, and to take continual care to
make all similes consistent. The similes of the old bards and orators
were consistent, because they seemed to see and hear and feel them: what
we call poetry was to them real life, not as to the modern versemaker a
masquerade of gods and heroes, shepherds and shepherdesses, stage
heroines and philosophic savages in paint and feathers. It was with a
far deeper consciousness that the circumstance of nature was worked out
in endless imaginative detail in ancient days and among uncultured
races.

Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu Pennu, the Rain-god
of the Khonds, rests as he pours down the showers through his
sieve.[385] Over Peru there stands a princess with a vase of rain, and
when her brother strikes the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and
see the flash in lightning.[386] To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed
stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war and tempest, or
it was the personal Iris, messenger between gods and men.[387] To the
South Sea Islander it was the heaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed
up and down;[388] and so to the Scandinavian it was Bifröst, the
trembling bridge, timbered of three hues and stretched from sky to
earth; while in German folk-lore it is the bridge where the souls of the
just are led by their guardian angels across to paradise.[389] As the
Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in the clouds, it is to the Hindu
the bow of Rama,[390] and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer,
who slays with it the sorcerers that hunt after men’s lives;[391] it is
imagined, moreover, as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-dress of
feathers, St. Bernard’s crown, or the sickle of an Esthonian deity.[392]
And yet through all such endless varieties of mythic conception, there
runs one main principle, the evident suggestion and analogy of nature.
It has been said of the savages of North America, that ‘there is always
something actual and physical to ground an Indian fancy on.’[393] The
saying goes too far, but within limits it is emphatically true, not of
North American Indians alone, but of mankind.

Such resemblances as have just been displayed thrust themselves directly
on the mind, without any necessary intervention of words. Deep as
language lies in our mental life, the direct comparison of object with
object, and action with action, lies yet deeper. The myth-maker’s mind
shows forth even among the deaf-and-dumb, who work out just such
analogies of nature in their wordless thought. Again and again they have
been found to suppose themselves taught by their guardians to worship
and pray to sun, moon, and stars, as personal creatures. Others have
described their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to
things within their reach, one fancying the moon made like a dumpling
and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble across a table, and the
stars cut out with great scissors and stuck against the sky, while
another supposed the moon a furnace and the stars fire-grates, which the
people above the firmament light up as we kindle fires.[394] Now the
mythology of mankind at large is full of conceptions of nature like
these, and to assume for them no deeper original source than
metaphorical phrases, would be to ignore one of the great transitions of
our intellectual history.

Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the formation of
myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as
winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives
the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings.
Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose
product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus, by
the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed
imagination, we have others in which language has led, and imagination
has followed in the track. These two actions coincide too closely for
their effects to be thoroughly separated, but they should be
distinguished as far as possible. For myself, I am disposed to think
(differing here in some measure from Professor Max Müller’s view of the
subject) that the mythology of the lower races rests especially on a
basis of real and sensible analogy, and that the great expansion of
verbal metaphor into myth belongs to more advanced periods of
civilization. In a word, I take material myth to be the primary, and
verbal myth to be the secondary formation. But whether this opinion be
historically sound or not, the difference in nature between myth founded
on fact and myth founded on word is sufficiently manifest. The want of
reality in verbal metaphor cannot be effectually hidden by the utmost
stretch of imagination. In spite of this essential weakness, however,
the habit of realizing everything that words can describe is one which
has grown and flourished in the world. Descriptive names become
personal, the notion of personality stretches to take in even the most
abstract notions to which a name may be applied, and realized name,
epithet, and metaphor pass into interminable mythic growths by the
process which Max Müller has so aptly characterized as ‘a disease of
language.’ It would be difficult indeed to define the exact thought
lying at the root of every mythic conception, but in easy cases the
course of formation can be quite well followed. North American tribes
have personified Nipinūkhe and Pipūnūkhe, the beings who bring the
spring (nipin) and the winter (pipūn); Nipinūkhe brings the heat and
birds and verdure, Pipūnūkhe ravages with his cold winds, his ice and
snow; one comes as the other goes, and between them they divide the
world.[395] Just such personification as this furnishes the staple of
endless nature-metaphor in our own European poetry. In the springtime it
comes to be said that May has conquered Winter, his gate is open, he has
sent letters before him to tell the fruit that he is coming, his tent is
pitched, he brings the woods their summer clothing. Thus, when Night is
personified, we see how it comes to pass that Day is her son, and how
each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To minds in this
mythologic stage, the Curse becomes a personal being, hovering in space
till it can light upon its victim; Time and Nature arise as real
entities; Fate and Fortune become personal arbiters of our lives. But at
last, as the change of meaning goes on, thoughts that once had a more
real sense fade into mere poetic forms of speech. We have but to compare
the effect of ancient and modern personification on our own minds, to
understand something of what has happened in the interval. Milton may be
consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells how Sin and Death sat
within the gates of hell, and how they built their bridge of length
prodigious across the deep abyss to earth. Yet such descriptions leave
but scant sense of meaning on modern minds, and we are apt to say, as we
might of some counterfeit bronze from Naples, ‘For a sham antique how
cleverly it is done.’ Entering into the mind of the old Norseman, we
guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest modern imitation can
carry, lay in his pictures of Hel, the death-goddess, stern and grim and
livid, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in her
nine worlds the souls of the departed; Hunger is her dish, Famine is her
knife, Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain. When such old material
descriptions are transferred to modern times, in spite of all the
accuracy of reproduction their spirit is quite changed. The story of the
monk who displayed among his relics the garments of St. Faith is to us
only a jest; and we call it quaint humour when Charles Lamb, falling old
and infirm, once wrote to a friend, ‘My bed-fellows are Cough and Cramp;
we sleep three in a bed.’ Perhaps we need not appreciate the drollery
any the less for seeing in it at once a consequence and a record of a
past intellectual life.

The distinction of grammatical gender is a process intimately connected
with the formation of myths. Grammatical gender is of two kinds. What
may be called sexual gender is familiar to all classically-educated
Englishmen, though their mother tongue has mostly lost its traces. Thus
in Latin not only are such words as homo and femina classed
naturally as masculine and feminine, but such words as pes and
gladius are made masculine, and biga and navis feminine, and the
same distinction is actually drawn between such abstractions as honos
and fides. That sexless objects and ideas should thus be classed as
male and female, in spite of a new gender—the neuter or ‘neither’
gender—having been defined, seems in part explained by considering this
latter to have been of later formation, and the original Indo-European
genders to have been only masculine and feminine, as is actually the
case in Hebrew. Though the practice of attributing sex to objects that
have none is not easy to explain in detail, yet there seems nothing
mysterious in its principles, to judge from one at least of its main
ideas, which is still quite intelligible. Language makes an admirably
appropriate distinction between strong and weak, stern and gentle, rough
and delicate, when it contrasts them as male and female. It is possible
to understand even such fancies as those which Pietro della Valle
describes among the mediæval Persians, distinguishing between male and
female, that is to say, practically between robust and tender, even in
such things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribing their
proper use accordingly.[396] And no phrase could be more plain and
forcible than that of the Dayaks of Borneo, who say of a heavy downpour
of rain, ‘ujatn arai, ‘sa!’—‘a he rain this!’[397] Difficult as it may
be to decide how far objects and thoughts were classed in language as
male and female because they were personified, and how far they were
personified because they were classed as male and female, it is evident
at any rate that these two processes fit together and promote each
other.[398]

Moreover, in studying languages which lie beyond the range of common
European scholarship, it is found that the theory of grammatical gender
must be extended into a wider field. The Dravidian languages of South
India make the interesting distinction between a ‘high-caste or major
gender,’ which includes rational beings, i.e. deities and men, and a
‘caste-less or minor gender,’ which includes irrational objects, whether
living animals or lifeless things.[399] The distinction between an
animate and an inanimate gender appears with especial import in a family
of North American Indian languages, the Algonquin. Here not only do all
animals belong to the animate gender, but also the sun, moon, and stars,
thunder and lightning, as being personified creatures. The animate
gender, moreover, includes not only trees and fruits, but certain
exceptional lifeless objects which appear to owe this distinction to
their special sanctity or power; such are the stone which serves as the
altar of sacrifice to the manitus, the bow, the eagle’s feather, the
kettle, tobacco-pipe, drum, and wampum. Where the whole animal is
animate, parts of its body considered separately may be inanimate—hand
or foot, beak or wing. Yet even here, for special reasons, special
objects are treated as of animate gender; such are the eagle’s talons,
the bear’s claws, the beaver’s castor, the man’s nails, and other
objects for which there is claimed a peculiar or mystic power.[400] If
to anyone it seems surprising that savage thought should be steeped
through and through in mythology, let him consider the meaning that is
involved in a grammar of nature like this. Such a language is the very
reflexion of a mythic world.

There is yet another way in which language and mythology can act and
re-act on one another. Even we, with our blunted mythologic sense,
cannot give an individual name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a
weapon, without in the very act imagining for it something of a personal
nature. Among nations whose mythic conceptions have remained in full
vigour, this action may be yet more vivid. Perhaps very low savages may
not be apt to name their implements or their canoes as though they were
live people, but races a few stages above them show the habit in
perfection. Among the Zulus we hear of names for clubs, Igumgehle or
Glutton, U-nothlola-mazibuko or He-who-watches-the-fords; among names
for assagais are Imbubuzi or Groan-causer, U-silo-si-lambile or Hungry
Leopard, and the weapon being also used as an implement, a certain
assagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami,
He-digs-up-for-my-children.[401] A similar custom prevailed among the
New Zealanders. The traditions of their ancestral migrations tell how
Ngahue made from his jasper stone those two sharp axes whose names were
Tutauru and Hauhau-te-rangi; how with these axes were shaped the canoes
Arawa and Tainui; how the two stone anchors of Te Arawa were
called Toka-parore or Wrystone, and Tu-te-rangi-haruru or
Like-to-the-roaring-sky. These legends do not break off in a remote
past, but carry on a chronicle which reaches into modern times. It is
only lately, the Maoris say, that the famous axe Tutauru was lost, and
as for the ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua, which was made from a chip
of the same stone, they declare that it was not lost till 1846, when its
owner, Te Heuheu, perished in a landslip.[402] Up from this savage level
the same childlike habit of giving personal names to lifeless objects
may be traced, as we read of Thor’s hammer, Miölnir, whom the giants
know as he comes flying through the air, or of Arthur’s brand,
Excalibur, caught by the arm clothed in white samite when Sir Bedivere
flung him back into the lake, or of the Cid’s mighty sword Tizona, the
Firebrand, whom he vowed to bury in his own breast were she overcome
through cowardice of his.

The teachings of a childlike primæval philosophy ascribing personal life
to nature at large, and the early tyranny of speech over the human mind,
have thus been two great and, perhaps, greatest agents in mythologic
development. Other causes, too, have been at work, which will be noticed
in connexion with special legendary groups, and a full list, could it be
drawn up, might include as contributories many other intellectual
actions. It must be thoroughly understood, however, that such
investigation of the processes of myth-formation demands a lively sense
of the state of men’s minds in the mythologic period. When the Russians
in Siberia listened to the talk of the rude Kirgis, they stood amazed at
the barbarians’ ceaseless flow of poetic improvisation, and exclaimed,
‘Whatever these people see gives birth to fancies!’ Just so the
civilized European may contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought
with the wild shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may
say of him that everything he saw gave birth to fancy. Wanting the power
of transporting himself into this imaginative atmosphere, the student
occupied with the analysis of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in
conceiving its depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into
stupid fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of
throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor
who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be.
Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him,
could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky,
as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race,
‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to
understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but
deep poetic feeling.

Yet such of us as share but very little in this rare gift, may make
shift to let evidence in some measure stand in its stead. In the poetic
stage of thought we may see that ideal conceptions once shaped in the
mind must have assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as
they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vividness with
which, as a child, I fancied I might look through a great telescope, and
see the constellations stand round the sky, red, green, and yellow, as I
had just been shown them on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic
fancy may be brought even more nearly home to our minds by comparing it
with the morbid subjectivity of illness. Among the lower races, and high
above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting,
narcotics, excitement, or disease, is a state common and held in honour
among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and
under its influence the barriers between sensation and imagination break
utterly away. A North American Indian prophetess once related the story
of her first vision: At her solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an
ecstasy, and at the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the
path that leads to the opening of the sky; there she heard a voice, and,
standing still, saw the figure of a man standing near the path, whose
head was surrounded by a brilliant halo, and his breast was covered with
squares; he said, ‘Look at me, my name is Oshauwauegeeghick, the Bright
Blue Sky!’ Recording her experience afterwards in the rude
picture-writing of her race, she painted this glorious spirit with the
hieroglyphic horns of power and the brilliant halo round his head.[403]
We know enough of the Indian pictographs to guess how a fancy with these
familiar details of the picture-language came into the poor excited
creature’s mind; but how far is our cold analysis from her utter belief
that in vision she had really seen this bright being, this Red Indian
Zeus. Far from being an isolated case, this is scarcely more than a fair
example of the rule that any idea shaped and made current by mythic
fancy, may at once acquire all the definiteness of fact. Even if to the
first shaper it be no more than lively imagination, yet when it comes to
be embodied in words and to pass from house to house, those who hear it
become capable of the most intense belief that it may be seen in
material shape, that it has been seen, that they themselves have seen
it. The South African who believes in a god with a crooked leg sees him
with a crooked leg in dreams and visions.[404] In the time of Tacitus it
was said, with a more poetic imagination, that in the far north of
Scandinavia men might see the very forms of the gods and the rays
streaming from their heads.[405] In the 6th century the famed Nile-god
might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the
waters of his river.[406] Want of originality indeed seems one of the
most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas
with their crowns and petticoats still transfer themselves from the
pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant
visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of
old were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When
the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in
the popular mind, of course men saw him in this conventional shape. So
real had St. Anthony’s satyr-demon become to men’s opinion, that there
is a grave 13th century account of the mummy of such a devil being
exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the
present time that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil
walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward
footprints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with
the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a
conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking
instance: there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually
encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of the
shingles (Latin, cingulum). By an imagination not difficult to
understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I
remember a case in Cornwall where a girl’s family waited in great fear
to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being
that if the snake’s head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet
fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by
Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as though
a snake were twined round him, and in whose mind this idea reached such
reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and
touch its rough scales with his hand.

The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly well instanced
in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage,
barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval life, and surviving to this
day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently
called the Doctrine of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift
or magic art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. The origin
of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained. What we are
especially concerned with is the fact of its prevalence in the world. It
may be noticed that such a notion is quite consistent with the animistic
theory that a man’s soul may go out of his body and enter that of a
beast or bird, and also with the opinion that men may be transformed
into animals; both these ideas having an important place in the belief
of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine of werewolves is
substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now
it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients
prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves
transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such
transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the
patient to imagine it taking place in his own person. But at any rate
such insane delusions do occur, and physicians apply to them the
mythologic term of lycanthropy. The belief in men being werewolves,
man-tigers, and the like, may thus have the strong support of the very
witnesses who believe themselves to be such creatures. Moreover,
professional sorcerers have taken up the idea, as they do any morbid
delusion, and pretend to turn themselves and others into beasts by magic
art. Through the mass of ethnographic details relating to this subject,
there is manifest a remarkable uniformity of principle.

Among the non-Aryan indigenes of India, the tribes of the Garo Hills
describe as ‘transformation into a tiger’ a kind of temporary madness,
apparently of the nature of delirium tremens, in which the patient walks
like a tiger, shunning society.[407] The Khonds of Orissa say that some
among them have the art of ‘mleepa,’ and by the aid of a god become
‘mleepa’ tigers for the purpose of killing enemies, one of the man’s
four souls going out to animate the bestial form. Natural tigers, say
the Khonds, kill game to benefit men, who find it half devoured and
share it, whereas man-killing tigers are either incarnations of the
wrathful Earth-goddess, or they are transformed men.[408] Thus the
notion of man-tigers serves, as similar notions do elsewhere, to account
for the fact that certain individual wild beasts show a peculiar
hostility to man. Among the Ho of Singbhoom it is related, as an example
of similar belief, that a man named Mora saw his wife killed by a tiger,
and followed the beast till it led him to the house of a man named
Poosa. Telling Poosa’s relatives of what had occurred, they replied that
they were aware that he had the power of becoming a tiger, and
accordingly they brought him out bound, and Mora deliberately killed
him. Inquisition being made by the authorities, the family deposed, in
explanation of their belief, that Poosa had one night devoured an entire
goat, roaring like a tiger whilst eating it, and that on another
occasion he told his friends he had a longing to eat a particular
bullock, and that very night that very bullock was killed and devoured
by a tiger.[409] South-eastern Asia is not less familiar with the idea
of sorcerers turning into man-tigers and wandering after prey; thus the
Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula believe that when a man becomes a tiger to
revenge himself on his enemies, the transformation happens just before
he springs, and has been seen to take place.[410]

How vividly the imagination of an excited tribe, once inoculated with a
belief like this, can realize it into an event, is graphically told by
Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America. When a sorcerer, to
get the better of an enemy, threatens to change himself into a tiger and
tear his tribesmen to pieces, no sooner does he begin to roar, than all
the neighbours fly to a distance; but still they hear the feigned
sounds. ‘Alas!’ they cry, ‘his whole body is beginning to be covered
with tiger-spots!’ ‘Look, his nails are growing!’ the fear-struck women
exclaim, although they cannot see the rogue, who is concealed within his
tent, but distracted fear presents things to their eyes which have no
real existence. ‘You daily kill tigers in the plain without dread,’ said
the missionary; ‘why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger
in the town?’ ‘You fathers don’t understand these matters,’ they reply
with a smile. ‘We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because we
can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be
seen nor killed by us.’[411] The sorcerers who induced assemblies of
credulous savages to believe in this monstrous imposture, were also the
professional spiritualistic mediums of the tribes, whose business it was
to hold intercourse with the spirits of the dead, causing them to appear
visibly, or carrying on audible dialogues with them behind a curtain.
Africa is especially rich in myths of man-lions, man-leopards,
man-hyænas. In the Kanuri language of Bornu, there is grammatically
formed from the word ‘bultu,’ a hyæna, the verb ‘bultungin,’ meaning ‘I
transform myself into a hyæna;’ and the natives maintain that there is a
town called Kabutiloa, where every man possesses this faculty.[412] The
tribe of Budas in Abyssinia, iron-workers and potters, are believed to
combine with these civilized avocations the gift of the evil eye and the
power of turning into hyænas, wherefore they are excluded from society
and the Christian sacrament. In the ‘Life of Nathaniel Pearce,’ the
testimony of one Mr. Coffin is printed. A young Buda, his servant, came
for leave of absence, which was granted; but scarcely was Mr. Coffin’s
head turned to his other servants, when some of them called out,
pointing in the direction the Buda had taken, ‘Look, look, he is turning
himself into a hyæna.’ Mr. Coffin instantly looked round, the young man
had vanished, and a large hyæna was running off at about a hundred
paces’ distance, in full light on the open plain, without tree or bush
to intercept the view. The Buda came back next morning, and as usual
rather affected to countenance than deny the prodigy. Coffin says,
moreover, that the Budas wear a peculiar gold earring, and this he has
frequently seen in the ears of hyænas shot in traps, or speared by
himself and others; the Budas are dreaded for their magical arts, and
the editor of the book suggests that they put ear-rings in hyænas’ ears
to encourage a profitable superstition.[413] Mr. Mansfield Parkyns’ more
recent account shows how thoroughly this belief is part and parcel of
Abyssinian spiritualism. Hysterics, lethargy, morbid insensibility to
pain, and the ‘demoniacal possession,’ in which the patient speaks in
the name and language of an intruding spirit, are all ascribed to the
spiritual agency of the Budas. Among the cases described by Mr. Parkyns
was that of a servant-woman of his, whose illness was set down to the
influence of one of these blacksmith-hyænas, who wanted to get her out
into the forest and devour her. One night, a hyæna having been heard
howling and laughing near the village, the woman was bound hand and foot
and closely guarded in the hut, when suddenly, the hyæna calling close
by, her master, to his astonishment, saw her rise ‘without her bonds’
like a Davenport Brother, and try to escape.[414] In Ashango-land, M. Du
Chaillu tells the following suggestive story. He was informed that a
leopard had killed two men, and many palavers were held to settle the
affair; but this was no ordinary leopard, but a transformed man. Two of
Akondogo’s men had disappeared, and only their blood was found, so a
great doctor was sent for, who said it was Akondogo’s own nephew and
heir Akosho. The lad was sent for, and when asked by the chief, answered
that it was truly he who had committed the murders, that he could not
help it, for he had turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for
blood, and after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo
loved the boy so much that he would not believe his confession, till
Akosho took him to a place in the forest, where lay the mangled bodies
of the two men, whom he had really murdered under the influence of this
morbid imagination. He was slowly burnt to death, all the people
standing by.[415]

Brief mention is enough for the comparatively well-known European
representatives of these beliefs. What with the mere continuance of old
tradition, what with the tricks of magicians, and what with cases of
patients under delusion believing themselves to have suffered
transformation, of which a number are on record, the European series of
details from ancient to modern ages is very complete. Virgil in the
Bucolics shows the popular opinion of his time that the arts of the
werewolf, the necromancer or ‘medium,’ and the witch, were different
branches of one craft, where he tells of Mœris as turning into a wolf by
the use of poisonous herbs, as calling up souls from the tombs, and as
bewitching away crops:—

              ‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venena
              Ipse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
              His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis
              Moerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,
              Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]

Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is Petronius
Arbiter’s story of the transformation of a ‘versipellis’ or ‘turnskin;’
this contains the episode of the wolf being wounded and the man who wore
its shape found with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to
belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a familiar
feature in European stories of werewolves and witches. In Augustine’s
time magicians were persuading their dupes that by means of herbs they
could turn them to wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is
mentioned at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas have
their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (hamramr) raging in fits of
furious madness. The Danes still know a man who is a werewolf by his
eyebrows meeting, and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of
the soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the last year
of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of Kalmar said the wolves
which overran the land were transformed Swedish prisoners. From
Herodotus’ legend of the Neuri who turned every year for a few days to
wolves, we follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian
sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to wolves;
and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares that the wolves that
sometimes in bitter winters dare to attack men, are themselves
‘wilkolak,’ men bewitched into wolf’s shape. The modern Greeks instead
of the classic λυκάνθρωπος adopt the Slavonic term βρύκολακας (Bulgarian
‘vrkolak’); it is a man who falls into a cataleptic state, while his
soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for blood. Modern Germany,
especially in the north, still keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and
in December you must not ‘talk of the wolf’ by name, lest the werewolves
hear you. Our English word ‘werewolf,’ that is ‘man-wolf’ (the
‘verevulf’ of Cnut’s Laws), still reminds us of the old belief in our
own country, and if it has had for centuries but little place in English
folklore, this has been not so much for lack of superstition, as of
wolves. To instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another
animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following Scotch story
may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for a long time tormented an honest
fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to
flight with his broad-sword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than
the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman’s
leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one
leg left. In France the creature has what is historically the same name
as our ‘werewolf;’ viz. in early forms ‘gerulphus,’ ‘garoul,’ and now
pleonastically ‘loup-garou.’ The parliament of Franche-Comté made a law
in 1573 to expel the werewolves; in 1598 the werewolf of Angers gave
evidence of his hands and feet turning to wolf’s claws; in 1603, in the
case of Jean Grenier, the judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane
delusion, not a crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a
magician could still give the following perfect account of the
witch-werewolf: ‘I teach the witches to take the form of wolves and eat
children, and when anyone has cut off one of their legs (which proves to
be a man’s arm) I forsake them when they are discovered, and leave them
in the power of justice.’ Even in our own day the idea has by no means
died out of the French peasant’s mind. Not ten years ago in France, Mr.
Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a guide after dark across a wild
place haunted by a loup-garou, an incident which led him afterwards to
write his ‘Book of Werewolves,’ a monograph of this remarkable
combination of myth and madness.[417]

If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided power of our modern
fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on
the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as
this, it becomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination
among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between the conditions of
a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a raving fanatic or a patient in
a fever-ward. A poet of our own day has still much in common with the
minds of uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude
man’s imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet’s
more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh
artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas,
which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so
powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single word will tell
the history of this transition, ranging from primæval to modern thought.
From first to last, the processes of phantasy have been at work; but
where the savage could see phantasms, the civilized man has come to
amuse himself with fancies.

Footnote 345:

  Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol. i. chaps. ix. xi.; Pausanias viii. 2;
  Plutarch. Theseus 1.

Footnote 346:

  See Banier, ‘La Mythologie et les Fables expliquées par l’Histoire,’
  Paris, 1738; Lempriere, ‘Classical Dictionary,’ &c.

Footnote 347:

  Hanusch, ‘Slav. Myth.’ p. 323; Grimm, D. M. p. 363; Latham, ‘Descr.
  Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 448; I. J. Schmidt, ‘Forschungen,’ p. 13; J. G.
  Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 268. See also Plutarch. Parallela xxxvi.;
  Campbell, ‘Highland Tales,’ vol. i. p. 278; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol.
  ii. p. 169; Tylor, ‘Wild Men and Beast-children,’ in Anthropological
  Review, May 1863.

Footnote 348:

  Macrae in ‘As. Res.’ vol. vii. p. 189.

Footnote 349:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 51.

Footnote 350:

  Grote, vol. iii. p. 104; vol. v. p. 22; Herodot. i. 189; vii. 34;
  Porphyr. de Abstinentia, ii. 30; Pausan. i. 28; Pollux, ‘Onomasticon.’

Footnote 351:

  Reid, ‘Essays,’ vol. iii. p. 113.

Footnote 352:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 210.

Footnote 353:

  See chap. xi.

Footnote 354:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102. See also De la Borde,
  ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 355:

  Le Jeune in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p.
  26. See Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. ii. p. 170.

Footnote 356:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 54; compare ‘Tanner’s
  Narrative,’ p. 317; see also ‘Prose Edda,’ i. 11; ‘Early Hist. of
  Mankind,’ p. 327.

Footnote 357:

  Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86; Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comm. Real.’
  i. c. 15; iii. c. 21.

Footnote 358:

  Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vi. 42; Clavigéro, vol. ii. p. 9;
  Sahagun in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico.’

Footnote 359:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 59.

Footnote 360:

  Le Jeune, in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1639,
  p. 88.

Footnote 361:

  Froebel, ‘Central America,’ p. 490.

Footnote 362:

  Tac. Ann. xiii. 55.

Footnote 363:

  Stanbridge, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 301.

Footnote 364:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 295; Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 254.

Footnote 365:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 276; see also De la Borde,
  ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 366:

  H. Yule in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xiii. (1844), p. 628.

Footnote 367:

  Origen, de Principiis, i. 7, 3; Pamphil. Apolog. pro Origine, ix. 84.

Footnote 368:

  De Maistre, ‘Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 210, see 184.

Footnote 369:

  Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684.

Footnote 370:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 265; see Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p.
  140 (Indra’s elephants drinking).

Footnote 371:

  Chron. Joh. Bromton, in ‘Hist. Angl. Scriptores,’ x. Ric. I. p. 1216.

Footnote 372:

  Lane, ‘Thousand and one N.’ vol. i. p. 30, 7.

Footnote 373:

  Krapf, ‘Travels,’ p. 198.

Footnote 374:

  Lane, ibid. pp. 30, 42; Burton, ‘El Medinah and Meccah,’ vol. ii. p.
  69; ‘Lake Regions,’ vol. i. p. 297; J. D. Hooker, ‘Himalayan
  Journals,’ vol. i. p. 79; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ p. 30; Tyerman and Bennet,
  vol. ii. p. 362. (Hindu piçâcha = demon, whirlwind.)

Footnote 375:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 121.

Footnote 376:

   Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 217.

Footnote 377:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 294.

Footnote 378:

  Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148; see 242.

Footnote 379:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 148.

Footnote 380:

  Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 106.

Footnote 381:

  Jas. Atkinson, ‘Customs of the Women of Persia,’ p. 49.

Footnote 382:

  2 Sam. xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xix. 35.

Footnote 383:

  G. S. Assemanni, ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis,’ ii. 86.

Footnote 384:

  Hanusch, ‘Slav. Mythus,’ p. 322. Compare Torquemada, ‘Monarquia
  Indiana,’ i. c. 14 (Mexico); Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 197.

Footnote 385:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 357.

Footnote 386:

  Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9.

Footnote 387:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 690.

Footnote 388:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 231; Polack, ‘New Z.’ vol. i. p. 273.

Footnote 389:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 694-6.

Footnote 390:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 140.

Footnote 391:

  Castren, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’ pp. 48, 49.

Footnote 392:

  Delbrück in Lazarus and Steinthal’s Zeitschrift, vol. iii. p. 269.

Footnote 393:

  Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 520.

Footnote 394:

  Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes, &c.’ Paris 1808, vol. ii. p. 634;
  ‘Personal Recollections’ by Charlotte Elizabeth, London, 1841, p. 182;
  Dr. Orpen, ‘The Contrast,’ p. 25. Compare Meiners, vol. i. p. 42.

Footnote 395:

  Le Jeune, in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 13.

Footnote 396:

  Pietro della Valle, ‘Viaggi,’ letter xvi.

Footnote 397:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. xxvii.

Footnote 398:

  See remarks on the tendency of sex-denoting language to produce myth
  in Africa, in W. H. Bleek, ‘Reynard the Fox in S. Afr.’ p. xx.;
  ‘Origin of Lang.’ p. xxiii.

Footnote 399:

  Caldwell, ‘Comp. Gr. of Dravidian Langs.’ p. 172.

Footnote 400:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 366. For other cases see
  especially Pott in Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Allg. Encyclop.’ art.
  ‘Geschlecht;’ also D. Forbes, ‘Persian Gr.’ p. 26; Latham, ‘Descr.
  Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 60.

Footnote 401:

  Callaway, ‘Relig. of Amazulu,’ p. 166.

Footnote 402:

  Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ pp. 132, &c., 211; Shortland, ‘Traditions of N.
  Z.’ p. 15.

Footnote 403:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 391 and pl. 55.

Footnote 404:

  Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 124.

Footnote 405:

  Tac. Germania, 45.

Footnote 406:

  Maury, ‘Magie, &c.’ p. 175.

Footnote 407:

  Eliot in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 32.

Footnote 408:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 92, 99, 108.

Footnote 409:

  Dalton, ‘Kols of Chota-Nagpore’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 32.

Footnote 410:

  J. Cameron, ‘Malayan India,’ p. 393; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i.
  p. 119; vol. iii. pp. 261, 273; ‘As. Res.’ vol. vi. p. 173.

Footnote 411:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 77. See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer.
  Urrelig.’ p. 63; Martius, ‘Ethn. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 652; Oviedo,
  ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 229; Piedrahita, ‘Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’ part i.
  lib. c. 3.

Footnote 412:

  Kölle, ‘Afr. Lit. and Kanuri Vocab.’ p. 275.

Footnote 413:

  ‘Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce’ (1810-9), ed. by J. J.
  Halls, London, 1831, vol. i. p. 286; also ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p.
  288; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 504.

Footnote 414:

  Parkyns, ‘Life in Abyssinia’ (1853), vol. ii. p. 146.

Footnote 415:

  Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 52. For other African details, see
  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 343; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 222, 365, 398;
  Burton, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 57; Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ pp. 615, 642; Magyar,
  ‘S. Afr.’ p. 136.

Footnote 416:

  Virg. Bucol. ecl. viii. 95.

Footnote 417:

  For collections of European evidence, see W. Hertz, ‘Der Werwolf;’
  Baring-Gould, ‘Book of Werewolves;’ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1047; Dasent,
  ‘Norse Tales,’ Introd. p. cxix.; Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. ii. pp. 32,
  566; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 312, vol. iii. p. 32; Lecky, ‘Hist.
  of Rationalism,’ vol. i. p. 82. Particular details in Petron. Arbiter,
  Satir. lxii.; Virgil. Eclog. viii. 97; Plin. viii. 34; Herodot. iv.
  105; Mela ii. 1; Augustin. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 17; Hanusch, ‘Slav.
  Myth.’ pp. 286, 320; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 118.

MYTHOLOGY (continued).

    Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, preservation of
    original sense and significant names—Nature-myths of upper savage
    races compared with related forms among barbaric and civilized
    nations—Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents—Sun and Moon: Eclipse
    and Sunset, as Hero or Maiden swallowed by Monster; Rising of Sun
    from Sea and Descent to Under-World; Jaws of Night and Death,
    Symplegades; Eye of Heaven, Eye of Odin and the Graiæ—Sun and Moon
    as mythic civilizers—Moon, her inconstancy, periodical death and
    revival—Stars, their generation—Constellations, their place in
    Mythology and Astronomy—Wind and Tempest—Thunder—Earthquake.

From laying down general principles of myth-development, we may now
proceed to survey the class of Nature-myths, such especially as seem to
have their earliest source and truest meaning among the lower races of
mankind.

Science, investigating nature, discusses its facts and announces its
laws in technical language which is clear and accurate to trained
students, but which falls only as a mystic jargon on the ears of
barbarians, or peasants, or children. It is to the comprehension of just
these simple unschooled minds that the language of poetic myth is
spoken, so far at least as it is true poetry, and not its quaint
affected imitation. The poet contemplates the same natural world as the
man of science, but in his so different craft strives to render
difficult thought easy by making it visible and tangible, above all by
referring the being and movement of the world to such personal life as
his hearers feel within themselves, and thus working out in
far-stretched fancy the maxim that ‘Man is the measure of all things.’
Let but the key be recovered to this mythic dialect, and its complex and
shifting terms will translate themselves into reality, and show how far
legend, in its sympathetic fictions of war, love, crime, adventure,
fate, is only telling the perennial story of the world’s daily life. The
myths shaped out of those endless analogies between man and nature which
are the soul of all poetry, into those half-human stories still so full
to us of unfading life and beauty, are the masterpieces of an art
belonging rather to the past than to the present. The growth of myth has
been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of
proportions and specimens—it is not only dying, but half dead, and
students are anatomising it. In this world one must do what one can, and
if the moderns cannot feel myth as their forefathers did, at least they
can analyse it. There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he
must be who will sympathise with myth, while he must be without who will
investigate it, and it is our fortune that we live near this
frontier-line, and can go in and out. European scholars can still in a
measure understand the belief of Greeks or Aztecs or Maoris in their
native myths, and at the same time can compare and interpret them
without the scruples of men to whom such tales are history, and even
sacred history. Moreover, were the whole human race at a uniform level
of culture with ourselves, it would be hard to bring our minds to
conceive of tribes in the mental state to which the early growth of
nature-myth belongs, even as it is now hard to picture to ourselves a
condition of mankind lower than any that has been actually found. But
the various grades of existing civilization preserve the landmarks of a
long course of history, and there survive by millions savages and
barbarians whose minds still produce, in rude archaic forms, man’s early
mythic representations of nature.

Those who read for the first time the dissertations of the modern school
of mythologists, and sometimes even those who have been familiar with
them for years, are prone to ask, with half-incredulous appreciation of
the beauty and simplicity of their interpretations, can they be really
true? Can so great a part of the legendary lore of classic, barbarian,
and mediæval Europe be taken up with the everlasting depiction of Sun
and Sky, Dawn and Gloaming, Day and Night, Summer and Winter, Cloud and
Tempest; can so many of the personages of tradition, for all their
heroic human aspect, have their real origin in anthropomorphic myths of
nature? Without any attempt to discuss these opinions at large, it will
be seen that inspection of nature-mythology from the present point of
view tells in their favour, at least as to principle. The general theory
that such direct conceptions of nature as are so naïvely and even baldly
uttered in the Veda, are among the primary sources of myth, is enforced
by evidence gained elsewhere in the world. Especially the traditions of
savage races display mythic conceptions of the outer world, primitive
like those of the ancient Indian hymns, agreeing with them in their
general character, and often remarkably corresponding in their very
episodes. At the same time it must be clearly understood that the truth
of such a general principle is no warrant for all the particular
interpretations which mythologists claim to base upon it, for of these
in fact many are wildly speculative, and many hopelessly unsound.
Nature-myth demands indeed a recognition of its vast importance in the
legendary lore of mankind, but only so far as its claim is backed by
strong and legitimate evidence.

The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of
man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who in
simile or in argument have told of light and darkness, of calm and
tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no
one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory
such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which
on the strength of mere resemblance derive episodes of myth from
episodes of nature must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student
who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and
sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them. It
may be judged by simple trial what such a method may lead to; no legend,
no allegory, no nursery rhyme, is safe from the hermeneutics of a
thorough-going mythologic theorist. Should he, for instance, demand as
his property the nursery ‘Song of Sixpence,’ his claim would be easily
established: obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the
four-and-twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the underlying
earth covered with the overarching sky; how true a touch of nature it is
that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the birds begin
to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out his money is pouring
out the sunshine, the golden shower of Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and
her transparent honey the moonlight; the Maid is the ‘rosy-fingered’
Dawn who rises before the Sun her master, and hangs out the clouds, his
clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird who so tragically ends
the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour of sunrise. The
time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a Sun-myth,
that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy.
Or if historical characters be selected with any discretion, it is easy
to point out the solar episodes embodied in their lives. See Cortès
landing in Mexico, and seeming to the Aztecs their very Sun-priest
Quetzalcoatl, come back from the East to renew his reign of light and
glory; mark him deserting the wife of his youth, even as the Sun leaves
the Dawn, and again in later life abandoning Marina for a new bride;
watch his sun-like career of brilliant conquest, checkered with
intervals of storm, and declining to a death clouded with sorrow and
disgrace. The life of Julius Cæsar would fit as plausibly into a scheme
of solar myth; his splendid course as in each new land he came, and saw,
and conquered; his desertion of Cleopatra; his ordinance of the solar
year for men; his death at the hand of Brutus, like Sîfrit’s death at
the hand of Hagen in the Nibelungen Lied; his falling pierced with many
bleeding wounds, and shrouding himself in his cloak to die in darkness.
Of Cæsar, better than of Cassius his slayer, it might have been said in
the language of sun-myth:

                        ‘... O setting sun,
                As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,
                So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;
                The sun of Rome is set!’

Thus, in interpreting heroic legend as based on nature-myth,
circumstantial analogy must be very cautiously appealed to, and at any
rate there is need of evidence more cogent than vague likenesses between
human and cosmic life. Now such evidence is forthcoming at its strongest
in a crowd of myths, whose open meaning it would be wanton incredulity
to doubt, so little do they disguise, in name or sense, the familiar
aspects of nature which they figure as scenes of personal life. Even
where the tellers of legend may have altered or forgotten its earlier
mythic meaning, there are often sufficient grounds for an attempt to
restore it. In spite of change and corruption, myths are slow to lose
all consciousness of their first origin; as for instance, classical
literature retained enough of meaning in the great Greek sun-myth, to
compel even Lempriere of the Classical Dictionary to admit that Apollo
or Phœbus ‘is often confounded with the sun.’ For another instance, the
Greeks had still present to their thoughts the meaning of Argos
Panoptes, Io’s hundred-eyed, all-seeing guard who was slain by Hermes
and changed into the Peacock, for Macrobius writes as recognizing in him
the star-eyed heaven itself;[418] even as Indra, the Sky, is in Sanskrit
the ‘thousand-eyed’ (sahasrâksha, sahasranayana). In modern times
the thought is found surviving or reviving in a strange region of
language: whoever it was that brought argo as a word for ‘heaven’ into
the Lingua Furbesca or Robbers’ Jargon of Italy,[419] must have been
thinking of the starry sky watching him like Argus with his hundred
eyes. The etymology of names, moreover, is at once the guide and
safeguard of the mythologist. The obvious meaning of words did much to
preserve vestiges of plain sense in classic legend, in spite of all the
efforts of the commentators. There was no disputing the obvious facts
that Hēlios was the Sun, and Selēnē the Moon; and as for Jove, all the
nonsense of pseudo-history could not quite do away the idea that he was
really Heaven, for language continued to declare this in such
expressions as ‘sub Jove frigido.’ The explanation of the rape of
Persephone, as a nature-myth of the seasons and the fruits of the earth,
does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to
prove its reality, Zeus, Hēlios, Dēmētēr—Heaven, and Sun, and Mother
Earth. Lastly, in stories of mythic beings who are the presiding genii
of star or mountain, tree or river, or heroes and heroines actually
metamorphosed into such objects, personification of nature is still
plainly evident; the poet may still as of old see Atlas bear the heavens
on his mighty shoulders, and Alpheus in impetuous course pursue the
maiden Arethusa.

In a study of the nature-myths of the world, it is hardly practicable to
start from the conceptions of the very lowest human tribes, and to work
upwards from thence to fictions of higher growth; partly because our
information is but meagre as to the beliefs of these shy and seldom
quite intelligible folk, and partly because the legends they possess
have not reached that artistic and systematic shape which they attain to
among races next higher in the scale. It therefore answers better to
take as a foundation the mythology of the North American Indians, the
South Sea Islanders, and other low-cultured tribes who best represent in
modern times the early mythologic period of human history. The survey
may be fitly commenced by a singularly perfect and purposeful cosmic
myth from New Zealand.

It seems long ago and often to have come into men’s minds, that the
overarching Heaven and the all-producing Earth are, as it were, a Father
and a Mother of the world, whose offspring are the living creatures,
men, and beasts, and plants. Nowhere, in the telling of this oft-told
tale, is present nature veiled in more transparent personification,
nowhere is the world’s familiar daily life repeated with more childlike
simplicity as a story of long past ages, than in the legend of ‘The
Children of Heaven and Earth’ written down by Sir George Grey among the
Maoris about the year 1850. From Rangi, the Heaven, and Papa, the Earth,
it is said, sprang all men and things, but sky and earth clave together,
and darkness rested upon them and the beings they had begotten, till at
last their children took counsel whether they should rend apart their
parents, or slay them. Then Tane-mahuta, father of forests, said to his
five great brethren, ‘It is better to rend them apart, and to let the
heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky
become as a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our
nursing mother.’ So Rongo-ma-tane, god and father of the cultivated food
of man, arose and strove to separate the heaven and the earth; he
struggled, but in vain, and vain too were the efforts of Tangaroa,
father of fish and reptiles, and of Haumia-tikitiki, father of
wild-growing food, and of Tu-matauenga, god and father of fierce men.
Then slow uprises Tane-mahuta, god and father of forests, and wrestles
with his parents, striving to part them with his hands and arms. ‘Lo, he
pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet
he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back
and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and
with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud.... But Tane-mahuta
pauses not; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far
above him he thrusts up the sky.’ But Tawhiri-ma-tea, father of winds
and storms, had never consented that his mother should be torn from her
lord, and now there arose in his breast a fierce desire to war against
his brethren. So the Storm-god rose and followed his father to the
realms above, hurrying to the sheltered hollows of the boundless skies,
to hide and cling and nestle there. Then came forth his progeny, the
mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly
drifting, wildly bursting; and in their midst their father rushed upon
his foe. Tane-mahuta and his giant forests stood unconscious and
unsuspecting when the raging hurricane burst on them, snapping the
mighty trees across, leaving trunks and branches rent and torn upon the
ground for the insect and the grub to prey on. Then the father of storms
swooped down to lash the waters into billows whose summits rose like
cliffs, till Tangaroa, god of ocean and father of all that dwell
therein, fled affrighted through his seas. His children, Ika-tere, the
father of fish, and Tu-te-wehiwehi, the father of reptiles, sought where
they might escape for safety; the father of fish cried, ‘Ho, ho, let us
all escape to the sea,’ but the father of reptiles shouted in answer,
‘Nay, nay, let us rather fly inland,’ and so these creatures separated,
for while the fish fled into the sea, the reptiles sought safety in the
forests and scrubs. But the sea-god Tangaroa, furious that his children
the reptiles should have deserted him, has ever since waged war on his
brother Tane who gave them shelter in his woods, Tane attacks him in
return, supplying the offspring of his brother Tu-matauenga, father of
fierce men, with canoes and spears and fish-hooks made from his trees,
and with nets woven from his fibrous plants, that they may destroy
withal the fish, the Sea-god’s children; and the Sea-god turns in wrath
upon the Forest-god, overwhelms his canoes with the surges of the sea,
sweeps with floods his trees and houses into the boundless ocean. Next
the god of storms pushed on to attack his brothers the gods and
progenitors of the tilled food and the wild, but Papa, the Earth, caught
them up and hid them, and so safely were these her children concealed by
their mother, that the Storm-god sought for them in vain. So he fell
upon the last of his brothers, the father of fierce men, but him he
could not even shake, though he put forth all his strength. What cared
Tu-matauenga for his brother’s wrath? He it was who has planned the
destruction of their parents, and had shown himself brave and fierce in
war; his brethren had yielded before the tremendous onset of the
Storm-god and his progeny; the Forest-god and his offspring had been
broken and torn in pieces; the Sea-god and his children had fled to the
depths of the ocean or the recesses of the shore; the gods of food had
been safe in hiding; but man still stood erect and unshaken upon the
bosom of his mother Earth, and at last the hearts of the Heaven and the
Storm became tranquil, and their passion was assuaged.

But now Tu-matauenga, father of fierce men, took thought how he might be
avenged upon his brethren who had left him unaided to stand against the
god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and
the birds and beasts, children of Tane the Forest-god, fell before him;
he netted nets from the flax-plant, and dragged ashore the fish, the
children of Tangaroa the Sea-god; he found in the hiding-place
underground the children of Rongo-ma-tane, the sweet potato and all
cultivated food, and the children of Haumia-tikitiki, the fern-root and
all wild-growing food, he dug them up and let them wither in the sun.
Yet, though he overcame his four brothers, and they became his food,
over the fifth he could not prevail, and Tawhiri-ma-tea, the Storm-god,
still ever attacks him in tempest and hurricane, striving to destroy him
both by sea and land. It was the bursting forth of the Storm-god’s wrath
against his brethren that caused the dry land to disappear beneath the
waters: the beings of ancient days who thus submerged the land were
Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce-hailstorms; and their progeny
were Mist, and Heavy-dew, and Light-dew, and thus but little of the dry
land was left standing above the sea. Then clear light increased in the
world, and the beings who had been hidden between Rangi and Papa before
they were parted, now multiplied upon the earth. ‘Up to this time the
vast Heaven has still ever remained separated from his spouse the Earth.
Yet their mutual love still continues; the soft warm sighs of her loving
bosom still ever rise up to him, ascending from the woody mountains and
valleys, and men call these mists; and the vast Heaven, as he mourns
through the long nights his separation from his beloved, drops frequent
tears upon her bosom, and men seeing these term them dew-drops.’[420]

The rending asunder of heaven and earth is a far-spread Polynesian
legend, well known in the island groups that lie away to the
north-east.[421] Its elaboration, however, into the myth here sketched
out was probably native New Zealand work. Nor need it be supposed that
the particular form in which the English governor took it down among the
Maori priests and tale-tellers, is of ancient date. The story carries in
itself evidence of an antiquity of character which does not necessarily
belong to mere lapse of centuries. Just as the adzes of polished jade
and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using
but yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze
battle-axes and linen mummy cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori poet’s
shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of intellectual
history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty centuries ago.
The myth-maker’s fancy of Heaven and Earth as father and mother of all
things naturally suggested the legend that they in old days abode
together, but have since been torn asunder. In China the same idea of
the universal parentage is accompanied by a similar legend of the
separation. Whether or not there is historical connexion here between
the mythology of Polynesia and China, I will not guess, but certainly
the ancient Chinese legend of the separation of heaven and earth in the
primæval days of Puang-Ku seems to have taken the very shape of the
Polynesian myth: ‘Some say a person called Puang-Ku opened or separated
the heavens and the earth, they previously being pressed down close
together.’[422] As to the mythic details in the whole story of ‘The
Children of Heaven and Earth,’ there is scarcely a thought that is not
still transparent, scarcely even a word that has lost its meaning to us.
The broken and stiffened traditions which our fathers fancied relics of
ancient history, are, as has been truly said, records of a past which
was never present; but the simple nature-myth, as we find it in its
actual growth, or reconstruct it from its legendary remnants, may be
rather called the record of a present which is never past. The battle of
the storm against the forest and the ocean is still waged before our
eyes; we still look upon the victory of man over the creatures of the
land and sea; the food-plants still hide in their mother earth, and the
fish and reptiles find shelter in the ocean and the thicket; but the
mighty forest-trees stand with their roots firm planted in the ground,
while with their branches they push up and up against the sky. And if we
have learnt the secret of man’s thought in the childhood of his race, we
may still realize with the savage the personal being of the ancestral
Heaven and Earth.

The idea of the Earth as a mother is more simple and obvious, and no
doubt for that reason more common in the world, than the idea of the
Heaven as a father. Among the native races of America the Earth-mother
is one of the great personages of mythology. The Peruvians worshipped
her as Mama-Pacha or ‘Mother-Earth,’ and the Caribs, when there was an
earthquake, said that it was their mother Earth dancing, and signifying
to them to dance and make merry likewise, which accordingly they did.
Among the North-American Indians the Comanches call on the Earth as
their mother, and the Great Spirit as their father. A story told by
Gregg shows a somewhat different thought of mythic parentage. General
Harrison once called the Shawnee chief Tecumseh for a talk:—‘Come here,
Tecumseh, and sit by your father!’ he said. ‘You my father!’ replied the
chief, with a stern air. ‘No! yonder sun (pointing towards it) is my
father, and the earth is my mother, so I will rest on her bosom,’ and he
sat down on the ground. Like this was the Aztec fancy, as it seems from
this passage in a Mexican prayer to Tezcatlipoca, offered in time of
war: ‘Be pleased, O our Lord, that the nobles who shall die in the war
be peacefully and joyously received by the Sun and the Earth, who are
the loving father and mother of all.’[423] In the mythology of Finns,
Lapps, and Esths, Earth-Mother is a divinely honoured personage.[424]
Through the mythology of our own country the same thought may be traced,
from the days when the Anglo-Saxon called upon the Earth, ‘Hâl wes thu
folde, fira modor,’ ‘Hail thou Earth, men’s mother,’ to the time when
mediæval Englishmen made a riddle of her, asking ‘Who is Adam’s mother?’
and poetry continued what mythology was letting fall, when Milton’s
archangel promised Adam a life to last

                    ‘... till like ripe fruit, thou drop
                    Into thy mother’s lap.’[425]

Among the Aryan race, indeed, there stands, wide and firm, the double
myth of the ‘two great parents,’ as the Rig-Veda calls them. They are
Dyaushpitar, Ζεὺς πατήρ, Jupiter, the ‘Heaven-father,’ and _Prthivî
mâtar_, the ‘Earth-mother;’ and their relation is still kept in mind in
the ordinance of Brahman marriage according to the Yajur-Veda, where the
bridegroom says to the bride, ‘I am the sky, thou art the earth, come
let us marry.’ When Greek poets called Ouranos and Gaia, or Zeus and
Dēmētēr, husband and wife, what they meant was the union of Heaven and
Earth; and when Plato said that the earth brought forth men, but God was
their shaper, the same old mythic thought must have been present to his
mind.[426] It reappears in ancient Scythia;[427] and again in China,
where Heaven and Earth are called in the Shu-King ‘Father and Mother of
all things.’ Chinese philosophy naturally worked this idea into the
scheme of the two great principles of nature, the Yin and Yang, male and
female, heavenly and earthly, and from this disposition of nature they
drew a practical moral lesson: Heaven, said the philosophers of the Sung
dynasty, made man, and earth made woman and therefore woman is to be
subject to man as Earth to Heaven.[428]

Entering next upon the world-wide myths of Sun, Moon, and Stars, the
regularity and consistency of human imagination may be first displayed
in the beliefs connected with eclipses. It is well known that these
phenomena, to us now crucial instances of the exactness of natural laws,
are, throughout the lower stages of civilization, the very embodiment of
miraculous disaster. Among the native races of America it is possible to
select a typical series of myths describing and explaining, according to
the rules of savage philosophy, these portents of dismay. The Chiquitos
of the southern continent thought the Moon was hunted across the sky by
huge dogs, who caught and tore her till her light was reddened and
quenched by the blood flowing from her wounds, and then the Indians,
raising a frightful howl and lamentation, would shoot across into the
sky to drive the monsters off. The Caribs, thinking that the demon
Maboya, hater of all light, was seeking to devour the Sun and Moon,
would dance and howl in concert all night long to scare him away. The
Peruvians, imagining such an evil spirit in the shape of a monstrous
beast, raised the like frightful din when the Moon was eclipsed,
shouting, sounding musical instruments, and beating the dogs to join
their howls to the hideous chorus. Nor are such ideas extinct in our own
days. In the Tupi language, the proper description of a solar eclipse is
‘oarasu jaguaretê vü,’ that is, ‘Jaguar has eaten Sun;’ and the full
meaning of this phrase is displayed by tribes who still shout and let
fly burning arrows to drive the devouring beast from his prey. On the
northern continent, again, some savages believed in a great
sun-swallowing dog, while others would shoot up arrows to defend their
luminaries against the enemies they fancied attacking them. By the side
of these prevalent notions there occur, however, various others; thus
the Caribs could imagine the eclipsed Moon hungry, sick, or dying; the
Peruvians could fancy the Sun angry and hiding his face, and the sick
Moon likely to fall in total darkness, and bring on the end of the
world; the Hurons thought the Moon sick, and explained their customary
charivari of shouting men and howling dogs as performed to recover her
from her complaint. Passing on from these most primitive conceptions, it
appears that natives of both South and North America fell upon
philosophic myths somewhat nearer the real facts of the case, insomuch
as they admit that the Sun and Moon cause eclipses of one another. In
Cumana, men thought that the wedded Sun and Moon quarrelled, and that
one of them was wounded; and the Ojibwas endeavoured by tumultuous noise
to distract the two from such a conflict. The course of progressive
science went far beyond this among the Aztecs, who, as part of their
remarkable astronomical knowledge, seem to have had an idea of the real
cause of eclipses, but who kept up a relic of the old belief by
continuing to speak in mythologic phrase of the Sun and Moon being
eaten.[429] Elsewhere in the lower culture, there prevailed similar
mythic conceptions. In the South Sea Islands some supposed the Sun and
Moon to be swallowed by an offended deity, whom they therefore induced,
by liberal offerings, to eject the luminaries from his stomach.[430] In
Sumatra we have the comparatively scientific notion that an eclipse has
to do with the action of the Sun and Moon on one another, and,
accordingly, they make a loud noise with sounding instruments to prevent
the one from devouring the other.[431] So, in Africa, there may be found
both the rudest theory of the Eclipse-monster, and the more advanced
conception that a solar eclipse is ‘the Moon catching the Sun.’[432]

It is no cause for wonder that an aspect of the heavens so awful as an
eclipse should in times of astronomic ignorance have filled men’s minds
with terror of a coming destruction of the world. It may help us still
to realize this thought if we consider how, as Calmet pointed out many
years ago, the prophet Joel adopted the plainest words of description of
the solar and lunar eclipse, ‘The sun shall be turned into darkness and
the moon into blood;’ nor could the thought of any catastrophe of nature
have brought his hearers face to face with a more lurid and awful
picture. But to our minds, now that the eclipse has long passed from the
realm of mythology into the realm of science, such words can carry but a
feeble glimmer of their early meaning. The ancient doctrine of the
eclipse has not indeed lost its whole interest. To trace it upward from
its early savage stages to the period when astronomy claimed it, and to
follow the course of the ensuing conflict over it between theology and
science—ended among ourselves but still being sluggishly fought out
among less cultured nations—this is to lay open a chapter of the history
of opinion, from which the student who looks forward as well as back may
learn grave lessons.

There is reason to consider most or all civilized nations to have
started from the myth of the Eclipse-monster in forms as savage as those
of the New World. It prevails still among the great Asiatic nations. The
Hindus say that the demon Râhu insinuated himself among the gods, and
obtained a portion of the amrita, the drink of immortality; Vishnu smote
off the now immortal head, which still pursues the Sun and Moon whose
watchful gaze detected his presence in the divine assembly. Another
version of the myth is that there are two demons, Râhu and Ketu, who
devour Sun and Moon respectively, and who are described in conformity
with the phenomena of eclipses, Râhu being black, and Ketu red; the
usual charivari is raised by the populace to drive them off, though
indeed, as their bodies have been cut off at the neck, their prey must
of natural course slip out as soon as swallowed. Or Râhu and Ketu are
the head and body of the dissevered demon, by which conception the
Eclipse-monster is most ingeniously adapted to advanced astronomy, the
head and tail being identified with the ascending and descending nodes.
The following remarks on the eclipse-controversy, made by Mr. Samuel
Davis a century ago in the Asiatick Researches, are still full of
interest. ‘It is evident, from what has been explained, that the
Pūndits, learned in the Jyotish shastrū, have truer notions of the form
of earth and the economy of the universe than are ascribed to the
Hindoos in general: and that they must reject the ridiculous belief of
the common Brahmūns, that eclipses are occasioned by the intervention of
the monster Rahoo, with many other particulars equally unscientific and
absurd. But as this belief is founded on explicit and positive
declarations contained in the védūs and pooranus, the divine authority
of which writings no devout Hindoo can dispute, the astronomers have
some of them cautiously explained such passages in those writings as
disagree with the principles of their own science: and where
reconciliation was impossible, have apologized, as well as they could,
for propositions necessarily established in the practice of it, by
observing, that certain things, as stated in other shastrūs, might have
been so formerly, and may be so still; but for astronomical purposes,
astronomical rules must be followed.’[433] It is not easy to give a more
salient example than this of the consequence of investing philosophy
with the mantle of religion, and allowing priests and scribes to convert
the childlike science of an early age into the sacred dogma of a late
one. Asiatic peoples under Buddhist influence show the eclipse-myth in
its different stages. The rude Mongols make a clamour of rough music to
drive the attacking Aracho (Râhu) from Sun or Moon. A Buddhist version
mentioned by Dr. Bastian describes Indra the Heaven-god pursuing Râhu
with his thunderbolt, and ripping open his belly, so that although he
can swallow the heavenly bodies, he lets them slip out again.[434] The
more civilized nations of South-East Asia, accepting the eclipse-demons
Râhu and Ketu, were not quite staggered in their belief by the
foreigners’ power of foretelling eclipses, nor even by learning roughly
to do the same themselves. The Chinese have official announcement of an
eclipse duly made beforehand, and then proceed to encounter the ominous
monster, when he comes, with gongs and bells and the regularly appointed
prayers. Travellers of a century or two ago relate curious details of
such combined belief in the dragon and the almanac, culminating in an
ingenious argument to account for the accuracy of the Europeans’
predictions. These clever people, the Siamese said, know the monster’s
mealtimes, and can tell how hungry he will be, that is, how large an
eclipse will be required to satisfy him.[435]

In Europe popular mythology kept up ideas, either of a fight of sun or
moon with celestial enemies, or of the moon’s fainting or sickness; and
especially remnants of such archaic belief are manifested in the
tumultuous clamour raised in defence or encouragement of the afflicted
luminary. The Romans flung firebrands into the air, and blew trumpets,
and clanged brazen pots and pans, ‘laboranti succurrere lunae.’ Tacitus,
relating the story of the soldiers’ mutiny against Tiberius, tells how
their plan was frustrated by the moon suddenly languishing in a clear
sky (luna claro repente coelo visa languescere): in vain by clang of
brass and blast of trumpet they strove to drive away the darkness, for
clouds came up and covered all, and the plotters saw, lamenting, that
the gods turned away from their crime.[436] In the period of the
conversion of Europe, Christian teachers began to attack the pagan
superstition, and to urge that men should no longer clamour and cry
‘vince luna!’ to aid the moon in her sore danger; and at last there came
a time when the picture of the sun or moon in the dragon’s mouth became
a mere old-fashioned symbol to represent eclipses in the calendar, and
the saying, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups’ passed into a mocking proverb
against fear of remote danger. Yet the ceremonial charivari is mentioned
in our own country in the seventeenth century: ‘The Irish or Welsh
during eclipses run about beating kettles and pans, thinking their
clamour and vexations available to the assistance of the higher orbes.’
In 1654 Nuremberg went wild with terror of an impending solar eclipse;
the markets ceased, the churches were crowded with penitents, and a
record of the event remains in the printed thanksgiving which was issued
(Danckgebeth nach vergangener höchstbedrohlich und hochschädlicher
Sonnenfinstenuss), which gives thanks to the Almighty for granting to
poor terrified sinners the grace of covering the sky with clouds, and
sparing them the sight of the awful sign in heaven. In our own times, a
writer on French folklore was surprised during a lunar eclipse to hear
sighs and exclamations, ‘Mon Dieu, qu’elle est souffrante!’ and found on
enquiry that the poor moon was believed to be the prey of some invisible
monster seeking to devour her.[437] No doubt such late survivals have
belonged in great measure to the ignorant crowd, for the educated
classes of the West have never suffered in its extreme the fatal Chinese
union of scepticism and superstition. Yet if it is our mood to bewail
the slowness with which knowledge penetrates the mass of mankind, there
stand dismal proofs before us here. The eclipse remained an omen of fear
almost up to our own century, and could rout a horror-stricken army, and
fill Europe with dismay, a thousand years after Pliny had written in
memorable words his eulogy of the astronomers; those great men, he said,
and above ordinary mortals, who, by discovering the laws of the heavenly
bodies, had freed the miserable mind of men from terror at the portents
of eclipses.

Day is daily swallowed up by Night, to be set free again at dawn, and
from time to time suffers a like but shorter durance in the maw of the
Eclipse and the Storm-cloud; Summer is overcome and prisoned by dark
Winter, to be again set free. It is a plausible opinion that such scenes
from the great nature-drama of the conflict of light and darkness are,
generally speaking, the simple facts, which in many lands and ages have
been told in mythic shape, as legends of a Hero or maiden devoured by a
Monster, and hacked out again or disgorged. The myths just displayed
show with absolute distinctness, that myth can describe eclipse as the
devouring and setting free of the personal sun and moon by a monster.
The following Maori legend will supply proof as positive that the
episode of the Sun’s or the Day’s death in sunset may be dramatized into
a tale of a personal solar hero plunging into the body of the personal
Night.

Maui, the New Zealand cosmic hero, at the end of his glorious career
came back to his father’s country, and was told that here, perhaps, he
might be overcome, for here dwelt his mighty ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po,
Great-Daughter-of-Night, whom ‘you may see flashing, and as it were
opening and shutting there, where the horizon meets the sky; what you
see yonder shining so brightly-red, are her eyes, and her teeth are as
sharp and hard as pieces of volcanic glass; her body is like that of a
man; and as for the pupils of her eyes, they are jasper; and her hair is
like the tangles of long sea-weed, and her mouth is like that of a
barra-couta.’ Maui boasted of his former exploits, and said, ‘Let us
fearlessly seek whether men are to die or live for ever;’ but his father
called to mind an evil omen, that when he was baptizing Maui he had left
out part of the fitting prayers, and therefore he knew that his son must
perish. Yet he said, ‘O, my last-born, and the strength of my old age,
... be bold, go and visit your great ancestress, who flashes so fiercely
there where the edge of the horizon meets the sky.’ Then the birds came
to Maui to be his companions in the enterprise, and it was evening when
they went with him, and they came to the dwelling of Hine-nui-te-po, and
found her fast asleep. Maui charged the birds not to laugh when they saw
him creep into the old chieftainess, but when he had got altogether
inside her, and was coming out of her mouth, then they might laugh long
and loud. So Maui stripped off his clothes, and the skin on his hips,
tattooed by the chisel of Uetonga, looked mottled and beautiful, like a
mackerel’s, as he crept in. The birds kept silence, but when he was in
up to his waist, the little tiwakawaka could hold its laughter in no
longer, and burst out loud with its merry note; then Maui’s ancestress
awoke, closed on him and caught him tight, and he was killed. Thus died
Maui, and thus death came into the world, for Hine-nui-te-po is the
goddess both of night and death, and had Maui entered into her body and
passed safely through her, men would have died no more. The New
Zealanders hold that the Sun descends at night into his cavern, bathes
in the Wai Ora Tane, the Water of Life, and returns at dawn from the
under-world; hence we may interpret the thought that if Man could
likewise descend into Hades and return, his race would be immortal.[438]
Further evidence that Hine-nui-te-po is the deity of Night or Hades,
appears in another New Zealand myth. Tane, descending to the shades
below in pursuit of his wife, comes to the Night (Po) of Hine-a-te-po,
Daughter-of-Night, who says to him, ‘I have spoken thus to her “Return
from this place, as I, Hine-a-te-po, am here. I am the barrier between
night and day.”’[439] It is seldom that solar characteristics are more
distinctly marked in the several details of a myth than they are here.

In the list of myths of engulfing monsters, there are others which seem
to display, with a clearness almost approaching this, an origin
suggested by the familiar spectacle of Day and Night, or Light and
Darkness. The simple story of the Day may well be told in the Karen tale
of Ta Ywa, who was born a tiny child, and went to the Sun to make him
grow; the Sun tried in vain to destroy him by rain and heat, and then
blew him up large till his head touched the sky; then he went forth and
travelled from his home far over the earth; and among the adventures
which befell him was this—a snake swallowed him, but they ripped the
creature up, and Ta Ywa came back to life,[440] like the Sun from the
ripped up serpent-demon in the Buddhist eclipse-myth. In North American
Indian mythology, a principal personage is Manabozho, an Algonquin hero
or deity whose solar character is well brought into view in an Ottawa
myth which tells us that Manabozho (whom it calls Na-na-bou-jou) is the
elder brother of Ning-gah-be-ar-nong Manito, the Spirit of the West, god
of the country of the dead in the region of the setting sun. Manabozho’s
solar nature is again revealed in the story of his driving the West, his
father, across mountain and lake to the brink of the world, though he
cannot kill him. This sun-hero Manabozho, when he angled for the King of
Fishes, was swallowed, canoe and all; then he smote the monster’s heart
with his war-club till he would fain have cast him up into the lake
again, but the hero set his canoe fast across the fish’s throat inside,
and finished slaying him; when the dead monster drifted ashore, the
gulls pecked an opening for Manabozho to come out. This is a story
familiar to English readers from its introduction into the poem of
Hiawatha. In another version, the tale is told of the Little Monedo of
the Ojibwas, who also corresponds with the New Zealand Maui in being the
Sun-Catcher; among his various prodigies, he is swallowed by the great
fish, and cut out again by his sister.[441] South Africa is a region
where there prevail myths which seem to tell the story of the world
imprisoned in the monster Night, and delivered by the dawning Sun. The
Basutos have their myth of the hero Litaolane; he came to man’s stature
and wisdom at his birth; all mankind save his mother and he had been
devoured by a monster; he attacked the creature and was swallowed whole,
but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world.
The Zulus tell stories as pointedly suggestive. A mother follows her
children into the maw of the great elephant, and finds forests and
rivers and highlands, and dogs and cattle, and people who had built
their villages there; a description which is simply that of the Zulu
Hades. When the Princess Untombinde was carried off by the
Isikqukqumadevu, the ‘bloated, squatting, bearded monster,’ the King
gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs,
and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out
cattle, and horses, and men, and last of all the princess herself. The
stories of these monsters being cut open imitate, in graphic savage
fashion, the cries of the imprisoned creatures as they came back from
darkness into daylight. ‘There came out first a fowl, it said,
“Kukuluku! I see the world!” For, for a long time it had been without
seeing it. After the fowl there came out a man, he said “Hau! I at
length see the world!”’ and so on with the rest.[442]

The well-known modern interpretation of the myth of Perseus and
Andromeda, or of Herakles and Hesione, as a description of the Sun
slaying the Darkness, has its connexion with this group of legends. It
is related in a remarkable version of this story, that when the Trojan
King Laomedon had bound his daughter Hesione to the rock, a sacrifice to
Poseidon’s destroying sea-monster, Herakles delivered the maiden,
springing full-armed into the fish’s gaping throat, and coming forth
hairless after three days’ hacking within. This singular story, probably
in part of Semitic origin, combines the ordinary myth of Hesione or
Andromeda with the story of Jonah’s fish, for which indeed the Greek
sculpture of Andromeda’s monster served as the model in early Christian
art, while Joppa was the place where vestiges of Andromeda’s chains on a
rock in front of the town were exhibited in Pliny’s time, and whence the
bones of a whale were carried to Rome as relics of Andromeda’s monster.
To recognize the place which the nature-myth of the Man swallowed by the
Monster occupies in mythology, among remote and savage races and onward
among the higher nations, affects the argument on a point of Biblical
criticism. It strengthens the position of the critics who, seeing that
the Book of Jonah consists of two wonder-episodes adapted to enforce two
great religious lessons, no longer suppose intention of literal
narrative in what they may fairly consider as the most elaborate parable
of the Old Testament. Had the Book of Jonah happened to be lost in old
times, and only recently recovered, it is indeed hardly likely that any
other opinion of it than this would find acceptance among scholars.[443]

The conception of Hades as a monster swallowing men in death, was
actually familiar to Christian thought. Thus, to take instances from
different periods, the account of the Descent into Hades in the
Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus makes Hades speak in his proper
personality, complaining that his belly is in pain, when the Saviour is
to descend and set free the saints imprisoned in it from the beginning
of the world; and in mediæval representations of this deliverance, the
so-called ‘Harrowing of Hell,’ Christ is depicted standing before a huge
fish-like monster’s open jaws, whence Adam and Eve are coming forth
first of mankind.[444] With even more distinctness of mythical meaning,
the man-devouring monster is introduced in the Scandinavian Eireks-Saga.
Eirek, journeying toward Paradise, comes to a stone bridge guarded by a
dragon, and entering into its maw, finds that he has arrived in the
world of bliss.[445] But in another wonder-tale, belonging to that
legendary growth which formed round early Christian history, no such
distinguishable remnant of nature-myth survives. St. Margaret, daughter
of a priest of Antioch, had been cast into a dungeon, and there Satan
came upon her in the form of a dragon and swallowed her alive:

       ‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,
       And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:
       His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,
       And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,

       Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,
       And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan gone
       Took her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.
       Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!
       Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;
       Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]

Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown to European
folk-lore. One is the story of Little Red Ridinghood, mutilated in the
English nursery version, but known more perfectly by old wives in
Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red
satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the Wolf, but they
both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping
beast. Any one who can fancy with prince Hal, ‘the blessed sun himself a
fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta,’ and can then imagine her
swallowed up by Sköll, the Sun-devouring Wolf of Scandinavian mythology,
may be inclined to class the tale of Little Red Ridinghood as a myth of
sunset and sunrise. There is indeed another story in Grimm’s Märchen,
partly the same as this one, which we can hardly doubt to have a quaint
touch of sun-myth in it. It is called the Wolf and Seven Kids, and tells
of the Wolf swallowing the kids all but the youngest of the seven, who
was hidden in the clock-case. As in Little Red Ridinghood, they cut open
the Wolf and fill him with stones. This tale, which took its present
shape since the invention of clocks, looks as though the tale-teller was
thinking, not of real kids and wolf, but of days of the week swallowed
by night, or how should he have hit upon such a fancy as that the wolf
could not get at the youngest of the seven kids, because it was hidden
(like to-day) in the clock case?[447]

It may be worth while to raise the question apropos of this nursery
tale, does the peasant folk-lore of modern Europe really still display
episodes of nature-myth, not as mere broken-down and senseless
fragments, but in full shape and significance? In answer it will be
enough to quote the story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, brought forward by
Mr. W. Ralston in one of his lectures on Russian Folk-lore. Vasilissa’s
stepmother and two sisters, plotting against her life, send her to get a
light at the house of Bába Yagá, the witch, and her journey contains the
following history of the Day, told in truest mythic fashion. Vasilissa
goes and wanders, wanders in the forest. She goes, and she shudders.
Suddenly before her bounds a rider, he himself white, and clad in white,
the horse under him white, and the trappings white. And day began to
dawn. She goes farther, when a second rider bounds forth, himself red,
clad in red, and on a red horse. The sun began to rise. She goes on all
day, and towards evening arrives at the witch’s house. Suddenly there
comes again a rider, himself black, clad all in black, and on a black
horse; he bounded to the gates of the Bába Yagá and disappeared as if he
had sunk through the earth. Night fell. After this, when Vasilissa asks
the witch, who was the white rider, she answers, ‘That is my clear Day;’
who was the red rider, ‘That is my red Sun;’ who was the black rider,
‘That is my black Night; they are all my trusty friends.’ Now,
considering that the story of Little Red Ridinghood belongs to the same
class of folk-lore tales as this story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, we
need not be afraid to seek in the one for traces of the same archaic
type of nature-myth which the other not only keeps up, but keeps up with
the fullest consciousness of meaning.

The development of nature-myth into heroic legend seems to have taken
place among the barbaric tribes of the South Sea Islands and North
America much as it took place among the ancestors of the classic
nations of the Old World. We are not to expect accurate consistency or
proper sequence of episodes in the heroic cycles, but to judge from
the characteristics of the episodes themselves as to the ideas which
suggested them. As regards the less cultured races, a glance at two
legendary cycles, one from Polynesia and the other from North America,
will serve to give an idea of the varieties of treatment of phases of
sun-myth. The New Zealand myth of Maui, mixed as it may be with other
fancies, is in its most striking features the story of Day and Night.
The story of the Sun’s birth from the ocean is thus told. There were
five brothers, all called Maui, and it was the youngest Maui who had
been thrown into the sea by Taranga his mother, and rescued by his
ancestor Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great-Man-in-Heaven, who took him to
his house, and hung him in the roof. Then is given in fanciful
personality the tale of the vanishing of Night at dawn. One night,
when Taranga came home, she found little Maui with his brothers, and
when she knew her last-born, the child of her old age, she took him to
sleep with her, as she had been used to take the other Mauis his
brothers, before they were grown up. But the little Maui grew vexed
and suspicious, when he found that every morning his mother rose at
dawn and disappeared from the house in a moment, not to return till
nightfall. So one night he crept out and stopped every crevice in the
wooden window and the doorway, that the day might not shine into the
house; then broke the faint light of early dawn, and then the sun rose
and mounted into the heavens, but Taranga slept on, for she knew not
it was broad day outside. At last she sprang up, pulled out the
stopping of the chinks, and fled in dismay. Then Maui saw her plunge
into a hole in the ground and disappear, and thus he found the deep
cavern by which his mother went down below the earth as each night
departed. After this, follows the episode of Maui’s visit to his
ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua, at that western Land’s End where Maori
souls descend into the subterranean region of the dead. She sniffs as
he comes towards her, and distends herself to devour him, but when she
has sniffed round from south by east to north, she smells his coming
by the western breeze, and so knows that he is a descendant of hers.
He asks for her wondrous jawbone, she gives it to him, and it is his
weapon in his next exploit when he catches the sun, Tama-nui-te-Ra,
Great-Man-Sun, in the noose, and wounds him and makes him go slowly.
With a fishhook pointed with the miraculous jawbone, and smeared with
his own blood for bait, Maui next performs his most famous feat of
fishing up New Zealand, still called Te-Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui.
To understand this, we must compare the various versions of the story
in these and other Pacific Islands, which show that it is a general
myth of the rising of dry land from beneath the ocean. It is said
elsewhere that it was Maui’s grandfather, Rangi-Whenua, Heaven-Earth,
who gave the jawbone. More distinctly, it is also said that Maui had
two sons, whom he slew when young to take their jawbones; now these
two sons must be the Morning and Evening, for Maui made the morning
and evening stars from an eye of each; and it was with the jawbone of
the eldest that he drew up the land from the deep. It is related that
when Maui pulled up his fish, he found it was land, on which were
houses, and stages on which to put food, and dogs barking, and fires
burning, and people working. It appears, moreover, that the submarine
region out of which the land was lifted was the under-world of Night,
for Maui’s hook had caught the gable of the house of Hine-nui-te-po,
Great-Daughter-of-Night, and when the land came up her house was on
it, and she was standing near. Another Maori legend tells how Maui
takes fire in his hands, it burns him, and he springs with it into the
sea: ‘When he sank in the waters, the sun for the first time set, and
darkness covered the earth. When he found that all was night, he
immediately pursued the sun, and brought him back in the morning.’
When Maui carried or flung the fire into the sea, he set a volcano
burning. It is told, again, that when Maui had put out all fires on
earth, his mother sent him to get new fire from her ancestress
Mahuika. The Tongans, in their version of the myth, relate how the
youngest Maui discovers the cavern that leads to Bulotu, the west-land
of the dead, and how his father, another Maui, sends him to the yet
older Maui who sits by his great fire; the two wrestle, and Maui
brings away fire for men, leaving the old earthquake-god lying
crippled below. The legendary group thus dramatizes the birth of the
sun from the ocean and the departure of the night, the extinction of
the light at sunset and its return at dawn, and the descent of the sun
to the western Hades, the under-world of night and death, which is
incidentally identified with the region of subterranean fire and
earthquake. Here, indeed, the characteristics of true nature-myth are
not indistinctly marked, and Maui’s death by his ancestress the Night
fitly ends his solar career.[448]

It is a sunset-story, very differently conceived, that begins the
beautiful North American Indian myth of the Red Swan. The story belongs
to the Algonquin race. The hunter Ojibwa had just killed a bear and
begun to skin him, when suddenly something red tinged all the air
around. Reaching the shore of a lake, the Indian saw it was a beautiful
red swan, whose plumage glittered in the sun. In vain the hunter shot
his shafts, for the bird floated unharmed and unheeding, but at last he
remembered three magic arrows at home, which had been his father’s. The
first and second arrow flew near and nearer, the third struck the swan,
and flapping its wings, it flew off slowly towards the sinking of the
sun. With full sense of the poetic solar meaning of this episode
Longfellow has adapted it as a sunset picture, in one of his Indian
poems:

                    ‘Can it be the sun descending
                    O’er the level plain of water?
                    Or the Red Swan floating, flying,
                    Wounded by the magic arrow,

                    Staining all the waves with crimson,
                    With the crimson of its life-blood,
                    Filling all the air with splendour,
                    With the splendour of its plumage?’

The story goes on to tell how the hunter speeds westward in pursuit of
the Red Swan. At lodges where he rests, they tell him she has often
passed there, but those who followed her have never returned. She is the
daughter of an old magician who has lost his scalp, which Ojibwa
succeeds in recovering for him and puts back on his head, and the old
man rises from the earth, no longer aged and decrepit, but splendid in
youthful glory. Ojibwa departs, and the magician calls forth the
beautiful maiden, now not his daughter but his sister, and gives her to
his victorious friend. It was in after days, when Ojibwa had gone home
with his bride, that he travelled forth, and coming to an opening in the
earth, descended and came to the abode of departed spirits; there he
could behold the bright western region of the good, and the dark cloud
of wickedness. But the spirits told him that his brethren at home were
quarrelling for the possession of his wife, and at last, after long
wandering, this Red Indian Odysseus returned to his mourning constant
Penelope, laid the magic arrows to his bow, and stretched the wicked
suitors dead at his feet.[449] Thus savage legends from Polynesia and
America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the
theory[450] that Odysseus visiting the Elysian fields, or Orpheus
descending to the land of Hades to bring back the ‘wide-shining’
Eurydikê, are but the Sun himself descending to, and ascending from, the
world below.

Where Night and Hades take personal shape in myth, we may expect to find
conceptions like that simply shown in a Sanskrit word for evening,
‘rajanîmukha,’ i.e., ‘mouth of night.’ Thus the Scandinavians told of
Hel the death-goddess, with mouth gaping like the mouth of Fenrir her
brother, the moon-devouring wolf; and an old German poem describes
Hell’s abyss yawning from heaven to earth:

                    ‘der was der Hellen gelîch
                    diu daz abgrunde
                    begenit mit ir munde
                    unde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]

The sculptures on cathedrals still display for the terror of the wicked
the awful jaws of Death, the mouth of Hell wide yawning to swallow its
victims. Again, where barbaric cosmology accepts the doctrine of a
firmament arching above the earth, and of an under world whither the sun
descends when he sets and man when he dies, here the conception of gates
or portals, whether really or metaphorically meant, has its place. Such
is the great gate which the Gold Coast negro describes the Heaven as
opening in the morning for the Sun; such were the ancient Greek’s gates
of Hades, and the ancient Jew’s gates of Sheol. There are three mythic
descriptions connected with these ideas found among the Karens, the
Algonquins, and the Aztecs, which are deserving of special notice. The
Karens of Burma, a race among whom ideas are in great measure borrowed
from the more cultured Buddhists they have been in contact with, have
precedence here for the distinctness of their statement. They say that
in the west there are two massive strata of rocks which are continually
opening and shutting, and between these strata the sun descends at
sunset, but how the upper stratum is supported, no one can describe. The
idea comes well into view in the description of a Bghai festival, where
sacrificed fowls are thus addressed,—‘The seven heavens, thou ascendest
to the top; the seven earths, thou descendest to the bottom. Thou
arrivest at Khu-the; thou goest unto Tha-ma [i.e., Yama, the Judge of
the Dead in Hades.] Thou goest through the crevices of rocks, thou goest
through the crevices of precipices. At the opening and shutting of the
western gates of rock, thou goest in between; thou goest below the earth
where the Sun travels. I employ thee, I exhort thee. I make thee a
messenger, I make thee an angel, &c.’[452] Passing from Burma to the
region of the North American lakes, we find a corresponding description
in the Ottawa tale of Iosco, already quoted here for its clearly marked
personification of Sun and Moon. This legend, though modern in some of
its description of the Europeans, their ships, and their far-off land
across the sea, is evidently founded on a myth of Day and Night. Iosco
seems to be Ioskeha, the White One, whose contest with his brother
Tawiscara, the Dark One, is an early and most genuine Huron nature-myth
of Day and Night. Iosco and his friends travel for years eastward and
eastward to reach the sun, and come at last to the dwelling of Manabozho
near the edge of the world, and then, a little beyond, to the chasm to
be passed on the way to the land of the Sun and Moon. They began to hear
the sound of the beating sky, and it seemed near at hand, but they had
far to travel before they reached the place. When the sky came down, its
pressure would force gusts of wind from the opening, so strong that the
travellers could hardly keep their feet, and the sun passed but a short
distance above their heads, The sky would come down with violence, but
it would rise slowly and gradually. Iosco and one of his friends stood
near the edge, and with a great effort leapt through and gained a
foothold on the other side; but the other two were fearful and
undecided, and when their companions called to them through the
darkness, ‘Leap! leap! the sky is on its way down,’ they looked up and
saw it descending, but paralyzed by fear they sprang so feebly that they
only reached the other side with their hands, and the sky at the same
moment striking violently on the earth with a terrible sound, forced
them into the dreadful black abyss.[453] Lastly, in the funeral ritual
of the Aztecs there is found a like description of the first peril that
the shade had to encounter on the road leading to that subterranean Land
of the Dead, which the sun lights when it is night on earth. Giving the
corpse the first of the passports that were to carry him safe to his
journey’s end, the survivors said to him, ‘With these you will pass
between the two mountains that smite one against the other.’[454] On the
suggestion of this group of solar conceptions and that of Maui’s death,
we may perhaps explain as derived from a broken-down fancy of solar myth
that famous episode of Greek legend, where the good ship Argo passed
between the Symplêgades, those two huge cliffs that opened and closed
again with swift and violent collision.[455] Can any effort of baseless
fancy have brought into the poet’s mind a thought so quaint in itself,
yet so fitting with the Karen and Aztec myths of the gates of Night and
Death? With the Maori legend, the Argonautic tale has a yet deeper
coincidence. In both the event is to determine the future; but this
thought is worked out in two converse ways. If Maui passed through the
entrance of Night and returned to Day, death should not hold mankind; if
the Argo passed the Clashers, the way should lie open between them for
ever. The Argo sped through in safety, and the Symplêgades can clash no
longer on the passing ship; Maui was crushed, and man comes not forth
again from Hades.

There is another solar metaphor which describes the sun, not as a
personal creature, but as a member of a yet greater being. He is called
in Java and Sumatra ‘Mata-ari,’ in Madagascar ‘Maso-andro,’ the ‘Eye of
Day.’ If we look for translation of this thought from metaphor into
myth, we may find it in the New Zealand stories of Maui setting his own
eye up in heaven as the Sun, and the eyes of his two children as the
Morning and the Evening Stars.[456] The nature-myth thus implicitly and
explicitly stated is one widely developed on Aryan ground. It forms part
of that macrocosmic description of the universe well known in Asiatic
myth, and in Europe expressed in that passage of the Orphic poem which
tells of Jove, at once the world’s ruler and the world itself: his
glorious head irradiates the sky where hangs his starry hair, the waters
of the sounding ocean are the belt that girds his sacred body the earth
omniparent, his eyes are sun and moon, his mind, moving and ruling by
counsel all things, is the royal æther that no voice nor sound escapes:

             ‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrens
             Cynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius æther
             Regius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitque
             Consilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullus
             Hancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.
             Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatus
             Obtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,
             Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]

Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of the lesser light, he can
in various terms describe the sun as the eye of heaven. In the Rig-Veda
it is the ‘eye of Mitra, Varuna, and Agni’—‘chakshuh Mitrasya Varunasyah
Agneh.’[458] In the Zend-Avesta it is ‘the shining sun with the swift
horses, the eye of Ahura-Mazda;’ elsewhere both eyes, apparently sun and
moon, are praised.[459] To Hesiod it is the ‘all-seeing eye of
Zeus’—‘πάντα ἰδὼν Διὸς ὀφθαλμός:’ Macrobius speaks of antiquity calling
the sun the eye of Jove—‘τί ἥλιος; οὐράνιος ὀφθαλμός.’[460] The old
Germans, in calling the sun ‘Wuotan’s eye,’[461] recognized Wuotan,
Woden Odhin, as being himself the divine Heaven. These mythic
expressions are of the most unequivocal type. By the hint they give,
conjectural interpretations may be here not indeed asserted, but
suggested, for two of the quaintest episodes of ancient European myth.
Odin, the All-father, say the old skalds of Scandinavia, sits among his
Æsir in the city Asgard, on his high throne Hlidskialf (Lid-shelf),
whence he can look down over the whole world discerning all the deeds of
men. He is an old man wrapped in his wide cloak, and clouding his face
with his wide hat, ‘os pileo ne cultu proderetur obnubens,’ as Saxo
Grammaticus has it. Odin is one-eyed; he desired to drink from Mimir’s
well, but he had to leave there one of his eyes in pledge, as it is said
in the Völuspa:

              ‘All know I, Odin!  Where thou hiddest thine eye
              In Mimir’s famous well.
              Mead drinks Mimir every morning
              From Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’

As Odin’s single eye seems certainly to be the sun in heaven, one may
guess what is the lost eye in the well—perhaps the sun’s own reflection
in any pool, or more likely that of the moon, which in popular myth is
told of as found in the well.[462] Possibly, too, some such solar fancy
may explain part of the myth of Perseus. There are three Scandinavian
Norns, whose names are Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld—Was, and Is, and
Shall-be—and these three maidens are the ‘Weird sisters’ who fix the
lifetime of all men. So the Fates, the Parkai, daughters of the
inevitable Anágkē, divide among them the periods of time: Lachesis sings
the past, Klôthô the present, Atropos the future. Now is it allowable to
consider these fatal sisters as of common nature with two other mythic
sister-triads—the Graiai and their kinsfolk the Gorgons?[463] If it be
so, it is easy to understand why of the three Gorgons one alone was
mortal, whose life her two immortal sisters could not save, for the
deathless past and future cannot save the ever-dying present. Nor would
the riddle be hard to read, what is the one eye that the Graiai had
between them, and passed from one to another?—the eye of day—the sun,
that the past gives up to the present, and the present to the future.

Compared with the splendid Lord of Day, the pale Lady of Night takes, in
myth as in nature, a lower and lesser place. Among the wide legendary
group which associates together Sun and Moon, two striking examples are
to be seen in the traditions by which half-civilized races of South
America traced their rise from the condition of the savage tribes around
them. These legends have been appealed to even by modern writers as
gratefully remembered records of real human benefactors, who carried
long ago to America the culture of the Old World. But happily for
historic truth, mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the
episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation.
The Muyscas of the high plains of Bogota were once, they said, savages
without agriculture, religion, or law; but there came to them from the
East an old and bearded man, Bochica, the child of the Sun, and he
taught them to till the fields, to clothe themselves, to worship the
gods, to become a nation. But Bochica had a wicked, beautiful wife,
Huythaca, who loved to spite and spoil her husband’s work; and she it
was who made the river swell till the land was covered by a flood, and
but a few of mankind escaped to the mountain-tops. Then Bochica was
wroth, and he drove the wicked Huythaca from the earth, and made her the
Moon, for there had been no moon before; and he cleft the rocks and made
the mighty cataract of Tequendama, to let the deluge flow away. Then,
when the land was dry, he gave to the remnant of mankind the year and
its periodic sacrifices, and the worship of the Sun. Now the people who
told this myth had not forgotten, what indeed we might guess without
their help, that Bochica was himself Zuhé, the Sun, and Huythaca the
Sun’s wife, the Moon.[464]

Like to this in meaning, though different in fancy, is the
civilization-myth of the Incas. Men, said this Quichua legend, were
savages dwelling in caves like wild beasts devouring wild roots and
fruit and human flesh, covering themselves with leaves and bark or skins
of animals. But our father the Sun took pity on them, and sent two of
his children, Manco Ccapac and his sister-wife, Mama Occllo these rose
from the lake of Titicaca, and gave to the uncultured hordes law and
government, marriage and moral order, tillage and art and science. Thus
was founded the great Peruvian empire, where in after ages each Inca and
his sister-wife, continuing the mighty race of Manco Ccapac and Mama
Occllo, represented in rule and religion not only the first earthly
royal ancestors, but the heavenly father and mother of whom we can see
these to be personifications, namely, the Sun himself, and his
sister-wife the Moon.[465] Thus the nations of Bogota and Peru,
remembering their days of former savagery, and the association of their
culture with their national religion, embodied their traditions in myths
of an often-recurring type, ascribing to the gods themselves, in human
shape, the establishment of their own worship.

The ‘inconstant moon’ figures in a group of characteristic stories.
Australian legend says that Mityan, the Moon, was a native cat, who fell
in love with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander ever
since.[466] The Khasias of the Himalaya say that the Moon falls monthly
in love with his mother-in-law, who throws ashes in his face, whence his
spots.[467] Slavonic legend, following the same track, says that the
Moon, King of Night and husband of the Sun, faithlessly loved the
Morning Star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment, as we see
him in the sky.[468] By a different train of thought, the Moon’s
periodic death and revival has suggested a painful contrast to the
destiny of man, in one of the most often-repeated and characteristic
myths of South Africa, which is thus told among the Namaqua. The Moon
once sent the Hare to Men to give this message, ‘Like as I die and rise
to life again, so you also shall die and rise to life again,’ but the
Hare went to the Men and said, ‘Like as I die and do not rise again, so
you shall also die and not rise to life again.’ Then the Hare returned
and told the Moon what he had done, and the Moon struck at him with a
hatchet and slit his lip, as it has remained ever since, and some say
the Hare fled and is still fleeing, but others say he clawed at the
Moon’s face and left the scars that are still to be seen on it, and they
also say that the reason why the Namaqua object to eating the hare (a
prejudice which in fact they share with very different races) is because
he brought to men this evil message.[469] It is remarkable that a story
so closely resembling this, that it is difficult not to suppose both to
be versions from a common original, is told in the distant Fiji Islands.
There was a dispute between two gods as to how man should die: ‘Ra Vula
(the Moon) contended that man should be like himself—disappear awhile
and then live again. Ra Kalavo (the Rat) would not listen to this kind
proposal, but said, “Let man die as a rat dies.” And he prevailed.’ The
dates of the versions seem to show that the presence of these myths
among the Hottentots and Fijians, at the two opposite sides of the
globe, is at any rate not due to transmission in modern times.[470]

There is a very elaborate savage nature-myth of the generation of the
Stars, which may unquestionably serve as a clue connecting the history
of two distant tribes. The rude Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula express
in plain terms the belief in a solid firmament, usual in the lower
grades of civilization; they say the sky is a great pot held over the
earth by a cord, and if this cord broke, everything on earth would be
crushed. The Moon is a woman, and the Sun also: the Stars are the Moon’s
children, and the Sun had in old times as many. Fearing, however, that
mankind could not bear so much brightness and heat, they agreed each to
devour her children; but the Moon, instead of eating up her stars, hid
them from the Sun’s sight, who believing them all devoured, ate up her
own; no sooner had she done it, than the Moon brought her family out of
their hiding-place. When the Sun saw them, filled with rage she chased
the Moon to kill her; the chase has lasted ever since, and sometimes the
Sun even comes near enough to bite the Moon, and that is an eclipse; the
Sun, as men may still see, devours his Stars at dawn, and the Moon hides
hers all day while the Sun is near, and only brings them out at night
when her pursuer is far away. Now among a tribe of North East India, the
Ho of Chota-Nagpore, the myth reappears, obviously from the same source,
but with a varied ending; the Sun cleft the Moon in twain for her
deceit, and thus cloven and growing whole again she remains, and her
daughters with her which are the Stars.[471]

From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced in the mythology
of the Stars a course of thought, changed indeed in application, yet
never broken in its evident connexion from first to last. The savage
sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into
living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with
them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilization, the
modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to
account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial
globe. The savage names and stories of stars and constellations may seem
at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens in
the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of
understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in
them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are
the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our
Capella), and kill him at the the beginning of the great heat and the
mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that
Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of
the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines
to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these
simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the
seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the
stars who are called their discoverers.[472] Not less transparent is the
meaning in the beautiful Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker. In old days
eternal winter reigned upon the earth, till a sprightly little animal
called the Fisher, helped by other beasts his friends, broke an opening
through the sky into the lovely heaven-land beyond, let the warm winds
pour forth and the summer descend to earth, and opened the cages of the
prisoned birds: but when the dwellers in heaven saw their birds let
loose and their warm gales descending, they started in pursuit, and
shooting their arrows at the Fisher, hit him at last in his one
vulnerable spot at the tip of his tail; thus he died for the good of the
inhabitants of earth, and became the constellation that bears his name,
so that still at the proper season men see him lying as he fell toward
the north on the plains of heaven, with the fatal arrow still sticking
in his tail.[473] Compare these savage stories with Orion pursuing the
Pleiad sisters who take refuge from him in the sea, and the maidens who
wept themselves to death and became the starry cluster of the Hyades,
whose rising and setting betokened rain: such mythic creatures might for
simple significance have been invented by savages, even as the savage
constellation-myths might have been made by ancient Greeks. When we
consider that the Australians who can invent such myths, and invent them
with such fulness of meaning, are savages who put two and one together
to make their numeral for three, we may judge how deep in the history of
culture those conceptions lie, of which the relics are still represented
in our star-maps by Castor and Pollux, Arcturus and Sirius, Boötes and
Orion, the Argo and the Charles’s Wain, the Toucan and the Southern
Cross. Whether civilized or savage, whether ancient or new made after
the ancient manner, such names are so like in character that any tribe
of men might adopt them from any other, as American tribes are known to
receive European names into their own skies, and as our constellation of
the Royal Oak is said to have found its way, in new copies of the old
Hindu treatises, into the company of the Seven Sages and the other
ancient constellations of Brahmanic India.

Such fancies are so fanciful, that two peoples seldom fall on the same
name for a constellation, while, even within the limits of the same
race, terms may differ altogether. Thus the stars which we call Orion’s
Belt are in New Zealand either the Elbow of Maui, or they form the stem
of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the
Southern Cross.[474] The Great Bear is equally like a Wain, Orion’s Belt
serves as well for Frigga’s or Mary’s Spindle, or Jacob’s Staff. Yet
sometimes natural correspondences occur. The seven sister Pleiades seem
to the Australians a group of girls playing to a corroboree; while the
North American Indians call them the Dancers; and the Lapps the Company
of Virgins.[475] Still more striking is the correspondence between
savages and cultured nations in fancies of the bright starry band that
lies like a road across the sky. The Basutos call it the ‘Way of the
Gods;’ the Ojis say it is the ‘Way of Spirits,’ which souls go up to
heaven by.[476] North American tribes know it as ‘the Path of the Master
of Life,’ the ‘Path of Spirits,’ ‘the Road of Souls,’ where they travel
to the land beyond the grave, and where their camp-fires may be seen
blazing as brighter stars.[477] Such savage imaginations of the Milky
Way fit with the Lithuanian myth of the ‘Road of the Birds,’ at whose
end the souls of the good, fancied as flitting away at death like birds,
dwell free and happy.[478] That souls dwell in the Galaxy was a thought
familiar to the Pythagoreans, who gave it on their master’s word that
the souls that crowd there descend, and appear to men as dreams,[479]
and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this ‘column
of light,’ whence they could come down to earth and again return.[480]
It is a fall from such ideas of the Galaxy to the Siamese ‘Road of the
White Elephant,’ the Spaniards’ ‘Road of Santiago,’ or the Turkish
‘Pilgrims’ Road,’ and a still lower fall to the ‘Straw Road’ of the
Syrian, the Persian, and the Turk, who thus compare it with their lanes
littered with the morsels of straw that fall from the nets they carry it
in.[481] But of all the fancies which have attached themselves to the
celestial road, we at home have the quaintest. Passing along the short
and crooked way from St. Paul’s to Cannon Street, one thinks to how
small a remnant has shrunk the name of the great street of the
Wætlingas, which in old days ran from Dover through London into Wales.
But there is a Watling Street in heaven as well as on earth, once
familiar to Englishmen, though now almost forgotten even in local
dialect. Chaucer thus speaks of it in his ‘House of Fame:’ —

                   ‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eye
                   Se yondir, lo, the Galaxie,
                   The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,
                   For it is white, and some parfay,
                   Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]

Turning from the mythology of the heavenly bodies, a glance over other
districts of nature-myth will afford fresh evidence that such legend has
its early home within the precincts of savage culture. It is thus with
the myths of the Winds. The New Zealanders tell how Maui can ride upon
the other Winds or imprison them in their caves, but he cannot catch the
West wind nor find its cave to roll a stone against the mouth, and
therefore it prevails, yet from time to time he all but overtakes it,
and hiding in its cave for shelter it dies away.[483] Such is the fancy
in classic poetry of Aeolus holding the prisoned winds in his dungeon
cave:—

                        ‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro
            Luctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonoras
            Imperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]

The myth of the Four Winds is developed among the native races of
America with a range and vigour and beauty scarcely rivalled elsewhere
in the mythology of the world. Episodes belonging to this branch of Red
Indian folklore are collected in Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ and
thence rendered with admirable taste and sympathy, though unfortunately
not with proper truth to the originals, in Longfellow’s masterpiece, the
‘Song of Hiawatha.’ The West Wind Mudjekeewis is Kabeyun, Father of the
Winds, Wabun is the East Wind, Shawondasee the South Wind, Kabibonokka
the North Wind. But there is another mighty wind not belonging to the
mystic quaternion, Manabozho the North-West Wind, therefore described
with mythic appropriateness as the unlawful child of Kabeyun. The fierce
North Wind, Kabibnokka, in vain strives to force Shingebis, the
lingering diver-bird, from his warm and happy winter-lodge; and the lazy
South Wind, Shawondasee, sighs for the maiden of the prairie with her
sunny hair, till it turns to silvery white, and as he breathes upon her,
the prairie dandelion has vanished.[485] Man naturally divides his
horizon into four quarters, before and behind, right and left, and thus
comes to fancy the world a square, and to refer the winds to its four
corners. Dr. Brinton, in his ‘Myths of the New World,’ has well traced
from these ideas the growth of legend after legend among the native
races of America, where four brother heroes, or mythic ancestors or
divine patrons of mankind, prove, on closer view, to be in personal
shape the Four Winds.[486]

The Vedic hymns to the Maruts, the Storm Winds, who tear asunder the
forest kings and make the rocks shiver, and assume again, after their
wont, the form of new-born babes, the mythic feats of the child Hermes
in the Homeric hymn, the legendary birth of Boreas from Astraios and
Eôs, Starry Heaven and Dawn, work out, on Aryan ground, mythic
conceptions that Red Indian tale-tellers could understand and
rival.[487] The peasant who keeps up in fireside talk the memory of the
Wild Huntsman, Wodejäger, the Grand Veneur of Fontainebleau, Herne the
Hunter of Windsor Forest, has almost lost the significance of this grand
old storm-myth. By mere force of tradition, the name of the ‘Wish’ or
‘Wush’ hounds of the Wild Huntsman has been preserved through the west
of England; the words must for ages past have lost their meaning among
the country folk, though we may plainly recognize in them Woden’s
ancient well-known name, old German ‘Wunsch.’ As of old, the Heaven-God
drives the clouds before him in raging tempest across the sky, while,
safe within the cottage walls, the tale-teller unwittingly describes in
personal legendary shape this same Wild Hunt of the Storm.[488]

It has many a time occurred to the savage poet or philosopher to realize
the thunder, or its cause, in myths of a Thunder-bird. Of this wondrous
creature North American legend has much to tell. He is the bird of the
great Manitu, as the eagle is of Zeus, or he is even the great Manitu
himself incarnate. The Assiniboins not only know of his existence, but
have even seen him, and in the far north the story is told how he
created the world. The Ahts of Vancouver’s Island talk of Tootooch, the
mighty bird dwelling aloft and far away, the flap of whose wings makes
the thunder (Tootah), and his tongue is the forked lightning. There were
once four of these birds in the land, and they fed on whales; but the
great deity Quawteaht, entering into a whale, enticed one thunder-bird
after another to swoop down and seize him with his talons, when plunging
to the bottom of the sea he drowned it. Thus three of them perished, but
the last one spread his wings and flew to the distant height where he
has since remained. The meaning of the story may probably be that
thunderstorms come especially from one of the four quarters of heaven.
Of such myths, perhaps that told among the Dacotas is the quaintest:
Thunder is a large bird, they say: hence its velocity. The old bird
begins the thunder; its rumbling noise is caused by an immense quantity
of young birds, or thunders, who continue it, hence the long duration of
the peals. The Indian says it is the young birds, or thunders, that do
the mischief; they are like the young mischievous men who will not
listen to good counsel. The old thunder or bird is wise and good, and
does not kill anybody, nor do any kind of mischief. Descending southward
to Central America, there is found mention of the bird Voc, the
messenger of Hurakan, the Tempest-god (whose name has been adopted in
European languages as huracano, ouragan, hurricane) of the
Lightning and of the Thunder. So among Caribs, Brazilians, Hervey
Islanders and Karens, Bechuanas and Basutos, we find legends of a
flapping or flashing Thunder-bird, which seem simply to translate into
myth the thought of thunder and lightning descending from the upper
regions of the air, the home of the eagle and the vulture.[489]

The Heaven-god dwells in the regions of the sky, and thus what form
could be fitter for him and for his messengers than the likeness of a
bird? But to cause the ground to quake beneath our feet, a being of
quite different nature is needed, and accordingly the office of
supporting the solid earth is given in various countries to various
monstrous creatures, human or animal in character, who make their office
manifest from time to time by a shake given in negligence or sport or
anger to their burden. Wherever earthquakes are felt, we are likely to
find a version of the great myth of the Earth-bearer. Thus in Polynesia
the Tongans say that Maui upholds the earth on his prostrate body, and
when he tries to turn over into an easier posture there is an
earthquake, and the people shout and beat the ground with sticks to make
him lie still. Another version forms part of the interesting myth lately
mentioned, which connects the under-world whither the sun descends at
night, with the region of subterranean volcanic fire and of earthquake.
The old Maui lay by his fire in the dead-land of Bulotu, when his
grandson Maui came down by the cavern entrance; the young Maui carried
off the fire, they wrestled, the old Maui was overcome, and has lain
there bruised and drowsy ever since, underneath the earth, which quakes
when he turns over in his sleep.[490] In Celebes we hear of the
world-supporting Hog, who rubs himself against a tree, and then there is
an earthquake.[491] Among the Indians of North America, it is said that
earthquakes come of the movement of the great world-bearing Tortoise.
Now this Tortoise seems but a mythic picture of the Earth itself, and
thus the story only expresses in mythic phrase the very fact that the
earth quakes; the meaning is but one degree less distinct than among the
Caribs, who say when there is an earthquake that their Mother Earth is
dancing.[492] Among the higher races of the continent, such ideas remain
little changed in nature; the Tlascalans said that the tired
world-supporting deities shifting their burden to a new relay caused the
earthquake;[493] the Chibchas said it was their god Chibchacum moving
the earth from shoulder to shoulder.[494] The myth ranges in Asia
through as wide a stretch of culture. The Kamchadals tell of Tuil the
Earthquake-god, who sledges below ground, and when his dog shakes off
fleas or snow there is an earthquake;[495] Ta Ywa, the solar hero of the
Karens, set Shie-oo beneath the earth to carry it, and there is an
earthquake when he moves.[496] The world-bearing elephants of the
Hindus, the world-supporting frog of the Mongol Lamas, the world-bull of
the Moslems, the gigantic Omophore of the Manichæan cosmology, are all
creatures who carry the earth on their backs or heads, and shake it when
they stretch or shift.[497] Thus in European mythology the Scandinavian
Loki, strapped down with thongs of iron in his subterranean cavern,
writhes when the overhanging serpent drops venom on him; or Prometheus
struggles beneath the earth to break his bonds; or the Lettish Drebkuls
or Poseidon the Earth-shaker makes the ground rock beneath men’s
feet.[498] From thorough myths of imagination such as most of these, it
may be sometimes possible to distinguish philosophic myths like them in
form, but which appear to be attempts at serious explanation without
even a metaphor. The Japanese think that earthquakes are caused by huge
whales creeping underground, having been probably led to this idea by
finding the fossil bones which seem the remains of such subterranean
monsters, just as we know that the Siberians who find in the ground the
mammoth-bones and tusks account for them as belonging to huge burrowing
beasts, and by force of this belief, have brought themselves to think
they can sometimes see the earth heave and sink as the monsters crawl
below. Thus, in investigating the earthquake myths of the world, it
appears that two processes, the translation into mythic language of the
phenomenon itself, and the crude scientific theory to account for it by
a real moving animal underground, may result in legends of very striking
similarity.[499]

In thus surveying the mythic wonders of heaven and earth, sun, moon, and
stars, wind, thunder, and earthquake, it is possible to set out in
investigation under conditions of actual certainty. So long as such
beings as Heaven or Sun are consciously talked of in mythic language,
the meaning of their legends is open to no question, and the actions
ascribed to them will as a rule be natural and apposite. But when the
phenomena of nature take a more anthropomorphic form, and become
identified with personal gods and heroes, and when in after times these
beings, losing their first consciousness of origin, become centres round
which floating fancies cluster, then their sense becomes obscure and
corrupt, and the consistency of their earlier character must no longer
be demanded. In fact, the unreasonable expectation of such consistency
in nature-myths, after they have passed into what may be called their
heroic stage, is one of the mythologist’s most damaging errors. The
present examination of nature-myths has mostly taken them in their
primitive and unmistakable condition, and has only been in some degree
extended to include closely-corresponding legends in a less easily
interpretable state. It has lain beyond my scope to enter into any
systematic discussion of the views of Grimm, Grote, Max Müller, Kuhn,
Schirren, Cox, Bréal, Dasent, Kelly, and other mythologists. Even the
outlines here sketched out have been purposely left without filling in
surrounding detail which might confuse their shape, although this
strictness has caused the neglect of many a tempting hint to work out
episode after episode, by tracing their relation to the myths of far-off
times and lands. It has rather been my object to bring prominently into
view the nature-mythology of the lower races, that their clear and fresh
mythic conceptions may serve as a basis in studying the nature-myths of
the world at large. The evidence and interpretation here brought
forward, imperfect as they are, seem to countenance a strong opinion as
to the historical development of legends which describe in personal
shape the life of nature. The state of mind to which such imaginative
fictions belong is found in full vigour in the savage condition of
mankind, its growth and inheritance continue into the higher culture of
barbarous or half-civilized nations, and at last in the civilized world
its effects pass more and more from realized belief into fanciful,
affected, and even artificial poetry.

Footnote 418:

  Macrob. ‘Saturn.’ i. 19, 12. See Eurip. Phœn. 1116, &c. and Schol.;
  Welcker, vol. i. p. 336; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ vol. ii. p. 380.

Footnote 419:

  Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ p. 425.

Footnote 420:

  Sir G. Grey, ‘Polynesian Mythology,’ p. i. &c., translated from the
  original Maori text published by him under the title of ‘Ko nga
  Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori, &c.’ London, 1854. Compare with Shortland,
  ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 55, &c.; R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 114, &c.

Footnote 421:

  Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer, &c.’ p. 42; Ellis, ‘Polyn.
  Res.’ vol. i. p. 116; Tyerman and Bennet, p. 526; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’
  p. 245.

Footnote 422:

  Premare in Pauthier, ‘Livres Sacrés de l’Orient,’ p. 19; Doolittle,
  ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396.

Footnote 423:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 108, 110, 117, 221, 369, 494, 620;
  Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Ant. of Peru,’ p. 161; Gregg, ‘Journal of a Santa
  Fé Trader,’ vol. ii. p. 237; Sahagun, ‘Retorica, &c., Mexicana,’ cap.
  3, in Kingsborough, ‘Ant. of Mexico,’ vol. v.

Footnote 424:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86.

Footnote 425:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. xix. 229-33, 608; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ p. 153;
  Milton, ‘Paradise Lost,’ ix. 273, i. 535; see Lucretius, i. 250.

Footnote 426:

  Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. pp. 663-7; Colebrooke,
  ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 220. Plato, Repub. iii. 414-5; ‘ἡ γὴ αὐτοὺς μήτηρ
  οὖσα ἀνῆκε—ἁλλ’ ὸ θεὸς πλάττων.’

Footnote 427:

  Herod. iv. 59.

Footnote 428:

  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen’ part i. p. 37; Davis, ‘Chinese,’
  vol. ii. p. 64; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 106; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.
  ii. p. 437, vol. iii. p. 302.

Footnote 429:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 53, 219, 231, 255, 395, 420;
  Martius ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 329, 467, 585, vol. ii. p. 109;
  Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 352, vol. ii. p. 371; De la Borde,
  ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525; Dobrizhoffer ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 84; Smith and
  Lowe, ‘Journey from Lima to Para,’ p. 230; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes
  of N. A.’ part i. p. 271; Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. France,’ vol. vi. p. 149;
  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 295; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 191; ‘Early
  Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 163.

Footnote 430:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 331.

Footnote 431:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 194.

Footnote 432:

  Grant in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90; Kölle, ‘Kanuri Proverbs,
  &c.’ p. 207.

Footnote 433:

  H. H. Wilson, ‘Vishnupurana,’ pp. 78, 140; Skr. Dic. s.v. râhu; Sir W.
  Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 290; S. Davis, ibid., p. 258;
  Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 584; Roberts, ‘Oriental
  Illustrations,’ p. 7; Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism.’

Footnote 434:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 63; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p.
  344.

Footnote 435:

  Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. vi. p. 449; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 308;
  Turpin, Richard, and Borri in Pinkerton, vol. iv. pp. 579, 725, 815;
  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 109, vol. iii. p. 242. See
  Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’ vol. i. p. 398 (Talmudic myth).

Footnote 436:

  Plutarch, de Facie in Orbe Lunae; Juvenal, Sat. vi. 441; Plin. ii. 9;
  Tacit. Annal. i. 28.

Footnote 437:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 668-78, 224; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth,’ p. 268; Brand,
  ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 152; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. iv. p.
  350; D. Monnier, ‘Traditions populaires comparées,’ p. 138; see Migne,
  ‘Dic. des Superstitions,’ art. ‘Eclipse’; Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De
  Occulta Philosophia,’ ii. c. 45, gives a picture of the lunar
  eclipse-dragon.

Footnote 438:

  Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ pp. 54-58; in his Maori texts, Ko nga Mahinga,
  pp. 28-30, Ko nga Mateatea, pp. xlviii.-ix. I have to thank Sir G.
  Grey for a more explicit and mythologically more consistent
  translation of the story of Maui’s entrance into the womb of
  Hine-nui-te-po and her crushing him to death between her thighs, than
  is given in his English version. Compare R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p.
  132; Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseel.’ p. 33; Shortland, ‘Trads. of
  N. Z.’ p. 63 (a version of the myth of Maui’s death); see also pp.
  171, 180, and Baker in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 53.

Footnote 439:

  John White, ‘Ancient History of the Maori,’ vol. i. p. 146. In former
  editions a statement received from New Zealand was inserted, that the
  cry or laugh of the tiwakawaka or pied fantail is only heard at
  sunset. This, however does not agree with the accounts of Sir W. Lawry
  Buller, who, in his ‘Birds of New Zealand,’ vol. i. p. 69,
  supplemented by his answer to my enquiry, makes it clear that the bird
  sings in the daytime. Thus the argument connecting the sunset-song
  with the story as a sunset-myth falls away. In another version of
  Maui’s death, in White, vol. ii. p. 112, the laughing bird is the
  patatai or little swamp-rail, which cries at and after nightfall and
  in the early morning (Buller, vol. ii. p. 98). Note to 3rd ed.

Footnote 440:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 178,
  &c.

Footnote 441:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 318; ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i.
  p. 135, &c., 144; John Tanner, ‘Narrative,’ p. 357; see Brinton,
  ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 166. For legends of Sun-Catcher, see ‘Early
  Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. xii.

Footnote 442:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 347; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 56,
  69, 84, 334 (see also the story, p. 241, of the frog who swallowed the
  princess and carried her safe home). See Cranz, p. 271 (Greenland
  angekok swallowed by bear and walrus and thrown up again), and
  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 506-7; J. M. Harris in ‘Mem. Anthrop.
  Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 31 (similar notions in Africa and New Guinea).

Footnote 443:

  Tzetzes ap. Lycophron, Cassandra, 33. As to connexion with Joppa and
  Phœnicia, see Plin. v. 14; ix. 4; Mela, i. 11; Strabo, xvi. 2, 28;
  Movers, Phönizier, vol. i. pp. 422-3. The expression in Jonah, ii. 2,
  ‘out of the belly of Hades’ (mibten sheol, ἐκ κοιλίας ᾄδου) seems a
  relic of the original meaning of the myth.

Footnote 444:

  ‘Apocr. Gosp.’ Nicodemus, ch. xx.; Mrs. Jameson, ‘History of our Lord
  in Art,’ vol. ii. p. 258.

Footnote 445:

  Eireks Saga, 3, 4, in ‘Flateyjarbok,’ vol. i., Christiania, 1859;
  Baring-Gould, ‘Myths of the Middle Ages,’ p. 238.

Footnote 446:

  Mrs. Jameson, ‘Sacred and Legendary Art,’ vol. ii. p. 138.

Footnote 447:

  J. and W. Grimm, ‘Kinder und Hausmärchen,’ vol. i. pp. 26, 140; vol.
  iii. p. 15. (See ref. to these two stories, ‘Early Hist, of M.’ 1st
  ed. (1865) p. 338.) I find that Sir G. W. Cox, ‘Mythology’ (1870),
  vol. i. p. 358, had noticed the Wolf and Seven Kids as a myth of the
  days of the week (Note to 2nd ed.). For mentions of the wolf of
  darkness, see Hanusch, p. 192; Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 12; Grimm, ‘D.
  M.’ pp. 224, 668. With the episode of the stones substituted compare
  the myth of Zeus and Kronos. For various other stories belonging to
  the group of the Man swallowed by the Monster, see Lucian, Historiæ
  Veræ I.; Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism,’ p. 501; Lane, ‘Thousand and One
  Nights,’ vol. iii. p. 104; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ p. 98; ‘Nursery
  Rhymes,’ p. 48; ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 337.

Footnote 448:

  Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 16, &c., see 144; Jas. White, ‘Ancient History
  of the Maori,’ vol. ii. pp. 76, 115. Other details in Schirren,
  ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ pp. 32-7, 143-51; R. Taylor, ‘New
  Zealand,’ p. 124, &c.; compare 116, 141, &c., and volcano-myth, p.
  248; Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 142; Polack, ‘M. and C. of New Z.’ vol.
  i. p. 15; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga Is.’ p. 134. See also Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 252, 527 (Samoan version). In comparing the group of
  Maui-legends it is to be observed that New Zealand Mahuika and
  Maui-Tikitiki correspond to Tongan Mafuike and Kijikiji, Samoan Mafuie
  and Tiitii.

Footnote 449:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 1-33. The three arrows recur in
  Manabozho’s slaying the Shining Manitu, vol. i. p. 153. See the
  remarkably corresponding three magic arrows in Orvar Odd’s Saga;
  Nilsson, ‘Stone Age,’ p. 197. The Red-Swan myth of sunset is
  introduced in George Eliot’s ‘Spanish Gypsy,’ p. 63; Longfellow,
  ‘Hiawatha,’ xii.

Footnote 450:

  See Kuhn’s ‘Zeitschrift,’ 1860, vol. ix. p. 212; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’
  vol. ii. p. 127; Cox, ‘Mythology,’ vol. i. p. 256, vol. ii. p. 239.

Footnote 451:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 291, 767.

Footnote 452:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. pp.
  233-4. Prof. Liebrecht, in his notice of the 1st ed. of the present
  work, in ‘Gött. Gel. Anz.’ 1872, p. 1290, refers to a Burmese legend
  in Bastian, O. A. vol. ii. p. 515, and a Mongol legend, Gesser Chan,
  book iv.

Footnote 453:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 40, &c.; Loskiel, ‘Gesch.
  der Mission,’ Barby, 1789, p. 47 (the English edition, part i. p. 35,
  is incorrect). See also Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 63. In an
  Esquimaux tale, Giviok comes to the two mountains which shut and open;
  paddling swiftly between, he gets through, but the mountains clashing
  together crush the stern of his kayak: Rink, ‘Eskimoische Eventyr og
  Sagn,’ p. 98, referred to by Liebrecht, l.c.

Footnote 454:

  Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. i.; Torquemanda,
  ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ xiii. 47; ‘Con estos has de pasar por medio de
  dos Sierras, que se estan batiendo, y encontrando la una con la otra.’
  Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94.

Footnote 455:

  Apollodor. i. 9, 22; Appollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 310-616; Pindar,
  ‘Pythia Carm.’ iv. 370.

Footnote 456:

  Polack, ‘Manners of N. Z.’ vol. i. p. 16; ‘New Zealand,’ vol. i. p.
  358; Yate, p. 142; Schirren, pp. 88, 165.

Footnote 457:

  Euseb. Præp. Evang. iii. 9.

Footnote 458:

  Rig-Veda, i. 115; Böhtlingk and Roth, s.v. ‘mitra.’

Footnote 459:

  Avesta, tr. Spiegel, ‘Yaçna,’ i. 35; iii., lxvii., 61-2; compare
  Burnouf, ‘Yaçna.’

Footnote 460:

  Macrob. Saturnal. i. 21, 13. See Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 85.

Footnote 461:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 665. See also Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p.
  213.

Footnote 462:

  Edda, ‘Völuspa,’ 22; ‘Gylfaginning,’ 15. See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 133;
  ‘Reinhart Fuchs.’

Footnote 463:

  As to the identification of the Norns and the Fates, see Grimm, ‘D.
  M.’ pp. 376-86; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 154. It is to be
  observed in connexion with the Perseus-myth, that another of its
  obscure episodes, the Gorgon’s head turning those who look on it into
  stone, corresponds with myths of the sun itself. In Hispaniola, men
  came out of two caves (thus being born of their mother Earth); the
  giant who guarded these caves strayed one night, and the rising sun
  turned him into a great rock called Kauta, just as the Gorgon’s head
  turned Atlas the Earth-bearer into the mountain that bears his name;
  after this, others of the early cave-men were surprised by the
  sunlight, and turned into stones, trees, plants or beasts (Friar Roman
  Pane in ‘Life of Columbus’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80; J. G.
  Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 179). In Central America a Quiché legend
  relates how the ancient animals were petrified by the Sun (Brasseur,
  ‘Popol Vuh,’ p. 245). Thus the Americans have the analogue of the
  Scandinavian myths of giants and dwarfs surprised by daylight outside
  their hiding-places, and turned to stones. Such fancies appear
  connected with the fancied human shapes of rocks or ‘standing stones’
  which peasants still account for as transformed creatures. Thus in
  Fiji, two rocks are a male and female deity turned to stone at
  daylight, Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 66; see Liebrecht in ‘Heidelberg.
  Jahrb.’ 1864, p. 216. This idea is brought also into the Perseus-myth,
  for the rocks abounding in Seriphos are the islanders thus petrified
  by the Gorgon’s head.

Footnote 464:

  Piedrahita, ‘Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’
  Antwerp, 1688, part i. lib. i. c. 3; Humboldt, ‘Monumens,’ pl. vi.; J.
  G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 423-30.

Footnote 465:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. c. 15; Prescott,
  ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 7; J. G. Müller, pp. 303-8, 328-39. Other Peruvian
  versions show the fundamental solar idea in different mythic shapes
  (Tr. of Cieza de Leon, tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Soc.
  1864, pp. xlix. 298, 316, 372). W. B. Stevenson (‘Residence in S.
  America,’ vol. i. p. 394) and Bastian (‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 347) met
  with a curious perversion of the myth, in which Inca Manco Ccapac,
  corrupted into Ingasman Cocapac, gave rise to a story of an
  Englishman figuring in the midst of Peruvian mythology.

Footnote 466:

  Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Australia,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 301.

Footnote 467:

  H. Yule, ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xiii. p. 628.

Footnote 468:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 269.

Footnote 469:

  Bleek, ‘Reynard in S. Africa,’ pp. 69-74; C. J. Andersson, ‘Lake
  Ngami,’ p. 328; see Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 148; Arbousset and Daumas,
  p. 471. As to connexion of the moon with the hare, cf. Skr. ‘çaçanka;’
  and in Mexico, Sahagun, book vii. c. 2, in Kingsborough, vol. vii.

Footnote 470:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 205. Compare the Caroline Island myth
  that in the beginning men only quitted life on the last day of the
  waning moon, and resuscitated as from a peaceful sleep when she
  reappeared; but the evil spirit Erigirers inflicted a death from which
  there is no revival: De Brosses, ‘Hist. des Navig. aux Terres
  Australes,’ vol. ii. p. 479. Also in a song of the Indians of
  California it is said, that even as the moon dies and returns to life,
  so they shall be re-born after death; Duflot de Mofras in Bastian,
  ‘Rechtsverhältnisse,’ p. 385, see ‘Psychologie,’ p. 54.

Footnote 471:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 284; vol. iv. p. 333; Tickell in
  ‘Journ. As. Soc.’ Bengal, vol. ix. part ii. p. 797; Latham, ‘Descr.
  Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 422.

Footnote 472:

  Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. pp. 301-3.

Footnote 473:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. pp. 57-66. The story of the hero or
  deity invulnerable like Achilles save in one weak spot, recurs in the
  tales of the slaying of the Shining Manitu, whose scalp alone was
  vulnerable, and of the mighty Kwasind, who could be killed only by the
  cone of the white pine wounding the vulnerable place on the crown of
  his head (vol. i. p. 153; vol. ii. p. 163).

Footnote 474:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 363.

Footnote 475:

  Stanbridge, l.c.; Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 148; Leems, ‘Lapland,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 411. The name of the Bear occurring in North
  America in connexion with the stars of the Great and Little Bear
  (Charlevoix, l.c.; Cotton Mather in Schoolcraft, ‘Tribes,’ vol. i. p.
  284) has long been remarked on (Goguet, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p.
  366, but with reference to Greenland, see Cranz, p. 294). See
  observations on the history of the Aryan name in Max Müller,
  ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 361.

Footnote 476:

  Casalis, p. 196; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191.

Footnote 477:

  Long’s Exp. vol. i. p. 288; Schoolcraft, part i. p. 272; Le Jeune in
  ‘Rel. des Jés. de la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 18; Loskiel, part i.
  p. 35; J. G. Müller, p. 63.

Footnote 478:

  Hanusch, pp. 272, 407, 415.

Footnote 479:

  Porphyr. de Antro Nympharum, 28; Macrob. de Somn. Scip. 1. 12.

Footnote 480:

  Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ vol. ii. p. 513.

Footnote 481:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 341; ‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr.
  Dubeux, p. 24; Grimm, ‘D.M.’ p. 330, &c.

Footnote 482:

  Chaucer, ‘House of Fame,’ ii. 427. With reference to questions of
  Aryan mythology illustrated by the savage galaxy-myths, see Pictet,
  ‘Origines,’ part ii. p. 582, &c. Mr. J. Jeremiah informs me that
  ‘Watling Street’ is still (1871) a name for the Milky Way in Scotland;
  see also his paper on ‘Welsh names of the Milky Way,’ Philological
  Soc., Nov. 17, 1871. The corresponding name ‘London Road’ is used in
  Suffolk.

Footnote 483:

  Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144, see Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 417.

Footnote 484:

  Virg. Aeneid, i. 56; Homer, Odyss. x. 1.

Footnote 485:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 200; vol. ii. pp. 122, 214;
  ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 324.

Footnote 486:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of the New World,’ ch. iii.

Footnote 487:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ tr. by Max Müller, vol. i. (Hymns to Maruts); Welcker,
  ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. iii. p. 67; Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’
  vol. ii. ch. v.

Footnote 488:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 126, 599, 894; Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 1st ser. p. xix.;
  Baring-Gould, ‘Book of Werewolves,’ p. 101; see ‘Myths of the Middle
  Ages,’ p. 25; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 13, 236;
  Monnier, ‘Traditions,’ pp. 75, &c., 741, 747.

Footnote 489:

  Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘Reise in N. A.’ vol. i. pp. 446, 455; vol. ii. pp.
  152, 223; Sir Alex. Mackenzie, ‘Voyages,’ p. cxvii.; Sproat, ‘Scenes
  of Savage Life’ (Vancouver’s I.), pp. 177, 213; Irving, ‘Astoria,’
  vol. ii. ch. xxii.; Le Jeune, op. cit. 1634, p. 26; Schoolcraft,
  ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 233, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 114-6,
  199; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 164; Brasseur, ‘Popol Vuh,’ p. 71 and Index,
  ‘Hurakan;’ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 222, 271; Ellis, ‘Polyn.
  Res.’ vol. ii. p. 417; Jno. Williams, ‘Missionary Enterprise,’ p. 93;
  Mason, l.c. p. 217; Moffat, ‘South Africa,’ p. 338; Casalis,
  ‘Basutos,’ p. 266; Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 119.

Footnote 490:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 120; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 135;
  Schirren, pp. 35-7.

Footnote 491:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 837.

Footnote 492:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 61, 122.

Footnote 493:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 482.

Footnote 494:

  Pouchet, ‘Plurality of Races,’ p. 2.

Footnote 495:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 267.

Footnote 496:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 182.

Footnote 497:

  Bell, ‘Tr. in Asia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 369; Bastian, ‘Oestl.
  Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 168; Lane, ‘Thousand and one Nights,’ vol. i. p.
  21; see Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 171; Beausobre, ‘Manichée,’
  vol. i. p. 243.

Footnote 498:

  Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 50; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 777, &c.

Footnote 499:

  Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684; see mammoth-myths
  in ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 315.

MYTHOLOGY (continued).

    Philosophical Myths: inferences become pseudo-history—Geological
    Myths—Effect of doctrine of Miracles on Mythology—Magnetic
    Mountain—Myths of relation of Apes to Men by development or
    degeneration—Ethnological import of myths of Ape-men, Men with
    tails, Men of the woods—Myths of Error, Perversion, and
    Exaggeration: stories of Giants, Dwarfs, and Monstrous Tribes of
    men—Fanciful explanatory Myths—Myths attached to legendary or
    historical Personages—Etymological Myths on names of places and
    persons—Eponymic Myths on names of tribes, nations, countries, &c.;
    their ethnological import—Pragmatic Myths by realization of
    metaphors and ideas—Allegory—Beast-Fable—Conclusion.

Although the attempt to reduce to rule and system the whole domain of
mythology would as yet be rash and premature, yet the piecemeal invasion
of one mythic province after another proves feasible and profitable.
Having discussed the theory of nature-myths, it is worth while to gain
in other directions glimpses of the crude and child-like thought of
mankind, not arranged in abstract doctrines, but embodied by mythic
fancy. We shall find the result in masses of legends, full of interest
as bearing on the early history of opinion, and which may be roughly
classified under the following headings: myths philosophical or
explanatory; myths based on real descriptions misunderstood,
exaggerated, or perverted; myths attributing inferred events to
legendary or historical personages; myths based on realization of
fanciful metaphor; and myths made or adapted to convey moral or social
or political instruction.

Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the
reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no
other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his
race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already an
intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not
engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even to the Botocudo or
Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience: he
has learnt to do definite acts that definite results may follow, to see
other acts done and their results following in course, to make inference
from the result back to the previous action, and to find his inference
verified in fact. When one day he has seen a deer or a kangaroo leave
footprints in the soft ground, and the next day he has found new
footprints and inferred that such an animal made them, and has followed
up the track and killed the game, then he knows that he has
reconstructed a history of past events by inference from their results.
But in the early stages of knowledge the confusion is extreme between
actual tradition of events, and ideal reconstruction of them. To this
day there go about the world endless stories told as matter of known
reality, but which a critical examination shows to be mere inferences,
often utterly illusory ones, from facts which have stimulated the
invention of some curious enquirer. Thus a writer in the Asiatick
Researches at the end of the 18th century relates the following account
of the Andaman islanders, as a historical fact of which he had been
informed: ‘Shortly after the Portuguese had discovered the passage to
India round the Cape of Good Hope, one of their ships, on board of which
were a number of Mozambique negroes, was lost on the Andaman islands,
which were till then uninhabited. The blacks remained in the island and
settled it: the Europeans made a small shallop in which they sailed to
Pegu.’ Many readers must have had their interest excited by this curious
story, but at the first touch of fact it dissolves into a philosophic
myth, made by the easy transition from what might have been to what was.
So far from the islands having been uninhabited at the time of Vasco de
Gama’s voyage, their population of naked blacks with frizzled hair had
been described six hundred years earlier, and the story, which sounded
reasonable to people puzzled by the appearance of a black population in
the Andaman islands, is of course repudiated by ethnologists aware of
the wide distribution of the negroid Papuans, really so distinct from
any race of African negroes.[500] Not long since, I met with a very
perfect myth of this kind. In a brickfield near London, there had been
found a number of fossil elephant bones, and soon afterwards a story was
in circulation in the neighbourhood somewhat in this shape: ‘A few years
ago, one of Wombwell’s caravans was here, an elephant died, and they
buried him in the field, and now the scientific gentlemen have found his
bones, and think they have got a præ-Adamite elephant.’ It seemed almost
cruel to spoil this ingenious myth by pointing out that such a prize as
a living mammoth was beyond the resources even of Wombwell’s menagerie.
But so exactly does such a story explain the facts to minds not troubled
with nice distinctions between existing and extinct species of
elephants, that it was on another occasion invented elsewhere under
similar circumstances. This was at Oxford, where Mr. Buckland found the
story of the Wombwell’s caravan and dead elephant current to explain a
similar find of fossil bones.[501] Such explanations of the finding of
fossils are easily devised and used to be freely made, as when fossil
bones found in the Alps were set down to Hannibal’s elephants, or when a
petrified oyster-shell found near Mont Cenis set Voltaire reflecting on
the crowd of pilgrims on their way to Rome, or when theologians supposed
such shells on mountains to have been left on their slopes and summits
by a rising deluge. Such theoretical explanations are unimpeachable in
their philosophic spirit, until further observation may prove them to be
unsound. Their disastrous effect on the historic conscience of mankind
only begins when the inference is turned upside down, to be told as a
recorded fact.

In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine of miracles
in its special bearing on mythology. The mythic wonder-episodes related
by a savage tale-teller, the amazing superhuman feats of his gods and
heroes, are often to his mind miracles in the original popular sense of
the word, that is, they are strange and marvellous events; but they are
not to his mind miracles in a frequent modern sense of the word, that
is, they are not violations or supersessions of recognized laws of
nature. Exceptio probat regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception
is to imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes neither
rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought up to use a different
canon of evidence, will calmly reject this savage’s most revered
ancestral traditions, simply on the ground that they relate events which
are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the
credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the course of
culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized stages. What
concerns us here is that there is an important department of legend
which this change in public opinion, generally so resistless, left to a
great extent unaltered. In the middle ages the long-accepted practice
rose to its height, of allowing the mere assertion of supernatural
influence by angels or devils, saints or sorcerers, to override the
rules of evidence and the results of experience. The consequence was
that the doctrine of miracles became as it were a bridge along which
mythology travelled from the lower into the higher culture. Principles
of myth-formation belonging properly to the mental state of the savage,
were by its aid continued in strong action in the civilized world.
Mythic episodes which Europeans would have rejected contemptuously if
told of savage deities or heroes, only required to be adapted to
appropriate local details, and to be set forth as miracles in the life
of some superhuman personage, to obtain as of old a place of credit and
honour in history.

From the enormous mass of available instances in proof of this let us
take two cases belonging to the class of geological myths. The first is
the well-known legend of St. Patrick and the serpents. It is thus given
by Dr. Andrew Boorde in his description of Ireland and the Irish in
Henry VIII.’s time. ‘Yet in Ierland is stupendyous thynges; for there is
neyther Pyes nor venymus wormes. There is no Adder, nor Snake, nor
Toode, nor Lyzerd, nor no Euyt, nor none such lyke. I haue sene stones
the whiche haue had the forme and shap of a snake and other venimus
wormes. And the people of the countre sayth that suche stones were
wormes, and they were turned into stones by the power of God and the
prayers of saynt Patryk. And Englysh marchauntes of England do fetch of
the erth of Irlonde to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll
venimus wormes.’[502] In treating this passage, the first step is to
separate pieces of imported foreign myth, belonging properly not to
Ireland, but to islands of the Mediterranean; the story of the earth of
the island of Krete being fatal to venomous serpents is to be found in
Ælian,[503] and St. Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one
of the Lerins opposite Cannes)[504] seems to take precedence of the
Irish saint. What is left after these deductions is a philosophic myth
accounting for the existence of fossil ammonites as being petrified
snakes, to which myth a historical position is given by claiming it as a
miracle, and ascribing it to St. Patrick. The second myth is valuable
for the historical and geological evidence which it incidentally
preserves. At the celebrated ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis at
Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli, the marble columns, encircled half-way up
by borings of lithodomi, stand to prove that the ground of the temple
must have been formerly submerged many feet below the sea, and
afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably
silent as to the events demonstrated by this conclusive geological
evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Roman emperors
from the second to the third century, and the mention of its existence
in ruins in the 16th century, no documentary information was till lately
recognized. It has now been pointed out by Mr. Tuckett that a passage in
the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, dating apparently more or less
before the end of the 9th century, mentions the subsidence of the
temple, ascribing it to a miracle of St. Paul. The legend is as follows:
‘And when he (Paul) came out of Messina he sailed to Didymus, and
remained there one night. And having sailed thence, he came to Pontiole
(Puteoli) on the second day. And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought
him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son
from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to
Pontiole. And some of Peter’s disciples having been found there, and
having received Paul, exhorted him to stay with them. And he stayed a
week in hiding, because of the command of Cæsar (that he should be put
to death). And all the toparchs were waiting to seize and kill him. But
Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his
shipmaster’s dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into
the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized
him and beheaded him, and sent his head to Cæsar.... And Paul, being in
Pontiole, and having heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded, being
grieved with great grief, gazing into the height of the heaven, said: “O
Lord Almighty in Heaven, who hast appeared to me in every place whither
I have gone on account of Thine only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus
Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and
followed His word.” He said to them, therefore, “Follow me.” And going
forth from Pontiole with those who had believed in the word of God, they
came to a place called Baias (Baiæ), and looking up with their eyes,
they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one
fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the
sea.... And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that
had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been
swallowed up with all its multitude.’[505]

Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of
the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual
history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or
explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights’ story, which at
first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is
nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the
Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary
wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of
their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a
mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the
mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older
than the date when the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ were edited. When, in
Henry of Veldeck’s 12th century poem, Duke Ernest and his companions
sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and
are themselves dragged in below it among ‘many a work of keels,’ whose
masts stand like a forest.[506] Turning from tale-tellers to grave
geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find
El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be
still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so
built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at
sea. This quaint notion is to be found in ‘Sir John Mandeville’: ‘In an
isle clept Crues, ben schippes with-outen nayles of iren, or bonds, for
the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there aboute in
that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schipp passed by
the marches, and hadde either iren bandes or iren nayles, anon he sholde
ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to him; and
so wolde it draw to him the schipp, because of the iren; that he sholde
never departen fro it, ne never go thens.’[507] Now it seems that
accounts of the magnetic mountain have been given not only as belonging
to the southern seas, but also to the north, and that men have connected
with such notions the pointing of the magnetic needle, as Sir Thomas
Browne says, ‘ascribing thereto the cause of the needle’s direction, and
conceeving the effluxions from these mountains and rocks invite the
lilly toward the north.’[508] On this evidence we have, I think, fair
ground for supposing that hypotheses of polar magnetic mountains were
first devised to explain the action of the compass, and that these gave
rise to stories of such mountains exerting what would be considered
their proper effect on the iron of passing ships. The argument is
clenched by the consideration that Europeans, who colloquially say the
needle points to the north, naturally required their loadstone mountain
in high northern latitudes while on the other hand it was as natural
that Orientals should place this wondrous rock in the south, for they
say it is to the south that the needle points. The conception of
magnetism among peoples who had not reached the idea of double polarity
may be gathered from the following quaint remarks in the 17th century
cyclopædia of the Chinese emperor Kang-hi. ‘I now hear the Europeans say
it is towards the North pole that the compass turns; the ancients said
it was toward the South; which have judged most rightly? Since neither
give any reason why, we come to no more with the one side than with the
other. But the ancients are the earlier in date, and the farther I go
the more I perceive that they understood the mechanism of nature. All
movement languishes and dies in proportion as it approaches the north;
it is hard to believe it to be from thence that the movement of the
magnetic needle comes.’[509]

To suppose that theories of a relation between man and the lower
mammalia are only a product of advanced science, would be an extreme
mistake. Even at low levels of culture, men addicted to speculative
philosophy have been led to account for the resemblance between apes and
themselves by solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we
must class as philosophic myths. Among these, stories which embody the
thought of an upward change from ape to man, more or less approaching
the last-century theory of development, are to be found side by side
with others which in the converse way account for apes as degenerate
from a previous human state.

Central American mythology works out the idea that monkeys were once a
human race.[510] In South-East Africa, Father Dos Santos remarked long
since that ‘they hold that the apes were anciently men and women, and
thus they call them in their tongue the first people.’ The Zulus still
tell the tale of an Amafeme tribe who became baboons. They were an idle
race who did not like to dig, but wished to eat at other people’s
houses, saying, ‘We shall live, although we do not dig, if we eat the
food of those who cultivate the soil.’ So the chief of that place, of
the house of Tusi, assembled the tribe, and they prepared food and went
out into the wilderness. They fastened on behind them the handles of
their now useless digging picks, these grew and became tails, hair made
its appearance on their bodies, their foreheads became overhanging, and
so they became baboons, who are still called ‘Tusi’s men.’[511] Mr.
Kingsley’s story of the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes, who
degenerated by natural selection into gorillas, is the civilized
counterpart of this savage myth. Or monkeys may be transformed
aborigines, as the Mbocobis relate in South America: in the great
conflagration of their forests a man and woman climbed a tree for refuge
from the fiery deluge, but the flames singed their faces and they became
apes.[512] Among more civilized nations these fancies have graphic
representatives in Moslem legends, of which one is as follows:—There was
a Jewish city which stood by a river full of fish, but the cunning
creatures, noticing the habits of the citizens, ventured freely in sight
on the Sabbath, though they carefully kept away on working-days. At last
the temptation was too strong for the Jewish fishermen, but they paid
dearly for a few days’ fine sport by being miraculously turned into apes
as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking. In after times, when Solomon
passed through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and Mareb, he
received from their descendants, monkeys living in houses and dressed
like men, an account of their strange history.[513] So, in classic
times, Jove had chastised the treacherous race of the Cercopes; he took
from them the use of tongues born but to perjure, leaving them to bewail
in hoarse cries their fate, transformed into the hairy apes of the
Pithecusæ, like and yet unlike the men they had been:—

             ‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idem
             Dissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]

Turning from degeneration to development, it is found that legends of
the descent of human tribes from apes are especially applied to races
despised as low and beast-like by some higher neighbouring people, and
the low race may even acknowledge the humiliating explanation. Thus the
aboriginal features of the robber-caste of the Marawars of South India
are the justification for their alleged descent from Rama’s monkeys, as
for the like genealogy of the Kathkuri, or catechu-gatherers, which
these small, dark, low-browed, curly-haired tribes actually themselves
believe in. The Jaitwas of Rajputana, a tribe reckoned politically as
Rajputs, nevertheless trace their descent from the monkey-god Hanuman,
and confirm it by alleging that their princes still bear its evidence in
a tail-like prolongation of the spine; a tradition which has probably a
real ethnological meaning, pointing out the Jaitwas as of non-Aryan
race.[515] Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down on as lower
animals by the more warlike and civilized Malays, have among them
traditions of their own descent from a pair of the ‘unka puteh,’ or
‘white monkeys,’ who reared their young ones and sent them into the
plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants
became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained
apes.[516] Thus Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed,
uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed
to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had
grown corn and eaten it their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they
began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The
population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at
last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India,
united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.[517] In these
traditions the development from ape to man is considered to have come in
successive generations, but the negroes are said to attain the result in
the individual, by way of metempsychosis. Froebel speaks of negro slaves
in the United States believing that in the next world they shall be
white men and free, nor is there anything strange in their cherishing a
hope so prevalent among their kindred in West Africa. But from this the
traveller goes on to quote another story, which, if not too good to be
true, is a theory of upward and downward development, almost thorough
enough for a Buddhist philosopher. He says, ‘A German whom I met here
told me that the blacks believe the damned among the negroes to become
monkeys; but if in this state they behave well, they are advanced to the
state of a negro again, and bliss is eventually possible to them,
consisting in their turning white, becoming winged, and so on.’[518]

To understand these stories (and they are worth some attention for the
ethnological hints they contain), it is necessary that we should discard
the results of modern scientific zoology, and bring our minds back to a
ruder condition of knowledge. The myths of human degeneration and
development have much more in common with the speculations of Lord
Monboddo than with the anatomical arguments of Professor Huxley. On the
one hand, uncivilized men deliberately assign to apes an amount of human
quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous. Everyone has
heard the story of the negroes declaring that apes really can speak, but
judiciously hold their tongues lest they should be made to work; but it
is not so generally known that this is found as serious matter of belief
in several distant regions—West Africa, Madagascar, South America,
&c.—where monkeys or apes are found.[519] With this goes another
widely-spread anthropoid story, which relates how great apes like the
gorilla and the orang-utan carry off women to their homes in the woods,
much as the Apaches and Comanches of our own time carry off to their
prairies the women of North Mexico.[520] And on the other hand, popular
opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated the
monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages as
senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology have
contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference between an
Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the immense interval
between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no difficulty in
understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the eyes of men who hunt
them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their
language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, and who fail totally
to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows
among the rudest tribes of man. It is well known that when Sanskrit
legend tells of the apes who fought in the army of King Hanuman, it
really refers to those aborigines of the land who were driven by the
Aryan invaders to the hills and jungles, and whose descendants are known
to us as Bhils, Kols, Sonthals, and the like, rude tribes such as the
Hindu still speaks of as ‘monkey-people.’[521] One of the most perfect
identifications of the savage and the monkey in Hindustan is the
following description of the bunmanus, or ‘man of the woods’ (Sanskr.
vana  wood, manusha  man). ‘The bunmanus is an animal of the
monkey kind. His face has a near resemblance to the human; he has no
tail, and walks erect. The skin of his body is black, and slightly
covered with hair.’ That this description really applies not to apes,
but to the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines of the land, appears
further in the enumeration of the local dialects of Hindustan, to which,
it is said, ‘may be added the jargon of the bunmanus, or wild men of the
woods.’[522] In the islands of the Indian Archipelago, whose tropical
forests swarm both with high apes and low savages, the confusion between
the two in the minds of the half-civilized inhabitants becomes almost
inextricable. There is a well-known Hindu fable in the Hitopadesa, which
relates as a warning to stupid imitators the fate of the ape who
imitated the carpenter, and was caught in the cleft when he pulled out
the wedge; this fable has come to be told in Sumatra as a real story of
one of the indigenous savages of the island.[523] It is to rude
forest-men that the Malays habitually give the name of orang-utan,
i.e., ‘man of the woods.’ But in Borneo this term is applied to the
miyas ape, whence we have learnt to call this creature the orang-utan,
and the Malays themselves are known to give the name in one and the same
district to both the savage and the ape.[524] This term ‘man of the
woods’ extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of
the khon pa, ‘men of the wood,’ meaning apes;[525] the Brazilians of
cauiari, or ‘wood-men,’ meaning a certain savage tribe.[526] The name
of the Bosjesman, so amusingly mispronounced by Englishmen, as though
it were some outlandish native word, is merely the Dutch equivalent for
Bush-man, ‘man of the woods or bush.’[527] In our own language the
‘homo silvaticus’ or ‘forest-man’ has become the ‘salvage man’ or
savage. European opinion of the native tribes of the New World may be
judged of by the fact that, in 1537, Pope Paul III. had to make express
statement that these Indians were really men (attendentes Indos ipsos
utpote veros homines).[528] Thus there is little cause to wonder at the
circulation of stories of ape-men in South America, and at there being
some indefiniteness in the local accounts of the selvage or ‘savage,’
that hairy wild man of the woods who, it is said, lives in the trees,
and sometimes carries off the native women.[529] The most perfect of
these mystifications is to be found in a Portuguese manuscript quoted in
the account of Castelnau’s expedition, and giving, in all seriousness,
the following account of the people called Cuatas: ‘This populous
nation dwells east of the Juruena, in the neighbourhood of the rivers
San Joâo and San Thome, advancing even to the confluence of the Juruena,
and the Arinos. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing
it walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground;
they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are
of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons; they
sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no
industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and
fish.’[530] The writer of this record shows no symptom of being aware
that cuata or coata is the name of the large black Simia Paniscus,
and that he has been really describing, not a tribe of Indians, but a
species of apes.

Various reasons may have led to the growth of another quaint group of
legends, describing human tribes with tails like beasts. To people who
at once believe monkeys a kind of savages, and savages a kind of
monkeys, men with tails are creatures coming under both definitions.
Thus the Homo caudatus, or satyr, often appears in popular belief as a
half-human creature, while even in old-fashioned works on natural
history he may be found depicted on the evident model of an anthropoid
ape. In East Africa, the imagined tribe of long-tailed men are also
monkey-faced,[531] while in South America the coata tapuya, or
‘monkey-men,’ are as naturally described as men with tails.[532]
European travellers have tried to rationalize the stories of tailed men
which they meet with in Africa and the East. Thus Dr. Krapf points to a
leather appendage worn behind from the girdle by the Wakamba, and
remarks, ‘It is no wonder that people say there are men with tails in
the interior of Africa,’ and other writers have called attention to
hanging mats or waist-cloths, fly-flappers or artificial tails worn for
ornament, as having made their wearers liable to be mistaken at a
distance for tailed men.[533] But these apparently silly myths have
often a real ethnological significance, deeper at any rate than such a
trivial blunder. When an ethnologist meets in any district with the
story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of
aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant
population, who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails
accordingly. Although the aboriginal Miau-tsze, or ‘children of the
soil,’ come down from time to time into Canton to trade, the Chinese
still firmly believe them to have short tails like monkeys;[534] the
half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed
men;[535] the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the
Niam-Nam of the interior.[536] The outcast race of Cagots, about the
Pyrenees, were said to be born with tails; and in Spain the mediæval
superstition still survives that the Jews have tails, like the devil, as
they say.[537] In England the notion was turned to theological profit by
being claimed as a judgment on wretches who insulted St. Augustine and
St. Thomas of Canterbury. Horne Tooke quotes thus from that zealous and
somewhat foul-mouthed reformer, Bishop Bale: ‘Johan Capgrave and
Alexander of Esseby sayth, that for castynge of fyshe tayles at thys
Augustyne, Dorsett Shyre menne hadde tayles ever after. But Polydorus
applieth it unto Kentish men at Stroud by Rochester, for cuttinge of
Thomas Becket’s horse’s tail. Thus hath England in all other land a
perpetuall infamy of tayles by theyr wrytten legendes of lyes, yet can
they not well tell where to bestowe them truely ... an Englyshman now
cannot travayle in an other land, by way of marchandyse or any other
honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe,
that al Englishmen have tailes.’[538] The story at last sank into a
commonplace of local slander between shire and shire, and the Devonshire
belief that Cornishmen had tails lingered at least till a few years
ago.[539] Not less curious is the tradition among savage tribes, that
the tailed state was an early or original condition of man. In the Fiji
Islands there is a legend of a tribe of men with tails like dogs, who
perished in the great deluge, while the Tasmanians declared that men
originally had tails and no knee-joints. Among the natives of Brazil, it
is related by a Portuguese writer of about 1600, after a couple have
been married, the father or father-in-law cuts a wooden stick with a
sharp flint, imagining that by this ceremony he cuts off the tails of
any future grandchildren, so that they will be born tailless.[540] There
seems no evidence to connect the occasional occurrence of tail-like
projections by malformation with the stories of tailed human
tribes.[541]

Anthropology, until modern times, classified among its facts the
particulars of monstrous human tribes, gigantic or dwarfish, mouthless
or headless, one-eyed or one-legged, and so forth. The works of ancient
geographers and naturalists abound in descriptions of these strange
creatures; writers such as Isidore of Seville and Roger Bacon collected
them, and sent them into fresh and wider circulation in the middle ages,
and the popular belief of uncivilized nations retains them still. It was
not till the real world had been so thoroughly explored as to leave
little room in it for the monsters, that about the beginning of the
present century science banished them to the ideal world of mythology.
Having had to glance here at two of the principal species in this
amazing semi-human menagerie, it may be worth while to look among the
rest for more hints as to the sources of mythic fancy.[542]

That some of the myths of giants and dwarfs are connected with
traditions of real indigenous or hostile tribes is settled beyond
question by the evidence brought forward by Grimm, Nilsson, and Hanusch.
With all the difficulty of analyzing the mixed nature of the dwarfs of
European folklore, and judging how far they are elves, or gnomes, or
such like nature-spirits, and how far human beings in mythic aspect, it
is impossible not to recognize the element derived from the kindly or
mischievous aborigines of the land, with their special language, and
religion, and costume. The giants appear in European folklore as
Stone-Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their
agriculture and the sound of their church-bells. The rude native’s fear
of the more civilized intruder in his land is well depicted in the tale
of the giant’s daughter, who found the boor ploughing his field and
carried him home in her apron for a plaything—plough, and oxen, and all;
but her mother bade her carry them back to where she found them, for,
said she, they are of a people that can do the Huns much ill. The fact
of the giant tribes bearing such historic names as Hun or Chud is
significant, and Slavonic men have, perhaps, not yet forgotten that the
dwarfs talked of in their legends were descended from the aborigines
whom the Old-Prussians found in the land. Beyond a doubt the old
Scandinavians are describing the ancient and ill-used Lapp population,
once so widely spread over Northern Europe, when their sagas tell of the
dwarfs, stunted and ugly, dressed in reindeer kirtle and coloured cap,
cunning and cowardly, shy of intercourse even with friendly Norsemen,
dwelling in caves or in the mound-like Lapland ‘gamm,’ armed only with
arrows tipped with stone and bone, yet feared and hated by their
conquerors for their fancied powers of witchcraft.[543] Moslem legend
relates that the race of Gog and Magog (Yajuj and Majuj) are of tiny
stature, but with ears like elephants; they are a numerous people, and
ravaged the world; they dwell in the East, separated from Persia by a
high mountain, with but one pass; and the nations their neighbours, when
they heard of Alexander the Great (Dhû ’l-Karnain) traversing the world,
paid tribute to him, and he made them a wall of bronze and iron, to keep
in the nation of Gog and Magog.[544] Who can fail to recognize in this a
mystified description of the Tatars of High Asia? Professor Nilsson
tries to account in a general way for the huge or tiny stature of
legendary tribes, as being mere exaggeration of their actual largeness
or smallness. We must admit that this sometimes really happens. The
accounts which European eye-witnesses brought home of the colossal
stature of the Patagonians, to whose waists they declared their own
heads reached, are enough to settle once for all the fact that myths of
giants may arise from the sight of really tall men,[545] and it is so,
too, with the dwarf-legends of the same region, as where Knivet, the old
traveller, remarks of the little people of Rio de la Plata, that they
are ‘not so very little as described.’[546]

Nevertheless, this same group of giant and dwarf myths may serve as a
warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation, however sound
within its proper limits. There is plenty of evidence that giant-legends
are sometimes philosophic myths, made to account for the finding of
great fossil bones. To give but a single instance of such connexion,
certain huge jaws and teeth, found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth,
were recognized as belonging to the giant Gogmagog, who in old times
fought his last fight there against Corineus, the eponymic hero of
Cornwall.[547] As to the dwarfs, again, stories of them are curiously
associated with those long-enduring monuments of departed races—their
burial-cysts and dolmens. Thus, in the United States, ranges of rude
stone cysts, often only two or three feet long, are connected with the
idea of a pygmy race buried in them. In Brittany, the dolmens are the
abodes and treasuries of the dwarfs who built them, and likewise in
India it is a usual legend of such prehistoric burial-places, that they
were dwarfs’ houses—the dwellings of the ancient pygmies, who here again
appear as representatives of prehistoric tribes.[548] But a very
different meaning is obvious in a mediæval traveller’s account of the
hairy, man-like creatures of Cathay, one cubit high, and that do not
bend their knees as they walk, or in an Arab geographer’s description of
an island people in the Indian seas, four spans high, naked, with red
downy hair on their faces, and who climb up trees and shun mankind. If
any one could possibly doubt the real nature of these dwarfs, his doubt
may be resolved by Marco Polo’s statement that in his time monkeys were
regularly embalmed in the East Indies, and sold in boxes to be exhibited
over the world as pygmies.[549] Thus various different facts have given
rise to stories of giants and dwarfs, more than one mythic element
perhaps combining to form a single legend—a result perplexing in the
extreme to the mythological interpreter.

Descriptions of strange tribes made in entire good faith may come to be
understood in new extravagant senses, when carried among people not
aware of the original facts. The following are some interpretations of
this kind, among which some far-fetched cases are given, to show that
the method must not be trusted too much. The term ‘nose-less’ is apt to
be misunderstood, yet it was fairly enough applied to flat-nosed tribes,
such as Turks of the steppes, whom Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela thus depicts
in the twelfth century:—‘They have no noses, but draw breath through two
small holes.’[550] Again, among the common ornamental mutilations of
savages is that of stretching the ears to an enormous size by weights or
coils, and it is thus verbally quite true that there are men whose ears
hang down upon their shoulders. Yet without explanation such a phrase
would be understood to describe, not the appearance of a real savage
with his ear-lobes stretched into pendant fleshy loops, but rather that
of Pliny’s Panotii, or of the Indian Karnaprâvarana, ‘whose ears
serve them for cloaks,’ or of the African dwarfs, said to use their ears
one for mattress and the other for coverlet when they lie down. One of
the most extravagant of these stories is told by Fray Pedro Simon in
California, where in fact the territory of Oregon has its name from
the Spanish term of Orejones, or ‘Big-Ears,’ given to the inhabitants
from their practice of stretching their ears with ornaments.[551] Even
purely metaphorical descriptions, if taken in a literal sense, are
capable of turning into catches, like the story of the horse with its
head where its tail should be. I have been told by a French Protestant
from the Nismes district that the epithet of gorgeo negro, or
‘black-throat,’ by which Catholics describe a Huguenot, was taken so
literally that heretic children were sometimes forced to open their
mouths to satisfy the orthodox of their being of the usual colour
within. On examining the description of savage tribes by higher races,
it appears that several of the epithets usually applied only need
literalizing to turn into the wildest of the legendary monster-stories.
Thus the Burmese speak of the rude Karens as ‘dog-men;’[552] Marco Polo
describes the Angaman (Andaman) islanders as brutish and savage
cannibals, with heads like dogs.[553] Ælian’s account of the dog-headed
people of India is on the face of it an account of a savage race. The
Kynokephali, he says, are so called from their bodily appearance, but
otherwise they are human, and they go dressed in the skins of beasts;
they are just, and harm not men; they cannot speak, but roar, yet they
understand the language of the Indians; they live by hunting, being
swift of foot, and they cook their game not by fire, but by tearing it
into fragments and drying it in the sun; they keep goats and sheep, and
drink the milk. The naturalist concludes by saying that he mentions
these fitly among the irrational animals, because they have not
articulate, distinct, and human language.[554] This last suggestive
remark well states the old prevalent notion that barbarians have no real
language, but are ‘speechless,’ ‘tongueless,’ or even mouthless.[555]
Another monstrous people of wide celebrity are Pliny’s Blemmyæ, said to
be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in their
breasts creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, who dwelt far
and wide in South American forests, and who to our mediæval ancestors
were as real as the cannibals with whom Othello couples them:—

                  ‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
                  Do grow beneath their shoulders.’

If, however, we look in dictionaries for the Acephali, we may find not
actual headless monsters, but heretics so called because their original
head or founder was not known; and when the kingless Turkoman hordes say
of themselves ‘We are a people without a head,’ the metaphor is even
more plain and natural.[556] Moslem legend tells of the Shikk and the
Nesnas, creatures like one half of a split man, with one arm, leg, and
eye. Possibly it was thence that the Zulus got their idea of a tribe of
half-men, who in one of their stories found a Zulu maiden in a cave and
thought she was two people, but on closer inspection of her admitted,
‘The thing is pretty! But oh the two legs!’ These realistic fancies
coincide with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only ‘half
a man,’ semihomo, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.[557] Again,
when the Chinese compared themselves to the outer barbarians, they said
‘We see with two eyes, the Latins with one, and all other nations are
blind.’ Such metaphors, proverbial among ourselves, verbally correspond
with legends of one-eyed tribes, such as the savage cave-dwelling
Kyklopes.[558] Verbal coincidence of this kind, untrustworthy enough in
these latter instances, passes at last into the vaguest fancy. The
negroes called Europeans ‘long-headed,’ using the phrase in our familiar
metaphorical sense; but translate it into Greek, and at once Hesiod’s
Makrokephaloi come into being.[559] And, to conclude the list, one of
the commonest of the monster-tribes of the Old and New World is that
distinguished by having feet turned backward. Now there is really a
people whose name, memorable in scientific controversy, describes them
as ‘having feet the opposite way,’ and they still retain that ancient
name of Antipodes.[560]

Returning from this digression to the region of philosophic myth, we may
examine new groups of explanatory stories, produced from that craving to
know causes and reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention of
a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon
or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a
story to account for it, and even if he does not persuade himself that
this is a real legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it
from him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our task in
dealing with such stories is made easy when the criterion of possibility
can be brought to bear upon them. It has become a mere certainty to
moderns that asbestos is not really salamander’s wool; that morbid
hunger is not really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man’s stomach;
that a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-drill by
seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till sparks came. The
African Wakuafi account for their cattle-lifting proclivities by the
calm assertion that Engai, that is, Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and
so wherever there is any it is their call to go and seize it.[561] So in
South America the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara
a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing the men and
adopting the women and children.[562] But though it may be consistent
with the notions of these savages to relate such explanatory legends, it
is not consistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too,
the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with more
authentic sources of information, or to encroach on the domain of valid
history. It is of no use for the Chinese to tell their stupid story of
written characters having been invented from the markings on a
tortoise’s shell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and
simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to this day.
Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the West Highland legend
that the Pope once laid an interdict on the land, but forgot to curse
the hills, so the people tilled them, this story being told to account
for those ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild
hill-sides, the so-called ‘elf-furrows.’[563] The most embarrassing
cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither impossible
enough to condemn, nor probable enough to receive. Ethnographers who
know how world-wide is the practice of defacing the teeth among the
lower races, and how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization,
naturally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human nature, at a
particular stage of development. But the mutilating tribes themselves
have local legends to account for local customs; thus the Penongs of
Burmah and the Batoka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but
the one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other that
it is to be like oxen and not like zebras.[564] Of the legends of
tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to account for the fact that
while the Fijians tattoo only the women, their neighbours, the Tongans,
tattoo only the men. It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji
to report to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe, went
on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt by heart, ‘Tattoo
the women, but not the men,’ but unluckily he tripped over a stump, got
his lesson wrong, and reached Tonga repeating ‘Tattoo the men, but not
the women,’ an ordinance which they observed ever after. How reasonable
such an explanation seemed to the Polynesian mind, may be judged from
the Samoans having a version with different details, and applied to
their own instead of the Tongan islands.[565]

All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story with no personal
name to hang it to. This want is thus graphically expressed by Sprenger
the historian in his life of Mohammed: ‘It makes, on me at least, quite
a different impression when it is related that “the Prophet said to
Alkama,” even if I knew nothing whatever else of this Alkama, than if it
were merely stated that “he said to somebody.”’ The feeling which this
acute and learned critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest
times, and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice historic
conscience, germinated to the production of much mythic fruit. Thus it
has come to pass that one of the leading personages to be met with in
the tradition of the world is really no more than—Somebody. There is
nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he cannot put
on; one only restriction binds him at all, that the name he assumes
shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and
even from this he oftentimes breaks loose. So rife in our own day is
this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of
place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be
guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the
ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy
tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth
with a builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody assumes the
name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct of Tezcuco; to the Persian
any huge and antique ruin is the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia,
says Dr. Bastian, buildings of the most various ages are set down to
Peter the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or Charles V.; and European
folklore may attribute to the Devil any old building of unusual
massiveness, and especially those stone structures which antiquaries now
class as præ-historic monuments. With a more graceful thought, the
Indians of North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio,
great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were shaped in old
days by the great Manitu himself, in promise of a plentiful supply of
game in the world of spirits. The New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe
separated the North and South Islands, and formed Cook’s Straits. Greek
myth placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of
Herakles; in more recent times the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar
became one of the many feats of Alexander of Macedon.[566] Such a group
of stories as this is no unfair test of the value of mere traditions of
personal names which simply answer the questions that mankind have been
asking for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts.
Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be able,
especially in the more modern cases, to separate the real from the
imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid down that, in the absence of
corroborative evidence, every tradition stands suspect of mythology, if
it can be made by the simple device of fitting some personal name to the
purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have introduced into the
world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments, or games, or agriculture,
or marriage, or any other of the elements of civilization.

Among the various matters which have excited curiosity, and led to its
satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local names. These, when the
popular ear has lost their primitive significance, become in barbaric
times an apt subject for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar
fashion. Thus the Tibetans declare that their lake Chomoriri was named
from a woman (chomo) who was carried into it by the yak she was
riding, and cried in terror ri-ri! The Arabs say the founders of the
city of Sennaar saw on the river bank a beautiful woman with teeth
glittering like fire, whence they called the place Sinnâr, i.e.,
‘tooth of fire.’ The Arkadians derived the name of their town Trapezus
from the table (trapeza), which Zeus overturned when the wolfish
Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him.[567] Such crude
fancies in no way differ in nature from English local legends current up
to recent times, such as that which relates how the Romans, coming in
sight of where Exeter now stands, exclaimed in delight, ‘_Ecce
terra!_’ and thus the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious
enquirer wished to know from the inhabitants of Fordingbridge, or as
the country people call it, Fardenbridge, what the origin of this name
might be, and heard in reply that the bridge was thought to have been
built when wages were so cheap that masons worked for a ‘farden’ a day.
The Falmouth folks’ story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known,
how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors, because,
as she said, ‘The penny come so quick,’ whence the place came to be
called Pennycomequick; this nonsense being invented to account for an
ancient Cornish name, probably Penycumgwic, ‘head of the creek
valley.’ Mythic fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to
such remnants as this.

That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk of broughams and
bluchers, cannot deny. But any such etymology ought to have
contemporary document or some equally forcible proof in its favour, for
this is a form of explanation taken by the most flagrant myths. David
the painter, it is related, had a promising pupil named Chicque, the
son of a fruiterer; the lad died at eighteen, but his master continued
to hold him up to later students as a model of artistic cleverness, and
hence arose the now familiar term of chic. Etymologists, a race not
wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial
canard; the word chic dates at anyrate from the seventeenth
century.[568] Another word with which similar liberty has been taken, is
cant. Steele, in the ‘Spectator,’ says that some people derive it from
the name of one Andrew Cant, a Scotch minister, who had the gift of
preaching in such a dialect that he was understood by none but his own
congregation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a very
accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is mentioned in
‘Whitelock’s Memorials,’ and seems to have known how to speak out in
very plain terms indeed. But at any rate he flourished about 1650,
whereas the verb to cant was then already an old word. To cante,
meaning to speak, is mentioned in Harman’s ‘List of Rogues’ Words,’ in
1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and gypsies that they
have devised a language among themselves, which they name canting, but
others ‘Pedlars’ Frenche.’[569] Of all etymologies ascribed to personal
names, one of the most curious is that of the Danse Macabre, or Dance
of Death, so well known from Holbein’s pictures. Its supposed author is
thus mentioned in the ‘Biographie Universelle:’ ‘Macaber, poëte
allemand, serait tout-à-fait inconnu sans l’ouvrage qu’on a sous son
nom.’ This, it may be added, is true enough, for there never was such a
person at all, the Danse Macabre being really Chorea Machabæorum,
the Dance of the Maccabees, a kind of pious pantomime of death
performed in churches in the fifteenth century. Why the performance
received this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is
distinguished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth chapter of
Book II. of the Maccabees, which relates how the people betook
themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord that the sin of those who
had been slain among them might be wholly blotted out; for if Judas had
not expected that the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous
and vain to pray for the dead.[570] Traced to its origin, it is thus
seen that the Danse Macabre is neither more nor less than the Dance of
the Dead.

It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be known by the
name of their chief, as in books of African travel we read of ‘Eyo’s
people,’ or ‘Kamrazi’s people.’ Such terms may become permanent, like
the name of the Osmanli Turks taken from the great Othman, or
Osman. The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be
combined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have given his
name to a clan of O’Briens or Mac Alpines. How far the tribal names
of the lower races may have been derived from individual names of chiefs
or forefathers, is a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to
obtain. In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated by
the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having such a leader,
who is sometimes even styled ‘yank,’ i.e. ‘father.’[571] The Zulus and
Maoris were races who paid great attention to the traditional
genealogies of their clan-ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their
kinsfolk but their gods; and they distinctly recognize the possibility
of tribes being named from a deceased ancestor or chief. The Kafir tribe
of Ama-Xosa derives its name from a chief, U-Xosa;[572] and the
Maori tribes of Ngate-Wakaue and Nga-Puhi claim descent from chiefs
called Wakaue and Puhi.[573] Around this nucleus of actuality,
however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its
effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how many people or country
gained its name, had only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor
or ruler, and then the simple process of turning a national or local
title into a personal name at once added a new genealogy to historical
tradition. In some cases, the name of the imagined ancestor is invented
in such form that the local or gentile name may stand as grammatically
derived from it, as usually happens in real cases, like the derivation
of Cæsarea from Cæsar, or of the Benedictines from Benedict. But
in the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the mere
unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city often becomes
without more ado the name of the eponymic hero. It has to be remembered,
moreover, that countries and nations can be personified by an
imaginative process which has not quite lost its sense in modern speech.
France is talked of by politicians as an individual being, with
particular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a statue or
picture with suitable attributes. And if one were to say that
Britannia has two daughters, Canada and Australia, or that she has
gone to keep house for a decrepit old aunt called India, this would be
admitted as plain fact expressed in fantastic language. The invention of
ancestries from eponymic heroes or name-ancestors has, however, often
had a serious effect in corrupting historic truth, by helping to fill
ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies. Yet, when surveyed
in a large view, the nature of the eponymic fictions is patent and
indisputable, and so regular are their forms, that we could scarcely
choose more telling examples of the consistent processes of imagination,
as shown in the development of myths.

The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient Greek tribes and
nations makes it easy to test them by comparison, and the test is a
destructive one. Treat the heroic genealogies they belong to as
traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly
independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and
tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their
proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as
fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an
exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and
tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and
gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group
consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such as Mantinêus,
Phigalos, Tegeatês, who, according to the simply inverting legend,
are called founders of Mantinêa, Phigalia, Tegea. The father of
King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land, Ægina; the
city of Mykênai had not only an ancestress Mykênê, but an eponymic
ancestor as well, Mykêneus. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe,
stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached
herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret
of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others,
by claiming as founders of Paris and Tours the Trojans Paris and
Turnus, and connecting France and Britain with the Trojan war
through Francus, son of Hector, and Brutus, great grandson of Æneas.
A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies
or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in ‘Blackstone’s
Commentaries:’ when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the
natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one
Zinganeus, whence the Turks called them Zinganees, but, being at
length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties
over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton’s mind emerging,
but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He
mentions in the beginning of his ‘History of Britain,’ the ‘outlandish
figment’ of the four kings, Magus, Saron, Druis, and Bardus; he
has no approval for the giant Albion, son of Neptune, who subdued the
island and called it after his own name; he scoffs at the four sons of
Japhet, called Francus, Romanus, Alemannus, and Britto. But when
he comes to Brutus and the Trojan legends of old English history, his
sceptical courage fails him: ‘those old and inborn names of successive
kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their lives at
least som part of what so long hath bin remember’d, cannot be thought
without too strict an incredulity.’[574]

Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may
be instanced in South American tribes called the Amoipira and
Potyuara,[575] Khond clans called Baska and Jakso,[576] Turkoman
hordes called Yomut, Tekke, and Chaudor,[577] all of them
professing to derive their designations from ancestors or chiefs who
bore as individuals these very names. Where criticism can be brought to
bear on these genealogies, its effect is often such as drove Brutus and
his Trojans out of English history. When there appear in the genealogy
of Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns like Kano and
Katsena,[578] it is natural to consider these towns to have been
personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns a whole set
of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various races of the land, as
Mexi the founder of Mexico, Chichimecatl the first king of the
Chichimecs, and so forth, down to Otomitl the ancestor of the
Otomis, whose very name by its termination betrays its Aztec
invention.[579] The Brazilians account for the division of the Tupis
and Guaranis, by the legend of two ancestral brothers, Tupi and
Guarani, who quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here
an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word Guarani not
being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of
‘warriors’ given by the missionaries to certain tribes.[580] And when
such facts are considered as that North American clans named after
animals, Beaver, Crayfish, and the like, account for these names by
simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,[581] the
tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of
real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of
eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.

The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short
at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest
criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not
less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient
chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic
genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of
migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The
ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what
they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying
language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The
Greek legend of the twin brothers Danaos and Ægyptos, founders of
the nations of the Danaoi or Homeric Greeks and of the Ægyptians,
represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic
myth of Hellēn, the personified race of the Hellēnes, is another and
more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great
branches of the Greek race: the three sons of Hellēn, it relates, were
Aiolos, Dōros, and Xouthos; the first two gave their names to the
Æolians and Dorians, the third had sons called Achaios and Iōn,
whose names passed as a heritage to the Achaioi and Ionians. The
belief of the Lydians, Mysians, and Karians as to their national
kinship is well expressed in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces
their descent from the three brothers Lydos, Mysos, and Kar.[582]
The Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons, Irej,
Tur, and Selm, distinguishes the two nationalities of Iranian and
Turanian, i.e. Persian and Tatar.[583] The national genealogy of the
Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs thus: Melik Talut (King Saul) had
two sons, Berkia and Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David;
the son of Berkia was Afghan, and the son of Irmia was Usbek. Thanks
to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their use of Biblical
personal names derived from Biblical sources, the idea of their being
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel found great credence among
European scholars up to the present century.[584] Yet the pedigree is
ethnologically absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship
of the Aryan Afghan and the Turanian Usbek, so distinct both in
feature and in language, appears to be in their union by common
Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of sham history, which derives
both from a Semitic source, is only too characteristic of Moslem
chronicle. Among the Tatars is found a much more reasonable national
pedigree; in the 13th century, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober
circumstantial history, that they were originally called Turks from
Turk the eldest son of Japhet, but one of their princes left his
dominions to his twin sons, Tatar and Mongol which gave rise to the
distinction that has ever since prevailed between these two
nations.[585] Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the
unimpeachable ethnological fact, that the Turks, Mongols, and
Tatars are closely-connected branches of one national stock, and we
can only dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part of the
Turk to represent the head of the family, the ancestor of the Mongol
and the Tatar. Thus these eponymic national genealogies, mythological
in form but ethnological in substance, embody opinions of which we may
admit or deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as
distinctly ethnological documents.[586]

It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually expressed in a
metaphorical language, in which lands and nations are personified, and
their relations indicated by terms of personal kinship. This description
applies to that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of
nations in the 10th chapter of Genesis. In some cases it is a problem of
minute and difficult criticism to distinguish among its ancestral names
those which are simply local or national designations in personal form.
But to critics conversant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples,
such as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national list
may suffice to show that part of its names are not names of real men,
but of personified cities, lands, and races. The city Zidon (צידן) is
brother to Heth (חת) the father of the Hittites, and next follow in
person the Jebusite and the Amorite. Among plain names of countries,
Cush or Æthiopia (כוש) begets Nimrod, Asshur or Assyria (אשור)
builds Nineveh, and even the dual Mizraim (מצרים), the ‘two Egypts,’
usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt, appears in the
line of generations as a personal son and brother of other countries,
and ancestor of populations. The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in
personifications of at least two of its members, Madai (מדי) the
Mede, and Javan (יון) the Ionian. And as regards the family to
which the Israelites themselves belong, if Canaan (כנען), the father
of Zidon (צידן), be transferred to it to represent the Phœnicians, by
the side of Asshur (אשור), Aram (ארם), Eber (עבר), and the other
descendants of Shem, the result will be mainly to arrange the Semitic
stock according to the ordinary classification of modern comparative
philology.

Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves as a medium for
expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where
fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediæval
schoolmen have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating
plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then solemnly offering
them in this scientific guise as explanations of themselves—accounting
for opium making people sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue.
The myth-maker’s proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by
comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as many a legend
cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping the familiar facts of
daily life into imaginary histories of their own cause and origin,
childlike answers to those world-old questions of whence and why, which
the savage asks as readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of
such description in the dress of history, that its easier examples
translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since the great
battle among the plantains and bananas, the vanquished have hung down
their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,[587] who can mistake
the simple metaphor which compares the upright and the drooping plants
to a conqueror standing among his beaten foes? In simile just as obvious
lies the origin of another Polynesian legend, which relates the creation
of the coco-nut from a man’s head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and
the yams from his legs.[588] To draw one more example from the mythology
of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that heavenly youth
with green robe and waving feathers, whom for the good of men the Indian
overcame and buried, and who sprang again from his grave as the Indian
corn, Mondamin, the ‘Spirit’s grain.’[589] The New Forest peasant deems
that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of his ancient foes
the Danes; the Maori sees on the red cliffs of Cook’s Straits the
blood-stains that Kupe made when, mourning for the death of his
daughter, he cut his forehead with pieces of obsidian; in the spot where
Buddha offered his own body to feed the starved tigress’s cubs, his
blood for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The modern
Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams running red with
earth, as to the ancient Greek the river that flowed by Byblos bore down
in its summer floods the red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from
the red filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been done
there; John the Baptist’s blood still grows in Germany on his day, and
peasants still go out to search for it; the red meal fungus is blood
dropped by the flying Huns when they hurt their feet against the high
tower-roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls of
Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt in the siege,
and yet more marvellous to relate, at St. Denis’s church in Cornwall,
the blood-stains on the stones fell there when the saint’s head was cut
off somewhere else.[590] Of such translations of descriptive metaphor
under thin pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded with
examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the combined consistency
and variety of what may be called the mythic language, to extract from
its dictionary such a group as this, which in variously imaginative
fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.

The merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor, when once it gains a
sense of reality, may begin to be spoken of as an actual event. The
Moslems have heard the very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but
in fact, and among them the saying that a man’s fate is written on his
forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be deciphered
from the letter-like markings of the sutures of his skull. One of the
miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly
by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend
declares, opened the prophet’s breast, and took a black clot from his
heart, which he washed with Zemzem water and replaced; details are given
of the angel’s dress and golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he
had seen the very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture with
the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the familiar
metaphor that Mohammed’s heart was divinely opened and cleansed, and
indeed he does say in the Koran that God opened his heart.[591] A single
instance is enough to represent the same habit in Christian legend.
Marco Polo relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the
Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or Islam, to justify
their Scriptural text by removing a certain mountain. Now there was
among them a shoemaker, who, having been tempted to excess of admiration
for a woman, had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded the
mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the Khalif and all his
people, and since then the anniversary of the miracle has been kept
holy. The Venetian traveller, after the manner of mediæval writers,
records the story without a symptom of suspicion;[592] yet to our minds
its whole origin so obviously lies in three verses of St. Matthew’s
gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To modern taste such wooden
fictions as these are far from attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a
stupid creature; nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull
and vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of his
mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to embody it in a
material incident. Yet wearisome as he may be, it is none the less
needful to understand him, to acknowledge the vast influence he has had
on the belief of mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its
extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a concrete shape,
which has in all ages been a mainspring of mythology.

Though allegory cannot maintain the large place often claimed for it in
mythology, it has yet had too much influence to be passed over in this
survey. It is true that the search for allegorical explanation is a
pursuit that has led many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of
mysticism. Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with
historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with
its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites, and asses and wolves for
Midianites and Egyptians, these creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic
sketch of Old Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is
immensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are narrower than
mythologists of past centuries have supposed. It is now reasonably
thought preposterous to interpret the Greek legends as moral apologues,
after the manner of Herakleides the philosopher, who could discern a
parable of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just about
to draw his sword on Agamemnon.[593] Still, such a mode of
interpretation has thus much to justify it, that numbers of the fanciful
myths of the world are really allegories. There is allegory in the
Hesiodic myth of Pandora, whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden
band and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the pangs
of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of lies and treachery
and pleasant speech. Heedless of his wiser brother’s words, the foolish
Epimetheus took her; she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out
the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and
night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope
in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a
different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale,
that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost
to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was
left behind for comfort to the luckless human race.[594] Yet the
primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them.
Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists
judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon
tells after Prodikos the story of Herakles choosing between the short
and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue,[595]
but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral
apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature
jars upon the reader’s mind.

The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more
clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child,
the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory
in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems
bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to
prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of
myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction
that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old
Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a
monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral
lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the
semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer,
he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who
ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as
partaking of moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any hyæna or wolf
may probably be a man-hyæna or a werewolf; to men who so utterly believe
‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’ that they will
really regulate their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men
an integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship of
beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the
beast-stories had their first home. Even the Australians tell their
quaint beast-tales, of the Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of
Pussy-brother who singed his friends’ noses while they were asleep.[596]
The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures of their stupid
deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks upon him, such as painting
his face like a woman’s, so that when he looked in the water he fell in
love with himself.[597] Beast-tales abound among such races as the
Polynesians and the North American Indians, who value in them ingenuity
of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and characters of the
creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf
found in Cloudland his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair
and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to
earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the
Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and that is why she
lives and dives alone to this very day.[598] In Guinea, where
beast-fable is one of the great staples of native conversation, the
following story is told as a type of the tales which in this way account
for peculiarities of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his
daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform the feat of
drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified Elephant, the graceful
Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the first mouthful of the fire-water, and
retreated. Then the tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden
in the long grass thousands of his fellows; he took his first glass and
went away, but instead of his coming back, another just like him came
for the second, and so on till the barrel was emptied and Telinga walked
off with the Monkey-king’s daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant
and Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge in the
highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and
suffer such violence and injustice. This is why to this day the little
telingas are only found in the highest tree-tops.[599] Such stories have
been collected by scores from savage tradition in their original state,
while as yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy and
natural transition from the story into the parable is made among
savages, perhaps without help from higher races. In the Hottentot Tales,
side by side with the myth of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out
of the best of the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his
own back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral apologue of the
Lion who thought himself wiser than his Mother, and perished by the
Hunter’s spear, for want of heed to her warning against the deadly
creature whose head is in a line with his breast and shoulders.[600] So
the Zulus have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax, who
did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were given out,
because he did not like to be out in the rain; he only asked the other
animals to bring it for him, and so he never got it.[601] Among the
North American legends of Manabozho, there is a fable quite Æsopian in
its humour. Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose, and
being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into great doubts as to
where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at the head, people will laugh
and say, he ate him backwards, but if I begin at the side they will say,
he ate him sideways. At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a
delicate piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop, stop!
said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise, and in spite of his
hunger he left the meat and climbed up to quiet the creaking, but was
caught between two branches and held fast, and presently he saw a pack
of wolves coming. Go that way! Go that way! he cried out, whereupon the
wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not tell us to go
another way. So they came on, and found the moose, and ate it to the
bones while Manabozho looked wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind
opened the branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to
himself, ‘See the effect of meddling with frivolous things when I had
certain good in my possession.’[602]

In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean antiquity, but it
did not at once supplant the animal-myths pure and simple. For ages the
European mind was capable at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from
the Æsopian crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means
edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the Babrius and
Phædrus collections were over a thousand years old, when the genuine
Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth in the incomparable ‘Reynard the
Fox,’ traceable in Jakob Grimm’s view to an original Frankish
composition of the 12th century, itself containing materials of far
earlier date.[603] Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral
hangs on to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one; nor
is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in general and the
clergy in particular. Its creatures are incarnate qualities, the Fox of
cunning, the Bear of strength, the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of
guilelessness. The charm of the narrative, which every class in mediæval
Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but
scholars’ knowledge, lies in great measure in he cleverly sustained
combination of the beast’s nature and the man’s. How great the influence
of the Reynard Epic was in the middle ages, may be judged from
Reynard, Bruin, Chanticleer, being still names familiar to people
who have no idea of their having been originally names of the characters
in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable are its traces in modern
French. The donkey has its name of baudet from Baudoin, Baldwin the
Ass. Common French dictionaries do not even contain the word goupil
(vulpes), so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out
of use by his Frankish title in the Beast-Epic, Raginhard the
Counsellor, Reinhart, Reynard, Renart, renard. The moralized
apologues like Æsop’s which Grimm contemptuously calls ‘fables thinned
down to mere moral and allegory,’ ‘a fourth watering of the old grapes
into an insipid moral infusion,’ are low in æsthetic quality as compared
with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics will be apt to judge
them after the manner of the child who said how convenient it was to
have ‘Moral’ printed in Æsop’s fables, that everybody might know what to
skip.

The want of power of abstraction which has ever had such disastrous
effect on the beliefs of mankind, confounding myth and chronicle, and
crushing the spirit of history under the rubbish of literalized
tradition, comes very clearly into view in the study of parable. The
state of mind of the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so
instructive in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though
full-sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such men
have in comprehending the unreality of any story. She could not be made
to see that arithmetical problems were anything but statements of
concrete fact, and when her teacher asked her, ‘If you can buy a barrel
of cider for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar?’ she
replied quite simply, ‘I cannot give much for cider, because it is very
sour.’[604] It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism,
that among people so civilized as the Buddhists, the most obviously
moral beast-fables have become literal incidents of sacred history.
Gautama, during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog, a
fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so far were the
legends of these transformations from mere myth to his followers, that
there have been preserved as relics in Buddhist temples the hair,
feathers, and bones of the creatures whose bodies the great teacher
inhabited. Now among the incidents which happened to Buddha during his
series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the familiar fable
of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who, when he was a Squirrel, set
an example of parental virtue by trying to dry up the ocean with his
tail, to save his young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his
persevering courage was rewarded by a miracle.[605] To our modern minds,
a moral which seems the very purpose of a story is evidence unfavourable
to its truth as fact. But if even apologues of talking birds and beasts
have not been safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most
evident moral can have been but slight protection to parables told of
possible and life-like men. It was not a needless precaution to state
explicitly of the New Testament parables that they were parables, and
even this guard has not availed entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some
curious experience in the following passage:—‘I know that I was not very
young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial existence of
Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist and Herod; when the Good
Samaritan was as real a personage as any of the Apostles; when I was
full of sincerest pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten
to trim their lamps, and thought them—in my secret soul—rather hardly
treated. This impression of the literal actual truth of the parables I
have since met with in many children, and in the uneducated but devout
hearers and readers of the Bible; and I remember that when I once tried
to explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the word parable,
and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was
scandalized—she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told anything
to his disciples that was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her
own mind, and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.’[606]
Nor, it may be added, has such realization been confined to the minds of
the poor and ignorant. St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their
hospitals, and from whom the lazzarone and the lazzaretto take their
name, obviously derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.

The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty, thus given
by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history, may conclude this
dissertation on mythology. In its course there have been examined the
processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend
by exaggeration and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by
mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative theories
and still less substantial fictions into pretended traditional events,
the passage of myth into miracle-legend, the definition by name and
place given to any floating imagination, the adaptation of mythic
incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story
into history. The investigation of these intricate and devious
operations has brought ever more and more broadly into view two
principles of mythologic science. The first is that legend, when
classified on a sufficient scale, displays a regularity of development
which the notion of motiveless fancy quite fails to account for, and
which must be attributed to laws of formation whereby every story, old
and new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause. So
uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes possible to treat
myth as an organic product of mankind at large, in which individual,
national, and even racial distinctions stand subordinate to universal
qualities of the human mind. The second principle concerns the relation
of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and
mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old
mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the
study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found
embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that,
far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them.
Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite of themselves, the shapers
and transmitters of poetic legend have preserved for us masses of sound
historical evidence. They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes
their own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed in the
structure of their legends the operations of their own minds, they
placed on record the arts and manners, the philosophy and religion of
their own times, times of which formal history has often lost the very
memory. Myth is the history of its authors, not of its subjects; it
records the lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.

Footnote 500:

  Hamilton in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 344; Colebrooke, ibid. vol. iv. p.
  385; Earl in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 682; vol. iv. p. 9.
  See Renaudot, ‘Travels of Two Mahommedans,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p.
  183.

Footnote 501:

  F. Buckland, ‘Curiosities of Nat. Hist.’ 3rd series, vol. ii. p. 39.

Footnote 502:

  Andrew Boorde, ‘Introduction of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Furnivall,
  Early Eng. Text Soc. 1870, p. 133.

Footnote 503:

  Ælian, De Nat. Animal, v. 2, see 8.

Footnote 504:

  Acta Sanctorum Bolland. Jan. xvi.

Footnote 505:

  ‘Acts of Peter and Paul,’ trans. by A. Walker, in Ante-Nicene Library,
  vol. xvi. p. 257; F. F. Tuckett in ‘Nature,’ Oct. 20, 1870. See Lyell,
  ‘Principles of Geology,’ ch. xxx.; Phillips, ‘Vesuvius,’ p. 244.

Footnote 506:

  Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. i. pp. 161, 217; vol. iii. p. 78;
  Hole, ‘Remarks on the Ar. N.’ p. 104; Heinrich von Veldeck, ‘Herzog
  Ernst’s von Bayern Erhöhung, &c.’ ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see
  Ludlow, ‘Popular Epics of Middle Ages,’ p. 221.

Footnote 507:

  Sir John Maundevile, ‘Voiage and Travaile.’

Footnote 508:

  Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Vulgar Errours,’ ii. 3.

Footnote 509:

  ‘Mémoires conc. l’Hist., &c., des Chinois,’ vol. iv. p. 457. Compare
  the story of the magnetic (?) horseman in ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol.
  iii. p. 119, with the old Chinese mention of magnetic cars with a
  movable-armed pointing figure, A. v. Humboldt, ‘Asie Centrale,’ vol.
  i. p. xl.; Goguet, vol. iii. p. 284. (The loadstone mountain has its
  power from a turning brazen horseman on the top.)

Footnote 510:

  Brasseur, ‘Popol Vuh,’ pp. 23-31. Compare this Central American myth
  of the ancient senseless mannikins who become monkeys, with a
  Pottowatomi legend in Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 320.

Footnote 511:

  Dos Santos, ‘Ethiopia Oriental,’ Evora, 1609, part i. chap. ix.;
  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 177. See also Burton, ‘Footsteps in
  E. Afr.’ p. 274; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 178 (W. Afr.).

Footnote 512:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102.

Footnote 513:

  Weil, ‘Bibl. Leg. der Muselmänner,’ p. 267; Lane, ‘Thousand and One
  N.’ vol. iii. p. 350; Burton, ‘El Medinah, &c.’ vol. ii. p. 343.

Footnote 514:

  Ovid, ‘Metamm.’ xiv. 89-100; Welcker, ‘Griechische Götterlehre,’ vol.
  iii. p. 108.

Footnote 515:

  Campbell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 132; Latham,
  ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 456; Tod, ‘Annals of Rajasthan,’ vol. i. p.
  114.

Footnote 516:

  Bourien in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 73; see ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’
  vol. ii. p. 271.

Footnote 517:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 435; ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. pp.
  347, 349, 387, Koeppen, vol. ii. p. 44; J. J. Schmidt, ‘Völker
  Mittel-Asiens,’ p. 210.

Footnote 518:

  Froebel, ‘Central America,’ p. 220; see Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. For other traditions of human descent
  from apes, see Farrar, ‘Chapters on Language,’ p. 45.

Footnote 519:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ p. 440; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 178; Cauche, ‘Relation de
  Madagascar,’ p. 127; Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. i. p. 288;
  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 44; Pouchet, ‘Plurality of Human Race,’
  p. 22.

Footnote 520:

  Monboddo, ‘Origin and Progress of Lang.’ 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 277; Du
  Chaillu, ‘Equatorial Africa,’ p. 61; St. John, ‘Forests of Far East,’
  vol. i. p. 17; vol. ii. p. 239.

Footnote 521:

  Max Müller in Bunsen, ‘Phil. Univ. Hist.’ vol. i. p. 340; ‘Journ. As.
  Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xxiv. p. 207. See Marsden in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv. p.
  226; Fitch in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 415; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’
  vol. i. p. 465; vol. ii. p. 201.

Footnote 522:

  Ayeen Akbaree, trans. by Gladwin; ‘Report of Ethnological Committee
  Jubbulpore Exhibition, 1866-7,’ part i. p. 3. See the mention of the
  ban-manush in ‘Kumaon and Nepal,’ Campbell; ‘Ethnology of India,’ in
  ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 46.

Footnote 523:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 41.

Footnote 524:

  Logan in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 246; vol. iii. p. 490;
  Thomson, ibid. vol. i. p. 350; Crawfurd, ibid. vol. iv. p. 186.

Footnote 525:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 123; vol. iii. p. 435.

Footnote 526:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 425, 471.

Footnote 527:

  Its analogue is bosjesbok, ‘bush-goat,’ the African antelope. The
  derivation of the Bosjesman’s name from his nest-like shelter in a
  bush, given by Kolben and others since, is newer and far-fetched.

Footnote 528:

  Martius, vol. i. p. 50.

Footnote 529:

  Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81; Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p.
  xxx.; Bates, ‘Amazons,’ vol. i. p. 73; vol. ii. p. 204.

Footnote 530:

  Castelnau, ‘Exp. dans l’Amér. du Sud,’ vol. iii. p. 118. See Martius,
  vol. i. pp. 248, 414, 563, 633.

Footnote 531:

  Petherick, ‘Egypt, &c.’ p. 367.

Footnote 532:

  Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 685; Martius, vol. i. pp. 425, 633.

Footnote 533:

  Krapf, p. 142; Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 83; St. John, vol.
  i. pp. 51, 405; and others.

Footnote 534:

  Lockhart, ‘Abor. of China,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 181.

Footnote 535:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 358; vol. iv. p. 374; Cameron,
  ‘Malayan India,’ p. 120; Marsden, p. 7; Antonio Galvano, pp. 120, 218.

Footnote 536:

  Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230; Bostock and Riley’s Pliny (Bohn’s ed.),
  vol. ii. p. 134, note.

Footnote 537:

  Francisque-Michel, ‘Races Maudites,’ vol. i. p. 17; ‘Argot,’ p. 349;
  Fernan Caballero, ‘La Gaviota,’ vol. i. p. 59.

Footnote 538:

  Horne Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ vol. i. p. 397.

Footnote 539:

  Baring-Gould, ‘Myths,’ p. 137.

Footnote 540:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 252; Backhouse, ‘Austr.’ p. 557; Purchas,
  vol. iv. p. 1290; De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ p. 543.

Footnote 541:

  For various other stories of tailed men, see ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p.
  149; ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 454; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol.
  iii. p. 261, &c. (Nicobar Islands); Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. ii. pp. 246,
  316 (Sarytschew Is.); ‘Letters of Columbus,’ Hakluyt Soc. p. 11
  (Cuba), &c., &c.

Footnote 542:

  Details of monstrous tribes have been in past centuries specially
  collected in the following works: ‘Anthropometamorphosis: Man
  Transformed, or the Artificiall Changeling, &c.,’ scripsit J. B.
  cognomento Chirosophus, M.D., London, 1653; Calovius, ‘De
  Thaumatanthropologia, vera pariter atque ficta tractatus
  historico-physicus,’ Rostock, 1685; J. A. Fabricius, ‘Dissertatio de
  hominibus orbis nostri incolis, &c.,’ Hamburg, 1721. Only a few
  principal references are here given.

Footnote 543:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xvii. xviii.; Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of
  Scandinavia,’ ch. vi.; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 230, 325-7; Wuttke,
  ‘Volksabergl.’ p. 231.

Footnote 544:

  ‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr. Dubeux, part i. ch. viii. See Koran, xviii.
  92.

Footnote 545:

  Pigafetta in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 314. See Blumenbach, ‘De Generis
  Humanæ Varietate;’ Fitzroy, ‘Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,’ vol. i.;
  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 488.

Footnote 546:

  Knivet in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1231; compare Humboldt and Bonpland,
  vol. v. p. 564, with Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ p. 424; see also Krapf,
  ‘East Africa,’ p. 51; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 319.

Footnote 547:

  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. xi.; Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 1st series, pp.
  18, 304.

Footnote 548:

  Squier, ‘Abor. Monuments of N. Y.’ p. 68; Long’s ‘Exp.’ vol. i. pp.
  62, 275; Hersart de Villemarqué, ‘Chants Populaires de la Bretagne,’
  p. liv., 35; Meadows Taylor in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 157.

Footnote 549:

  Gul. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 69; Lane, ‘Thousand and
  One N.’ vol. iii. pp. 81, 91, see 24, 52, 97; Hole, p. 63; Marco Polo,
  book iii. ch. xii.

Footnote 550:

  Benjamin of Tudela, ‘Itinerary,’ ed. and tr. by Asher, 83; Plin. vii.
  2. See Max Müller in Bunsen ‘Philos. Univ. Hist.,’ vol. i. pp. 346,
  358.

Footnote 551:

  Plin. iv. 27; Mela, iii. 6; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 120;
  vol. ii. p. 93; St. John, vol. ii. p. 117; Marsden, p. 53; Lane,
  ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. iii. pp. 92, 305; Petherick, ‘Egypt, &c.’
  p. 367; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. i. p. 235; Pedro Simon, ‘Indias
  Occidentales,’ p. 7.

Footnote 552:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol i. p. 133.

Footnote 553:

  Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xviii.

Footnote 554:

  Ælian, iv. 46; Plin. vi. 35; vii. 2. See for other versions, Purchas,
  vol. iv. p. 1191; vol. v. p. 901; Cranz, p. 267; Lane, ‘Thousand and
  One Nights,’ vol. iii. pp. 36, 94, 97, 305; Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230;
  Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 83.

Footnote 555:

  Plin. v. 8; vi. 24, 35; vii. 2; Mela, iii. 9; Herberstein in Hakluyt,
  vol. i. p. 593; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 483; Davis, l.c.; see
  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 77.

Footnote 556:

  Plin. v. 8; Lane, vol. i. p. 33; vol. ii. p. 377; vol. iii. p. 81;
  Eisenmenger, vol. ii. p. 559; Mandeville, p. 243; Raleigh in Hakluyt,
  vol. iii. pp. 652, 665; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 176;
  Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1285; vol. v. p. 901; Isidor. Hispal. s.v.
  ‘Acephali;’ Vambéry, p. 310, see p. 436.

Footnote 557:

  Lane, vol. i. p. 33; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 199, 202.
  Virg. Æn. viii. 194; a similar metaphor is the name of the Nimchas,
  from Persian nim—half, ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 192, cf. French
  demi-monde. Compare the ‘one-legged’ tribes, Plin. vii. 2;
  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 521; Charlevoix, vol. i. p.
  25. The Australians use the metaphor ‘of one leg’ (matta gyn) to
  describe tribes as of one stock, G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab.’ pp. 5, 71.

Footnote 558:

  Hayton in Purchas, vol. iii. p. 108; see Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. vi. p.
  129; Vambéry, p. 49; Homer. Odyss. ix.; Strabo, i. 2, 12; see
  Scherzer, ‘Voy. of Novara,’ vol. ii. p. 40; C. J. Andersson, ‘Lake
  Ngami, &c.,’ p. 453; Du Chaillu, ‘Equatorial Africa,’ p. 440; Sir J.
  Richardson, ‘Polar Regions,’ p. 300. For tribes with more than two
  eyes, see Pliny’s metaphorically explained Nisacæthæ and Nisyti, Plin.
  vi. 35; also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 414; ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol.
  i. pp. 25, 76; Petherick, l.c.; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr.’ p. xx.; Schirren,
  p. 196.

Footnote 559:

  Kölle, ‘Vei Gr.’ p. 229; Strabo, i. 2, 35. The artificially elongated
  skulls of real Μακροκέφαλοι (Hippokrates, ‘De Aeris,’ 14.) are found
  in the burial-places of Kertch.

Footnote 560:

  Plin., vii. 2.; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81.

Footnote 561:

  Krapf, p. 359.

Footnote 562:

  Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 390.

Footnote 563:

  D. Wilson, ‘Archæology, &c. of Scotland,’ p. 123.

Footnote 564:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 128; Livingstone, p. 532.

Footnote 565:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ p. 160; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 113; Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ p. 182 (a similar legend told by the Samoans). Another
  tattooing legend in Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 152; Bastian,
  ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 112.

Footnote 566:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. pp. 167-8; Wilkinson in Rawlinson’s
  ‘Herodotus,’ vol. ii. p. 79; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 972-6; W. G. Palgrave,
  ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 251; Squier and Davis, ‘Monuments of Mississippi
  Valley,’ p. 134; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 258.

Footnote 567:

  Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 43; Lejean in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’
  15 Feb. 1862, p. 856; Apollodor. iii. 8. Compare the derivation of
  Arequipa by the Peruvians from the words ari! quepay== ‘yes!
  remain,’ said to have been addressed to the colonists by the Inca:
  Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.;’ also the supposed etymology of
  Dahome, Danh-ho-men== ‘on the belly of Danh,’ from the story of
  King Dako building his palace on the body of the conquered King Danh:
  Burton, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 401.

Footnote 568:

  Charnock, ‘Verba Nominalia,’ s.v. ‘chic;’ see Francisque-Michel,
  ‘Argot,’ s.v.

Footnote 569:

  ‘Spectator,’ No. 147; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 93; Hotten,
  ‘Slang Dictionary,’ p. 3; Charnock, s.v. ‘cant.’ As to the real
  etymology, that from the beggar’s whining chaunt is defective, for
  the beggar drops this tone exactly when he cants, i.e., talks jargon
  with his fellows. If cant is directly from Latin cantare, it will
  correspond with Italian cantare and French chanter, both used as
  slang words for to speak (Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot’). A Keltic origin
  is more probable, Gaelic and Irish cainnt, caint == talk,
  language, dialect (see Wedgwood ‘Etymological Dictionary’). The Gaelic
  equivalents for pedlars’ French or tramps’ slang, are ‘Laidionn nan
  ceard,’ ‘cainnt cheard,’ i.e., tinkers’ Latin or jargon, or exactly
  ‘cairds’ cant.’ A deeper connexion between cainnt and cantare
  does not affect this.

Footnote 570:

  See also Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ s.v. ‘maccabe, macchabée’==noyé.

Footnote 571:

  Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ pp. 69, 184.

Footnote 572:

  Döhne, ‘Zulu Dic.’ p. 417; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 269; Waitz, vol.
  ii. pp. 349, 352.

Footnote 573:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 224.

Footnote 574:

  On the adoption of imaginary ancestors as connected with the fiction
  of a common descent, and the important political and religious effects
  of these proceedings, see especially Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol.
  i.; McLennan, ‘Primitive Marriage;’ Maine, ‘Ancient Law.’ Interesting
  details on eponymic ancestors in Pott, ‘Anti-Kaulen, oder Mythische
  Vorstellungen vom Ursprnge der Völker and Sprachen.’

Footnote 575:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 54; see p. 283.

Footnote 576:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 78.

Footnote 577:

  Vambéry, ‘Central Asia,’ p. 325; see also Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol.
  i. p. 456 (Ostyaks); Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. 242
  (Tunguz).

Footnote 578:

  Barth, ‘N. & Centr. Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 71.

Footnote 579:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 574.

Footnote 580:

  Martius, vol. i. pp. 180-4; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 416.

Footnote 581:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 319, part iii. p. 268, see
  part ii. p. 49; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 128; J. G. Müller, pp. 134, 327.

Footnote 582:

  Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece;’ Pausan. iii. 20; Diod. Sic. v.; Apollodor.
  Bibl. i. 7, 3, vi. 1, 4; Herodot. i. 171.

Footnote 583:

  Max Müller in Bunsen, vol. i. p. 338; Tabari, part i. ch. xlv., lxix.

Footnote 584:

  Sir W. Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 24; Vansittart, ibid. p. 67;
  see Campbell, in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 7.

Footnote 585:

  Will, de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 23; Gabelentz in
  ‘Zeitschr. für die Kunde des Morgenlandes,’ vol. ii. p. 73; Schmidt,
  ‘Völker Mittel-Asien,’ p. 6.

Footnote 586:

  See also Pott, ‘Anti-Kaulen,’ pp. 19, 23; ‘Rassen,’ pp. 70, 153; and
  remarks on colonization-myths in Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 68.

Footnote 587:

   Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 311; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 252.

Footnote 588:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 69.

Footnote 589:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 122; ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p.
  320, part ii. p. 230.

Footnote 590:

  J. R. Wise, ‘The New Forest,’ p. 160; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 268;
  Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 249; M. A. Walker, ‘Macedonia,’ p.
  192; Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 665; Lucian. de Deâ Syriâ, 8;
  Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 2nd Series, p. 15; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp.
  16, 94; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 59, vol. iii. p. 185; Buchanan,
  ‘Mysore, &c.’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 714.

Footnote 591:

  Sprenger, ‘Leben des Mohammad,’ vol. i. pp. 78, 119, 162, 310.

Footnote 592:

  Marco Polo, book i. ch. viii.

Footnote 593:

  Grote, vol. i. p. 347.

Footnote 594:

  Welcker, vol. i. p. 756.

Footnote 595:

  Xenoph. Memorabilia, ii. 1.

Footnote 596:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 259.

Footnote 597:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 255.

Footnote 598:

  Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 306.

Footnote 599:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 382.

Footnote 600:

  Bleek, ‘Reynard in S. Afr.’ pp. 5, 47, 67 (these are not among the
  stories which seem recently borrowed from Europeans). See ‘Early
  History of Mankind,’ p. 10.

Footnote 601:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 355.

Footnote 602:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 160; see pp. 43, 51.

Footnote 603:

  Jakob Grimm, ‘Reinhart Fuchs,’ Introd.

Footnote 604:

  Account of Laura Bridgman, p. 120.

Footnote 605:

  Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 313; Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ p. 98.
  See the fable of the ‘Crow and Pitcher,’ in Plin. x. 60, and Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. i. p. 76.

Footnote 606:

  Jameson, ‘History of Our Lord in Art,’ vol. i. p. 375.

ANIMISM.

    Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative
    statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many
    cases uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual
    Beings, here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural
    Religion—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls,
    and of other Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and
    definition among the lower races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or
    Ghost-Soul—It is a theoretical conception of primitive Philosophy,
    designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology,
    especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams,
    Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in name and nature to Shadow,
    Blood, Breath—Division of Plurality of Souls—Soul cause of Life; its
    restoration to body when supposed absent—Exit of Soul in
    Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of dreamer’s or seer’s
    own soul; theory of visits received by them from other
    souls—Ghost-Soul seen in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has
    form of body; suffers mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated
    and defined as of Material Substance; this appears to be the
    original doctrine—Transmission of Souls to service in future life by
    Funeral Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—Souls of Animals—Their
    transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of Plants—Souls of
    Objects—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Relation of doctrine
    of Object-Souls to Epicurean theory of Ideas—Historical development
    of Doctrine of Souls, from the Ethereal Soul of primitive Biology to
    the Immaterial Soul of modern Theology.

Are there, or have there been, tribes of men so low in culture as to
have no religious conceptions whatever? This is practically the question
of the universality of religion, which for so many centuries has been
affirmed and denied, with a confidence in striking contrast to the
imperfect evidence on which both affirmation and denial have been based.
Ethnographers, if looking to a theory of development to explain
civilization, and regarding its successive stages as arising one from
another, would receive with peculiar interest accounts of tribes devoid
of all religion. Here, they would naturally say, are men who have no
religion because their forefathers had none, men who represent a
præ-religious condition of the human race, out of which in the course of
time religious conditions have arisen. It does not, however, seem
advisable to start from this ground in an investigation of religious
development. Though the theoretical niche is ready and convenient, the
actual statue to fill it is not forthcoming. The case is in some degree
similar to that of the tribes asserted to exist without language or
without the use of fire; nothing in the nature of things seems to forbid
the possibility of such existence, but as a matter of fact the tribes
are not found. Thus the assertion that rude non-religious tribes have
been known in actual existence, though in theory possible, and perhaps
in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient proof which,
for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to demand.

It is not unusual for the very writer who declares in general terms the
absence of religious phenomena among some savage people, himself to give
evidence that shows his expressions to be misleading. Thus Dr. Lang not
only declares that the aborigines of Australia have no idea of a supreme
divinity, creator, and judge, no object of worship, no idol, temple, or
sacrifice, but that ‘in short, they have nothing whatever of the
character of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish them
from the beasts that perish.’ More than one writer has since made use of
this telling statement, but without referring to certain details which
occur in the very same book. From these it appears that a disease like
small-pox, which sometimes attacks the natives, is ascribed by them ‘to
the influence of Budyah, an evil spirit who delights in mischief;’ that
when the natives rob a wild bees’ hive, they generally leave a little of
the honey for Buddai; that at certain biennial gatherings of the
Queensland tribes, young girls are slain in sacrifice to propitiate some
evil divinity; and that, lastly, according to the evidence of the Rev.
W. Ridley, ‘whenever he has conversed with the aborigines, he found them
to have definite traditions concerning supernatural beings—Baiame, whose
voice they hear in thunder, and who made all things, Turramullum the
chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief, and wisdom, and
appears in the form of a serpent at their great assemblies, &c.’[607] By
the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers, it is known that the
natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have since remained, a
race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons,
and deities. In Africa, Mr. Moffat’s declaration as to the Bechuanas is
scarcely less surprising—that ‘man’s immortality was never heard of
among that people,’ he having remarked in the sentence next before, that
the word for the shades or manes of the dead is ‘liriti.’[608] In South
America, again, Don Felix de Azara comments on the positive falsity of
the ecclesiastics’ assertion that the native tribes have a religion. He
simply declares that they have none; nevertheless in the course of his
work he mentions such facts as that the Payaguas bury arms and clothing
with their dead and have some notions of a future life, and that the
Guanas believe in a Being who rewards good and punishes evil. In fact,
this author’s reckless denial of religion and law to the lower races of
this region justifies D’Orbigny’s sharp criticism, that, ‘this is indeed
what he says of all the nations he describes, while actually proving the
contrary of his thesis by the very facts he alleges in its
support.’[609]

Such cases show how deceptive are judgments to which breadth and
generality are given by the use of wide words in narrow senses. Lang,
Moffat, and Azara are authors to whom ethnography owes much valuable
knowledge of the tribes they visited, but they seem hardly to have
recognized anything short of the organized and established theology of
the higher races as being religion at all. They attribute irreligion to
tribes whose doctrines are unlike theirs, in much the same manner as
theologians have so often attributed atheism to those whose deities
differed from their own, from the time when the ancient invading Aryans
described the aboriginal tribes of India as adeva, i.e. ‘godless,’ and
the Greeks fixed the corresponding term ἄθεοι on the early Christians as
unbelievers in the classic gods, to the comparatively modern ages when
disbelievers in witchcraft and apostolical succession were denounced as
atheists; and down to our own day, when controversialists are apt to
infer, as in past centuries, that naturalists who support a theory of
development of species therefore necessarily hold atheistic
opinions.[610] These are in fact but examples of a general perversion of
judgment in theological matters, among the results of which is a popular
misconception of the religions of the lower races, simply amazing to
students who have reached a higher point of view. Some missionaries, no
doubt, thoroughly understand the minds of the savages they have to deal
with, and indeed it is from men like Cranz, Dobrizhoffer, Charlevoix,
Ellis, Hardy, Callaway, J. L. Wilson, T. Williams, that we have obtained
our best knowledge of the lower phases of religious belief. But for the
most part the ‘religious world’ is so occupied in hating and despising
the beliefs of the heathen whose vast regions of the globe are painted
black on the missionary maps, that they have little time or capacity
left to understand them. It cannot be so with those who fairly seek to
comprehend the nature and meaning of the lower phases of religion.
These, while fully alive to the absurdities believed and the horrors
perpetrated in its name, will yet regard with kindly interest all record
of men’s earnest seeking after truth with such light as they could find.
Such students will look for meaning, however crude and childish, at the
root of doctrines often most dark to the believers who accept them most
zealously; they will search for the reasonable thought which once gave
life to observances now become in seeming or reality the most abject and
superstitious folly. The reward of these enquirers will be a more
rational comprehension of the faiths in whose midst they dwell, for no
more can he who understands but one religion understand even that
religion, than the man who knows but one language can understand that
language. No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation from the rest,
and the thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to
intellectual clues which run back through far præ-Christian ages to the
very origin of human civilization, perhaps even of human existence.

While observers who have had fair opportunities of studying the religion
of savages have thus sometimes done scant justice to the facts before
their eyes, the hasty denials of others who have judged without even
facts can carry no great weight. A 16th-century traveller gave an
account of the natives of Florida which is typical of such: ‘Touching
the religion of this people, which wee have found, for want of their
language wee could not understand neither by signs nor gesture that they
had any religion or lawe at all.... We suppose that they have no
religion at all, and that they live at their own libertie.’[611] Better
knowledge of these Floridans nevertheless showed that they had a
religion, and better knowledge has reversed many another hasty assertion
to the same effect; as when writers used to declare that the natives of
Madagascar had no idea of a future state, and no word for soul or
spirit;[612] or when Dampier enquired after the religion of the natives
of Timor, and was told that they had none;[613] or when Sir Thomas Roe
landed in Saldanha Bay on his way to the court of the Great Mogul, and
remarked of the Hottentots that ‘they have left off their custom of
stealing, but know no God or religion.’[614] Among the numerous accounts
collected by Lord Avebury as evidence bearing on the absence or low
development of religion among low races,[615] some may be selected as
lying open to criticism from this point of view. Thus the statement that
the Samoan Islanders had no religion cannot stand, in face of the
elaborate description by the Rev. G. Turner of the Samoan religion
itself; and the assertion that the Tupinambas of Brazil had no religion
is one not to be received on merely negative evidence, for the religious
doctrines and practices of the Tupi race have been recorded by Lery, De
Laet, and other writers. Even with much time and care and knowledge of
language, it is not always easy to elicit from savages the details of
their theology. They try to hide from the prying and contemptuous
foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their
worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity. Mr. Sproat’s
experience in Vancouver’s Island is an apt example of this state of
things. He says: ‘I was two years among the Ahts, with my mind
constantly directed towards the subject of their religious beliefs,
before I could discover that they possessed any ideas as to an
overruling power or a future state of existence. The traders on the
coast, and other persons well acquainted with the people, told me that
they had no such ideas, and this opinion was confirmed by conversation
with many of the less intelligent savages; but at last I succeeded in
getting a satisfactory clue.’[616] It then appeared that the Ahts had
all the time been hiding a whole characteristic system of religious
doctrines as to souls and their migrations, the spirits who do good and
ill to men, and the great gods above all. Thus, even where no positive
proof of religious ideas among any particular tribe has reached us, we
should distrust its denial by observers whose acquaintance with the
tribe in question has not been intimate as well as kindly. It is said of
the Andaman Islanders that they have not the rudest elements of a
religious faith; yet it appears that the natives did not even display to
the foreigners the rude music which they actually possessed, so that
they could scarcely have been expected to be communicative as to their
theology, if they had any.[617] In our time the most striking negation
of the religion of savage tribes is that published by Sir Samuel Baker,
in a paper read in 1866 before the Ethnological Society of London, as
follows: ‘The most northern tribes of the White Nile are the Dinkas,
Shillooks, Nuehr, Kytch, Bohr, Aliab, and Shir. A general description
will suffice for the whole, excepting the Kytch. Without any exception,
they are without a belief in a Supreme Being, neither have they any form
of worship or idolatry; nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened
by even a ray of superstition.’ Had this distinguished explorer spoken
only of the Latukas, or of other tribes hardly known to ethnographers
except through his own intercourse with them, his denial of any
religious consciousness to them would have been at least entitled to
stand as the best procurable account, until more intimate communication
should prove or disprove it. But in speaking thus of comparatively well
known tribes such as the Dinkas, Shilluks and Nuehr, Sir S. Baker
ignores the existence of published evidence, such as describes the
sacrifices of the Dinkas, their belief in good and evil spirits (adjok
and djyok), their good deity and heaven-dwelling creator, Dendid, as
likewise Néar the Deity of the Nuehr, and the Shilluk’s creator, who is
described as visiting, like other spirits, a sacred wood or tree.
Kaufmann, Brun-Rollet, Lejean, and other observers, had thus placed on
record details of the religion of these White Nile tribes, years before
Sir S. Baker’s rash denial that they had any religion at all.[618]

The first requisite in a systematic study of the religions of the lower
races, is to lay down a rudimentary definition of religion. By requiring
in this definition the belief in a supreme deity or of judgment after
death, the adoration of idols or the practice of sacrifice, or other
partially-diffused doctrines or rites, no doubt many tribes may be
excluded from the category of religious. But such narrow definition has
the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments
than with the deeper motive which underlies them. It seems best to fall
back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum
definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings. If this standard
be applied to the descriptions of low races as to religion, the
following results will appear. It cannot be positively asserted that
every existing tribe recognizes the belief in spiritual beings, for the
native condition of a considerable number is obscure in this respect,
and from the rapid change or extinction they are undergoing, may ever
remain so. It would be yet more unwarranted to set down every tribe
mentioned in history, or known to us by the discovery of antiquarian
relics, as necessarily having passed the defined minimum of religion.
Greater still would be the unwisdom of declaring such a rudimentary
belief natural or instinctive in all human tribes of all times; for no
evidence justifies the opinion that man, known to be capable of so vast
an intellectual development, cannot have emerged from a non-religious
condition, previous to that religious condition in which he happens at
present to come with sufficient clearness within our range of knowledge.
It is desirable, however, to take our basis of enquiry in observation
rather than from speculation. Here, so far as I can judge from the
immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the belief in
spiritual beings appears among all low races with whom we have attained
to thoroughly intimate acquaintance; whereas the assertion of absence of
such belief must apply either to ancient tribes, or to more or less
imperfectly described modern ones. The exact bearing of this state of
things on the problem of the origin of religion may be thus briefly
stated. Were it distinctly proved that non-religious savages exist or
have existed, these might be at least plausibly claimed as
representatives of the condition of Man before he arrived at the
religious state of culture. It is not desirable, however, that this
argument should be put forward, for the asserted existence of the
non-religious tribes in question rests, as we have seen, on evidence
often mistaken and never conclusive. The argument for the natural
evolution of religious ideas among mankind is not invalidated by the
rejection of an ally too weak at present to give effectual help.
Non-religious tribes may not exist in our day, but the fact bears no
more decisively on the development of religion, than the impossibility
of finding a modern English village without scissors or books or
lucifer-matches bears on the fact that there was a time when no such
things existed in the land.

I propose here, under the name of Animism, to investigate the deep-lying
doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of
Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy. Animism is not a
new technical term, though now seldom used.[619] From its special
relation to the doctrine of the soul, it will be seen to have a peculiar
appropriateness to the view here taken of the mode in which theological
ideas have been developed among mankind. The word Spiritualism, though
it may be, and sometimes is, used in a general sense, has this obvious
defect to us, that it has become the designation of a particular modern
sect, who indeed hold extreme spiritualistic views, but cannot be taken
as typical representatives of these views in the world at large. The
sense of Spiritualism in its wider acceptation, the general belief in
spiritual beings, is here given to Animism.

Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and
thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to
last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern
culture. Doctrines adverse to it, so largely held by individuals or
schools, are usually due not to early lowness of civilization, but to
later changes in the intellectual course, to divergence from, or
rejection of, ancestral faiths; and such newer developments do not
affect the present enquiry as to the fundamental religious condition of
mankind. Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of
Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men. And although
it may at first sight seem to afford but a bare and meagre definition of
a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient; for
where the root is, the branches will generally be produced. It is
habitually found that the theory of Animism divides into two great
dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning
souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the
death or destruction of the body; second, concerning other spirits,
upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held to
affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here
and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with
men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief
in their existence leads naturally, and it might almost be said
inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation. Thus
Animism in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a
future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, these
doctrines practically resulting in some kind of active worship. One
great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher
nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the
religion of the lower races. It is not that these races have no moral
sense or no moral standard, for both are strongly marked among them, if
not in formal precept, at least in that traditional consensus of society
which we call public opinion, according to which certain actions are
held to be good or bad, right or wrong. It is that the conjunction of
ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher
culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower. I propose here
hardly to touch upon the purely moral aspects of religion, but rather to
study the animism of the world so far as it constitutes, as
unquestionably it does constitute, an ancient and world-wide philosophy,
of which belief is the theory and worship is the practice. Endeavouring
to shape the materials for an enquiry hitherto strangely undervalued and
neglected, it will now be my task to bring as clearly as may be into
view the fundamental animism of the lower races, and in some slight and
broken outline to trace its course into higher regions of civilization.
Here let me state once for all two principal conditions under which the
present research is carried on. First, as to the religious doctrines and
practices examined, these are treated as belonging to theological
systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation;
in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion. Second, as to
the connexion between similar ideas and rites in the religions of the
savage and the civilized world. While dwelling at some length on
doctrines and ceremonies of the lower races, and sometimes
particularizing for special reasons the related doctrines and ceremonies
of the higher nations, it has not seemed my proper task to work out in
detail the problems thus suggested among the philosophies and creeds of
Christendom. Such applications, extending farthest from the direct scope
of a work on primitive culture, are briefly stated in general terms, or
touched in slight allusion, or taken for granted without remark.
Educated readers possess the information required to work out their
general bearing on theology, while more technical discussion is left to
philosophers and theologians specially occupied with such arguments.

The first branch of the subject to be considered is the doctrine of
human and other Souls, an examination of which will occupy the rest of
the present chapter. What the doctrine of the soul is among the lower
races, may be explained in stating the animistic theory of its
development. It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of
culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In
the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living
body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death?
In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams
and visions? Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient
savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious
inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life
and a phantom. These two are evidently in close connexion with the body,
the life as enabling it to feel and think and act, the phantom as being
its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be things
separable from the body, the life as able to go away and leave it
insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing to people at a distance
from it. The second step would seem also easy for savages to make,
seeing how extremely difficult civilized men have found it to unmake. It
is merely to combine the life and the phantom. As both belong to the
body, why should they not also belong to one another, and be
manifestations of one and the same soul? Let them then be considered as
united, and the result is that well-known conception which may be
described as an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul. This, at any rate,
corresponds with the actual conception of the personal soul or spirit
among the lower races, which may be defined as follows: It is a thin
unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or
shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates;
independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its
corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far
behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and
invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing
to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it
bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the
death of that body; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies
of other men, of animals, and even of things. Though this definition is
by no means of universal application, it has sufficient generality to be
taken as a standard, modified by more or less divergence among any
particular people. Far from these world-wide opinions being arbitrary or
conventional products, it is seldom even justifiable to consider their
uniformity among distant races as proving communication of any sort.
They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain
evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and
rational primitive philosophy. So well, indeed, does primitive animism
account for the facts of nature, that it has held its place into the
higher levels of education. Though classic and mediæval philosophy
modified it much, and modern philosophy has handled it yet more
unsparingly, it has so far retained the traces of its original
character, that heirlooms of primitive ages may be claimed in the
existing psychology of the civilized world. Out of the vast mass of
evidence, collected among the most various and distant races of mankind,
typical details may now be selected to display the earlier theory of the
soul, the relation of the parts of this theory, and the manner in which
these parts have been abandoned, modified, or kept up, along the course
of culture.

To understand the popular conceptions of the human soul or spirit, it is
instructive to notice the words which have been found suitable to
express it. The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary
is an unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflexion, and thus the
familiar term of the shade comes in to express the soul. Thus the
Tasmanian word for the shadow is also that for the spirit;[620] the
Algonquins describe a man’s soul as otahchuk, ‘his shadow;’[621] the
Quiché language uses natub for ‘shadow, soul;’[622] the Arawak ueja
means ‘shadow, soul, image;’[623] the Abipones made the one word
loákal serve for ‘shadow, soul, echo, image.’[624] The Zulus not only
use the word tunzi for ‘shadow, spirit, ghost,’ but they consider that
at death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to
become an ancestral spirit.[625] The Basutos not only call the spirit
remaining after death the seriti or ‘shadow,’ but they think that if a
man walks on the river bank, a crocodile may seize his shadow in the
water and draw him in;[626] while in Old Calabar there is found the same
identification of the spirit with the ukpon or ‘shadow,’ for a man to
lose which is fatal.[627] There are thus found among the lower races not
only the types of those familiar classic terms, the skia and umbra,
but also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless
men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern
readers in Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl. Thus the dead in
Purgatory knew that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs,
his figure cast a shadow on the ground.[628] Other attributes are taken
into the notion of soul or spirit, with especial regard to its being the
cause of life. Thus the Caribs, connecting the pulses with spiritual
beings, and especially considering that in the heart dwells man’s chief
soul, destined to a future heavenly life, could reasonably use the one
word iouanni for ‘soul, life, heart.’[629] The Tongans supposed the
soul to exist throughout the whole extension of the body, but
particularly in the heart. On one occasion, the natives were declaring
to a European that a man buried months ago was nevertheless still alive.
‘And one, endeavouring to make me understand what he meant, took hold of
my hand, and squeezing it, said, “This will die, but the life that is
within you will never die;” with his other hand pointing to my
heart.’[630] So the Basutos say of a dead man that his heart is gone
out, and of one recovering from sickness that his heart is coming
back.[631] This corresponds to the familiar Old World view of the heart
as the prime mover in life, thought, and passion. The connexion of soul
and blood, familiar to the Karens and Papuas, appears prominently in
Jewish and Arabic philosophy.[632] To educated moderns the idea of the
Macusi Indians of Guiana may seem quaint, that although the body will
decay, ‘the man in our eyes’ will not die, but wander about.[633] Yet
the association of personal animation with the pupil of the eye is
familiar to European folklore, which not unreasonably discerned a sign
of bewitchment or approaching death in the disappearance of the image,
pupil, or baby, from the dim eyeballs of the sick man.[634]

The act of breathing, so characteristic of the higher animals during
life, and coinciding so closely with life in its departure, has been
repeatedly and naturally identified with the life or soul itself. Laura
Bridgman showed in her instructive way the analogy between the effects
of restricted sense and restricted civilization, when one day she made
the gesture of taking something away from her mouth: ‘I dreamed,’ she
explained in words, ‘that God took away my breath to heaven.’[635] It is
thus that West Australians used one word waug for ‘breath, spirit,
soul;[636] that in the Netela language of California, piuts means
‘life, breath, soul;[637] that certain Greenlanders reckoned two souls
to man, namely his shadow and his breath;[638] that the Malays say the
soul of the dying man escapes through his nostrils, and in Java use the
same word ñawa for ‘breath, life, soul.’[639] How the notions of life,
heart, breath, and phantom unite in the one conception of a soul or
spirit, and at the same time how loose and vague such ideas are among
barbaric races, is well brought into view in the answers to a religious
inquest held in 1528 among the natives of Nicaragua. ‘When they die,
there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person, and is
called julio [Aztec yuli==to live]. This being goes to the place
where the man and woman are. It is like a person, but does not die, and
the body remains here.’ Question. ‘Do those who go up on high keep the
same body, the same face, and the same limbs, as here below?’ Answer.
‘No; there is only the heart.’ Question. ‘But since they tear out
their hearts [i.e. when a captive was sacrificed], what happens then?’
Answer. ‘It is not precisely the heart, but that in them which makes
them live, and that quits the body when they die.’ Or, as stated in
another interrogatory, ‘It is not their heart that goes up above, but
what makes them live, that is to say, the breath that issues from their
mouth and is called julio.’[640] The conception of the soul as breath
may be followed up through Semitic and Aryan etymology, and thus into
the main streams of the philosophy of the world. Hebrew shows nephesh,
‘breath,’ passing into all the meanings of ‘life, soul, mind, animal,’
while ruach and neshamah make the like transition from ‘breath’ to
‘spirit’; and to these the Arabic nefs and ruh correspond. The same
is the history of Sanskrit âtman and prâna, of Greek psychē and
pneuma, of Latin animus, anima, spiritus. So Slavonic duch has
developed the meaning of ‘breath’ into that of soul or spirit; and the
dialects of the Gypsies have this word dūk with the meanings of
‘breath, spirit, ghost,’ whether these pariahs brought the word from
India as part of their inheritance of Aryan speech, or whether they
adopted it in their migration across Slavonic lands.[641] German geist
and English ghost, too, may possibly have the same original sense of
breath. And if any should think such expressions due to mere metaphor,
they may judge the strength of the implied connexion between breath and
spirit by cases of most unequivocal significance. Among the Seminoles of
Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her
face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and
knowledge for its future use. These Indians could have well understood
why at the death-bed of an ancient Roman, the nearest kinsman leant over
to inhale the last breath of the departing (et excipies hanc animam ore
pio). Their state of mind is kept up to this day among Tyrolese
peasants, who can still fancy a good man’s soul to issue from his mouth
at death like a little white cloud.[642]

It will be shown that men, in their composite and confused notions of
the soul, have brought into connexion a list of manifestations of life
and thought even more multifarious than this. But also, seeking to avoid
such perplexity of combination, they have sometimes endeavoured to
define and classify more closely, especially by the theory that man has
a combination of several kinds of spirit, soul, or image, to which
different functions belong. Already in the barbaric world such
classification has been invented or adopted. Thus the Fijians
distinguished between a man’s ‘dark spirit’ or shadow, which goes to
Hades, and his ‘light spirit’ or reflexion in water or a mirror, which
stays near where he dies.[643] The Malagasy say that the saina or mind
vanishes at death, the aina or life becomes mere air, but the
matoatoa or ghost hovers round the tomb.[644] In North America, the
duality of the soul is a strongly marked Algonquin belief; one soul goes
out and sees dreams while the other remains behind; at death one of the
two abides with the body, and for this the survivors leave offerings of
food, while the other departs to the land of the dead. A division into
three souls is also known, and the Dakotas say that man has four souls,
one remaining with the corpse, one staying in the village, one going in
the air, and one to the land of spirits.[645] The Karens distinguish
between the ‘là’ or ‘kelah,’ the personal life-phantom, and the ‘thah,’
the responsible moral soul.[646] More or less under Hindu influence, the
Khonds have a fourfold division, as follows: the first soul is that
capable of beatification or restoration to Boora the Good Deity; the
second is attached to a Khond tribe on earth and is re-born generation
after generation, so that at the birth of each child the priest asks who
has returned; the third goes out to hold spiritual intercourse, leaving
the body in a languid state, and it is this soul which can pass for a
time into a tiger, and transmigrates for punishment after death; the
fourth dies on the dissolution of the body.[647] Such classifications
resemble those of higher nations, as for instance the three-fold
division of shade, manes, and spirit:

            ‘Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:
              Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt.
            Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,
              Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.’

Not attempting to follow up the details of such psychical division into
the elaborate systems of literary nations, I shall not discuss the
distinction which the ancient Egyptians seem to have made in the Ritual
of the Dead between the man’s ba, akh, ka, khaba, translated by
Dr. Birch as his ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘image,’ ‘shade,’ or the Rabbinical
division into what may be roughly described as the bodily, spiritual,
and celestial souls, or the distinction between the emanative and
genetic souls in Hindu philosophy, or the distribution of life,
apparition, ancestral spirit, among the three souls of the Chinese, or
the demarcations of the nous, psychē, and pneuma, or of the
anima and animus, or the famous classic and mediæval theories of the
vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls. Suffice it to point out here
that such speculation dates back to the barbaric condition of our race,
in a state fairly comparing as to scientific value with much that has
gained esteem within the precincts of higher culture. It would be a
difficult task to treat such classification on a consistent logical
basis. Terms corresponding with those of life, mind, soul, spirit,
ghost, and so forth, are not thought of as describing really separate
entities, so much as the several forms and functions of one individual
being. Thus the confusion which here prevails in our own thought and
language, in a manner typical of the thought and language of mankind in
general, is in fact due not merely to vagueness of terms, but to an
ancient theory of substantial unity which underlies them. Such ambiguity
of language, however, will be found to interfere little with the present
enquiry, for the details given of the nature and action of spirits,
souls, phantoms, will themselves define the exact sense such words are
to be taken in.

The early animistic theory of vitality, regarding the functions of life
as caused by the soul, offers to the savage mind an explanation of
several bodily and mental conditions, as being effects of a departure of
the soul or some of its constituent spirits. This theory holds a wide
and strong position in savage biology. The South Australians express it
when they say of one insensible or unconscious, that he is
‘wilyamarraba,’ i.e., ‘without soul.’[648] Among the Algonquin Indians
of North America, we hear of sickness being accounted for by the
patient’s ‘shadow’ being unsettled or detached from his body, and of the
convalescent being reproached for exposing himself before his shadow was
safely settled down in him; where we should say that a man was ill and
recovered, they would consider that he died, but came again. Another
account from among the same race explains the condition of men lying in
lethargy or trance; their souls have travelled to the banks of the River
of Death, but have been driven back and return to reanimate their
bodies.[649] Among the Fijians, ‘when any one faints or dies, their
spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it;
and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying
at full length, and bawling out lustily for the return of his own
soul.’[650] To the negroes of North Guinea, derangement or dotage is
caused by the patient being prematurely deserted by his soul, sleep
being a more temporary withdrawal.[651] Thus, in various countries, the
bringing back of lost souls becomes a regular part of the sorcerer’s or
priest’s profession. The Salish Indians of Oregon regard the spirit as
distinct from the vital principle, and capable of quitting the body for
a short time without the patient being conscious of its absence; but to
avoid fatal consequences it must be restored as soon as possible, and
accordingly the medicine-man in solemn form replaces it down through the
patient’s head.[652] The Turanian or Tatar races of Northern Asia
strongly hold the theory of the soul’s departure in disease, and among
the Buddhist tribes the Lamas carry out the ceremony of soul-restoration
in most elaborate form. When a man has been robbed by a demon of his
rational soul, and has only his animal soul left, his senses and memory
grow weak and he falls into a dismal state. Then the Lama undertakes to
cure him, and with quaint rites exorcises the evil demon. But if this
fails, then it is the patient’s soul itself that cannot or will not find
its way back. So the sick man is laid out in his best attire and
surrounded with his most attractive possessions, the friends and
relatives go thrice round the dwelling, affectionately calling back the
soul by name, while as a further inducement the Lama reads from his book
descriptions of the pains of hell, and the dangers incurred by a soul
which wilfully abandons its body, and then at last the whole assembly
declare with one voice that the wandering spirit has returned and the
patient will recover.[653] The Karens of Burma will run about pretending
to catch a sick man’s wandering soul, or as they say with the Greeks and
Slavs, his ‘butterfly’ (leip-pya), and at last drop it down upon his
head. The Karen doctrine of the ‘là’ is indeed a perfect and well-marked
vitalistic system. This là, soul, ghost, or genius, may be separated
from the body it belongs to, and it is a matter of the deepest interest
to the Karen to keep his là with him, by calling it, making offerings of
food to it, and so forth. It is especially when the body is asleep, that
the soul goes out and wanders; if it is detained beyond a certain time,
disease ensues, and if permanently, then its owner dies. When the ‘wee’
or spirit-doctor is employed to call back the departed shade or life of
a Karen, if he cannot recover it from the region of the dead, he will
sometimes take the shade of a living man and transfer it to the dead,
while its proper owner, whose soul has ventured out in a dream, sickens
and dies. Or when a Karen becomes sick, languid and pining from his là
having left him, his friends will perform a ceremony with a garment of
the invalid’s and a fowl which is cooked and offered with rice, invoking
the spirit with formal prayers to come back to the patient.[654] This
ceremony is perhaps ethnologically connected, though it is not easy to
say by what manner of diffusion or when, with a rite still practised in
China. When a Chinese is at the point of death, and his soul is supposed
to be already out of his body, a relative may be seen holding up the
patient’s coat on a long bamboo, to which a white cock is often
fastened, while a Tauist priest by incantations brings the departed
spirit into the coat, in order to put it back into the sick man. If the
bamboo after a time turns round slowly in the holder’s hands, this shows
that the spirit is inside the garment.[655]

Such temporary exit of the soul has a world-wide application to the
proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer himself. He professes to
send forth his spirit on distant journeys, and probably often believes
his soul released for a time from its bodily prison, as in the case of
that remarkable dreamer and visionary Jerome Cardan, who describes
himself as having the faculty of passing out of his senses as into
ecstasy whenever he will, feeling when he goes into this state a sort of
separation near the heart as if his soul were departing, this state
beginning from his brain and passing down his spine, and he then feeling
only that he is out of himself.[656] Thus the Australian native doctor
is alleged to obtain his initiation by visiting the world of spirits in
a trance of two or three days’ duration;[657] the Khond priest
authenticates his claim to office by remaining from one to fourteen days
in a languid and dreamy state, caused by one of his souls being away in
the divine presence;[658] the Greenland angekok’s soul goes forth from
his body to fetch his familiar demon;[659] the Turanian shaman lies in
lethargy while his soul departs to bring hidden wisdom from the land of
spirits.[660] The literature of more progressive races supplies similar
accounts. A characteristic story from old Scandinavia is that of the
Norse chief Ingimund, who shut up three Finns in a hut for three nights,
that they might visit Iceland and inform him of the lie of the country
where he was to settle; their bodies became rigid, they sent their souls
on the errand, and awakening after the three days they gave a
description of the Vatnsdæl.[661] The typical classic case is the story
of Hermotimos, whose prophetic soul went out from time to time to visit
distant regions, till at last his wife burnt the lifeless body on the
funeral pile, and when the poor soul came back, there was no longer a
dwelling for it to animate.[662] A group of the legendary visits to the
spirit-world; which will be described in the next chapter, belong to
this class. A typical spiritualistic instance may be quoted from
Jung-Stilling, who says that examples have come to his knowledge of sick
persons who, longing to see absent friends, have fallen into a swoon
during which they have appeared to the distant objects of their
affection.[663] As an illustration from our own folklore, the well-known
superstition may serve, that fasting watchers on St. John’s Eve may see
the apparitions of those doomed to die during the year come with the
clergyman to the church door and knock; these apparitions are spirits
who come forth from their bodies, for the minister has been noticed to
be much troubled in his sleep while his phantom was thus engaged, and
when one of a party of watchers fell into a sound sleep and could not be
roused, the others saw his apparition knock at the church door.[664]
Modern Europe has indeed kept closely enough to the lines of early
philosophy, for such ideas to have little strangeness to our own time.
Language preserves record of them in such expressions as ‘out of
oneself,’ ‘beside oneself,’ ‘in an ecstasy,’ and he who says that his
spirit goes forth to meet a friend, can still realize in the phrase a
meaning deeper than metaphor.

This same doctrine forms one side of the theory of dreams prevalent
among the lower races. Certain of the Greenlanders, Cranz remarks,
consider that the soul quits the body in the night and goes out hunting,
dancing, and visiting; their dreams, which are frequent and lively,
having brought them to this opinion.[665] Among the Indians of North
America, we hear of the dreamer’s soul leaving his body and wandering in
quest of things attractive to it. These things the waking man must
endeavour to obtain, lest his soul be troubled, and quit the body
altogether.[666] The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to
leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the dead to
hold converse with its friends.[667] The Tagals of Luzon object to
waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul.[668] The
Karens, whose theory of the wandering soul has just been noticed,
explain dreams to be what this là sees and experiences in its journeys
when it has left the body asleep. They even account with much acuteness
for the fact that we are apt to dream of people and places which we knew
before; the leip-pya, they say, can only visit the regions where the
body it belongs to has been already.[669] Onward from the savage state,
the idea of the spirit’s departure in sleep may be traced into the
speculative philosophy of higher nations, as in the Vedanta system, and
the Kabbala.[670] St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which
so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine
the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw
coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then
expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which when asked previously
he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) enquired of this
philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked
at his own: ‘I did not do it,’ said the philosopher, ‘but I dreamt I
did.’ And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic
image while waking, which the other saw in a dream.[671] European
folklore, too, has preserved interesting details of this primitive
dream-theory, such as the fear of turning a sleeper over lest the absent
soul should miss the way back. King Gunthram’s legend is one of a group
interesting from the same point of view. The king lay in the wood asleep
with his head in his faithful henchman’s lap; the servant saw as it were
a snake issue from his lord’s mouth and run to the brook, but it could
not pass, so the servant laid his sword across the water, and the
creature ran along it and up into a mountain; after a while it came back
and returned into the mouth of the sleeping king, who waking told him
how he had dreamt that he went over an iron bridge into a fountain full
of gold.[672] This is one of those instructive legends which preserve
for us, as in a museum, relics of an early intellectual condition of our
Aryan race, in thoughts which to our modern minds have fallen to the
level of quaint fancy, but which still remain sound and reasonable
philosophy to the savage. A Karen at this day would appreciate every
point of the story; the familiar notion of spirits not crossing water
which he exemplifies in his Burmese forests by stretching threads across
the brook for the ghosts to pass along; the idea of the soul going forth
embodied in an animal; and the theory of the dream being a real journey
of the sleeper’s soul. Finally, this old belief still finds, as such
beliefs so often do, a refuge in modern poetry:

                      ‘Yon child is dreaming far away,
                        And is not where he seems.’

This opinion, however, only constitutes one of several parts of the
theory of dreams in savage psychology. Another part has also a place
here, the view that human souls come from without to visit the sleeper,
who sees them as dreams. These two views are by no means incompatible.
The North American Indians allowed themselves the alternative of
supposing a dream to be either a visit from the soul of the person or
object dreamt of, or a sight seen by the rational soul, gone out for an
excursion while the sensitive soul remains in the body.[673] So the Zulu
may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who
comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in
a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble;
as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the
professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his
sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, ‘a house of
dreams.’[674] In the lower range of culture, it is perhaps most
frequently taken for granted that a man’s apparition in a dream is a
visit from his disembodied spirit, which the dreamer, to use an
expressive Ojibwa idiom, ‘sees when asleep.’ Such a thought comes out
clearly in the Fijian opinion that a living man’s spirit may leave the
body, to trouble other people in their sleep;[675] or in a recent
account of an old Indian woman of British Columbia sending for the
medicine-man to drive away the dead people who came to her every
night.[676] A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the
negroes of West Africa in this respect is extremely characteristic and
instructive. ‘All their dreams are construed into visits from the
spirits of their deceased friends. The cautions, hints, and warnings
which come to them through this source are received with the most
serious and deferential attention, and are always acted upon in their
waking hours. The habit of relating their dreams, which is universal,
greatly promotes the habit of dreaming itself, and hence their sleeping
hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as
their waking are with the living. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons
of their excessive superstitiousness. Their imaginations become so
lively that they can scarcely distinguish between their dreams and their
waking thoughts, between the real and the ideal, and they consequently
utter falsehood without intending, and profess to see things which never
existed.’[677]

To the Greek of old, the dream-soul was what to the modern savage it
still is. Sleep, loosing cares of mind, fell on Achilles as he lay by
the sounding sea, and there stood over him the soul of Patroklos, like
to him altogether in stature, and the beauteous eyes, and the voice, and
the garments that wrapped his skin; he spake, and Achilles stretched out
to grasp him with loving hands, but caught him not, and like a smoke the
soul sped twittering below the earth. Along the ages that separate us
from Homeric times, the apparition in dreams of men living or dead has
been a subject of philosophic speculation and of superstitious
fear.[678] Both the phantom of the living and the ghost of the dead
figure in Cicero’s typical tale. Two Arcadians came to Megara together,
one lodged at a friend’s house, the other at an inn. In the night this
latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, for the
innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but
thinking the vision of no consequence went to sleep again. Then a second
time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that though he had failed
to help, he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him and
hidden his body in a dung-cart, wherefore he charged his
fellow-traveller to be early next morning at the city-gate before the
cart passed out. Struck with this second dream, the traveller went as
bidden, and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in
it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice. ‘Quid hoc somnio dici
potest divinius!’[679] Augustine discusses with reference to the nature
of the soul various dream-stories of his time, where the apparitions of
men dead or living are seen in dreams. In one of the latter he himself
figured, for when a disciple of his, Eulogius the rhetor of Carthage,
once could not get to sleep for thinking of an obscure passage in
Cicero’s Rhetoric, that night Augustine came to him in a dream and
explained it. But Augustine’s tendency was toward the modern theory of
dreams, and in this case he says it was certainly his image that
appeared, not himself, who was far across the sea, neither knowing nor
caring about the matter.[680] As we survey the immense series of
dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediæval, and modern
literature, we may find it difficult enough to decide which are truth
and which are fiction. But along the course of these myriad narratives
of human phantoms appearing in dreams to cheer or torment, to warn or
inform, or to demand fulfilment of their own desires, the problem of
dream-apparitions may be traced in progress of gradual determination,
from the earlier conviction that a disembodied soul really comes into
the presence of the sleeper, toward the later opinion that such a
phantasm is produced in the dreamer’s mind without the perception of any
external objective figure.

The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their
bearing on primitive theories of the soul,[681] and the two classes of
phenomena substantiate and supplement one another. Even in healthy
waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid
distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and
reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific
education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around
him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very
senses. Thus it comes to pass that throughout the lower civilization men
believe, with the most vivid and intense belief, in the objective
reality of the human spectres which they see in sickness, exhaustion, or
excitement. As will be hereafter noticed, one main reason of the
practices of fasting, penance, narcotising by drugs, and other means of
bringing on morbid exaltation, is that the patients may obtain the sight
of spectral beings, from whom they look to gain spiritual knowledge and
even worldly power. Human ghosts are among the principal of these
phantasmal figures. There is no doubt that honest visionaries describe
ghosts as they really appear to their perception, while even the
impostors who pretend to see them conform to the descriptions thus
established; thus, in West Africa, a man’s kla or soul, becoming at
his death a sisa or ghost, can remain in the house with the corpse,
but is only visible to the wong-man, the spirit-doctor.[682] Sometimes
the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all
of an assembled company. Thus the natives of the Antilles believed that
the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many
went together;[683] thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to
be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.[684]
Such is perhaps the meaning of the description of Samuel’s ghost,
visible to the witch of Endor, but not to Saul, for he has to ask her
what it is she sees.[685] Yet this test of the nature of an apparition
is one which easily breaks down. We know well how in civilized countries
a current rumour of some one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a
sight of it to others whose minds are in a properly receptive state. The
condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on such
slight excitement into positive hallucination is rather the rule than
the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes, whose
minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a gesture, an
unaccustomed noise. Among savage tribes, however, as among civilized
races who have inherited remains of early philosophy formed under
similar conditions, the doctrine of visibility or invisibility of
phantoms has been obviously shaped with reference to actual experience.
To declare that souls or ghosts are necessarily either visible or
invisible, would directly contradict the evidence of men’s senses. But
to assert or imply, as the lower races do, that they are visible
sometimes and to some persons, but not always or to every one, is to lay
down an explanation of facts which is not indeed our usual modern
explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible product
of early science.

Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called
‘second sight,’ it may be pointed out that they are related among savage
tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree
medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next
day at noon; or when Mr. J. Mason Brown, travelling with two voyageurs
on the Coppermine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was
seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on enquiry,
stated that ‘He saw them coming, and heard them talk on their
journey.’[686] These are analogous to accounts of the Highland
second-sight, as when Pennant heard of a gentleman of the Hebrides, said
to have the convenient gift of foreseeing visitors in time to get ready
for them, or when Dr. Johnson was told by another laird that a labouring
man of his had predicted his return to the island, and described the
peculiar livery his servant had been newly dressed in.[687]

As a general rule, people are apt to consider it impossible for a man to
be in two places at once, and indeed a saying to that effect has become
a popular saw. But the rule is so far from being universally accepted,
that the word ‘bilocation’ has been invented to express the miraculous
faculty possessed by certain Saints of the Roman Church, of being in two
places at once; like St. Alfonso di Liguori, who had the useful power of
preaching his sermon in church while he was confessing penitents at
home.[688] The reception and explanation of these various classes of
stories fit perfectly with the primitive animistic theory of
apparitions, and the same is true of the following most numerous class
of the second-sight narratives.

Death is the event which, in all stages of culture, brings thought to
bear most intensely, though not always most healthily, on the problems
of psychology. The apparition of the disembodied soul has in all ages
been thought to bear especial relation to its departure from its body at
death. This is well shown by the reception not only of a theory of
ghosts, but of a special doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches.’ Thus the
Karens say that a man’s spirit, appearing after death, may thus announce
it.[689] In New Zealand it is ominous to see the figure of an absent
person, for if it be shadowy and the face not visible, his death may ere
long be expected, but if the face be seen he is dead already. A party of
Maoris (one of whom told the story) were seated round a fire in the open
air, when there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a
relative left ill at home; they exclaimed, the figure vanished, and on
the return of the party it appeared that the sick man had died about the
time of the vision.[690] Examining the position of the doctrine of
wraiths among the higher races, we find it especially prominent in three
intellectual districts, Christian hagiology, popular folklore, and
modern spiritualism. St. Anthony saw the soul of St. Ammonius carried to
heaven in the midst of choirs of angels, the same day that the holy
hermit died five days’ journey off in the desert of Nitria; when St.
Ambrose died on Easter Eve, several newly-baptized children saw the holy
bishop, and pointed him out to their parents, but these with their less
pure eyes could not behold him; and so forth.[691] Folklore examples
abound in Silesia and the Tyrol, where the gift of wraith-seeing still
flourishes, with the customary details of funerals, churches,
four-cross-roads, and headless phantoms, and an especial association
with New Year’s Eve. The accounts of ‘second-sight’ from North Britain
mostly belong to a somewhat older date. Thus the St. Kilda people used
to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending
death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of
Kirkcudbrightshire, ‘It is common among them to fancy that they see the
wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others
present with him. Within these last twenty years, it was hardly possible
to meet with any person who had not seen many wraiths and ghosts in the
course of his experience.’ Those who discuss the authenticity of the
second-sight stories as actual evidence, must bear in mind that they
prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but
for such phantoms as demon-dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic
omens. Thus a phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision on a living man
predicts his death, immediate if it is up to his head, less nearly
approaching if it is only up to his waist; and to see in spiritual
vision a spark of fire fall upon a person’s arm or breast, is a
forerunner of a dead child to be seen in his arms.[692] As visionaries
often see phantoms of living persons without any remarkable event
coinciding with their hallucinations, it is naturally admitted that a
man’s phantom or ‘double’ may be seen without portending anything in
particular. The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of
apparition where the person’s death corresponds more or less nearly with
the time when some friend perceives his phantom.[693] Narratives of this
class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, are
abundantly in circulation. Thus, I have an account by a lady, who ‘saw,
as it were, the form of some one laid out,’ near the time when a brother
died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady known to her, who
thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the
moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is sent me by a
Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty years ago she and a girl
leading her pony recognized the familiar figure of one Peter Sutherland,
whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health in Edinburgh; he turned a
corner and they saw no more of him, but next week came the news of his
sudden death.

That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body,
is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and
objectively present in dreams and visions. My own view is that nothing
but dreams and visions could have ever put into men’s minds such an idea
as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies. It is thus habitually
taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage or civilized, that
souls set free from the earthly body are recognized by a likeness to it
which they still retain, whether as ghostly wanderers on earth or
inhabitants of the world beyond the grave. Man’s spirit, says
Swedenborg, is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form,
and this is the poet’s dictum in ‘In Memoriam:’

                   ‘Eternal form shall still divide
                   The eternal soul from all beside;
                     And I shall know him when we meet.’

This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases
from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to
illustrate it.[694] But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve
to display the thoroughness with which the soul is thus conceived as an
image of the body. As a consistent corollary to such an opinion, it is
argued that the mutilation of the body will have a corresponding effect
upon the soul, and very low savage races have philosophy enough to work
out this idea. Thus it was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of
the early European visitors, that they ‘believe that the dead arrive in
the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact just as they left
this.’[695] Thus, too, the Australian who has slain his enemy will cut
off the right thumb of the corpse, so that although the spirit will
become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the
shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but
harmless.[696] The negro fears long sickness before death, such as will
send him lean and feeble into the next world. His theory of the
mutilation of soul with body could not be brought more vividly into view
than in that ugly story of the West Indian planter, whose slaves began
to seek in suicide at once relief from present misery and restoration to
their native land; but the white man was too cunning for them, he cut
off the heads and hands of the corpses, and the survivors saw that not
even death could save them from a master who could maim their very souls
in the next world.[697] The same rude and primitive belief continues
among nations risen far higher in intellectual rank. The Chinese hold in
especial horror the punishment of decapitation, considering that he who
quits this world lacking a member will so arrive in the next, and a case
is recorded lately of a criminal at Amoy who for this reason begged to
die instead by the cruel death of crucifixion, and was crucified
accordingly.[698] The series ends as usual in the folklore of the
civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house
at Bologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real
chained fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the
remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of
his friend William Rufus carried black and naked on a black goat across
the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the midst of the
breast; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the king had been
slain in the New Forest by the arrow of Walter Tirell.[699]

In studying the nature of the soul as conceived among the lower races,
and in tracing such conceptions onward among the higher, circumstantial
details are available. It is as widely recognized among mankind that
souls or ghosts have voices, as that they have visible forms, and indeed
the evidence for both is of the same nature. Men who perceive evidently
that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision,
naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly
voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds. This is involved
in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men,
from savagery onward to civilization, while the more modern doctrine of
the subjectivity of such phenomena recognizes the phenomena themselves,
but offers a different explanation of them. One special conception,
however, requires particular notice. This defines the spirit-voice as
being a low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice.
The Algonquin Indians of North America could hear the shadow-souls of
the dead chirp like crickets.[700] The divine spirits of the New Zealand
dead, coming to converse with the living, utter their words in whistling
tones, and such utterances by a squeaking noise are mentioned elsewhere
in Polynesia.[701] The Zulu diviner’s familiar spirits are ancestral
manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence
they have their name of ‘imilozi’ or whistlers.[702] These ideas
correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a ‘twitter
or ‘thin murmur:’

                     Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,
               Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]

               ‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,
               Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]

As the attributes of the soul or ghost extend to other spiritual beings,
and the utterances of such are to a great extent given by the voice of
mediums, we connect these accounts with the notion that the language of
demons is also a low whistle or mutter, whence the well-known practice
of whispering or murmuring charms, the ‘susurrus necromanticus’ of
sorcerers, to whom the already cited description of ‘wizards that peep
(i.e. chirp) and mutter’ is widely applicable.[705]

The conception of dreams and visions as caused by present objective
figures, and the identification of such phantom souls with the shadow
and the breath, has led to the treatment of souls as substantial
material beings. Thus it is a usual proceeding to make openings through
solid materials to allow souls to pass. The Iroquois in old times used
to leave an opening in the grave for the lingering soul to visit its
body, and some of them still bore holes in the coffin for the same
purpose.[706] The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had
lost his soul, would make a hole in a burial-house to let out a spirit
which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s
head.[707] The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at
death.[708] And lastly, the custom of opening a window or door for the
departing soul when it quits the body is to this day a very familiar
superstition in France, Germany, and England.[709] Again, the souls of
the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt and driven like
any other living creatures. Thus the Queensland aborigines would beat
the air in an annual mock fight, held to scare away the souls that death
had let loose among the living since last year.[710] Thus North American
Indians, when they had tortured an enemy to death, ran about crying and
beating with sticks to scare the ghost away; they have been known to set
nets round their cabins to catch and keep out neighbours’ departed
souls; fancying the soul of a dying man to go out at the wigwam roof,
they would habitually beat the sides with sticks to drive it forth; we
even hear of the widow going off from her husband’s funeral followed by
a person flourishing a handful of twigs about her head like a
flyflapper, to drive off her husband’s ghost and leave her free to marry
again.[711] With a kindlier feeling, the Congo negroes abstained for a
whole year after a death from sweeping the house, lest the dust should
injure the delicate substance of the ghost;[712] the Tonquinese avoided
house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back
to their houses for the New Year’s visit;[713] and it seems likely that
the special profession of the Roman ‘everriatores’ who swept the houses
out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.[714] To this
day, it remains a German peasants’ saying that it is wrong to slam a
door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.[715] The not uncommon practice
of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for
granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism,
extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They
range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had
been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his
life, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter the neat-herd, who lifted up
the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his
arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming
back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known
by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to
the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human
soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.[716]

Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both
among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The
Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of
the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something
comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more
solid vegetable fibre.[717] The Greenland seers described the soul as
they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they
said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh
nor bone nor sinew.[718] The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial
as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified
body.[719] Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an
example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter
escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial
body.[720] In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of
Epicurus that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it
could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’[721] Among the
Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with
mortal bodies,[722] and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a
certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin
and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.[723] For an example of
mediæval doctrine, may be cited a 14th-century English poem, the
‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ (i.e. ‘Remorse of Conscience’) which points out how
the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the
more in purgatory:

                ‘The soul is more tendre and nesche
                Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
                Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
                Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,
                Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]

The doctrine of the ethereal soul passed on into more modern philosophy,
and the European peasant holds fast to it still; as Wuttke says, the
ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality, for
they have bodies as we have, though of other kind: they can eat and
drink, they can be wounded and killed.[725] Nor was the ancient doctrine
ever more distinctly stated than by a modern spiritualistic writer, who
observes that ‘a spirit is no immaterial substance; on the contrary, the
spiritual organization is composed of matter ... in a very high state of
refinement and attenuation.’[726]

Among rude races, the original conception of the human soul seems to
have been that of ethereality, or vaporous materiality, which has held
so large a place in human thought ever since. In fact, the later
metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any
meaning to a savage. It is moreover to be noticed that, as to the whole
nature and action of apparitional souls, the lower philosophy escapes
various difficulties which down to modern times have perplexed
metaphysicians and theologians of the civilized world. Considering the
thin ethereal body of the soul to be itself sufficient and suitable for
visibility, movement, and speech, the primitive animists required no
additional hypotheses to account for these manifestations; they had no
place for theories such as detailed by Calmet, as that immaterial souls
have their own vaporous bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous
bodies provided for them by supernatural means to enable them to appear
as spectres, or that they possess the power of condensing the
circumambient air into phantom-like bodies to invest themselves in, or
of forming from it vocal instruments.[727] It appears to have been
within systematic schools of civilized philosophy that the
transcendental definitions of the immaterial soul were obtained, by
abstraction from the primitive conception of the ethereal-material soul,
so as to reduce it from a physical to a metaphysical entity.

Departing from the body at the time of death, the soul or spirit is
considered set free to linger near the tomb, to wander on earth or flit
in the air, or to travel to the proper region of spirits—the world
beyond the grave. The principal conceptions of the lower psychology as
to a Future Life will be considered in the following chapters, but for
the present purpose of investigating the theory of souls in general, it
will be well to enter here upon one department of the subject. Men do
not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free
and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature,
by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses. Thus
there arises one of the most widespread, distinct, and intelligible
rites of animistic religion—that of funeral human sacrifice for the
service of the dead. When a man of rank dies and his soul departs to its
own place, wherever and whatever that place may be, it is a rational
inference of early philosophy that the souls of attendants, slaves, and
wives, put to death at his funeral, will make the same journey and
continue their service in the next life, and the argument is frequently
stretched further, to include the souls of new victims sacrificed in
order that they may enter upon the same ghostly servitude. It will
appear from the ethnography of this rite that it is not strongly marked
in the very lowest levels of culture, but that, arising in the lower
barbaric stage, it develops itself in the higher, and thenceforth
continues or dwindles in survival.

Of the murderous practices to which this opinion leads, remarkably
distinct accounts may be cited from among tribes of the Indian
Archipelago. The following account is given of the funerals of great men
among the rude Kayans of Borneo:—‘Slaves are killed in order that they
may follow the deceased and attend upon him. Before they are killed the
relations who surround them enjoin them to take great care of their
master when they join him, to watch and shampoo him when he is
indisposed, to be always near him, and to obey all his behests. The
female relatives of the deceased then take a spear and slightly wound
the victims, after which the males spear them to death.’ Again, the
opinion of the Idaan is ‘that all whom they kill in this world shall
attend them as slaves after death. This notion of future interest in the
destruction of the human species is a great impediment to an intercourse
with them, as murder goes farther than present advantage or resentment.
From the same principle they will purchase a slave, guilty of any
capital crime, at fourfold his value, that they may be his
executioners.’ With the same idea is connected the ferocious custom of
‘head-hunting,’ so prevalent among the Dayaks before Rajah Brooke’s
time. They considered that the owner of every human head they could
procure would serve them in the next world, where, indeed, a man’s rank
would be according to his number of heads in this. They would continue
the mourning for a dead man till a head was brought in, to provide him
with a slave to accompany him to the ‘habitation of souls;’ a father who
lost his child would go out and kill the first man he met, as a funeral
ceremony; a young man might not marry till he had procured a head, and
some tribes would bury with a dead man the first head he had taken,
together with spears, cloth, rice, and betel. Waylaying and murdering
men for their heads became, in fact, the Dayaks’ national sport, and
they remarked ‘the white men read books, we hunt for heads
instead.’[728] Of such rites in the Pacific islands, the most hideously
purposeful accounts reach us from the Fiji group. Till lately, a main
part of the ceremony of a great man’s funeral was the strangling of
wives, friends, and slaves, for the distinct purpose of attending him
into the world of spirits. Ordinarily the first victim was the wife of
the deceased, and more than one if he had several, and their corpses,
oiled as for a feast, clothed with new fringed girdles, with heads
dressed and ornamented, and vermilion and turmeric powder spread on
their faces and bosoms, were laid by the side of the dead warrior.
Associates and inferior attendants were likewise slain, and these bodies
were spoken of as ‘grass for bedding the grave.’ When Ra Mbithi, the
pride of Somosomo, was lost at sea, seventeen of his wives were killed;
and after the news of the massacre of the Namena people, in 1839, eighty
women were strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered
husbands. Such sacrifices took place under the same pressure of public
opinion which kept up the widow-burning in modern India. The Fijian
widow was worked upon by her relatives with all the pressure of
persuasion and of menace; she understood well that life to her
henceforth would mean a wretched existence of neglect, disgrace, and
destitution; and tyrannous custom, as hard to struggle against in the
savage as in the civilized world, drove her to the grave. Thus, far from
resisting, she became importunate for death, and the new life to come,
and till public opinion reached a more enlightened state, the
missionaries often used their influence in vain to save from the
strangling-cord some wife whom they could have rescued, but who herself
refused to live. So repugnant to the native mind was the idea of a
chieftain going unattended into the other world, that the missionaries’
prohibition of the cherished custom was one reason of the popular
dislike to Christianity. Many of the nominal Christians, when once a
chief of theirs was shot from an ambush, esteemed it most fortunate that
a stray shot at the same time killed a young man at a distance from him,
and thus provided a companion for the spirit of the slain chief.[729]

In America, the funeral human sacrifice makes its characteristic
appearance. A good example may be taken from among the Osages, whose
habit was sometimes to plant in the cairn raised over a corpse a pole
with an enemy’s scalp hanging to the top. Their notion was that by
taking an enemy and suspending his scalp over the grave of a deceased
friend, the spirit of the victim became subjected to the spirit of the
buried warrior in the land of spirits. Hence the last and best service
that could be performed for a deceased relative was to take an enemy’s
life, and thus transmit it by his scalp.[730] The correspondence of this
idea with that just mentioned among the Dayaks is very striking. With a
similar intention, the Caribs would slay on the dead master’s grave any
of his slaves they could lay hands on.[731] Among the native peoples
risen to considerably higher grades of social and political life, these
practices were not suppressed but exaggerated, in the ghastly sacrifices
of warriors, slaves, and wives, who departed to continue their duteous
offices at the funeral of the chief or monarch in Central America[732]
and Mexico,[733] in Bogota[734] and Peru.[735] It is interesting to
notice, in somewhat favourable contrast with these customs of
comparatively cultured American nations, the practice of certain rude
tribes of the North-West. The Quakeolths, for instance, did not actually
sacrifice the widow, but they made her rest her head on her husband’s
corpse while it was being burned, until at last she was dragged more
dead than alive from the flames; if she recovered, she collected her
husband’s ashes and carried them about with her for three years, during
which any levity or deficiency of grief would render her an outcast.
This looks like a mitigated survival from an earlier custom of actual
widow-burning.[736]

Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic and horrid
descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central,
and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and
with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in
his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a
little stool with the dead chief’s head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi
is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his
right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in
alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation
of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in
Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to
the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of
massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of
hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this
all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly ‘Customs:’—‘They
periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the
shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression,
lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial
piety.’ Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily
murder:—‘Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it
must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim,
almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him,
an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades
in the best of humours.’[737] In southern districts of Africa, accounts
of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of
the dead man’s favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a
practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and
formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of
attendants with a chief is a thing of the past among the Barotse, as
among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chief’s
servants and attendant warriors were cast into the fire which had
consumed his body, that they might go with him, and prepare things
beforehand, and get food for him.[738]

If now we turn to the records of Asia and Europe, we shall find the
sacrifice of attendants for the dead widely prevalent in both continents
in old times, while in the east its course may be traced continuing
onward to our own day. The two Mohammedans who travelled in Southern
Asia in the ninth century relate that on the accession of certain kings
a quantity of rice is prepared, which is eaten by some three or four
hundred men, who present themselves voluntarily to share it, thereby
undertaking to burn themselves at the monarch’s death. With this
corresponds Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account in Southern India of
the king of Maabar’s guard of horsemen, who, when he dies and his body
is burnt, throw themselves into the fire to do him service in the next
world.[739] In the seventeenth century the practice is described as
still prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten
to thirty of his servants put themselves to death by the ‘hara kari,’ or
ripping-up, having indeed engaged during his lifetime, by the solemn
compact of drinking wine together, to give their bodies to their lord at
his death. Yet already in ancient times such funeral sacrifices were
passing into survival, when the servants who followed their master in
death were replaced by clay images set up at the tomb.[740] Among the
Ossetes of the Caucasus, an interesting relic of widow-sacrifice is
still kept up: the dead man’s widow and his saddle-horse are led thrice
round the grave, and no man may marry the widow or mount the horse thus
devoted.[741] In China, legend preserves the memory of the ancient
funeral human sacrifice. The brother of Chin Yang, a disciple of
Confucius, died, and his widow and steward wished to bury some living
persons with him, to serve him in the regions below. Thereupon the sage
suggested that the proper victims would be the widow and steward
themselves, but this not precisely meeting their views, the matter
dropped, and the deceased was interred without attendants. This story at
least shows the rite to have been not only known but understood in China
long ago. In modern China, the suicide of widows to accompany their
husbands is a recognized practice, sometimes even performed in public.
Moreover, the ceremonies of providing sedan-bearers and an
umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce
beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these
bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to
represent survivals of a more murderous reality.[742]

The Aryan race gives striking examples of the rite of funeral human
sacrifice in its sternest shape, whether in history or in myth, that
records as truly as history the manners of old days.[743] The episodes
of the Trojan captives laid with the horses and hounds on the funeral
pile of Patroklos, and of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile
of her husband, and Pausanias’s narrative of the suicide of the three
Messenian widows, are among its Greek representatives.[744] In
Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with his dwarf foot-page, his horse
and saddle; Brynhild lies on the pile by her beloved Sigurd, and men and
maids follow after them on the hell-way.[745] The Gauls in Cæsar’s time
burned at the dead man’s sumptuous funeral whatever was dear to him,
animals also, and much-loved slaves and clients.[746] Old mentions of
Slavonic heathendom describe the burning of the dead with clothing and
weapons, horses and hounds, with faithful servants, and above all, with
wives. Thus St. Boniface says that ‘the Wends keep matrimonial love with
so great zeal, that the wife may refuse to survive her husband, and she
is held praiseworthy among women who slays herself by her own hand, that
she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.’[747] This Aryan rite of
widow-sacrifice has not only an ethnographic and antiquarian interest,
but even a place in modern politics. In Brahmanic India the widow of a
Hindu of the Brahman or the Kshatriya caste was burnt on the funeral
pile with her husband, as a satî or ‘good woman,’ which word has
passed into English as suttee. Mentioned in classic and mediæval
times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the last
century.[748] Often one dead husband took many wives with him. Some went
willingly and gaily to the new life, many were driven by force of
custom, by fear of disgrace, by family persuasion, by priestly threats
and promises, by sheer violence. When the rite was suppressed under
modern British rule, the priesthood resisted to the uttermost, appealing
to the Veda, as sanctioning the ordinance, and demanding that the
foreign rulers should respect it. Yet in fact, as Prof. H. H. Wilson
proved, the priests had actually falsified their sacred Veda in support
of a rite enjoined by long and inveterate prejudice, but not by the
traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brahmanic funeral
rites have been minutely detailed from the Sanskrit authorities in an
essay by Prof. Max Müller. Their directions are that the widow is to be
set on the funeral pile with her husband’s corpse, and if he be a
warrior his bow is to be placed there too. But then a brother-in-law or
adopted child or old servant is to lead the widow down again at the
summons, ‘Rise, woman, come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh
unto him whose life is gone. Come to us. Thou hast thus fulfilled thy
duties of a wife to the husband who once took thy hand, and made thee a
mother.’ The bow, however, is to be broken and thrown back upon the
pile, and the dead man’s sacrificial instruments are to be laid with him
and really consumed. While admitting that the modern ordinance of
Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual,
we may nevertheless find reason to consider the practice as not a new
invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but as the revival, under
congenial influences, of an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a
period even earlier than the Veda. The ancient authorized ceremony looks
as though, in a primitive form of the rite, the widow had been actually
sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a humaner law substituted a
mere pretence. This view is supported by the existence of an old and
express prohibition of the wife being sacrificed, a prohibition
seemingly directed against a real custom, ‘to follow the dead husband is
prohibited, so says the law of the Brahmans. With regard to the other
castes this law for women may be or may not be.’[749] To treat the Hindu
widow-burning as a case of survival and revival seems to me most in
accordance with a general ethnographic view of the subject.
Widow-sacrifice is found in various regions of the world under a low
state of civilization, and this fits with the hypothesis of its having
belonged to the Aryan race while yet in an early and barbarous
condition. Thus the prevalence of a rite of suttee like that of modern
India among ancient Aryan nations settled in Europe, Greeks,
Scandinavians, Germans, Slaves, may be simply accounted for by direct
inheritance from the remote common antiquity of them all. If this theory
be sound, it will follow that ancient as the Vedic ordinances may be,
they represent in this matter a reform and a reaction against a yet more
ancient barbaric rite of widow-sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact,
but yet kept up in symbol. The history of religion displays but too
plainly the proneness of mankind to relapse, in spite of reformation,
into the lower and darker condition of the past. Stronger and more
tenacious than even Vedic authority, the hideous custom of the suttee
may have outlived an attempt to suppress it in early Brahmanic times,
and the English rulers, in abolishing it, may have abolished a relic not
merely of degenerate Hinduism, but of the far more remotely ancient
savagery out of which the Aryan civilization had grown.

In now passing from the consideration of the souls of men to that of the
souls of the lower animals, we have first to inform ourselves as to the
savage man’s idea, which is very different from the civilized man’s, of
the nature of these lower animals. A remarkable group of observances
customary among rude tribes will bring this distinction sharply into
view. Savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would
to men alive or dead, offer them homage, ask pardon when it is their
painful duty to hunt and kill them. A North American Indian will reason
with a horse as if rational. Some will spare the rattlesnake, fearing
the vengeance of its spirit if slain; others will salute the creature
reverently, bid it welcome as a friend from the land of spirits,
sprinkle a pinch of tobacco on its head for an offering, catch it by the
tail and dispatch it with extreme dexterity, and carry off its skin as a
trophy. If an Indian is attacked and torn by a bear, it is that the
beast fell upon him intentionally in anger, perhaps to revenge the hurt
done to another bear. When a bear is killed, they will beg pardon of
him, or even make him condone the offence by smoking the peace-pipe with
his murderers, who put the pipe in his mouth and blow down it, begging
his spirit not to take revenge.[750] So in Africa, the Kafirs will hunt
the elephant, begging him not to tread on them and kill them, and when
he is dead they will assure him that they did not kill him on purpose,
and they will bury his trunk, for the elephant is a mighty chief, and
his trunk is his hand that he may hurt withal. The Congo people will
even avenge such a murder by a pretended attack on the hunters who did
the deed.[751] Such customs are common among the lower Asiatic tribes.
The Stiens of Kambodia ask pardon of the beast they have killed;[752]
the Ainos of Yesso kill the bear, offer obeisance and salutation to him,
and cut up his carcase.[753] The Koriaks, if they have slain a bear or
wolf, will flay him, dress one of their people in the skin, and dance
round him, chanting excuses that they did not do it, and especially
laying the blame on a Russian. But if it is a fox, they take his skin,
wrap his dead body in hay, and sneering tell him to go to his own people
and say what famous hospitality he has had, and how they gave him a new
coat instead of his old one.[754] The Samoyeds excuse themselves to the
slain bear, telling him it was the Russians who did it, and that a
Russian knife will cut him up.[755] The Goldi will set up the slain
bear, call him ‘my lord’ and do ironical homage to him, or taking him
alive will fatten him in a cage, call him ‘son’ and ‘brother,’ and kill
and eat him as a sacrifice at a solemn festival.[756] In Borneo, the
Dayaks, when they have caught an alligator with a baited hook and rope,
address him with respect and soothing till they have his legs fast, and
then mocking call him ‘rajah’ and ‘grandfather.’[757] Thus when the
savage gets over his fears, he still keeps up in ironical merriment the
reverence which had its origin in trembling sincerity. Even now the
Norse hunter will say with horror of a bear that will attack man, that
he can be ‘no Christian bear.’

The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so
prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower
races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human
language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought,
logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and
reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts
the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely,
the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen
in vision or in dream. As for believers, savage or civilized, in the
great doctrine of metempsychosis, these not only consider that an animal
may have a soul, but that this soul may have inhabited a human being,
and thus the creature may be in fact their own ancestor or once familiar
friend. A line of facts, arranged as waymarks along the course of
civilization, will serve to indicate the history of opinion from
savagery onward, as to the souls of animals during life and after death.
North American Indians held every animal to have its spirit, and these
spirits their future life; the soul of the Canadian dog went to serve
his master in the other world; among the Sioux, the prerogative of
having four souls was not confined to man, but belonged also to the
bear, the most human of animals.[758] The Greenlanders considered that a
sick human soul might be replaced by the sorcerer with a fresh healthy
soul of a hare, a reindeer, or a young child.[759] Maori tale-tellers
have heard of the road by which the spirits of dogs descend to Reinga,
the Hades of the departed; the Hovas of Madagascar know that the ghosts
of beasts and men, dwelling in a great mountain in the south called
Ambondrombe, come out occasionally to walk among the tombs or
execution-places of criminals.[760] The Kamchadals held that every
creature, even the smallest fly, would live again in the
under-world.[761] The Kukis of Assam think that the ghost of every
animal a Kuki kills in the chase or for the feast will belong to him in
the next life, even as the enemy he slays in the field will then become
his slave. The Karens apply the doctrine of the spirit or personal
life-phantom, which is apt to wander from the body and thus suffer
injury, equally to men and to animals.[762] The Zulus say the cattle
they kill come to life again, and become the property of the dwellers in
the world beneath.[763] The Siamese butcher, when in defiance of the
very principles of his Buddhism he slaughters an ox, before he kills the
creature has at least the grace to beseech its spirit to seek a happier
abode.[764] In connexion with such transmigration, Pythagorean and
Platonic philosophy gives to the lower animals undying souls, while
other classic opinion may recognize in beasts only an inferior order of
soul, only the ‘anima’ but not the human ‘animus’ besides. Thus Juvenal:

                ‘Principio indulsit communis conditor illis
                Tantum animas; nobis animum quoque....’[765]

Through the middle ages, controversy as to the psychology of brutes has
lasted on into our own times, ranging between two extremes; on the one
the theory of Descartes which reduced animals to mere machines, on the
other what Mr. Alger defines as ‘the faith that animals have immaterial
and deathless souls.’ Among modern speculations may be instanced that of
Wesley, who thought that in the next life animals will be raised even
above their bodily and mental state at the creation, ‘the horridness of
their appearance will be exchanged for their primæval beauty,’ and it
even may be that they will be made what men are now, creatures capable
of religion. Adam Clarke’s argument for the future life of animals rests
on abstract justice: whereas they did not sin, but yet are involved in
the sufferings of sinful man, and cannot have in the present state the
happiness designed for them, it is reasonable that they must have it in
another.[766] Although, however, the primitive belief in the souls of
animals still survives to some extent in serious philosophy, it is
obvious that the tendency of educated opinion on the question whether
brutes have soul, as distinguished from life and mind, has for ages been
in a negative and sceptical direction. The doctrine has fallen from its
once high estate. It belonged originally to real, though rude science.
It has now sunk to become a favourite topic in that mild speculative
talk which still does duty so largely as intellectual conversation, and
even then its propounders defend it with a lurking consciousness of its
being after all a piece of sentimental nonsense.

Animals being thus considered in the primitive psychology to have souls
like human beings, it follows as the simplest matter of course that
tribes who kill wives and slaves, to dispatch their souls on errands of
duty with their departed lords, may also kill animals in order that
their spirits may do such service as is proper to them. The Pawnee
warrior’s horse is slain on his grave to be ready for him to mount
again, and the Comanche’s best horses are buried with his favourite
weapons and his pipe, all alike to be used in the distant happy
hunting-grounds.[767] In South America not only do such rites occur, but
they reach a practically disastrous extreme. Patagonian tribes, says
D’Orbigny, believe in another life, where they are to enjoy perfect
happiness, therefore they bury with the deceased his arms and ornaments,
and even kill on his tomb all the animals which belonged to him, that he
may find them in the abode of bliss; and this opposes an insurmountable
barrier to all civilization, by preventing them from accumulating
property and fixing their habitations.[768] Not only do Pope’s now
hackneyed lines express a real motive with which the Indian’s dog is
buried with him, but on the North American continent the spirit of the
dog has another remarkable office to perform. Certain Esquimaux, as
Cranz relates, would lay a dog’s head in a child’s grave, that the soul
of the dog, who is everywhere at home, might guide the helpless infant
to the land of souls. In accordance with this, Captain Scoresby in
Jameson’s Land found a dog’s skull in a small grave, probably a child’s.
Again, in the distant region of the Aztecs, one of the principal funeral
ceremonies was to slaughter a techichi, or native dog; it was burnt or
buried with the corpse, with a cotton thread fastened to its neck, and
its office was to convey the deceased across the deep waters of
Chiuhnahuapan, on the way to the Land of the Dead.[769] The dead
Buraet’s favourite horse, led saddled to the grave, killed, and flung
in, may serve for a Tatar example.[770] In Tonquin, even wild animals
have been customarily drowned at funeral ceremonies of princes, to be at
the service of the departed in the next world.[771] Among Semitic
tribes, an instance of the custom may be found in the Arab sacrifice of
a camel on the grave, for the dead man’s spirit to ride upon.[772] Among
the nations of the Aryan race in Europe, the prevalence of such rites is
deep, wide, and full of purpose. Thus, warriors were provided in death
with horses and housings, with hounds and falcons. Customs thus
described in chronicle and legend, are vouched for in our own time by
the opening of old barbaric burial-places. How clear a relic of savage
meaning lies here may be judged from a Livonian account as late as the
fourteenth century, which relates how men and women slaves, sheep and
oxen, with other things, were burnt with the dead, who, it was believed,
would reach some region of the living, and find there, with the
multitude of cattle and slaves, a country of life and happiness.[773] As
usual, these rites may be traced onward in survival. The Mongols, who
formerly slaughtered camels and horses at their owner’s burial, have
been induced to replace the actual sacrifice by a gift of the cattle to
the Lamas.[774] The Hindus offer a black cow to the Brahmans, in order
to secure their passage across the Vaitaranî, the river of death, and
will often die grasping the cow’s tail as if to swim across in
herdsman’s fashion, holding on to a cow.[775] It is mentioned as a
belief in Northern Europe that he who has given a cow to the poor will
find a cow to take him over the bridge of the dead, and a custom of
leading a cow in the funeral procession is said to have been kept up to
modern times.[776] All these rites probably belong together as connected
with ancient funeral sacrifice, and the survival of the custom of
sacrificing the warrior’s horse at his tomb is yet more striking.
Saint-Foix long ago put the French evidence very forcibly. Mentioning
the horse led at the funeral of Charles VI., with the four
valets-de-pied in black, and bareheaded, holding the corners of its
caparison, he recalls the horses and servants killed and buried with
præ-Christian kings. And that his readers may not think this an
extraordinary idea, he brings forward the records of property and horses
being presented at the offertory in Paris, in 1329, of Edward III.
presenting horses at King John’s funeral in London, and of the funeral
service for Bertrand Duguesclin, at St. Denis, in 1389, when horses were
offered, the Bishop of Auxerre laid his hand on their heads, and they
were afterwards compounded for.[777] Germany retained the actual
sacrifice within the memory of living men. A cavalry general, Count
Friedrich Kasimir Boos von Waldeck, was buried at Treves in 1781
according to the forms of the Teutonic Order; his horse was led in the
procession, and the coffin having been lowered into the grave the horse
was killed and thrown in upon it.[778] This was, perhaps, the last
occasion when such a sacrifice was consummated in solemn form in Europe.
But that pathetic incident of a soldier’s funeral, the leading of the
saddled and bridled charger in the mournful procession, keeps up to this
day a lingering reminiscence of the grim religious rite now passed away.

Plants, partaking with animals the phenomena of life and death, health
and sickness, not unnaturally have some kind of soul ascribed to them.
In fact, the notion of a vegetable soul, common to plants and to the
higher organisms possessing an animal soul in addition, was familiar to
mediæval philosophy, and is not yet forgotten by naturalists. But in the
lower ranges of culture, at least within one wide district of the world,
the souls of plants are much more fully identified with the souls of
animals. The Society Islanders seem to have attributed ‘varua,’ i.e.
surviving soul or spirit, not to men only but to animals and
plants.[779] The Dayaks of Borneo not only consider men and animals to
have a spirit or living principle, whose departure from the body causes
sickness and eventually death, but they also give to the rice its
‘samangat padi,’ or ‘spirit of the paddy,’ and they hold feasts to
retain this soul securely, lest the crop should decay.[780] The Karens
say that plants as well as men and animals have their ‘là’ (‘kelah’),
and the spirit of sickly rice is here also called back like a human
spirit considered to have left the body. Their formulas for the purpose
have even been written down, and this is part of one:—‘O come, rice
kelah, come. Come to the field. Come to the rice.... Come from the West.
Come from the East. From the throat of the bird, from the maw of the
ape, from the throat of the elephant.... From all granaries come. O rice
kelah, come to the rice.’[781] There is reason to think that the
doctrine of the spirits of plants lay deep in the intellectual history
of South-East Asia, but was in great measure superseded under Buddhist
influence. The Buddhist books show that in the early days of their
religion, it was matter of controversy whether trees had souls, and
therefore whether they might lawfully be injured. Orthodox Buddhism
decided against the tree-souls, and consequently against the scruple to
harm them, declaring trees to have no mind or sentient principle, though
admitting that certain dewas or spirits do reside in the body of trees,
and speak from within them. Buddhists also relate that a heterodox sect
kept up the early doctrine of the actual animate life of trees, in
connexion with which may be remembered Marco Polo’s somewhat doubtful
statement as to certain austere Indians objecting to green herbs for
such a reason, and some other passages from later writers. The subject
of the spirits of plants is an obscure one, whether from the lower races
not having definite opinions, or from our not finding it easy to trace
them.[782] The evidence from funeral sacrifices, so valuable as to most
departments of early psychology, fails us here, from plants not being
thought suitable to send for the service of the dead.[783] Yet, as we
shall see more fully elsewhere, there are two topics which bear closely
on the matter. On the one hand, the doctrine of transmigration widely
and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being
animated by human souls; on the other, the belief in tree-spirits and
the practice of tree-worship involve notions more or less closely
coinciding with that of tree-souls, as when the classic hamadryad dies
with her tree, or when the Talein of South-East Asia, considering every
tree to have a demon or spirit, offers prayers before he cuts one down.

Thus far the details of the lower animistic philosophy are not very
unfamiliar to modern students. The primitive view of the souls of men
and beasts, as asserted or acted on in the lower and middle levels of
culture, so far belongs to current civilized thought, that those who
hold the doctrine to be false, and the practices based upon it futile,
can nevertheless understand and sympathise with the lower nations to
whom they are matters of the most sober and serious conviction. Nor is
even the notion of a separable spirit or soul as the cause of life in
plants too incongruous with ordinary ideas to be readily appreciable.
But the theory of souls in the lower culture stretches beyond this
limit, to take in a conception much stranger to modern thought. Certain
high savage races distinctly hold, and a large proportion of other
savage and barbarian races make a more or less close approach to, a
theory of separable and surviving souls or spirits belonging to stocks
and stones, weapons, boats, food, clothes, ornaments, and other objects
which to us are not merely soulless but lifeless.

Yet, strange as such a notion may seem to us at first sight, if we place
ourselves by an effort in the intellectual position of an uncultured
tribe, and examine the theory of object-souls from their point of view,
we shall hardly pronounce it irrational. In discussing the origin of
myth, some account has been already given of the primitive stage of
thought in which personality and life are ascribed not to men and beasts
only, but to things. It has been shown how what we call inanimate
objects—rivers, stones, trees, weapons, and so forth—are treated as
living intelligent beings, talked to, propitiated, punished for the harm
they do. Hume, whose ‘Natural History of Religion’ is perhaps more than
any other work the source of modern opinions as to the development of
religion, comments on the influence of this personifying stage of
thought. ‘There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all
beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities
with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are
intimately conscious.... The unknown causes, which continually employ
their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended
to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to
them thought and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and
figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with
ourselves.’ Auguste Comte has ventured to bring such a state of thought
under terms of strict definition in his conception of the primary mental
condition of mankind—a state of ‘pure fetishism, constantly
characterized by the free and direct exercise of our primitive tendency
to conceive all external bodies soever, natural or artificial, as
animated by a life essentially analogous to our own, with mere
differences of intensity.’[784] Our comprehension of the lower stages of
mental culture depends much on the thoroughness with which we can
appreciate this primitive, childlike conception, and in this our best
guide may be the memory of our own childish days. He who recollects when
there was still personality to him in posts and sticks, chairs, and
toys, may well understand how the infant philosophy of mankind could
extend the notion of vitality to what modern science only recognises as
lifeless things; thus one main part of the lower animistic doctrine as
to souls of objects is accounted for. The doctrine requires for its full
conception of a soul not only life, but also a phantom or apparitional
spirit; this development, however, follows without difficulty, for the
evidence of dreams and visions applies to the spirits of objects in much
the same manner as to human ghosts. Everyone who has seen visions while
lightheaded in fever, everyone who has ever dreamt a dream, has seen the
phantoms of objects as well as of persons. How then can we charge the
savage with far-fetched absurdity for taking into his philosophy and
religion an opinion which rests on the very evidence of his senses? The
notion is implicitly recognized in his accounts of ghosts, which do not
come naked, but clothed, and even armed; of course there must be spirits
of garments and weapons, seeing that the spirits of men come bearing
them. It will indeed place savage philosophy in no unfavourable light,
if we compare this extreme animistic development of it with the popular
opinion still surviving in civilized countries, as to ghosts and the
nature of the human soul as connected with them. When the ghost of
Hamlet’s father appeared armed cap-a-pe,

                  ‘Such was the very armour he had on,
                  When he the ambitious Norway combated.’

And thus it is a habitual feature of the ghost-stories of the civilized,
as of the savage world, that the ghost comes dressed, and even dressed
in well-known clothing worn in life. Hearing as well as sight testifies
to the phantoms of objects: the clanking of ghostly chains and the
rustling of ghostly dresses are described in the literature of
apparitions. Now by the savage theory, according to which the ghost and
his clothes are alike real and objective, and by the modern scientific
theory, according to which both ghost and garment are alike imaginary
and subjective, the facts of apparitions are rationally met. But the
modern vulgar who ignore or repudiate the notion of ghosts of things,
while retaining the notion of ghosts of persons, have fallen into a
hybrid state of opinion which has neither the logic of the savage nor of
the civilized philosopher.

Among the lower races of mankind, three have been observed to hold most
explicitly and distinctly the doctrine of object-souls. These are the
Algonquin tribes, extending over a great district of North America, the
islanders of the Fijian group, and the Karens of Burma. Among the
Indians of North America, Father Charlevoix wrote, souls are, as it
were, the shadows and the animated images of the body, and it is by a
consequence of this principle that they believe everything to be animate
in the universe. This missionary was especially conversant with the
Algonquins, and it was among one of their tribes, the Ojibwas, that
Keating noticed the opinion that not only men and beasts have souls, but
inorganic things, such as kettles, &c., have in them a similar essence.
In the same district Father Le Jeune had described, in the seventeenth
century, the belief that the souls, not only of men and animals, but of
hatchets and kettles, had to cross the water to the Great Village, out
where the sun sets.[785] In interesting correspondence with this quaint
thought is Mariner’s description of the Fiji doctrine—‘If an animal or a
plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other
substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial
bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a
chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of
the gods. If a house is taken down or any way destroyed, its immortal
part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm
this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or
deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of
which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the
souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes
and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world,
swimming, or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the
regions of immortality.’ A full generation later the Rev. Thomas
Williams, while remarking that the escape of brutes and lifeless
substances to the spirit-land of Mbulu does not receive universal credit
among the Fijians, nevertheless confirms the older account of it:—‘Those
who profess to have seen the souls of canoes, houses, plants, pots, or
any artificial bodies, swimming with other relics of this frail world on
the stream of the Kauvandra well, which bears them into the regions of
immortality, believe this doctrine as a matter of course; and so do
those who have seen the footmarks left about the same well by the ghosts
of dogs, pigs, &c.’[786] The theory among the Karens is stated by the
Rev. E. B. Cross, as follows:—‘Every object is supposed to have its
“kelah.” Axes and knives, as well as trees and plants, are supposed to
have their separate “kelahs.”’ ‘The Karen, with his axe and cleaver, may
build his house, cut his rice, and conduct his affairs, after death as
before.’[787]

As so many races perform funeral sacrifices of men and animals, in order
to dispatch their souls for the service of the soul of the deceased, so
tribes who hold this doctrine of object-souls very rationally sacrifice
objects, in order to transmit these souls. Among the Algonquin tribes,
the sacrifice of objects for the dead was a habitual rite, as when we
read of a warrior’s corpse being buried with musket and war-club,
calumet and war-paint, and a public address being made to the body at
burial concerning his future path; while in like manner a woman would be
buried with her paddle and kettle, and the carrying-strap for the
everlasting burden of her heavily-laden life. That the purpose of such
offerings is the transmission of the object’s spirit or phantom to the
possession of the man’s is explicitly stated as early as 1623 by Father
Lallemant; when the Indians buried kettles, furs, &c., with the dead,
they said that the bodies of the things remained, but their souls went
to the dead who used them. The whole idea is graphically illustrated in
the following Ojibwa tradition or myth. Gitchi Gauzini was a chief who
lived on the shores of Lake Superior, and once, after a few days’
illness, he seemed to die. He had been a skilful hunter, and had desired
that a fine gun which he possessed should be buried with him when he
died. But some of his friends not thinking him really dead, his body was
not buried; his widow watched him for four days, he came back to life,
and told his story. After death, he said, his ghost travelled on the
broad road of the dead toward the happy land, passing over great plains
of luxuriant herbage, seeing beautiful groves, and hearing the songs of
innumerable birds, till at last, from the summit of a hill, he caught
sight of the distant city of the dead, far across an intermediate space,
partly veiled in mist, and spangled with glittering lakes and streams.
He came in view of herds of stately deer and moose, and other game,
which with little fear walked near his path. But he had no gun, and
remembering how he had requested his friends to put his gun in his
grave, he turned back to go and fetch it. Then he met face to face the
train of men, women, and children who were travelling toward the city of
the dead. They were heavily laden with guns, pipes, kettles, meats, and
other articles; women were carrying basket-work and painted paddles, and
little boys had their ornamented clubs and their bows and arrows, the
presents of their friends. Refusing a gun which an overburdened
traveller offered him, the ghost of Gitchi Gauzini travelled back in
quest of his own, and at last reached the place where he had died. There
he could see only a great fire before and around him, and finding the
flames barring his passage on every side, he made a desperate leap
through, and awoke from his trance. Having concluded his story, he gave
his auditors this counsel, that they should no longer deposit so many
burdensome things with the dead, delaying them on their journey to the
place of repose, so that almost everyone he met complained bitterly. It
would be wiser, he said, only to put such things in the grave as the
deceased was particularly attached to, or made a formal request to have
deposited with him.[788]

With purpose no less distinct, when a dead Fijian chief is laid out
oiled and painted and dressed as in life, a heavy club is placed ready
near his right hand, which holds one or more of the much-prized carved
‘whale’s tooth’ ornaments. The club is to serve for defence against the
adversaries who await his soul on the road to Mbulu, seeking to slay and
eat him. We hear of a Fijian taking a club from a companion’s grave, and
remarking in explanation to a missionary who stood by, ‘The ghost of the
club has gone with him.’ The purpose of the whale’s tooth is this; on
the road to the land of the dead, near the solitary hill of
Takiveleyawa, there stands a ghostly pandanus-tree, and the spirit of
the dead man is to throw the spirit of the whale’s tooth at this tree,
having struck which he is to ascend the hill and await the coming of the
spirits of his strangled wives.[789] The funeral rites of the Karens
complete the present group. They kept up what seems a clear survival
from actual human and animal sacrifice, fastening up near an important
person’s grave a slave and a pony; these invariably released themselves,
and the slave became henceforth a free man. Moreover, the practice of
placing food, implements and utensils, and valuables of gold and silver,
near the remains of the deceased, was general among them.[790]

Now the sacrifice of property for the dead is one of the great religious
rites of the world; are we then justified in asserting that all men who
abandon or destroy property as a funeral ceremony believe the articles
to have spirits, which spirits are transmitted to the deceased? Not so;
it is notorious that there are people who recognize no such theory but
who nevertheless deposit offerings with the dead. Affectionate fancy or
symbolism, a horror of the association of death leading the survivors to
get rid of anything that even suggests the dreadful thought, a desire to
abandon the dead man’s property, an idea that the hovering ghost may
take pleasure in or make use of the gifts left for him, all these are or
may be efficient motives.[791] Yet, having made full allowance for all
this, we shall find good reason to judge that many other peoples, though
they may never have stated the theory of object-souls in the same
explicit way as the Algonquins, Fijians, and Karens, have recognized it
with more or less distinctness. It has given me the more confidence in
this opinion to find it held, under proper reservation, by Mr. W. R.
Alger, an American investigator, who in a treatise entitled ‘A Critical
History of the Doctrine of a Future Life’ has discussed the ethnography
of his subject with remarkable learning and sagacity. ‘The barbarian
brain,’ he writes, ‘seems to have been generally impregnated with the
feeling that everything else has a ghost as well as man.... The custom
of burning or burying things with the dead probably arose, in some cases
at least, from the supposition that every object, has its manes.’[792]
It will be desirable briefly to examine further the subject of funeral
offerings, as bearing on this interesting question of early psychology.

A wide survey of funeral sacrifices over the world will plainly show one
of their most usual motives to be a more or less defined notion of
benefiting the deceased, whether out of kindness to him or from fear of
his displeasure. How such an intention may have taken this practical
shape we can perhaps vaguely guess, familiar as we are with a state of
mind out of which funeral sacrifices could naturally have sprung. The
man is dead, but it is still possible to fancy him alive, to take his
cold hand, to speak to him, to place his chair at the table, to bury
suggestive mementoes in his coffin, to throw flowers into his grave, to
hang wreaths of everlastings on his tomb. The Cid may be set on Babieca
with his sword Tizona in his hand, and carried out to do battle as of
old against the unbeliever; the dead king’s meal may be carried in to
him in state, although the chamberlain must announce that the king does
not dine to-day. Such childlike ignoring of death, such childlike
make-believe that the dead can still do as heretofore, may well have led
the savage to bury with his kinsman the weapons, clothes, and ornaments
that he used in life, to try to feed the corpse, to put a cigar in the
mouth of the skull before its final burial, to lay playthings in the
infant’s grave. But one thought beyond would carry this dim blind fancy
into the range of logical reasoning. Granted that the man is dead and
his soul gone out of him, then the way to provide that departed soul
with food or clothes or weapons is to bury or burn them with the body,
for whatever happens to the man may be taken to happen to the objects
that lie beside him and share his fate, while the precise way in which
the transmission takes place may be left undecided. It is possible that
the funeral sacrifice customary among mankind may have rested at first,
and may to some extent still rest, on vague thoughts and imaginations
like these, as yet fitted into no more definite and elaborate
philosophic theory.

There are, however, two great groups of cases of funeral sacrifice,
which so logically lead up to or involve the notion of souls or spirits
of objects, that the sacrificer himself could hardly answer otherwise a
point-blank question as to their meaning. The first group is that in
which those who sacrifice men and beasts with the intention of conveying
their souls to the other world, also sacrifice lifeless things
indiscriminately with them. The second group is that in which the
phantoms of the objects sacrificed are traced distinctly into the
possession of the human phantom.

The Caribs, holding that after decease man’s soul found its way to the
land of the dead, sacrificed slaves on a chief’s grave to serve him in
the new life, and for the same purpose buried dogs with him, and also
weapons.[793] The Guinea negroes, at the funeral of a great man, killed
several wives and slaves to serve him in the other world, and put fine
clothes, gold fetishes, coral, beads, and other valuables, into the
coffin, to be used there too.[794] When the New Zealand chief had slaves
killed at his death for his service, and the mourning family gave his
chief widow a rope to hang herself with in the woods and so rejoin her
husband,[795] it is not easy to discern here a motive different from
that which induced them at the same time to provide the dead man also
with his weapons. Nor can an intellectual line well be drawn between the
intentions with which the Tunguz has buried with him his horse, his bow
and arrows, his smoking apparatus and kettle. In the typical description
which Herodotus gives of the funeral of the ancient Scythian chiefs, the
miscellaneous contents of the burial-mound, the strangled wife and
household servants, the horses, the choice articles of property, the
golden vessels, fairly represent the indiscriminate purpose which
actuated the barbaric sacrifice of creatures and things.[796] So in old
Europe, the warrior with his sword and spear, the horse with his saddle,
the hunter’s hound and hawk and his bow and arrow, the wife with her gay
clothes and jewels, lie together in the burial-mound. Their common
purpose has become one of the most undisputed inferences of Archæology.

As for what becomes of the objects sacrificed for the dead there are on
record the most distinct statements taken from the sacrificers
themselves. Although the objects rot in the grave or are consumed on the
pile, they nevertheless come in some way into the possession of the
disembodied souls they are intended for. Not the material things
themselves, but phantasmal shapes corresponding to them, are carried by
the souls of the dead on their far journey beyond the grave, or are used
in the world of spirits; while sometimes the phantoms of the dead appear
to the living, bearing property which they have received by sacrifice,
or demanding something that has been withheld. The Australian will take
his weapons with him to his paradise.[797] A Tasmanian, asked the reason
of a spear being deposited in a native’s grave, replied ‘To fight with
when he is asleep.’[798] Many Greenlanders thought that the kayak and
arrows and tools laid by a man’s grave, the knife and sewing implements
laid by a woman’s, would be used in the next world.[799] The instruments
buried with the Sioux are for him to make a living with hereafter; the
paints provided for the dead Iroquois were to enable him to appear
decently in the other world.[800] The Aztec’s water-bottle was to serve
him on the journey to Mictlan, the land of the dead; the bonfire of
garments and baskets and spoils of war was intended to send them with
him, and somehow to protect him against the bitter wind; the offerings
to the warrior’s manes on earth would reach him on the heavenly
plains.[801] Among the old Peruvians, a dead prince’s wives would hang
themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his
attendants would be buried in his fields or places of favourite resort,
in order that his soul, passing through those places, might take their
souls along with him for future service. In perfect consistency with
these strong animistic notions, the Peruvians declared that their reason
for sacrifice of property to the dead was that they ‘have seen, or
thought they saw, those who have long been dead walking, adorned with
the things that were buried with them, and accompanied by their wives
who had been buried alive.’[802]

As definite an implication of the spirit or phantom of an object appears
in a recent account from Madagascar, where things are buried to become
in some way useful to the dead. When King Radama died, it was reported
and firmly believed that his ghost was seen one night in the garden of
his country seat, dressed in one of the uniforms which had been buried
with him, and riding one of the best horses killed opposite his
tomb.[803] Turanian tribes of North Asia avow that the motive of their
funeral offerings of horses and sledges, clothes and axes and kettles,
flint and steel and tinder, meat and butter, is to provide the dead for
his journey to the land of souls, and for his life there.[804] Among the
Esths of Northern Europe, the dead starts properly equipped on his
ghostly journey with needle and thread, hairbrush and soap, bread and
brandy and coin; a toy, if it is a child. And so full a consciousness of
practical meaning survived till lately, that now and then a soul would
come back at night to reproach its relations with not having provided
properly for it, but left it in distress.[805] To turn from these now
Europeanized Tatars to a rude race of the Eastern Archipelago, among the
Orang Binua of Sambawa there prevails this curious law of inheritance;
not only does each surviving relative, father, mother, son, brother, and
so forth, take his or her proper share, but the deceased inherits one
share from himself, which is devoted to his use by eating the animals at
the funeral feast, burning everything else that will burn, and burying
the remainder.[806] In Cochin China, the common people object to
celebrating their feast of the dead on the same day with the upper
classes, for this excellent reason, that the aristocratic souls might
make the servant souls carry home their presents for them. These people
employ all the resources of their civilization to perform with the more
lavish extravagance the savage funeral sacrifices. Here are details from
an account published in 1849 of the funeral of a late king of Cochin
China. ‘When the corpse of Thien Tri was deposited in the coffin, there
were also deposited in it many things for the use of the deceased in the
other world, such as his crown, turbans, clothes of all descriptions,
gold, silver, and other precious articles, rice and other provisions.’
Meals were set out near the coffin, and there was a framed piece of
damask with woollen characters, the abode of one of the souls of the
defunct. In the tomb, an enclosed edifice of stone, the childless wives
of the deceased were to be perpetually shut up to guard the sepulchre,
‘and prepare daily the food and other things of which they think the
deceased has need in the other life.’ At the time of the deposit of the
coffin in a cavern behind the tomb building, there were burnt there
great piles of boats, stages, and everything used in the funeral, ‘and
moreover of all the objects which had been in use by the king during his
lifetime, of chessmen, musical instruments, fans, boxes, parasols, mats,
fillets, carriages, &c., &c., and likewise a horse and an elephant of
wood and pasteboard.’ ‘Some months after the funeral, at two different
times, there were constructed in a forest near a pagoda two magnificent
palaces of wood with rich furnishings, in all things similar to the
palace which the defunct monarch had inhabited. Each palace was composed
of twenty rooms, and the most scrupulous attention was given in order
that nothing might be awanting necessary for a palace, and these palaces
were burned with great pomp, and it is thus that immense riches have
been given to the flames from the foolish belief that it would serve the
dead in the other world.’[807]

Though the custom is found among the Beduins of arraying the dead with
turban, girdle, and sword, yet funeral offerings for the service of
the dead are by no means conspicuous among Semitic nations. The
mention of the rite by Ezekiel, while showing a full sense of its
meaning, characterizes it as not Israelite, but Gentile: ‘The mighty
fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to Hades with weapons
of war, and they have laid their swords under their heads.’[808] Among
the Aryan nations, on the contrary, such funeral offerings are known
to have prevailed widely and of old, while for picturesqueness of rite
and definiteness of purpose they can scarcely be surpassed even among
savages. Why the Brahman’s sacrificial instruments are to be burnt
with him on the funeral pile, appears from this line of the Veda
recited at the ceremony: ‘Yadâ gachâhatyasunîtimetâmathâ devânâm
vasanîrbhavâti,’—‘When he cometh unto that life, faithfully will he do
the service of the gods.’[809] Lucian is sarcastic, but scarcely
unfair, in his comments on the Greek funeral rites, speaking of those
who slew horses and slave-girls and cupbearers, and burned or buried
clothes and ornaments, as for use and service in the world below; of
the meat and drink offerings on the tombs which serve to feed the
bodiless shades in Hades; of the splendid garments and the garlands of
the dead, that they might not suffer cold upon the road, nor be seen
naked by Kerberos. For Kerberos was intended the honey-cake deposited
with the dead; and the obolus placed in the mouth was the toll for
Charon, save at Hermione in Argolis, where men thought there was a
short descent to Hades, and therefore provided the dead with no coin
for the grim ferryman. How such ideas could be realized, may be seen
in the story of Eukrates, whose dead wife appeared to him to demand
one of her golden sandals, which had been dropped underneath the
chest, and so not burnt for her with the rest of her wardrobe; or in
the story of Periander, whose dead wife Melissa refused to give him an
oracular response, for she was shivering and naked, because the
garments buried with her had not been burnt, and so were of no use,
wherefore Periander plundered the Corinthian women of their best
clothes, which he burned in a great trench with prayer, and now
obtained his answer.[810] The ancient Gauls were led, by their belief
in another life, to burn and bury with the dead things suited to the
living; nor is the record improbable that they transferred to the
world below the repayment of loans, for even in modern centuries the
Japanese would borrow money in this life, to be repaid with heavy
interest in the next.[811] The souls of the Norse dead took with them
from their earthly home servants and horses, boats and ferry-money,
clothes and weapons. Thus, in death as in life, they journeyed,
following the long dark ‘hell-way’ (helvegr). The ‘hell-shoon’
(helskó) were bound upon the dead man’s feet for the toilsome journey;
and when King Harald was slain in the battle of Bravalla, they drove
his war-chariot, with the corpse upon it into the great burial-mound,
and there they killed the horse, and King Hring gave his own saddle
beside, that the fallen chief might ride or drive to Walhalla, as it
pleased him.[812] Lastly, in the Lithuanian and old Prussian district,
where Aryan heathendom held its place in Europe so firmly and so late,
accounts of funeral sacrifice of men, and beasts, and things, date on
even beyond the middle ages. Even as they thought that men would live
again in the resurrection rich or poor, noble or peasant, as on earth,
so ‘they believed that the things burned would rise again with them,
and serve them as before.’ Among these people lived the Kriwe
Kriweito, the great priest, whose house was on the high steep mountain
Anafielas. All the Souls of their dead must clamber up this mountain,
wherefore they burned with them claws of bears and lynxes for their
help. All the souls must pass through the Kriwe’s house, and he could
describe to the surviving relatives of each the clothes, and horse,
and weapons he had seen him come with, and even show, for greater
certainty, some mark made with lance or other instrument by the
passing soul.[813] Such examples of funeral rites show a common
ceremony, and to a great degree a common purpose, obtaining from
savagery through barbarism, and even into the higher civilization. Now
could we have required from all these races a distinct answer to the
question, whether they believed in spirits of all things, from men and
beasts down to spears and cloaks, sticks and stones, it is likely that
we might have often received the same acknowledgment of fully
developed animism which stands on record in North America, Polynesia,
and Burma. Failing such direct testimony, it is at least justifiable
to say that the lower culture, by practically dealing with
object-souls, goes far towards acknowledging their existence.

Before quitting the discussion of funeral offerings for transmission to
the dead, the custom must be traced to its final decay. It is apt not to
die out suddenly, but to leave surviving remnants, more or less dwindled
in form and changed in meaning. The Kanowits of Borneo talk of setting a
man’s property adrift for use in the next world, and even go so far as
to lay out his valuables by the bier, but in fact they only commit to
the frail canoe a few old things not worth plundering.[814] So in North
America, the funeral sacrifice of the Winnebagos has come down to
burying a pipe and tobacco with the dead, and sometimes a club in a
warrior’s grave, while the goods brought and hung up at the burial-place
are no longer left there, but the survivors gamble for them.[815] The
Santals of Bengal put two vessels, one for rice and the other for water,
on the dead man’s couch, with a few rupees, to enable him to appease the
demons on the threshold of the shadowy world, but when the funeral pile
is ready these things are removed.[816] The fanciful art of replacing
costly offerings by worthless imitations is at this day worked out into
the quaintest devices in China. As the men and horses dispatched by fire
for the service of the dead are but paper figures, so offerings of
clothes and money may be represented likewise. The imitations of Spanish
pillar-dollars in pasteboard covered with tinfoil, the sheets of
tinfoil-paper which stand for silver money, and if coloured yellow for
gold, are consumed in such quantities that the sham becomes a serious
reality, for the manufacture of mock-money is the trade of thousands of
women and children in a Chinese city. In a similar way trunks full of
property are forwarded in the care of the newly deceased, to friends who
are gone before. Pretty paper houses, ‘replete with every luxury,’ as
our auctioneers say, are burnt for the dead Chinaman to live in
hereafter, and the paper keys are burnt also, that he may unfasten the
paper locks of the paper chests that hold the ingots of gold-paper and
silver-paper, which are to be realized as current gold and silver in the
other world, an idea which, however, does not prevent the careful
survivors from collecting the ashes to re-extract the tin from them in
this.[817] Again, when the modern Hindu offers to his dead parent
funeral cakes with flowers and betel, he presents a woollen yam which he
lays across the cake, and naming the deceased says, ‘May this apparel,
made of woollen yam, be acceptable to thee.’[818] Such facts as these
suggest a symbolic meaning in the practically useless offerings which
Sir John Lubbock groups together—the little models of kayaks and spears
in Esquimaux graves, the models of objects in Egyptian tombs, and the
flimsy unserviceable jewelry buried with the Etruscan dead.[819]

Just as people in Borneo, after they had become Mohammedans, still kept
up the rite of burying provisions for the dead man’s journey, as a mark
of respect,[820] so the rite of interring funeral offerings survived in
Christian Europe. The ancient Greek burial of the dead with the obolus
in his mouth for Charon’s toll is represented in the modern Greek world,
where Charon and the funeral coin are both familiar. As the old
Prussians furnished the dead with spending-money to buy refreshment on
his weary journey, so to this day German peasants bury a corpse with
money in his mouth or hand, a fourpenny-piece or so. Similar little
funeral offerings of coin are recorded in the folklore books elsewhere
in Europe.[821] Christian funeral offerings of this kind are mostly
trifling in value, and doubtful as to the meaning with which they were
kept up. The early Christians retained the heathen custom of placing in
the tomb such things as articles of the toilette and children’s
playthings; modern Greeks would place oars on a shipman’s grave, and
other such tokens for other crafts; the beautiful classic rite of
scattering flowers over the dead still holds its place in Europe.[822]
Whatever may have been the thoughts which first prompted these kindly
ceremonies, they were thoughts belonging to far præ-Christian ages. The
change of sacrifice from its early significance is shown among the
Hindus, who have turned it to account for purposes of priestcraft: he
who gives water or shoes to a Brahman will find water to refresh him,
and shoes to wear, on the journey to the next world, while the gift of a
present house will secure him a future palace.[823] In interesting
correspondence with this, is a transition from pagan to Christian
folklore in our own land. The Lyke-Wake Dirge, the not yet forgotten
funeral chant of the North Country, tells, like some savage or barbaric
legend, of the passage over the Bridge of Death and the dreadful journey
to the other world. But though the ghostly traveller’s feet are still
shod with the old Norseman’s hell-shoon, he gains them no longer by
funeral offering, but by his own charity in life:—

              ‘This a nighte, this a nighte
                Every night and alle;
              Fire and fleet and candle-light,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              When thou from hence away are paste
                Every night and alle;
              To Whinny-moor thou comes at laste,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              If ever thou gave either hosen or shoon,
                Every night and alle;
              Sit thee down and put them on,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              But if hosen nor shoon thou never gave neean,
                Every night and alle;
              The Whinnes shall prick thee to the bare beean,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              From Whinny-moore when thou may passe,
                Every night and alle;
              To Brig o’ Dread thou comes at laste,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              From Brig o’ Dread when thou are paste,
                Every night and alle;
              To Purgatory Fire thou comes at laste,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              If ever thou gave either milke or drink,
                Every night and alle;
              The fire shall never make thee shrinke,
                And Christe receive thy saule.

              But if milk nor drink thou never gave neean,
                Every night and alle;
              The fire shall burn thee to the bare beean
                And Christe receive thy saule.’[824]

What reader, unacquainted with the old doctrine of offerings for the
dead, could realize the meaning of its remnants thus lingering in
peasants’ minds? The survivals from ancient funeral ceremony may here
again serve as warnings against attempting to explain relics of
intellectual antiquity by viewing them from the changed level of modern
opinion.

Having thus surveyed at large the theory of spirits or souls of objects,
it remains to point out what, to general students, may seem the most
important consideration belonging to it, namely, its close relation to
one of the most influential doctrines of civilized philosophy. The
savage thinker, though occupying himself so much with the phenomena of
life, sleep, disease, and death, seems to have taken for granted, as a
matter of course, the ordinary operations of his own mind. It hardly
occurred to him to think about the machinery of thinking. Metaphysics is
a study which first assumes clear shape at a comparatively high level of
intellectual culture. The metaphysical philosophy of thought taught in
our modern European lecture-rooms is historically traced back to the
speculative psychology of classic Greece. Now one doctrine which there
comes into view is especially associated with the name of Democritus,
the philosopher of Abdera, in the fifth century B.C. When Democritus
propounded the great problem of metaphysics, ‘How do we perceive
external things?’—thus making, as Lewes says, an era in the history of
philosophy,—he put forth, in answer to the question, a theory of
thought. He explained the fact of perception by declaring that things
are always throwing off images εἴδωλα of themselves, which images,
assimilating to themselves the surrounding air, enter a recipient soul,
and are thus perceived. Now, supposing Democritus to have been really
the originator of this famed theory of ideas, how far is he to be
considered its inventor? Writers on the history of philosophy are
accustomed to treat the doctrine as actually made by the philosophical
school which taught it. Yet the evidence here brought forward shows it
to be really the savage doctrine of object-souls, turned to a new
purpose as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought. Nor is the
correspondence a mere coincidence, for at this point of junction between
classic religion and classic philosophy the traces of historical
continuity may be still discerned. To say that Democritus was an ancient
Greek is to say that from his childhood he had looked on at the funeral
ceremonies of his country, beholding the funeral sacrifices of garments
and jewels and money and food and drink, rites which his mother and his
nurse could tell him were performed in order that the phantasmal images
of these objects might pass into the possession of forms shadowy like
themselves, the souls of dead men. Thus Democritus, seeking a solution
of his great problem of the nature of thought, found it by simply
decanting into his metaphysics a surviving doctrine of primitive savage
animism. This thought of the phantoms or souls of things, if simply
modified to form a philosophical theory of perception, would then and
there become his doctrine of Ideas. Nor does even this fully represent
the closeness of union which connects the savage doctrine of flitting
object-souls with the Epicurean philosophy. Lucretius actually makes the
theory of film-like images of things (simulacra, membranæ) account both
for the apparitions which come to men in dreams, and the images which
impress their minds in thinking. So unbroken is the continuity of
philosophic speculation from savage to cultured thought. Such are the
debts which civilized philosophy owes to primitive animism.

The doctrine of ideas, thus developed in the classic world, has, indeed,
by no means held its course thenceforth unchanged through metaphysics,
but has undergone transition somewhat like that of the doctrine of the
soul itself. Ideas, fined down to the abstract forms or species of
material objects, and applied to other than visible qualities, have at
last come merely to denote subjects of thought. Yet to this day the old
theory has not utterly died out, and the retention of the significant
term ‘idea’ (ἰδέα, visible form) is accompanied by a similar retention
of original meaning. It is still one of the tasks of the metaphysician
to display and refute the old notion of ideas as being real images, and
to replace it by more abstract conceptions. It is a striking instance
that Dugald Stewart can cite from the works of Sir Isaac Newton the
following distinct recognition of ‘sensible species:’ ‘Is not the
sensorium of animals, the place where the sentient substance is present;
and to which the sensible species of things are brought, through the
nerves and brain, that there they may be perceived by the mind present
in that place?’ Again, Dr. Reid states the original theory of ideas,
while declaring that he conceives it ‘to have no solid foundation,
though it has been adopted very generally by philosophers.... This
notion of our perceiving external objects, not immediately, but in
certain images or species of them conveyed by the senses, seems to be
the most ancient philosophical hypothesis we have on the subject of
perception, and to have, with small variations, retained its authority
to this day.’ Granted that Dr. Reid exaggerated the extent to which
metaphysicians have kept up the notion of ideas as real images of
things, few will deny that it does linger much in modern minds, and that
people who talk of ideas do often, in some hazy metaphorical way, think
of sensible images.[825] One of the shrewdest things ever said about
either ideas or ghosts was Bishop Berkeley’s retort upon Halley, who
bantered him about his idealism. The bishop claimed the mathematician as
an idealist also, his ‘ultimate ratios’ being ghosts of departed
quantities, appearing when the terms that produced them vanished.

It remains to sum up in few words the doctrine of souls, in the various
phases it has assumed from first to last among mankind. In the attempt
to trace its main course through the successive grades of man’s
intellectual history, the evidence seems to accord best with a theory of
its development, somewhat to the following effect. At the lowest levels
of culture of which we have clear knowledge, the notion of a ghost-soul
animating man while in the body, and appearing in dream and vision out
of the body, is found deeply ingrained. There is no reason to think that
this belief was learnt by savage tribes from contact with higher races,
nor that it is a relic of higher culture from which the savage tribes
have degenerated; for what is here treated as the primitive animistic
doctrine is thoroughly at home among savages, who appear to hold it on
the very evidence of their senses, interpreted on the biological
principle which seems to them most reasonable. We may now and then hear
the savage doctrines and practices concerning souls claimed as relics of
a high religious culture pervading the primæval race of man. They are
said to be traces of remote ancestral religion, kept up in scanty and
perverted memory by tribes degraded from a nobler state. It is easy to
see that such an explanation of some few facts, sundered from their
connexion with the general array, may seem plausible to certain minds.
But a large view of the subject can hardly leave such argument in
possession. The animism of savages stands for and by itself; it explains
its own origin. The animism of civilized men, while more appropriate to
advanced knowledge, is in great measure only explicable as a developed
product of the older and ruder system. It is the doctrines and rites of
the lower races which are, according to their philosophy, results of
point-blank natural evidence and acts of straightforward practical
purpose. It is the doctrines and rites of the higher races which show
survival of the old in the midst of the new, modification of the old to
bring it into conformity with the new, abandonment of the old because it
is no longer compatible with the new. Let us see at a glance in what
general relation the doctrine of souls among savage tribes stands to the
doctrine of souls among barbaric and cultured nations. Among races
within the limits of savagery, the general doctrine of souls is found
worked out with remarkable breadth and consistency. The souls of animals
are recognized by a natural extension from the theory of human souls;
the souls of trees and plants follow in some vague partial way; and the
souls of inanimate objects expand the general category to its extremest
boundary. Thenceforth, as we explore human thought onward from savage
into barbarian and civilized life, we find a state of theory more
conformed to positive science, but in itself less complete and
consistent. Far on into civilization, men still act as though in some
half-meant way they believed in souls or ghosts of objects, while
nevertheless their knowledge of physical science is beyond so crude a
philosophy. As to the doctrine of souls of plants, fragmentary evidence
of the history of its breaking down in Asia has reached us. In our own
day and country, the notion of souls of beasts is to be seen dying out.
Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating
itself on its first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul.
This doctrine has undergone extreme modification in the course of
culture. It has outlived the almost total loss of one great argument
attached to it,—the objective reality of apparitional souls or ghosts
seen in dreams and visions. The soul has given up its ethereal
substance, and become an immaterial entity, ‘the shadow of a shade.’ Its
theory is becoming separated from the investigations of biology and
mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the
senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a ground-work of
pure experience. There has arisen an intellectual product whose very
existence is of the deepest significance, a ‘psychology’ which has no
longer anything to do with ‘soul.’ The soul’s place in modern thought is
in the metaphysics of religion, and its especial office there is that of
furnishing an intellectual side to the religious doctrine of the future
life. Such are the alterations which have differenced the fundamental
animistic belief in its course through successive periods of the world’s
culture. Yet it is evident that, notwithstanding all this profound
change, the conception of the human soul is, as to its most essential
nature, continuous from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of
the modern professor of theology. Its definition has remained from the
first that of an animating, separable, surviving entity, the vehicle of
individual personal existence. The theory of the soul is one principal
part of a system of religious philosophy which unites, in an unbroken
line of mental connexion, the savage fetish-worshipper and the civilized
Christian. The divisions which have separated the great religions of the
world into intolerant and hostile sects are for the most part
superficial in comparison with the deepest of all religious schisms,
that which divides Animism from Materialism.

Footnote 607:

  J. D. Lang, ‘Queensland,’ pp. 340, 374, 380, 388, 444 (Buddai appears,
  p. 379, as causing a deluge; he is probably identical with Budyah).

Footnote 608:

  Moffat, ‘South Africa,’ p. 261.

Footnote 609:

  Azara, ‘Voy. dans l’Amérique Méridionale,’ vol. ii. pp. 3, 14, 25, 51,
  60, 91, 119, &c.; D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 318.

Footnote 610:

  Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. p. 435; Euseb. ‘Hist. Eccl.’ iv. 15;
  Bingham, book i. ch. ii.; Vanini, ‘De Admirandis Naturae Arcanis,’
  dial. 37; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism,’ vol. i. p. 126; Encyclop.
  Brit. (5th ed.) s.v. ‘Superstition.’

Footnote 611:

  J. de Verrazano in Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 300.

Footnote 612:

  See W. Ellis, ‘Hist. of Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 429; Flacourt, ‘Hist.
  de Madagascar,’ p. 59.

Footnote 613:

  Dampier, ‘Voyages,’ vol. ii. part ii. p. 76.

Footnote 614:

  Roe in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 2.

Footnote 615:

  Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ p. 564: see also ‘Origin of
  Civilization,’ p. 138.

Footnote 616:

  Sproat, ‘Scenes and Studies of Savage Life,’ p. 205.

Footnote 617:

  Mouat, ‘Andaman Islanders,’ pp. 2, 279, 303. Since the above was
  written, the remarkable Andaman religion has been described by Mr. E.
  H. Man, in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. xii. (1883) p. 156. (Note to
  3rd ed.)

Footnote 618:

  Baker, ‘Races of the Nile Basin,’ in Tr. Eth. Soc. vol. v. p. 231;
  ‘The Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 246. See Kaufmann, ‘Schilderungen aus
  Central-afrika,’ p. 123; Brun-Rollet, ‘Le Nil Blanc et le Soudan,’ pp.
  100, 222, also pp. 164, 200, 234; G. Lejean in ‘Rev. des Deux M.’
  April 1, 1862, p. 760; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. pp. 72-5;
  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 208. Other recorded cases of denial of
  religion of savage tribes on narrow definition or inadequate evidence
  may be found in Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. pp. 11-15
  (Australians and Californians); Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. i. p. 323
  (Aru Islanders, &c.); Farrar in ‘Anthrop. Rev.’ Aug. 1864, p. ccxvii,
  (Kafirs, &c.); Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 583 (Manaos); J. G.
  Palfrey, ‘Hist. of New England,’ vol. i. p. 46 (New England tribes).

Footnote 619:

  The term has been especially used to denote the doctrine of Stahl, the
  promulgator also of the phlogiston-theory. The Animism of Stahl is a
  revival and development in modern scientific shape of the classic
  theory identifying vital principle and soul. See his ‘Theoria Medica
  Vera,’ Halle, 1737; and the critical dissertation on his views,
  Lemoine, ‘Le Vitalisme et l’Animisme de Stahl,’ Paris, 1864.

Footnote 620:

  Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

Footnote 621:

  Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 291, Cree atchâk==soul.

Footnote 622:

  Brasseur, ‘Langue Quichée,’ s.v.

Footnote 623:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 705; vol. ii. p. 310.

Footnote 624:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 194.

Footnote 625:

  Döhne, ‘Zulu Dic.’ s.v. ‘tunzi;’ Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ pp. 91,
  126; ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 342.

Footnote 626:

   Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 245; Arbousset and Daumas, ‘Voyage,’ p. 12.

Footnote 627:

  Goldie, ‘Efik Dictionary,’ s.v.; see Kölle, ‘Afr. Native Lit.’ p. 324
  (Kanuri). Also ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. v. p. 713 (Australian).

Footnote 628:

  Dante, ‘Div. Comm. Purgatorio,’ canto iii. Compare Grohmann,
  ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p. 221. See ante, p. 85.

Footnote 629:

  Rochefort, pp. 429, 516; J. G. Müller, p. 207.

Footnote 630:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 135; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ &c. p.
  131.

Footnote 631:

  Casalis, l.c. See also Mariner, ibid.

Footnote 632:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 15-23.

Footnote 633:

  J. H. Bernau, ‘Brit. Guiana,’ p. 134.

Footnote 634:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1028, 1133. Anglo-Saxon man-lica.

Footnote 635:

  Lieber, ‘Laura Bridgman,’ in Smithsonian Contrib. vol. ii. p. 8.

Footnote 636:

  G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. of W. Australia,’ p. 103.

Footnote 637:

  Brinton, p. 50, see p. 235; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 15.

Footnote 638:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

Footnote 639:

  Crawfurd, ‘Malay Gr. and Dic.’ s.v.; Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 386.

Footnote 640:

  Oviedo, ‘Hist. du Nicaragua,’ pp. 21-51.

Footnote 641:

  Pott, ‘Zigeuner,’ vol. ii. p. 306; ‘Indo-Germ. Wurzel-Wörterbuch,’
  vol. i. p. 1073; Borrow, ‘Lavengro,’ vol. ii. ch. xxvi. ‘write the lil
  of him whose dook gallops down that hill every night,’ see vol. iii.
  ch. iv.

Footnote 642:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 253; Comm. in Virg. Æn. iv. 684;
  Cic. Verr. v. 45; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 210; Rochholz,
  ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ &c. vol. i. p. 111.

Footnote 643:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 241.

Footnote 644:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 393.

Footnote 645:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. pp. 75-8; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian
  Tribes,’ part i. pp. 33, 83, part iv. p. 70; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194;
  J. G. Müller, pp. 66, 207-8.

Footnote 646:

  Cross in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 310.

Footnote 647:

  Macpherson, pp. 91-2. See also Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 71 (Lapp);
  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 189 (Dayaks).

Footnote 648:

  Shürmann, ‘Vocab. of Parnkalla Lang.’ s.v.

Footnote 649:

  Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 291; Keating, ‘Narr. of Long’s Exp.’ vol. ii. p.
  154.

Footnote 650:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 242; see the converse process of catching
  away a man’s soul, causing him to pine and die, p. 250.

Footnote 651:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 220.

Footnote 652:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 319; also Sproat, p. 213 (Vancouver’s
  I.).

Footnote 653:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 34; Gmelin, ‘Reisen durch Sibirien,’ vol.
  ii. p. 359 (Yakuts); Ravenstein, ‘Amur,’ p. 351 (Tunguz).

Footnote 654:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 143; vol. ii. pp. 388, 418; vol.
  iii. p. 236. Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 196, &c.; Cross, ‘Karens,’ in
  ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. 1854, p. 307. See also St. John,
  ‘Far East,’ l.c. (Dayaks).

Footnote 655:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 150.

Footnote 656:

  Cardan, ‘De Varietate Rerum,’ Basel, 1556, cap. xliii.

Footnote 657:

  Stanbridge, ‘Abor. of Victoria,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 300.

Footnote 658:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 103.

Footnote 659:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 269. See also Sproat, l.c.

Footnote 660:

  Rühs, ‘Finland,’ p. 303; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 134; Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

Footnote 661:

  Vatnsdæla Saga; Baring-Gould, ‘Werewolves,’ p. 29.

Footnote 662:

  Plin. vii. 53; Lucian. Hermotimus, Musc. Encom. 7.

Footnote 663:

  R. D. Owen, ‘Footfalls on the Boundary of another World,’ p. 259. See
  A. R. Wallace, ‘Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural,’ p. 43.

Footnote 664:

  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 331, vol. iii. p. 236. See Calmet,
  ‘Diss. sur les Esprits;’ Maury, ‘Magie,’ part ii. ch. iv.

Footnote 665:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

Footnote 666:

  Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.

Footnote 667:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 104, 184, 333; Baker in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’
  vol. i. p. 57.

Footnote 668:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 319; Jagor in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.,’ vol.
  ii. p. 175.

Footnote 669:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 199; Cross, l.c.; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’
  vol. i. p. 144, vol. ii. p. 389, vol. iii. p. 266.

Footnote 670:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 16-20; Eisenmenger, vol. i. p. 458, vol.
  ii. pp. 13, 20, 453; Franck, ‘Kabbale,’ p. 235.

Footnote 671:

  Augustin. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 18.

Footnote 672:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1036.

Footnote 673:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 78; Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des
  Sauvages,’ vol. i. p. 363.

Footnote 674:

  Callaway, ‘Relig. of Amazulu,’ pp. 228, 260, 316; ‘Journ. Anthrop.
  Inst.’ vol. i. p. 170. See also St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 199
  (Dayaks).

Footnote 675:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 242.

Footnote 676:

  Mayne, ‘Brit. Columbia,’ p. 261; see Sproat, l.c.

Footnote 677:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ pp. 210, 395; M. H. Kingsley, ‘W. African
  Studies,’ p. 205. See also Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 396; J. G.
  Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 287; Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol.
  viii. p. 677; ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 8.

Footnote 678:

  Homer. Il. xxiii. 59. See also Odyss. xi. 207, 222; Porphyr. De Antro
  Nympharum; Virgil. Æn. ii. 794; Ovid. Fast. v. 475.

Footnote 679:

  Cicero De Divinatione, i. 27.

Footnote 680:

  Augustin. De Curâ pro Mortuis, x.-xii. Epist. clviii.

Footnote 681:

  Compare Voltaire’s remarks, ‘Dict. Phil.’ art. ‘ame,’ &c.

Footnote 682:

  Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magazin der Evang. Missionen’,
  Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.

Footnote 683:

  ‘Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo,’ tr. Alfonso Ulloa, Venice,
  1571, p. 127, Eng. Tr. in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80.

Footnote 684:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120.

Footnote 685:

  1 Sam. xxviii. 12.

Footnote 686:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 269.

Footnote 687:

  Pennant, ‘2nd Tour in Scotland,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 315;
  Johnson, ‘Journey to the Hebrides.’

Footnote 688:

  J. Gardner, ‘Faiths of the World,’ s.v. ‘bilocation.’

Footnote 689:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 198.

Footnote 690:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of New Zealand,’ p. 140; Polack, ‘M. and C. of New
  Zealanders,’ vol. i. p. 268. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p.
  393; J. G. Müller, p. 261.

Footnote 691:

  Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits,’ vol. i. ch. xl.

Footnote 692:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 44, 56, 208; Brand, ‘Popular
  Antiquities,’ vol. iii. pp. 155, 235; Johnson, ‘Journey to the
  Hebrides;’ Martin, ‘Western Islands of Scotland,’ in Pinkerton, vol.
  iii. p. 670.

Footnote 693:

  See R. D. Owen, ‘Footfalls on the Boundary of another World;’ Mrs.
  Crowe, ‘Night-Side of Nature;’ Howitt’s Tr. of Ennemoser’s ‘Magic,’
  &c.

Footnote 694:

  The conception of the soul as a small human image is found in various
  districts; see Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 356; St. John, ‘Far
  East,’ vol. i. p. 189 (Dayaks); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194 (N. A. Ind.).
  The idea of a soul as a sort of ‘thumbling’ is familiar to the Hindus
  and to German folklore; compare the representations of tiny souls in
  mediæval pictures.

Footnote 695:

  Magalhanes de Gandavo, p. 110; Maffei, ‘Indie Orientali,’ p. 107.

Footnote 696:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 287.

Footnote 697:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 42.

Footnote 698:

  Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 756, 763; Purchas, vol. iii. p. 495; J. Jones in
  ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 138.

Footnote 699:

  Calmet, vol. i. ch. xxxvi.; Plin. Ep. vii. 27; Hunt, ‘Pop. Romances,’
  vol. ii. p. 156.

Footnote 700:

  Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jésuites,’ 1639, p. 43; see 1634, p. 13.

Footnote 701:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 92; Yate, p. 140; R. Taylor, pp. 104,
  153; Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 406.

Footnote 702:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ pp. 265, 348, 370.

Footnote 703:

  Homer, II. xxiii. 100.

Footnote 704:

  Ovid, Fast. v. 457.

Footnote 705:

  Isaiah viii. 19; xxix. 4. The Arabs hate whistling (el sifr), it is
  talking to devils (Burton, ‘First Footsteps in East Africa,’ p. 142).
  ‘Nicolaus Remigius, whose “Daemonolatreia” is one of the ghastliest
  volumes in the ghastly literature of witchcraft, cites Hermolaus
  Barbarus as having heard the voice sub-sibilantis daemonis, and,
  after giving other instances, adduces the authority of Psellus to
  prove that the devils generally speak very low and confusedly in order
  not to be caught fibbing,’ Dr Sebastian Evans in ‘Nature,’ June 22,
  1871, p. 140. (Nicolai Remigii Daemonolatreia, Col. Agripp. 1596, lib.
  i. c. 8, ‘pleraeque aliae vocem illis esse aiunt qualem emittunt qui
  os in dolium aut restam rimosam insertum habent’—‘ut Daemones e pelvi
  stridulâ voce ac tenui sibilo verba ederent’).

Footnote 706:

  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 176.

Footnote 707:

  Flacourt, ‘Madagascar,’ p. 101.

Footnote 708:

  N. B. Dennys, ‘Folk-Lore of China,’ p. 22.

Footnote 709:

  Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 142; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’
  p. 209; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 801; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 761.

Footnote 710:

  Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 441; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 187.

Footnote 711:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. pp. 76, 122; Le Jeune in ‘Rel.
  des Jésuites,’ 1634, p. 23; 1639, p. 44; Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 292;
  Peter Jones, ‘Hist. of Ojebway Indians,’ p. 99.

Footnote 712:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323.

Footnote 713:

  Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.

Footnote 714:

  Festus, s.v. ‘everriatores;’ see Bastian, l.c., and compare Hartknoch,
  cited below, vol. ii. p. 40.

Footnote 715:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 132, 216.

Footnote 716:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 285; Glanvil, ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ part
  ii. p. 161; Wuttke, p. 216; Bastian ‘Psychologie’ p. 192.

Footnote 717:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 135.

Footnote 718:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

Footnote 719:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 429.

Footnote 720:

  Loubere, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 458; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p.
  259; see p. 278.

Footnote 721:

  Diog. Laert. x. 67-8; see Serv. ad. Æn. iv. 654.

Footnote 722:

  Irenæus contra Hæres. v. 7, 1; see Origen, De Princep. ii. 3, 2.

Footnote 723:

  Tertull. De Anima, 9.

Footnote 724:

  Hampole, ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt.’

Footnote 725:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 216, 226.

Footnote 726:

  A. J. Davis, ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse,’ New York, 1851, p.
  49.

Footnote 727:

  Calmet, vol. i. ch. xli. &c.

Footnote 728:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 359; vol. iii. pp. 104, 556; Earl,
  ‘Eastern Seas,’ p. 266; St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 52, 73, 79,
  119; Mundy, ‘Narr. from Brooke’s Journals,’ p. 203. Heads were taken
  as funeral offerings by the Garos of N. E. India, Eliot in ‘As. Res.’
  vol. iii. p. 28, Dalton, ‘Descr. Ethnol. of Bengal,’ p. 67; see also
  pp. 46-7 (Kukis).

Footnote 729:

  T. Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. pp. 188-204; Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol.
  ii. p. 220. For New Zealand accounts, see R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’
  pp. 218, 227; Polack, ‘New Zealanders,’ vol. i. pp. 66, 78, 116.

Footnote 730:

  J. M’Coy, ‘Hist. of Baptist Indian Mission,’ p. 360; Waitz, vol. iii.
  p. 200.

Footnote 731:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 429, 512; see also J. G. Müller, pp.
  174, 222.

Footnote 732:

  Oviedo, ‘Hist. de las Indias,’ lib. xxix. c. 31; Charlevoix, ‘Nouv.
  Fr.’ vol. vi. p. 178 (Natchez); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 219. See Brinton,
  ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 239.

Footnote 733:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 573.

Footnote 734:

  Piedrahita, ‘Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’ part i. lib. i. c. 3.

Footnote 735:

  Cieza de Leon, p. 161; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruv. Ant.’ p. 200;
  Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 29. See statements as to effigies, J. G.
  Müller, p. 379.

Footnote 736:

  Simpson, ‘Journey,’ vol. i. p. 190; similar practice among Takulli or
  Carrier Ind., Waitz, vol. iii. p. 200.

Footnote 737:

  Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. i. p. 124; vol. ii. p. 25; ‘Dahome,’ vol.
  ii. p. 18, &c.; ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 403; J. L. Wilson, ‘W.
  Afr.’ pp. 203, 219, 394. See also H. Rowley, ‘Mission to Central
  Africa,’ p. 229.

Footnote 738:

  Cavazzi, ‘1st. Descr. de’ tre Regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola,’
  Bologna, 1687, lib. i. 264; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 419-21; Callaway,
  ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 212.

Footnote 739:

  Renaudot, ‘Acc. by two Mohammedan Travellers,’ London, 1733, p. 81;
  and in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 215; Marco Polo, book iii. chap. xx.;
  and in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 162.

Footnote 740:

  Caron, ‘Japan,’ ibid., p. 622; Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ v. p. 22.

Footnote 741:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new series, vol. ii. p. 374.

Footnote 742:

  Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 119; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. 108,
  174, 192. The practice of attacking or killing all persons met by a
  funeral procession is perhaps generally connected with funeral human
  sacrifice; any one met on the road by the funeral of a Mongol prince
  was slain and ordered to go as escort; in the Kimbunda country, any
  one who meets a royal funeral procession is put to death with the
  other victims at the grave (Magyar, ‘Süd. Afrika,’ p. 353); see also
  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. i. p. 403; Cook, ‘First Voy.’ vol. i. pp.
  146, 236 (Tahiti).

Footnote 743:

  Jakob Grimm, ‘Verbrennen der Leichen,’ contains an instructive
  collection of references and citations.

Footnote 744:

  Homer, Il. xxiii. 175; Eurip. Suppl.; Pausanias, iv. 2.

Footnote 745:

  Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 49; ‘Brynhildarqvitha,’ &c.

Footnote 746:

  Cæsar., Bell. Gall. vi. 19.

Footnote 747:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 145.

Footnote 748:

  Strabo, xv. 1, 62; Cic. Tusc. Disp. v. 27, 78; Diod. Sic. xvii. 91;
  xix. 33, &c.; Grimm, ‘Verbrennen,’ p. 261; Renaudot, ‘Two
  Mohammedans,’ p. 4; and in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 194. See Buchanan,
  ibid. pp. 675, 682; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 298-312.

Footnote 749:

  H. H. Wilson, ‘On the supposed Vaidik authority for the Burning of
  Hindu Widows,’ in ‘Journ. Roy. As. Soc.’ vol. xvi. (1854) p. 201; in
  his ‘Works,’ vol. ii. p. 270. Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattung bei den
  Brahmanen,’ in ‘Zeitschr. der Deutsch. Morgenl. Ges.’ vol. ix.;
  ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 34.

Footnote 750:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 543; part iii. pp. 229, 520;
  Waitz, vol. iii. pp. 191-3.

Footnote 751:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 355, 364; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 178.

Footnote 752:

  Mouhot, ‘Indo-China,’ vol. i. p. 252.

Footnote 753:

  Wood in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 36.

Footnote 754:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 26.

Footnote 755:

  De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 61.

Footnote 756:

  Ravenstein, ‘Amur,’ p. 382; T. W. Atkinson, p. 483.

Footnote 757:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. ii. p. 253 (Dayaks).

Footnote 758:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 78; Sagard, ‘Hist. du
  Canada,’ p. 497; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 229.

Footnote 759:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 257.

Footnote 760:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 271; Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 429.

Footnote 761:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269.

Footnote 762:

  Stewart, ‘Notes on Northern Cachar,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol.
  xxiv. p. 632; Cross, ‘Karens,’ l.c.; Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c.

Footnote 763:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 317.

Footnote 764:

  Low in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 426. See Meiners, vol. i. p.
  220; vol. ii. p. 791.

Footnote 765:

  Juvenal, Sat. xv. 148.

Footnote 766:

  Alger, ‘Future Life,’ p. 632, and see ‘Bibliography,’ appendix ii.;
  Wesley, ‘Sermon on Rom. viii. 19-22;’ Adam Clarke, ‘Commentary,’ on
  same text. This, by the way, is the converse view to Bellarmine’s, who
  so patiently let the fleas bite him, saying, ‘We shall have heaven to
  reward us for our sufferings, but these poor creatures have nothing
  but the enjoyment of the present life.’—Bayle ‘Biog. Dic.’ The
  argument in Butler’s ‘Analogy,’ part i. ch. i. puts the evidence for
  souls of brutes on much the same footing as that for souls of men.

Footnote 767:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. pp. 237, 262; part ii. p. 68.

Footnote 768:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 196; vol. ii. pp. 23, 78;
  Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 118; Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ p. 178.

Footnote 769:

  Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 152; Cranz, p. 301: sec Nilsson, p. 140.
  Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ xiii. ch. 47; Clavigero, ‘Messico,’
  vol. ii. pp. 94-6.

Footnote 770:

  Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 312.

Footnote 771:

  Baron, ‘Tonquin,’ in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 704.

Footnote 772:

  W. G. Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 10; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii.
  p. 334; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 519 (Gallas).

Footnote 773:

  Grimm, ‘Verbrennen der Leichen.’ A curious correspondence in the
  practice of cutting off a fowl’s head as a funeral rite is to be
  noticed among the Yorubas of W. Africa (Burton, ‘W. and W.’ p. 220),
  Chuwashes of Siberia (Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120), old Russians
  (Grimm, ‘Verbrennen,’ p. 254).

Footnote 774:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 335.

Footnote 775:

  Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 177; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp.
  62, 284, 331.

Footnote 776:

  Mannhardt, ‘Götterwelt der Deutschen, &c.’ vol. i. p. 319.

Footnote 777:

  Saint-Foix, ‘Œuvres,’ Maestricht, 1778, vol. iv. p. 150.

Footnote 778:

  Chr. von Stramberg, ‘Rheinischer Antiquarius,’ i. vol. i., Coblence,
  1851, p. 203; J. M. Kemble, ‘Horæ Ferales,’ p. 66.

Footnote 779:

  Moerenhout, ‘Voy. Aux Iles du Grand Océan,’ vol. i. p. 430.

Footnote 780:

  St. John ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 187.

Footnote 781:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 202;
  Cross in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 309. See comparison
  of Siamese and Malay ideas; Low in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p.
  340.

Footnote 782:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 291, 443; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’
  vol. ii. p. 184; Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xxii. (compare various
  readings); Meiners, vol. i. p. 215; vol. ii. p. 799.

Footnote 783:

  Malay evidence has since been noticed by Wilken, ‘Het Animisme bij den
  Volken van den Indischen Archipel.’ p. 104. (Note to 3rd edition.)

Footnote 784:

  Hume, ‘Nat. Hist. of Rel.’ sec. ii.; Comte, ‘Philosophie Positive,’
  vol. v. p. 30.

Footnote 785:

  Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 74; Keating, ‘Long’s Exp.’ vol. ii. p. 154; Le
  Jeune, ‘Nouvelle France,’ p. 59; also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199; Gregg,
  ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. p. 244; see Addison’s No. 56 of the
  ‘Spectator.’

Footnote 786:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 129; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p.
  242. Similar ideas in Tahiti, Cook’s 3rd Voy. vol. ii. p. 166.

Footnote 787:

  Cross, l.c. pp. 309, 313; Mason, l.c. p. 202. Compare Meiners, vol. i.
  p. 144; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 161-3.

Footnote 788:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 68; ‘Algec Res.’ vol. ii. p.
  128; Lallemant in ‘Rel. des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1626,
  p. 3.

Footnote 789:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. pp. 188, 243, 246; Alger, p. 82; Seemann,
  ‘Viti,’ p. 229.

Footnote 790:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new series, vol. ii. p. 421.

Footnote 791:

  For some cases in which horror or abnegation are assigned as motives
  for abandonment of the dead man’s property, see Humboldt and Bonpland,
  vol. v. p. 626; Dalton in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p.
  191, &c.; Earl, ‘Papuans,’ p. 108; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 13;
  Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 151; Cranz, p. 301; Loskiel, ‘Ind. N. A.’ part
  i. p. 64, but see p. 76. The destruction or abandonment of the whole
  property of the dead may plausibly, whether justly or not, be
  explained by horror or abnegation; but these motives do not generally
  apply to cases where only part of the property is sacrificed, or new
  objects are provided expressly, and here the service of the dead seems
  the reasonable motive. Thus, at the funeral of a Garo girl, earthen
  vessels were broken as they were thrown in above the buried ashes.
  ‘They said, the spirit of the girl would not benefit by them if they
  were given unbroken, but for her the fragments would unite again.’
  (Dalton, ‘Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal,’ p. 67.) The mere fact of
  breaking or destruction of objects at funerals does not carry its own
  explanation, for it is equally applicable to sentimental abandonment
  and to practical transmission of the spirit of the object, as a man is
  killed to liberate his soul. For good cases of the breaking of vessels
  and utensils given to the dead, see ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p.
  325 (Mintira); Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. i. p. 322; G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab.
  W. Australia,’ p. 13 (Australians); Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol.
  iii. p. 188 (Ticunas); St. John, vol. i. p. 68 (Dayaks); Ellis,
  ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 254; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p.
  84 (Appalachicola); D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ vol. ii. p. 196 (N.
  A. I. and ancient graves in England). Cases of formal sacrifice where
  objects are offered to the dead and taken away again, are generally
  doubtful as to motive; see Spix and Martius, vol. i. p. 383; Martius,
  vol. i. p. 485 (Brazilian Tribes); Moffat, ‘S. Africa,’ p. 308
  (Bechuanas); ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 149 (Kayans).

Footnote 792:

  Alger, ‘Future Life,’ p. 81. He treats, however (p. 76), as
  intentionally symbolic the rite of the Winnebagos, who light fires on
  the grave to provide night after night camp-fires for the soul on its
  far journey (Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tr.’ vol. iv. p. 55; the idea is
  introduced in Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha,’ xix.). I agree with Dr. Brinton
  (‘Myths of New World,’ p. 241) that to look for recondite symbolic
  meaning in these simple childish rites is unreasonable. There was a
  similar Aztec rite (Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94). The Mintira light
  fires on the grave for the spirit to warm itself at (‘Journ. Ind.
  Archip.’ vol. i. p. 325, see p. 271, and compare Martius, vol. i. p.
  491). So Australians will light a fire near their camp at night for
  the ghost of some lately dead relative to sit by (Millett, ‘Australian
  Parsonage,’ p. 76.)

Footnote 793:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 222, see 420.

Footnote 794:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 430.

Footnote 795:

  Polack, ‘M. of New Zealanders,’ vol. ii. pp. 66, 78, 116, 127.

Footnote 796:

  Georgi, ‘Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 266; Herodot. iv. 71, see note in
  Rawlinson’s Tr. &c. &c.

Footnote 797:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 228, 245.

Footnote 798:

  Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 97.

Footnote 799:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ pp. 263, 301.

Footnote 800:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. pp. 55, 65; J. G. Müller,
  ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 88, 287.

Footnote 801:

  Sahagun, book iii. App. in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol.
  vii.; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94; Brasseur, vol. iii. pp. 497, 569.

Footnote 802:

  Cieza de Leon, p. 161; Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ pp.
  186, 200.

Footnote 803:

  Ellis, ‘Hist, of Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 254, 429; see Flacourt, p.
  60.

Footnote 804:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 118; J. Billings, ‘Exp. to N. Russia,’ p.
  129; see ‘Samoiedia’ in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 532, and Leems,
  ‘Lapland,’ ibid. p. 484.

Footnote 805:

  Boecler, ‘Ehsten Gebraüche,’ p. 69.

Footnote 806:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 691; see vol. i. pp. 297, 349.

Footnote 807:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 89; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 337.
  For other instances, see Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 332, &c.;
  Alger, ‘Future Life,’ part ii.

Footnote 808:

  Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iv. p. 159; Ezek. xxxii. 27.

Footnote 809:

  Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattung der Brahmanen,’ in D. M. Z. vol. ix. pp.
  vii.-xiv.

Footnote 810:

  Lucian. De Luctu, 9, &c.; Philopseudes, 27; Strabo, viii. 6, 12;
  Herodot. v. 92; Smith’s ‘Dic. Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ art. ‘funus.’

Footnote 811:

  Valer. Max. ii.; Mela, iii. 2. Froius (1565) in Maffei, ‘Histor.
  Indicarum,’ lib. iv.

Footnote 812:

  Grimm, ‘Verbrennen der Leichen,’ pp. 232, &c., 247, &c.; ‘Deutsche
  Myth.’ pp. 795-800.

Footnote 813:

  Dusburg, ‘Chronicon Prussiæ,’ iii. c. v.; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp.
  898, 415 (Anafielas is the glass-mountain of Slavonic and German myth,
  see Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 796). Compare statement in St. Clair and Brophy,
  ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 61; as to food transmitted to dead in other world, with
  more probable explanation, p. 77.

Footnote 814:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 54, 68. Compare Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 430.

Footnote 815:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 54.

Footnote 816:

  Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210.

Footnote 817:

  Davis, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 276; Doolittle, vol. i. p. 193; vol. ii.
  p. 275; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 334; see Marco Polo, book ii.
  ch. lxviii.

Footnote 818:

  Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. pp. 161, 169.

Footnote 819:

  Lubbock, ‘Prehistoric Times,’ p. 142; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol.
  ii. p. 319.

Footnote 820:

  Beeckmann, ‘Voy. to Borneo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 110.

Footnote 821:

  Politis, ‘Neohellen. Mythologia,’ vol. i. part i. p. 266; Hartknoch,
  ‘Alt. und Neues Preussen,’ part i. p. 181; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 791-5;
  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 212; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher
  Glaube,’ &c. vol. i. p. 187, &c.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c. p. 158 (France).

Footnote 822:

  Maitland, ‘Church in the Catacombs,’ p. 137; Forbes Leslie, vol. ii.
  p. 502; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 750; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’, vol. ii. p. 307.

Footnote 823:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 284.

Footnote 824:

  From the collated and annotated text in J. C. Atkinson, ‘Glossary of
  Cleveland Dialect,’ p. 595 (a  one, neean  none, beean = bone).
  Other versions in Scott, ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ vol. ii.
  p. 367; Kelly, ‘Indo-European Folk-lore,’ p. 115; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’
  vol. ii. p. 275. Two verses have perhaps been lost between the fifth
  and sixth. J. C. A. reads ‘meate’ in vv. 7 and 8; the usual reading
  ‘milke’ is retained here. The sense of these two verses may be that
  the liquor sacrificed in life will quench the fire: an idea parallel
  to that known to folklore, that he who gave bread in his lifetime will
  find it after death ready for him to cast into the hellhound’s jaws
  (Mannhardt, ‘Götterwelt der Deutschen und Nordischen Völker,’ p. 319),
  a sop to Cerberus.

Footnote 825:

  Lewes, ‘Biographical History of Philosophy,’ Democritus (and see his
  remarks on Reid); Lucretius, lib. iv.; ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 8;
  Stewart, ‘Philosophy of Human Mind,’ vol. i. chap. i. sec. 2; Reid,
  ‘Essays,’ ii. chaps. iv. xiv.; see Thos. Browne, ‘Philosophy of the
  Mind,’ lect. 27.

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                  OF MYTHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION,
                       LANGUAGE, ART, AND CUSTOM

               BY EDWARD B. TYLOR, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

         PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
     AUTHOR OF “RESEARCHES INTO THE EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND,” ETC.

   “Ce n’est pas dans les possibilités, c’est dans l’homme même qu’il
  faut étudier l’homme: il ne s’agit pas d’imaginer ce qu’il auroit pû
       ou dû faire, mais de regarder ce qu’il fait.”—DE BROSSES.

                             IN TWO VOLUMES

                                VOL. II

                                 LONDON
                   JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
                                  1920

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

[Rights of Translation and Reproduction reserved]

                     CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

CHAPTER XII.

ANIMISM (continued).

Doctrine of Soul’s Existence after Death; its main divisions,
Transmigration and Future Life—Transmigration of Souls: re-birth in
Human and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and Objects—Resurrection
of Body: scarcely held in savage religion—Future Life: a general if not
universal doctrine of low races—Continued existence, rather than
Immortality; second death of Soul—Ghost of Dead remains on earth,
especially if corpse unburied; its attachment to bodily remains—Feasts
of the Dead 1

CHAPTER XIII.

ANIMISM (continued).

Journey of the Soul to the Land of the Dead—Visits by the Living to the
Regions of Departed Souls—Connexion of such legends with myths of
Sunset: the Land of the Dead thus imagined as in the West—Realization of
current religious ideas, whether of savage or civilized theology, in
narratives of visits to the Regions of Souls—Localization of the Future
Life—Distant earthly region: Earthly Paradise, Isles of the
Blest—Subterranean Hades or Sheol—Sun, Moon, Stars—Heaven—Historical
course of belief as to such localization—Nature of Future
Life—Continuance-theory, apparently original, belongs especially to the
lower races—Transitional theories—Retribution-theory, apparently
derived, belongs especially to the higher races—Doctrine of Moral
Retribution as developed in the higher culture—Survey of Doctrine of
Future State, from savage to civilized stages—Its practical effect on
the sentiment and conduct of Mankind 44

CHAPTER XIV.

ANIMISM (continued).

Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider
Doctrine of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural
Religion—Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently
modelled on that of Souls—Transition-stage: classes of Souls
passing into good and evil Demons—Manes-Worship—Doctrine of
Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert
bodies—Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and
Oracle-inspiration—Fetishism—Disease-spirits embodied—Ghost attached to
remains of Corpse—Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in, attached to,
or operating through, an Object—Analogues of Fetish-doctrine in Modern
Science—Stock-and-Stone-Worship—Idolatry—Survival of Animistic
Phraseology in modern Language—Decline of Animistic theory of Nature 108

CHAPTER XV.

ANIMISM (continued).

Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the World—Pervading
Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting man—Spirits manifest in Dreams
and Visions: Nightmares; Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Visionary
Demons—Demons of darkness repelled by fire—Demons otherwise manifest:
seen by animals; detected by footprints—Spirits conceived and treated as
material—Guardian and Familiar Spirits—Nature-Spirits; historical course
of the doctrine—Spirits of Volcanos, Whirlpools, Rocks—Water-Worship:
Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c.—Tree-Worship: Spirits embodied in
or inhabiting Trees; Spirits of Groves and Forests—Animal-worship:
Animals Worshipped, directly, or as incarnations or representatives of
Deities; Totemism; Serpent-Worship—Species-Deities; their relation to
Archetypal Ideas 184

CHAPTER XVI.

ANIMISM (continued).

Higher Deities of Polytheism—Human characteristics applied to
Deity—Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy—Polytheism: its course of development
in lower and higher Culture—Principles of its investigation;
classification of Deities according to central conceptions of their
significance and function—Heaven-god—Rain
god—Thunder-god—Wind-gods—Earth-god—Water
god—Sea-god—Fire-god—Sun-god—Moon-god 247

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 Deity evolved in various forms; its place as completion of the
Polytheistic system and outcome of the Animistic philosophy; its
continuance and development among higher nations—General survey of
Animism as a Philosophy of Religion—Recapitulation of the theory
advanced as to its development through successive stages of culture; its
primary phases best represented among the lower races, while survivals
of these among the higher races mark the transition from savage through
barbaric to civilized faiths—Transition of Animism in the History of
Religion; its earlier and later stages as a Philosophy of the Universe;
its later stages as the principle of a Moral Institution 304

CHAPTER XVIII.

RITES AND CEREMONIES.

Religious Rites: their purpose practical or symbolic—Prayer: its
continuity from low to high levels of Culture; its lower phases
Unethical; its higher phases Ethical—Sacrifice: its original Gift-theory
passes into the Homage-theory and the Abnegation-theory—Manner of
reception of Sacrifice by Deity—Material Transfer to elements,
fetish-animals, priests; consumption of substance by deity or idol;
offering of blood; transmission by fire; incense—Essential transfer:
consumption of essence, savour, &c.—Spiritual Transfer: consumption or
transmission of soul of offering—Motive of Sacrificer—Transition from
Gift-theory to Homage-theory: insignificant and formal offerings;
sacrificial banquets—Abnegation-theory; sacrifice of children,
&c.—Sacrifice of Substitutes: part given for whole; inferior life for
superior; effigies—Modern survival of Sacrifice in folklore and
religion—Fasting, as a means of producing ecstatic vision; its course
from lower to higher Culture—Drugs use to produce ecstasy—Swoons and
fits induced for religious purposes—Orientation: its relation to
Sun-myth and Sun-worship; rules of East and West as to burial of dead,
position of worship, and structure of temple—Lustration by Water and
Fire: its transition from material to symbolic purification; its
connexion with special events of life; its appearance among the lower
races—Lustration of new-born children; of women; of those polluted by
bloodshed or the dead—Lustration continued at higher levels of
Culture—Conclusion 362

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture—Its bearing least
upon Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral, Social, and
Political Philosophy—Language—Mythology—Ethics and Law—Religion—Action
of the Science of Culture, as a means of furthering progress and
removing hindrance, effective in the course of Civilization 443

ANIMISM (continued).

    Doctrine of Soul’s Existence after Death; its main divisions,
    Transmigration and Future Life—Transmigration of Souls: re-birth in
    Human and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and
    Objects—Resurrection of Body: scarcely held in savage
    religion—Future Life: a general if not universal doctrine of low
    races—Continued existence, rather than Immortality; second death of
    Soul—Ghost of Dead remains on earth, especially if corpse unburied;
    its attachment to bodily remains—Feasts of the Dead.

Having thus traced upward from the lower levels of culture the opinions
of mankind as to the souls, spirits, ghosts, or phantoms, considered to
belong to men, to the lower animals, to plants, and to things, we are
now prepared to investigate one of the great religious doctrines of the
world, the belief in the soul’s continued existence in a Life after
Death. Here let us once more call to mind the consideration which cannot
be too strongly put forward, that the doctrine of a Future Life as held
by the lower races is the all but necessary outcome of savage Animism.
The evidence that the lower races believe the figures of the dead seen
in dreams and visions to be their surviving souls, not only goes far to
account for the comparative universality of their belief in the
continued existence of the soul after the death of the body, but it
gives the key to many of their speculations on the nature of this
existence, speculations rational enough from the savage point of view,
though apt to seem far-fetched absurdities to moderns in their much
changed intellectual condition. The belief in a Future Life falls into
two main divisions. Closely connected and even largely overlapping one
another, both world-wide in their distribution, both ranging back in
time to periods of unknown antiquity, both deeply rooted in the lowest
strata of human life which lie open to our observation, these two
doctrines have in the modern world passed into wonderfully different
conditions. The one is the theory of the Transmigration of Souls, which
has indeed risen from its lower stages to establish itself among the
huge religious communities of Asia, great in history, enormous even in
present mass, yet arrested and as it seems henceforth unprogressive in
development; but the more highly educated world has rejected the ancient
belief, and it now only survives in Europe in dwindling remnants. Far
different has been the history of the other doctrine, that of the
independent existence of the personal soul after the death of the body,
in a Future Life. Passing onward through change after change in the
condition of the human race, modified and renewed in its long ethnic
course, this great belief may be traced from its crude and primitive
manifestations among savage races to its establishment in the heart of
modern religion, where the faith in a future existence forms at once an
inducement to goodness, a sustaining hope through suffering and across
the fear of death, and an answer to the perplexed problem of the
allotment of happiness and misery in this present world, by the
expectation of another world to set this right.

In investigating the doctrine of Transmigration, it will be well first
to trace its position among the lower races, and afterwards to follow
its developments, so far as they extend in the higher civilization. The
temporary migration of souls into material substances, from human bodies
down to morsels of wood and stone, is a most important part of the lower
psychology. But it does not relate to the continued existence of the
soul after death, and may be more conveniently treated of elsewhere, in
connexion with such subjects as dæmoniacal possession and
fetish-worship. We are here concerned with the more permanent tenancy of
souls for successive lives in successive bodies.

Permanent transition, new birth, or re-incarnation of human souls in
other human bodies, is especially considered to take place by the soul
of a deceased person animating the body of an infant. It is recorded by
Brebeuf that the Hurons, when little children died, would bury them by
the wayside, that their souls might enter into mothers passing by, and
so be born again.[1] In North-West America, among the Tacullis, we hear
of direct transfusion of soul by the medicine-man, who, putting his
hands on the breast of the dying or dead, then holds them over the head
of a relative and blows through them; the next child born to this
recipient of the departed soul is animated by it, and takes the rank and
name of the deceased.[2] The Nutka Indians not without ingenuity
accounted for the existence of a distant tribe speaking the same
language as themselves, by declaring them to be the spirits of their
dead.[3] In Greenland, where the wretched custom of abandoning and even
plundering widows and orphans was tending to bring the whole race to
extinction, a helpless widow would seek to persuade some father that the
soul of a dead child of his had passed into a living child of hers, or
vice versâ, thus gaining for herself a new relative and protector.[4]
It is mostly ancestral or kindred souls that are thought to enter into
children, and this kind of transmigration is therefore from the savage
point of view a highly philosophical theory, accounting as it does so
well for the general resemblance between parents and children, and even
for the more special phenomena of atavism. In North-West America, among
the Koloshes, the mother sees in a dream the deceased relative whose
transmitted soul will give his likeness to the child;[5] and in
Vancouver’s Island in 1860 a lad was much regarded by the Indians
because he had a mark like the scar of a gun-shot wound on his hip, it
being believed that a chief dead some four generations before, who had
such a mark, had returned.[6] In Old Calabar, if a mother loses a child,
and another is born soon after, she thinks the departed one to have come
back.[7] The Wanika consider that the soul of a dead ancestor animates a
child, and this is why it resembles its father or mother;[8] in Guinea a
child bearing a strong resemblance, physical or mental, to a dead
relative, is supposed to have inherited his soul;[9] and the Yorubas,
greeting a new-born infant with the salutation, ‘Thou art come!’ look
for signs to show what ancestral soul has returned among them.[10] Among
the Khonds of Orissa, births are celebrated by a feast on the seventh
day, and the priest, divining by dropping rice-grains in a cup of water,
and judging from observations made on the person of the infant,
determines which of his progenitors has reappeared, and the child
generally at least among the northern tribes receives the name of that
ancestor.[11] In Europe the Lapps repeat an instructive animistic idea
just noticed in America; the future mother was told in a dream what name
to give her child, this message being usually given by the very spirit
of the deceased ancestor, who was about to be incarnate in her.[12]
Among the lower races generally the renewal of old family names by
giving them to new-born children may always be suspected of involving
some such thought. The following is a curious pair of instances from the
two halves of the globe. The New Zealand priest would repeat to the
infant a long list of names of its ancestors, fixing upon that name
which the child by sneezing or crying when it was uttered, was
considered to select for itself; while the Cheremiss in Russia would
shake the baby till it cried, and then repeat names to it, till it chose
itself one by leaving off crying.[13]

The belief in the new human birth of the departed soul, which has even
led West African negroes to commit suicide when in distant slavery, that
they may revive in their own land, in fact amounts among several of the
lower races to a distinct doctrine of an earthly resurrection. One of
the most remarkable forms which this belief assumes is when dark-skinned
races, wanting some reasonable theory to account for the appearance
among them of human creatures of a new strange sort, the white men, and
struck with their pallid deathly hue combined with powers that seem
those of superhuman spiritual beings, have determined that the manes of
their dead must have come back in this wondrous shape. The aborigines of
Australia have expressed this theory in the simple formula, ‘Blackfellow
tumble down, jump up Whitefellow.’ Thus a native who was hanged years
ago at Melbourne expressed in his last moments the hopeful belief that
he would jump up Whitefellow, and have lots of sixpences. The doctrine
has been current among them since early days of European intercourse,
and in accordance with it they habitually regarded the Englishmen as
their own deceased kindred, come back to their country from an
attachment to it in a former life. Real or imagined likeness completed
the delusion, as when Sir George Grey was hugged and wept over by an old
woman who found in him a son she had lost, or when a convict, recognized
as a deceased relative, was endowed anew with the land he had possessed
during his former life. A similar theory may be traced northward by the
Torres Islands to New Caledonia, where the natives thought the white men
to be the spirits of the dead who bring sickness, and assigned this as
their reason for wishing to kill white men.[14] In Africa, again, the
belief is found among the Western negroes that they will rise again
white, and the Bari of the White Nile, believing in the resurrection of
the dead on earth, considered the first white people they saw as
departed spirits thus come back.[15]

Next, the lower psychology, drawing no definite line of demarcation
between souls of men and of beasts, can at least admit without
difficulty the transmission of human souls into the bodies of the lower
animals. A series of examples from among the native tribes of America
will serve well to show the various ways in which such ideas are worked
out. The Ahts of Vancouver’s Island consider the living man’s soul able
to enter into other bodies of men and animals, going in and out like the
inhabitant of a house. In old times, they say, men existed in the forms
of birds, beasts, and fishes, or these had the spirits of the Indians in
their bodies; some think that after death they will pass again into the
bodies of the animals they occupied in this former state.[16] In an
Indian district of North-West California, we find natives believing the
spirits of their dead to enter into bears, and travellers have heard of
a tribe begging the life of a wrinkle-faced old she grizzly bear as the
recipient of the soul of some particular grandam, whom they fancied the
creature to resemble.[17] So, among the Esquimaux, a traveller noticed a
widow who was living for conscience’ sake upon birds, and would not
touch walrus-meat, which the angekok had forbidden her for a time,
because her late husband had entered into a walrus.[18] Among other
North American tribes, we hear of the Powhatans refraining from doing
harm to certain small wood-birds which received the souls of their
chiefs;[19] of Huron souls turning into turtle-doves after the burial of
their bones at the Feast of the Dead;[20] of that pathetic funeral rite
of the Iroquois, the setting free a bird on the evening of burial, to
carry away the soul.[21] In Mexico, the Tlascalans thought that after
death the souls of nobles would animate beautiful singing birds, while
plebeians passed into weasels and beetles and such like vile
creatures.[22] So, in Brazil, the Içannas say that the souls of the
brave will become beautiful birds, feeding on pleasant fruits, but
cowards will be turned into reptiles.[23] Among the Abipones we hear of
certain little ducks which fly in flocks at night, uttering a mournful
hiss, and which fancy associates with the souls of the dead;[24] while
in Popayan it is said that doves were not killed, as inspired by
departed souls.[25] Lastly, transmigration into brutes is also a
received doctrine in South America as when a missionary heard a
Chiriquane woman of western Brazil say of a fox, ‘May not that be the
spirit of my dead daughter?’[26]

In Africa, again, mention is made of the Maravi thinking that the souls
of bad men became jackals, and of good men snakes.[27] The Zulus, while
admitting that a man may turn into a wasp or lizard, work out in the
fullest way the idea of the dead becoming snakes, a creature whose
change of skin has so often been associated with the thought of
resurrection and immortality. It is especially certain green or brown
harmless snakes, which come gently and fearlessly into houses, which are
considered to be ‘amatongo’ or ancestors, and therefore are treated
respectfully, and have offerings of food given them. In two ways, the
dead man who has become a snake can still be recognized; if the creature
is one-eyed, or has a scar or some other mark, it is recognized as the
‘itongo’ of a man who was thus marked in life; but if he had no mark the
‘itongo’ appears in human shape in dreams, thus revealing the
personality of the snake.[28] In Guinea, monkeys found near a graveyard
are supposed to be animated by the spirits of the dead, and in certain
localities monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes, being thought men in
metempsychosis, are held sacred.[29] It is to be borne in mind that
notions of this kind may form in barbaric psychology but a portion of
the wide doctrine of the soul’s future existence. For a conspicuous
instance of this, let us take the system of the Gold-Coast negroes. They
believe that the ‘kla’ or ‘kra,’ the vital soul, becomes at death a
‘sisa’ or ghost, which can remain in the house with the body, plague the
living, and cause sickness, till it departs or is driven by the sorcerer
to the bank of the River Volta, where the ghosts build themselves houses
and dwell. But they can and do come back from this Land of Souls. They
can be born again as souls in new human bodies, and a soul who was poor
before will now be rich. Many will not come back as men, but will become
animals. To an African mother who has lost her child, it is a
consolation to say, ‘He will come again.’[30]

In higher levels of culture, the theory of re-embodiment of the soul
appears in strong and varied development. Though seemingly not received
by the early Aryans, the doctrine of migration was adopted and adapted
by Hindu philosophy, and forms an integral part of that great system
common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, wherein successive births or
existences are believed to carry on the consequences of past and prepare
the antecedents of future life. To the Hindu the body is but the
temporary receptacle of the soul, which, ‘bound in the chains of deeds’
and ‘eating the fruits of past actions,’ promotes or degrades itself
along a series of embodiments in plant, beast, man, deity. Thus all
creatures differ rather in degree than kind, all are akin to man, an
elephant or ape or worm may once have been human, and may become human
again, a pariah or barbarian is at once low-caste among men and
high-caste among brutes. Through such bodies migrate the sinful souls
which desire has drawn down from primal purity into gross material
being; the world where they do penance for the guilt incurred in past
existences is a huge reformatory, and life is the long grievous process
of developing evil into good. The rules are set forth in the book of
Manu how souls endowed with the quality of goodness acquire divine
nature, while souls governed by passion take up the human state, and
souls sunk in darkness are degraded to brutes. Thus the range of
migration stretches downward from gods and saints, through holy
ascetics, Brahmans, nymphs, kings, counsellors, to actors, drunkards,
birds, dancers, cheats, elephants, horses, Sudras, barbarians, wild
beasts, snakes, worms, insects, and inert things. Obscure as the
relation mostly is between the crime and its punishment in a new life,
there may be discerned through the code of penal transmigration an
attempt at appropriateness of penalty, and an intention to punish the
sinner wherein he sinned. For faults committed in a previous existence
men are afflicted with deformities, the stealer of food shall be
dyspeptic, the scandal-monger shall have foul breath, the horse-stealer
shall go lame, and in consequence of their deeds men shall be born
idiots, blind, deaf and dumb, mis-shaped, and thus despised of good men.
After expiation of their wickedness in the hells of torment, the
murderer of a Brahman may pass into a wild beast or pariah; he who
adulterously dishonours his guru or spiritual father shall be a hundred
times re-born as grass, a bush, a creeper, a carrion bird, a beast of
prey; the cruel shall become blood-thirsty beasts; stealers of grain and
meat shall turn into rats and vultures; the thief who took dyed
garments, kitchen-herbs, or perfumes, shall become accordingly a red
partridge, a peacock, or a musk-rat. In short, ‘in whatever disposition
of mind a man accomplishes such and such an act, he shall reap the fruit
in a body endowed with such and such a quality.’[31] The recognition of
plants as possible receptacles of the transmigrating spirit well
illustrates the conception of souls of plants. The idea is one known to
lower races in a district of the world which has been under Hindu
influence. Thus we hear among the Dayaks of Borneo of the human soul
entering the trunks of trees, where it may be seen damp and blood-like,
but no longer personal and sentient, or of its being re-born from an
animal which has eaten of the bark, flower, or fruit;[32] and the
Santals of Bengal are said to fancy that uncharitable men and childless
women are eaten eternally by worms and snakes, while the good enter into
fruit-bearing trees.[33] But it is an open question how far these and
the Hindu ideas of vegetable transmigration can be considered as
independent. A curious commentary on the Hindu working out of the
conception of plant-souls is to be found in a passage in a 17th-century
work, which describes certain Brahmans of the Coromandel Coast as eating
fruits, but being careful not to pull the plants up by the roots, lest
they should dislodge a soul; but few, it is remarked, are so scrupulous
as this, and the consideration has occurred to them that souls in roots
and herbs are most vile and abject bodies, so that if dislodged they may
become better off by entering into the bodies of men or beasts.[34]
Moreover, the Brahmanic doctrine of souls transmigrating into inert
things has in like manner a bearing on the savage theory of
object-souls.[35]

Buddhism, like the Brahmanism from which it seceded, habitually
recognized transmigration between superhuman and human beings and the
lower animals, and in an exceptional way recognized a degradation even
into a plant or a thing. How the Buddhist mind elaborated the doctrine
of metempsychosis, may be seen in the endless legends of Gautama himself
undergoing his 550 births, suffering pain and misery through countless
ages to gain the power of freeing sentient beings from the misery
inherent in all existence. Four times he became Maha Brahma, twenty
times the dewa Sekra, and many times or few he passed through such
stages as a hermit, a king, a rich man, a slave, a potter, a gambler, a
curer of snake bites, an ape, an elephant, a bull, a serpent, a snipe, a
fish, a frog, the dewa or genius of a tree. At last, when he became the
supreme Buddha, his mind, like a vessel overflowing with honey,
overflowed with the ambrosia of truth, and he proclaimed his triumph
over life:—

               ‘Painful are repeated births.
               O house-builder! I have seen thee,
               Thou canst not build again a house for me.
               Thy rafters are broken
               Thy roof-timbers are shattered.
               My mind is detached,
               I have attained to the extinction of desire.’

Whether the Buddhists receive the full Hindu doctrine of the migration
of the individual soul from birth to birth, or whether they refine away
into metaphysical subtleties the notion of continued personality, they
do consistently and systematically hold that a man’s life in former
existences is the cause of his now being what he is, while at this
moment he is accumulating merit or demerit whose result will determine
his fate in future lives. Memory, it is true, fails generally to recall
these past births, but memory, as we know, stops short of the beginning
even of this present life. When King Bimsara’s feet were burned and
rubbed with salt by command of his cruel son that he might not walk, why
was this torture inflicted on a man so holy? Because in a previous birth
he had walked near a dagoba with his slippers on, and had trodden on a
priest’s carpet without washing his feet. A man may be prosperous for a
time on account of the merit he has received in former births, but if he
does not continue to keep the precepts, his next birth will be in one of
the hells, he will then be born in this world as a beast, afterwards as
a preta or sprite; a proud man may be born again ugly with large lips,
or as a demon or a worm. The Buddhist theory of ‘karma’ or ‘action,’
which controls the destiny of all sentient beings, not by judicial
reward and punishment, but by the inflexible result of cause into
effect, wherein the present is ever determined by the past in an
unbroken line of causation, is indeed one of the world’s most remarkable
developments of ethical speculation.[36]

Within the classic world, the ancient Egyptians were described as
maintaining a doctrine of migration, whether by successive embodiments
of the immortal soul through creatures of earth, sea, and air, and back
again to man, or by the simpler judicial penalty which sent back the
wicked dead to earth as unclean beasts.[37] The pictures and
hieroglyphic sentences of the Book of the Dead, however, do not afford
the necessary confirmation for these statements, even the mystic
transformations of the soul not being of the nature of transmigrations.
Thus it seems that the theological centre whence the doctrine of moral
metempsychosis may have spread over the ancient cultured religions, must
be sought elsewhere than in Egypt. In Greek philosophy, great teachers
stood forth to proclaim the doctrine in a highly developed form. Plato
had mythic knowledge to convey of souls entering such new incarnations
as their glimpse of real existence had made them fit for, from the body
of a philosopher or a lover down to the body of a tyrant and usurper; of
souls transmigrating into beasts and rising again to man according to
the lives they led; of birds that were light-minded souls; of oysters
suffering in banishment the penalty of utter ignorance. Pythagoras is
made to illustrate in his own person his doctrine of metempsychosis, by
recognizing where it hung in Here’s temple the shield he had carried in
a former birth, when he was that Euphorbos whom Menelaos slew at the
siege of Troy. Afterwards he was Hermotimos, the Klazomenian prophet
whose funeral rites were so prematurely celebrated while his soul was
out, and after that, as Lucian tells the story, his prophetic soul
passed into the body of a cock. Mikyllos asks this cock to tell him
about Troy—were things there really as Homer said? But the cock replies,
‘How should Homer have known, O Mikyllos? When the Trojan war was going
on, he was a camel in Baktria!’[38]

In the later Jewish philosophy, the Kabbalists took up the doctrine of
migration, the gilgul or ‘rolling on’ of souls, and maintained it by
that characteristic method of Biblical interpretation which it is good
to hold up from time to time for a warning to the mystical interpreters
of our own day. The soul of Adam passed into David, and shall pass into
the Messiah, for are not these initials in the very name of Ad(a)m, and
does not Ezekiel say that ‘my servant David shall be their prince for
ever.’ Cain’s soul passed into Jethro, and Abel’s into Moses, and
therefore it was that Jethro gave Moses his daughter to wife. Souls
migrate into beasts and birds and vermin, for is not Jehovah ‘the lord
of the spirits of all flesh’? and he who has done one sin beyond his
good works shall pass into a brute. He who gives a Jew unclean meat to
eat, his soul shall enter into a leaf, blown to and fro by the wind;
‘for ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth;’ and he who speaks ill
words, his soul shall pass into a dumb stone, as did Nabal’s, ‘and he
became a stone.’[39] Within the range of Christian influence the
Manichæans appear as the most remarkable exponents of the
metempsychosis. We hear of their ideas of sinners’ souls transmigrating
into beasts, the viler according to their crimes; that he who kills a
fowl or rat will become a fowl or rat himself; that souls can pass into
plants rooted in the ground, which thus have not only life but sense;
that the souls of reapers pass into beans and barley, to be cut down in
their turn, and thus the elect were careful to explain to the bread when
they ate it, that it was not they who reaped the corn it was made of;
that the souls of the auditors, that is, the spiritually low commonalty
who lived a married life, would pass into melons and cucumbers, to
finish their purification by being eaten by the elect. But these details
come to us from the accounts of bitter theological adversaries, and the
question is, how much of them did the Manichæans really and soberly
believe? Allowing for exaggeration and constructive imputation, there is
some reason to consider the account at least founded on fact. The
Manichæans appear to have recognized a wandering of imperfect souls,
whether or not their composite religion may with its Zarathustrian and
Christian elements have also absorbed in so Indian a shape the doctrine
of purification of souls by migration into animals and plants.[40] In
later times, the doctrine of metempsychosis has been again and again
noticed in a district of South-Western Asia. William of Ruysbroek speaks
of the notion of souls passing from body to body as general among the
mediæval Nestorians, even a somewhat intelligent priest consulting him
as to the souls of brutes, whether they could find refuge elsewhere so
as not to be compelled to labour after death. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela
records in the 12th century of the Druses of Mount Hermon: ‘They say
that the soul of a virtuous man is transferred to the body of a new-born
child, whereas that of the vicious transmigrates into a dog, or some
other animal.’ Such ideas indeed, seem not yet extinct in the modern
Druse nation. Among the Nassairi, also, transmigration is believed in as
a penance and purification: we hear of migration of unbelievers into
camels, asses, dogs, or sheep, of disobedient Nassairi into Jews,
Sunnis, or Christians, of the faithful into new bodies of their own
people, a few such changes of ‘shirt’ (i.e. body), bringing them to
enter paradise or become stars.[41] An instance of the belief within the
limits of modern Christian Europe may be found among the Bulgarians,
whose superstition is that Turks who have never eaten pork in life will
become wild boars after death. A party assembled to feast on a boar has
been known to throw it all away, for the meat jumped off the spit into
the fire, and a piece of cotton was found in the ears, which the wise
man decided to be a piece of the ci-devant Turk’s turban.[42] Such
cases, however, are exceptional. Metempsychosis never became one of the
great doctrines of Christendom, though not unknown in mediæval
scholasticism, and though maintained by an eccentric theologian here and
there into our own times. It would be strange were it not so. It is in
the very nature of the development of religion that speculations of the
earlier culture should dwindle to survivals, yet be again and again
revived. Doctrines transmigrate, if souls do not; and metempsychosis,
wandering along the course of ages, came at last to animate the souls of
Fourier and Soame Jenyns.[43]

Thus we have traced the theory of metempsychosis in stage after stage of
the world’s civilization, scattered among the native races of America
and Africa, established in the Asiatic nations, especially where
elaborated by the Hindu mind into its system of ethical philosophy,
rising and falling in classic and mediæval Europe, and lingering at last
in the modern world as an intellectual crotchet, of little account but
to the ethnographer who notes it down as an item of evidence for his
continuity of culture. What, we may well ask, was the original cause and
motive of the doctrine of transmigration? Something may be said in
answer, though not at all enough for full explanation. The theory that
ancestral souls return, thus imparting their own likeness of mind and
body to their descendants and kindred, has been already mentioned and
commended as in itself a very reasonable and philosophical hypothesis,
accounting for the phenomenon of family likeness going on from
generation to generation. But why should it have been imagined that
men’s souls could inhabit the bodies of beasts and birds? As has been
already pointed out, savages not unreasonably consider the lower animals
to have souls like their own, and this state of mind makes the idea of a
man’s soul transmigrating into a beast’s body at least seem possible.
But it does not actually suggest the idea. The view stated in a previous
chapter as to the origin of the conception of soul in general, may
perhaps help us here. As it seems that the first conception of souls may
have been that of the souls of men, this being afterwards extended by
analogy to the souls of animals, plants, &c., so it may seem that the
original idea of transmigration was the straightforward and reasonable
one of human souls being re-born in new human bodies, where they are
recognized by family likenesses in successive generations. This notion
may have been afterwards extended to take in re-birth in bodies of
animals, &c. There are some well-marked savage ideas which will fit with
such a course of thought. The half-human features and actions and
characters of animals are watched with wondering sympathy by the savage,
as by the child. The beast is the very incarnation of familiar qualities
of man; and such names as lion, bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm,
when we apply them as epithets to men, condense into a word some leading
feature of a human life. Consistently with this, we see in looking over
details of savage transmigration that the creatures often have an
evident fitness to the character of the human beings whose souls are to
pass into them, so that the savage philosopher’s fancy of transferred
souls offered something like an explanation of the likeness between
beast and man. This comes more clearly into view among the more
civilized races who have worked out the idea of transmigration into
ethical schemes of retribution, where the appropriateness of the
creatures chosen is almost as manifest to the modern critic as it could
have been to the ancient believer. Perhaps the most graphic restoration
of the state of mind in which the theological doctrine of metempsychosis
was worked out in long-past ages, may be found in the writings of a
modern theologian whose spiritualism often follows to the extreme the
intellectual tracks of the lower races. In the spiritual world, says
Emanuel Swedenborg, such persons as have opened themselves for the
admission of the devil and acquired the nature of beasts, becoming foxes
in cunning, &c., appear also at a distance in the proper shape of such
beasts as they represent in disposition.[44] Lastly, one of the most
notable points about the theory of transmigration is its close bearing
upon a thought which lies very deep in the history of philosophy, the
development-theory of organic life in successive stages. An elevation
from the vegetable to the lower animal life, and thence onward through
the higher animals to man, to say nothing of superhuman beings, does not
here require even a succession of distinct individuals, but is brought
by the theory of metempsychosis within the compass of the successive
vegetable and animal lives of a single being.

Here a few words may be said on a subject which cannot be left out of
sight, connecting as it does the two great branches of the doctrine of
future existence, but which it is difficult to handle in definite terms,
and much more to trace historically by comparing the views of lower and
higher races. This is the doctrine of a bodily renewal or resurrection.
To the philosophy of the lower races it is by no means necessary that
the surviving soul should be provided with a new body, for it seems
itself to be of a filmy or vaporous corporeal nature, capable of
carrying on an independent existence like other corporeal creatures.
Savage descriptions of the next world are often such absolute copies of
this, that it is scarcely possible to say whether the dead are or are
not thought of as having bodies like the living; and a few pieces of
evidence of this class are hardly enough to prove the lower races to
hold original and distinct doctrines of corporeal resurrection.[45]
Again, attention must be given to the practice, so common among low and
high races, of preserving relics of the dead, from mere morsels of bone
up to whole mummified bodies. It is well known that the departed soul is
often thought apt to revisit the remains of the body, as is seen in the
well-known pictures of the Egyptian funeral ritual. But the preservation
of these remains, even where it thus involves a permanent connexion
between body and soul, does not necessarily approach more closely to a
bodily resurrection.[46] In discussing the closely allied doctrine of
metempsychosis, I have described the theory of the soul’s transmigration
into a new human body as asserting in fact an earthly resurrection. From
the same point of view, a bodily resurrection in Heaven or Hades is
technically a transmigration of the soul. This is plain among the higher
races, in whose religion these doctrines take at once clearer definition
and more practical import. There are some distinct mentions of bodily
resurrection in the Rig Veda: the dead is spoken of as glorified,
putting on his body (tanu); and it is even promised that the pious man
shall be born in the next world with his entire body (sarvatanû). In
Brahminism and Buddhism, the re-births of souls in bodies to inhabit
heavens and hells are simply included as particular cases of
transmigration. The doctrine of the resurrection appears far back in the
religion of Persia, and is thence supposed to have passed into late
Jewish belief.[47] In early Christianity, the conception of bodily
resurrection is developed with especial strength and fulness in the
Pauline doctrine. For an explicit interpretation of this doctrine, such
as commended itself to the minds of later theologians, it is instructive
to cite the remarkable passage of Origen, where he speaks of ‘corporeal
matter, of which matter, in whatever quality placed, the soul always has
use, now indeed carnal, but afterwards indeed subtler and purer, which
is called spiritual.’[48]

Passing from these metaphysical doctrines of civilized theology, we now
take up a series of beliefs higher in practical moment, and more clearly
conceived in savage thought. There may well have been, and there may
still be, low races destitute of any belief in a Future State.
Nevertheless, prudent ethnographers must often doubt accounts of such,
for this reason, that the savage who declares that the dead live no
more, may merely mean to say that they are dead. When the East African
is asked what becomes of his buried ancestors, the ‘old people,’ he can
reply that ‘they are ended,’ yet at the same time he fully admits that
their ghosts survive.[49] In an account of the religious ideas of the
Zulus, taken down from a native, it is explicitly stated that
Unkulunkulu the Old-Old-One said that people ‘were to die and never rise
again,’ and that he allowed them to ‘die and rise no more.’[50] Knowing
so thoroughly as we now do the theology of the Zulus, whose ghosts not
only survive in the under-world, but are the very deities of the living,
we can put the proper sense to these expressions. But without such
information, we might have mistaken them for denials of the soul’s
existence after death. This objection may even apply to one of the most
formal denials of a future life ever placed on record among an
uncultured race, a poem of the Dinka tribe of the White Nile, concerning
Dendid the Creator:—

    ‘On the day when Dendid made all things,
      He made the sun;
    And the sun comes forth, goes down, and comes again:
      He made the moon;
    And the moon comes forth, goes down, and comes again:
      He made the stars;
    And the stars come forth, go down, and come again:
      He made man;
    And man comes forth, goes down into the ground, and comes no more.’

It is to be remarked, however, that the close neighbours of these Dinka,
the Bari, believe that the dead do return to live again on earth, and
the question arises whether it is the doctrine of bodily resurrection,
or the doctrine of the surviving ghost-soul, that the Dinka poem denies.
The missionary Kaufmann says that the Dinka do not believe the
immortality of the soul, that they think it but a breath, and with death
all is over; Brun-Rollet’s contrary authority goes to prove that they do
believe in another life; both leave it an open question whether they
recognize the existence of surviving ghosts.[51]

Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole, we shall at least
not be ill-advised in taking as one of its general and principal
elements the doctrine of the soul’s Future Life. But here it is needful
to explain, to limit, and to reserve, lest modern theological ideas
should lead us to misconstrue more primitive beliefs. In such enquiries
the phrase ‘immortality of the soul’ is to be avoided as misleading. It
is doubtful how far the lower psychology entertains at all an absolute
conception of immortality, for past and future fade soon into utter
vagueness as the savage mind quits the present to explore them, the
measure of months and years breaks down even within the narrow span of
human life, and the survivor’s thought of the soul of the departed
dwindles and disappears with the personal memory that kept it alive. The
doctrine of the surviving soul may indeed be treated as common to all
known races, though its acceptance is not unanimous. In savage as in
civilized life, dull and careless natures ignore a world to come as too
far off, while sceptical intellects are apt to reject its belief as
wanting proof. There are even statements on record of whole classes
being formally excluded from future life. This may be a matter of social
pride. In the Tonga Islands, according to Mariner, it was held that the
chiefs and nobles would live hereafter in the happy island of Bolotu,
but that the souls of the common people would die with their bodies. So
Captain John Smith relates as to the belief of the Virginians, that the
chiefs went after death beyond the sunset mountains, there to dance and
sing with their predecessors, ‘but the common people they suppose shall
not live after death.’ In the record of a missionary examination of the
Nicaraguans, they are made to state their belief that if a man lived
well, his soul would ascend to dwell among the gods, but if ill it would
perish with the body, and there would be an end of it.[52] None of these
accounts, however, agree with what is known of the religion of kindred
peoples, Polynesian, Algonquin, or Aztec. But granted that the soul
survives the death of the body, instance after instance from the records
of the lower culture shows this soul to be regarded as a mortal being,
liable like the body itself to accident and death. The Greenlanders
pitied the poor souls who must pass in winter or in storm the dreadful
mountain where the dead descend to reach the other world, for then a
soul is like to come to harm, and die the other death where there is
nothing left, and this is to them the dolefullest thing of all.[53] Thus
the Fijians tell of the fight which the ghost of a departed warrior must
wage with the soul-killing Samu and his brethren; this is the contest
for which the dead man is armed by burying the war-club with his corpse,
and if he conquers, the way is open for him to the judgment-seat of
Ndengei, but if he is wounded, his doom is to wander among the
mountains, and if killed in the encounter he is cooked and eaten by Samu
and his brethren. But the souls of unmarried Fijians will not even
survive to stand this wager of battle; such try in vain to steal at low
water round to the edge of the reef past the rocks where Nangananga,
destroyer of wifeless souls, sits laughing at their hopeless efforts,
and asking them if they think the tide will never flow again, till at
last the rising flood drives the shivering ghosts to the beach, and
Nangananga dashes them in pieces on the great black stone, as one
shatters rotten firewood.[54] Such, again, were the tales told by the
Guinea negroes of the life or death of departed souls. Either the great
priest before whom they must appear after death would judge them,
sending the good in peace to a happy place, but killing the wicked a
second time with the club that stands ready before his dwelling; or else
the departed shall be judged by their god at the river of death, to be
gently wafted by him to a pleasant land if they have kept feasts and
oaths and abstained from forbidden meats, but if not, to be plunged into
the river by the god, and thus drowned and buried in eternal
oblivion.[55] Even common water can drown a negro ghost, if we may
believe the missionary Cavazzi’s story of the Matamba widows being
ducked in the river or pond to drown off the souls of their departed
husbands, who might still be hanging about them, clinging closest to the
best-loved wives. After this ceremony, they went and married again.[56]
From such details it appears that the conception of some souls suffering
extinction at death or dying a second death, a thought still as
heretofore familiar to speculative theology, is not unknown in the lower
culture.

The soul, as recognized in the philosophy of the lower races, may be
defined as an ethereal surviving being, conceptions of which preceded
and led up to the more transcendental theory of the immaterial and
immortal soul, which forms part of the theology of higher nations. It is
principally the ethereal surviving soul of early culture that has now to
be studied in the religions of savages and barbarians and the folk-lore
of the civilized world. That this soul should be looked on as surviving
beyond death is a matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain
experience is there to teach it to every savage; his friend or his enemy
is dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees the spectral form
which is to his philosophy a real objective being, carrying personality
as it carries likeness. This thought of the soul’s continued existence
is, however, but the gateway into a complex region of belief. The
doctrines which, separate or compounded, make up the scheme of future
existence among particular tribes, are principally these: the theories
of lingering, wandering, and returning ghosts, and of souls dwelling on
or below or above the earth in a spirit-world, where existence is
modelled upon the earthly life, or raised to higher glory, or placed
under reversed conditions, and lastly, the belief in a division between
happiness and misery of departed souls, by a retribution for deeds done
in life, determined in a judgment after death.

‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it,’ said Dr. Johnson
of the apparition of departed spirits. The doctrine that ghost-souls of
the dead hover among the living is indeed rooted in the lowest levels of
savage culture, extends through barbaric life almost without a break,
and survives largely and deeply in the midst of civilization. From the
myriad details of travellers, missionaries, historians, theologians,
spiritualists, it may be laid down as an admitted opinion, as wide in
distribution as it is natural in thought, that the two chief
hunting-grounds of the departed soul are the scenes of its fleshly life
and the burial place of its body. As in North America the Chickasaws
believed that the spirits of the dead in their bodily shape moved about
among the living in great joy; as the Aleutian islanders fancied the
souls of the departed walking unseen among their kindred, and
accompanying them in their journeys by sea and land; as Africans think
that souls of the dead dwell in their midst, and eat with them at meal
times; as Chinese pay their respects to kindred spirits present in the
hall of ancestors;[57] so multitudes in Europe and America live in an
atmosphere that swarms with ghostly shapes—spirits of the dead, who sit
over against the mystic by his midnight fire, rap and write in
spirit-circles, and peep over girls’ shoulders as they scare themselves
into hysterics with ghost-stories. Almost throughout the vast range of
animistic religion, we shall find the souls of the departed hospitably
entertained by the survivors on set occasions, and manes-worship, so
deep and strong among the faiths of the world, recognizes with a
reverence not without fear and trembling those ancestral spirits which,
powerful for good or ill, manifest their presence among mankind.
Nevertheless death and life dwell but ill together, and from savagery
onward there is recorded many a device by which the survivors have
sought to rid themselves of household ghosts. Though the unhappy savage
custom of deserting houses after a decease may often be connected with
other causes, such as horror or abnegation of all things belonging to
the dead, there are cases where it appears that the place is simply
abandoned to the ghost. In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to
leave his fathers’ house to decay, but after two years he might rebuild
it, the ghost being thought by that time to have departed;[58] the
Hottentots abandoned the dead man’s house, and were said to avoid
entering it lest the ghost should be within;[59] the Yakuts let the hut
fall in ruins where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of
demons;[60] the Karens were said to destroy their villages to escape the
dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls.[61] Such proceedings,
however, scarcely extend beyond the limits of barbarism, and only a
feeble survival of the old thought lingers on into civilization, where
from time to time a haunted house is left to fall in ruins, abandoned to
a ghostly tenant who cannot keep it in repair. But even in the lowest
culture we find flesh holding its own against spirit, and at higher
stages the householder rids himself with little scruple of an unwelcome
inmate. The Greenlanders would carry the dead out by the window, not by
the door, while an old woman, waving a firebrand behind, cried
‘piklerrukpok!’ i.e., ‘there is nothing more to be had here!’;[62] the
Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by an opening broken out on
purpose, to prevent him from finding the way back;[63] the Siamese, with
the same intention, break an opening through the house wall to carry the
coffin through, and then hurry it at full speed thrice round the
house;[64] in Russia the Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone after the
corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the soul from coming
back;[65] so Brandenburg peasants pour out a pail of water at the door
after the coffin, to prevent the ghost from walking; and Pomeranian
mourners returning from the churchyard leave behind the straw from the
hearse that the wandering soul may rest there, and not come back so far
as home.[66] In the ancient and mediæval world, men habitually invoked
supernatural aid beyond such material shifts as these, calling in the
priest to lay or banish intruding ghosts, nor is this branch of the
exorcist’s art even yet forgotten. There is, and always has been, a
prevalent feeling that disembodied souls, especially such as have
suffered a violent or untimely death, are baneful and malicious beings.
As Meiners suggests in his ‘History of Religions,’ they were driven
unwillingly from their bodies, and have carried into their new existence
an angry longing for revenge. No wonder that mankind should so generally
agree that if the souls of the dead must linger in the world at all,
their fitting abode should be not the haunts of the living but the
resting-places of the dead.

After all, it scarcely seems to the lower animistic philosophy that the
connexion between body and soul is utterly broken by death. Various
wants may keep the soul from its desired rest, and among the chief of
these is when its mortal remains have not had the funeral rites. Hence
the deep-lying belief that the ghosts of such will walk. Among some
Australian tribes the ‘ingna,’ or evil spirits, human in shape, but with
long tails and long upright ears, are mostly souls of departed natives,
whose bodies were left to lie unburied or whose death the avenger of
blood did not expiate, and thus they have to prowl on the face of the
earth, and about the place of death, with no gratification but to harm
the living.[67] In New Zealand, the ideas were to be found that the
souls of the dead were apt to linger near the bodies, and that the
spirits of men left unburied or killed in battle and eaten, would
wander; and the bringing such malignant souls to dwell within the sacred
burial-enclosure was a task for the priest to accomplish with his
charms.[68] Among the Iroquois of North America the spirit also stays
near the body for a time, and ‘unless the rites of burial were
performed, it was believed that the spirits of the dead hovered for a
time upon the earth, in a state of great unhappiness. Hence their
extreme solicitude to procure the bodies of the slain in battle.’[69]
Among Brazilian tribes, the wandering shadows of the dead are said to be
considered unresting till burial.[70] In Turanian regions of North Asia,
the spirits of the dead who have no resting-place in earth are thought
of as lingering above ground, especially where their dust remains.[71]
South Asia has such beliefs: the Karens say that the ghosts who wander
on earth are not the spirits of those who go to Plu, the land of the
dead, but of infants, of such as died by violence, of the wicked, and of
those who by accident have not been buried or burned;[72] the Siamese
fear as unkindly spirits the souls of such as died a violent death or
were not buried with the proper rites, and who desiring expiation,
invisibly terrify their descendants.[73] Nowhere in the world had such
thoughts a stronger hold than in classic antiquity, where it was the
most sacred of duties to give the body its funeral rites, that the shade
should not flit moaning near the gates of Hades, nor wander in the
dismal crowd along the banks of Acheron.[74] An Australian or a Karen
would have taken in the full significance of the fatal accusation
against the Athenian commanders, that they abandoned the bodies of their
dead in the sea-fight of Arginousai. The thought is not unknown to
Slavonic folk-lore: ‘Ha! with the shriek the spirit flutters from the
mouth, flies up to the tree, from tree to tree, hither and thither till
the dead is burned.’[75] In mediæval Europe the classic stories of
ghosts that haunt the living till laid by rites of burial pass here and
there into new legends, where, under a changed dispensation, the doleful
wanderer now asks Christian burial in consecrated earth.[76] It is
needless to give here elaborate details of the world-wide thought that
when the corpse is buried, exposed, burned, or otherwise disposed of
after the accepted custom of the land, the ghost accompanies its relics.
The soul stays near the Polynesian or the American Indian burial-place;
it dwells among the twigs and listens joyfully to the singing birds in
the trees where Siberian tribes suspend their dead; it lingers by the
Samoyed’s scaffolded coffin; it haunts the Dayak’s place of burial or
burning; it inhabits the little soul-hut above the Malagasy grave, or
the Peruvian house of sun-dried bricks; it is deposited in the Roman
tomb (animamque sepulchro condimus); it comes back for judgment into the
body of the later Israelite and the Moslem; it inhabits, as a divine
ancestral spirit, the palace-tombs of the old classic and new Asiatic
world; it is kept down by the huge cairn raised over Antar’s body lest
his mighty spirit should burst forth, by the iron nails with which the
Cheremiss secures the corpse in its coffin, by the stake that pins down
the suicide’s body at the four-cross way. And through all the changes of
religious thought from first to last in the course of human history, the
hovering ghosts of the dead make the midnight burial-ground a place
where men’s flesh creeps with terror. Not to discuss here the general
subject of funeral rites of mankind, of which only part of the
multifarious details are directly relevant to the present purpose, a
custom may be selected which is admirably adapted for the study of
animistic religion, at once from the clear conception it gives of the
belief in disembodied souls present among the living, and from the
distinct line of ethnographic continuity in which it may be traced
onward from the lower to the higher culture. This is the custom of
Feasts of the Dead.

Among the funeral offerings described in the last chapter of which the
purpose more or less distinctly appears to be that the departed soul
shall take them away in some ghostly or ideal manner, or that they shall
by some means be conveyed to him in his distant spirit-home, there are
given supplies of food and drink. But the feasts of the dead with which
we are now concerned are given on a different principle; they are, so to
speak, to be consumed on the premises. They are set out in some proper
place, especially near the tombs or in the dwelling-houses, and there
the souls of the dead come and satisfy themselves. In North America,
among Algonquins who held that one of a man’s two souls abides with the
body after death, the provisions brought to the grave were intended for
the nourishment of this soul; tribes would make offerings to ancestors
of part of any dainty food, and an Indian who fell by accident into the
fire would believe that the spirits of his ancestors pushed him in for
neglecting to make due offerings.[77] The minds of the Hurons were
filled with fancies not less lifelike than this. It seemed to them that
the dead man’s soul, in his proper human figure, walked in front of the
corpse as they carried it to the burial-ground, there to dwell till the
great feast of the dead; but meanwhile it would come and walk by night
in the village, and eat the remnants in the kettles, wherefore some
would not eat of these, nor touch the food at funeral feasts—though some
indeed would eat all.[78] In Madagascar, the elegant little upper
chamber in King Radama’s mausoleum was furnished with a table and two
chairs, and a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, and two tumblers were
placed there conformably with the ideas entertained by most of the
natives, that the ghost of the departed monarch might occasionally visit
the resting-place of his body, meet with the spirit of his father, and
partake of what he was known to be fond of in his lifetime.[79] The
Wanika of East Africa set a coco-nut shell full of rice and tembo near
the grave for the ‘koma’ or shade, which cannot exist without food and
drink.[80] In West Africa the Efik cook food and leave it on the table
in the little shed or ‘devil-house’ near the grave, and thither not only
the spirit of the deceased, but the spirits of the slaves sacrificed at
his funeral, come to partake of it.[81] Farther south, in the Congo
district, the custom has been described of making a channel into the
tomb to the head or mouth of the corpse, whereby to send down month by
month the offerings of food and drink.[82]

Among rude Asiatic tribes, the Bodo of North-East India thus celebrate
the last funeral rites. The friends repair to the grave, and the nearest
of kin to the deceased, taking an individual’s usual portion of food and
drink, solemnly presents it to the dead with these words, ‘Take and eat,
heretofore you have eaten and drunk with us, you can do so no more; you
were one of us, you can be so no longer; we come no more to you, come
you not to us.’ Thereupon each of the party breaks off a bracelet of
thread put on his wrist for this purpose, and casts it on the grave, a
speaking symbol of breaking the bond of fellowship, and ‘next the party
proceed to the river and bathe, and having thus lustrated themselves,
they repair to the banquet and eat, drink, and make merry as though they
never were to die.’[83] With more continuance of affection, Naga tribes
of Assam celebrate their funeral feasts month by month, laying food and
drink on the graves of the departed.[84] In the same region of the
world, the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur are remarkable for their pathetic
reverence for their dead. When a Ho or Munda has been burned on the
funeral pile, collected morsels of his bones are carried in procession
with a solemn, ghostly, sliding step, keeping time to the deep-sounding
drum, and when the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray
lowers it from time to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass
vessels mournfully reverse them to show that they are empty; thus the
remains are taken to visit every house in the village, and every
dwelling of a friend or relative for miles, and the inmates come out to
mourn and praise the goodness of the departed; the bones are carried to
all the dead man’s favourite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the
grove he planted, to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village
dance-room where he made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and
buried in an earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of
those huge stone slabs which European visitors wonder at in the
districts of the aborigines in India. Besides these, monumental stones
are set up outside the village to the memory of men of note; they are
fixed on an earthen plinth, where the ghost, resting in its walks among
the living, is supposed to sit shaded by the pillar. The Kheriahs have
collections of these monuments in the little enclosures round their
houses, and offerings and libations are constantly made at them. With
what feelings such rites are celebrated may be judged from this Ho
dirge:—

    ‘We never scolded you; never wronged you;
      Come to us back!
    We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together
      Under the same roof;
      Desert it not now!
    The rainy nights, and the cold blowing days, are coming on;
      Do not wander here!
    Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again!
    You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.
    The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.
      Come to your home!
    It is swept for you, and clean; and we are there who loved you ever;
    And there is rice put for you; and water;
      Come home, come home, come to us again!’

Among the Kol tribes this kindly hospitality to ancestral souls passes
on into the belief and ceremony of full manes-worship: votive offerings
are made to the ‘old folks’ when their descendants go on a journey, and
when there is sickness in the family it is generally they who are first
propitiated.[85] Among Turanian races, the Chuwash put food and napkins
on the grave, saying, ‘Rise at night and eat your fill, and there ye
have napkins to wipe your mouths!’ while the Cheremiss simply said,
‘That is for you, ye dead, there ye have food and drink!’ In this Tatar
region we hear of offerings continued year after year, and even of
messengers sent back by a horde to carry offerings to the tombs of their
forefathers in the old land whence they had emigrated.[86]

Details of this ancient rite are to be traced from the level of these
rude races far upward in civilization. South-East Asia is full of it,
and the Chinese may stand as its representative. He keeps his coffined
parent for years, serving him with meals as if alive. He summons
ancestral souls with prayer and beat of drum to feed on the meat and
drink set out on special days when they are thought to return home. He
even gives entertainments for the benefit of destitute and unfortunate
souls in the lower regions, such as those of lepers and beggars.
Lanterns are lighted to show them the way, a feast is spread for them,
and with characteristic fancy, some victuals are left over for any blind
or feeble spirits who may be late, and a pail of gruel is provided for
headless souls, with spoons for them to put it down their throats with.
Such proceedings culminate in the so-called Universal Rescue, now and
then celebrated, when a little house is built for the expected visitors,
with separate accommodation and bath-rooms for male and female
ghosts.[87] The ancient Egyptian would set out his provision of cakes
and trussed ducks on reed scaffolds in the tomb, or would even keep the
mummy in the house to be present as a guest at the feast, σύνδειπνον καὶ
συμπότην ἐποιήσατο, as Lucian says.[88] The Hindu, as of old, offers to
the dead the funeral cakes, places before the door the earthen vessels
of water for him to bathe in, of milk for him to drink, and celebrates
at new and full moon the solemn presentation of rice-cakes made with
ghee, with its attendant ceremonies so important for the soul’s release
from its twelvemonth’s sojourn with Yama in Hades, and its transition to
the Heaven of the Pitaras, the Fathers.[89] In the classic world such
rites were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food.[90]

In Christian times there manifests itself that interesting kind of
survival which, keeping up the old ceremony in form, has adapted its
motive to new thoughts and feelings. The classic funeral oblations
became Christian, the silicernium was succeeded by the feast held at the
martyr’s tomb. Faustus inveighs against the Christians for carrying on
the ancient rites: ‘Their sacrifices indeed ye have turned into
love-feasts, their idols into martyrs whom with like vows ye worship; ye
appease the shades of the dead with wine and meals, ye celebrate the
Gentiles’ solemn days with them, such as calends and solstices,—of their
life certainly ye have changed nought,’[91] and so forth. The story of
Monica shows how the custom of laying food on the tomb for the manes
passed into the ceremony, like to it in form, of setting food and drink
to be sanctified by the sepulchre of a Christian saint. Saint-Foix, who
wrote in the time of Louis XIV., has left us an account of the
ceremonial after the death of a King of France, during the forty days
before the funeral when his wax effigy lay in state. They continued to
serve him at meal-times as though still alive, the officers laid the
table, and brought the dishes, the maître d’hôtel handed the napkin to
the highest lord present to be presented to the king, a prelate blessed
the table, the basins of water were handed to the royal arm-chair, the
cup was served in its due course, and grace was said in the accustomed
manner, save that there was added to it the De Profundis.[92] Spaniards
still offer bread and wine on the tombs of those they love, on the
anniversary of their decease.[93] The conservative Eastern Church still
holds to ancient rite. The funeral feast is served in Russia, with its
tables for the beggars, laden with fish pasties and bowls of shchi and
jugs of kvas, its more delicate dinner for friends and priests, its
incense and chants of ‘everlasting remembrance’; and even the repetition
of the festival on the ninth, and twentieth, and fortieth day are not
forgotten. The offerings of saucers of kutiya or kolyvo are still made
in the church; this used to be of parboiled wheat and was deposited over
the body, it is now made of boiled rice and raisins, sweetened with
honey. In their usual mystic fashion, the Orthodox Christians now
explain away into symbolism this remnant of primitive offering to the
dead: the honey is heavenly sweetness, the shrivelled raisins will be
full beauteous grapes, the grain typifies the resurrection, ‘that which
thou sowest is not quickened except it die.’[94]

In the calendar of many a people, differing widely as they may in race
and civilization, there are to be found special yearly festivals of the
dead. Their rites are much the same as those performed on other days for
individuals; their season differs in different districts, but seems to
have particular associations with harvest-time and the fall of the year,
and with the year’s end as reckoned at midwinter or in early spring.[95]
The Karens make their annual offerings to the dead in the ‘month of
shades,’ that is, December;[96] the Kocch of North Bengal every year at
harvest-home offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents;[97] the Barea
of East Africa celebrate in November the feast of Thiyot, at once a
feast of general peace and merry-making, of thanksgiving for the
harvest, and of memorial for the deceased, for each of whom a little
pot-full of beer is set out two days, to be drunk at last by the
survivors;[98] in West Africa we hear of the feast of the dead at the
time of yam-harvest;[99] at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take
food to the graves for the shades to eat, ‘manger zombi,’ as they
say.[100] The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February and
May.[101] In the last five or ten days of their year the Zoroastrians
hold their feasts for departed relatives, when souls come back to the
world to visit the living, and receive from them offerings of food and
clothing.[102] The custom of setting empty seats at the St. John’s Eve
feast, for the departed souls of kinsfolk, is said to have lasted on in
Europe to the seventeenth century. Spring is the season of the
time-honoured Slavonic rite of laying food on the graves of the dead.
The Bulgarians hold a feast in the cemetery on Palm Sunday, and, after
much eating and drinking, leave the remains upon the graves of their
friends, who, they are persuaded, will eat them during the night. In
Russia such scenes may still be watched on the two appointed days called
Parents’ Days. The higher classes have let the rite sink to prayer at
the graves of lost relatives, and giving alms to the beggars who flock
to the cemeteries. But the people still ‘howl’ for the dead, and set out
on their graves a handkerchief for a tablecloth, with gingerbread, eggs,
curd-tarts, and even vodka, on it; when the weeping is over, they eat up
the food, especially commemorating the dead in Russian manner by
partaking of his favourite dainty, and if he were fond of a glass, the
vodka is sipped with the ejaculation, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven be his! He
loved a drink, the deceased!’[103] When Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the
end of the tenth century, instituted the celebration of All Souls’ Day
(November 2),[104] he set on foot one of those revivals which have so
often given the past a new lease of life. The Western Church at large
took up the practice, and round it there naturally gathered surviving
remnants of the primitive rite of banquets to the dead. The accusation
against the early Christians, that they appeased the shades of the dead
with feasts like the Gentiles, would not be beside the mark now, fifteen
hundred years later. On the eve of All Souls’ begins, within the limits
of Christendom, a commemoration of the dead which combines some touches
of pathetic imagination with relics of savage animism scarcely to be
surpassed in Africa or the South Sea Islands. In Italy the day is given
to feasting and drinking in honour of the dead, while skulls and
skeletons in sugar and paste form appropriate children’s toys. In Tyrol,
the poor souls released from purgatory fire for the night may come and
smear their burns with the melted fat of the ‘soul light’ on the hearth,
or cakes are left for them on the table, and the room is kept warm for
their comfort. Even in Paris the souls of the departed come to partake
of the food of the living. In Brittany the crowd pours into the
churchyard at evening, to kneel bareheaded at the graves of dead
kinsfolk, to fill the hollow of the tombstone with holy water, or to
pour libations of milk upon it. All night the church bells clang, and
sometimes a solemn procession of the clergy goes round to bless the
graves. In no household that night is the cloth removed, for the supper
must be left for the souls to come and take their part, nor must the
fire be put out, where they will come to warm themselves. And at last,
as the inmates retire to rest, there is heard at the door a doleful
chant—it is the souls, who, borrowing the voices of the parish poor,
have come to ask the prayers of the living.[105]

If we ask how the spirits of the dead are in general supposed to feed on
the viands set before them, we come upon difficult questions, which will
be met with again in discussing the theory of sacrifice. Even where the
thought is certainly that the departed soul eats, this thought may be
very indefinite, with far less of practical intention in it than of
childish make-believe. Now and then, however, the sacrificers themselves
offer closer definitions of their meaning. The idea of the ghost
actually devouring the material food is not unexampled. Thus, in North
America, Algonquin Indians considered that the shadow-like souls of the
dead can still eat and drink, often even telling Father Le Jeune that
they had found in the morning meat gnawed in the night by the souls.
More recently, we read that some Potawatomis will leave off providing
the supply of food at the grave if it lies long untouched, it being
concluded that the dead no longer wants it, but has found a rich
hunting-ground in the other world.[106] In Africa, again, Father Cavazzi
records of the Congo people furnishing their dead with supplies of
provisions, that they could not be persuaded that souls did not consume
material food.[107] In Europe the Esths, offering food for the dead on
All Souls’, are said to have rejoiced if they found in the morning that
any of it was gone.[108] A less gross conception is that the soul
consumes the steam or savour of the food, or its essence or spirit. It
is said to have been with such purpose that the Maoris placed food by
the dead man’s side, and some also with him in the grave.[109] The idea
is well displayed among the natives in Mexican districts, where the
souls who came to the annual feast are described as hovering over and
smelling the food set out for them, or sucking out its nutritive
quality.[110] The Hindu entreats the manes to quaff the sweet essence of
the offered food; thinking on them, he slowly sets the dish of rice
before the Brahmans, and while they silently eat the hot food, the
ancestral spirits take their part of the feast.[111] At the old Slavonic
meals for the dead, we read of the survivors sitting in silence and
throwing morsels under the table, fancying that they could hear the
spirits rustle, and see them feed on the smell and steam of the viands.
One account describes the mourners at the funeral banquet inviting in
the departed soul thought to be standing outside the door, and every
guest throwing morsels and pouring drink under the table, for him to
refresh himself. What lay on the ground was not picked up, but was left
for friendless and kinless souls. When the meal was over, the priest
rose from table, swept out the house, and hunted out the souls of the
dead ‘like fleas,’ with these words, ‘Ye have eaten and drunken, souls,
now go, now go!’[112] Many travellers have described the imagination
with which the Chinese make such offerings. It is that the spirits of
the dead consume the impalpable essence of the food, leaving behind its
coarse material substance, wherefore the dutiful sacrificers, having set
out sumptuous feasts for ancestral souls, allow them a proper time to
satisfy their appetite, and then fall to themselves.[113] The Jesuit
Father Christoforo Borri suggestively translates the native idea into
his own scholastic phraseology. In Cochin China, according to him,
people believed ‘that the souls of the dead have need of corporeal
sustenance and maintenance, wherefore several times a year, according to
their custom, they make splendid and sumptuous banquets, children to
their deceased parents, husbands to their wives, friends to their
friends, waiting a long while for the dead guest to come and sit down at
table to eat.’ The missionaries argued against this proceeding, but were
met by ridicule of their ignorance, and the reply ‘that there were two
things in the food, one the substance, and the other the accidents of
quantity, quality, smell, taste, and the like. The immaterial souls of
the dead, taking for themselves the substance of the food, which being
immaterial is food suited to the incorporeal soul, left only in the
dishes the accidents which corporeal senses perceive; for this the dead
had no need of corporeal instruments, as we have said.’ Thereupon the
Jesuit proceeds to remark, as to the prospect of conversion of these
people, ‘it may be judged from the distinction they make between the
accidents and the substance of the food which they prepare for the
dead,’ that it will not be very difficult to prove to them the mystery
of the Eucharist.[114] Now to peoples among whom prevails the rite of
feasts of the dead, whether they offer the food in mere symbolic
pretence, or whether they consider the souls really to feed on it in
this spiritual way (as well as in the cases inextricably mixed up with
these, where the offering is spiritually conveyed away to the world of
spirits), it can be of little consequence what becomes of the gross
material food. When the Kafir sorcerer, in cases of sickness, declares
that the shades of ancestors demand a particular cow, the beast is
slaughtered and left shut up for a time for the shades to eat, or for
its spirit to go to the land of shades, and then is taken out to be
eaten by the sacrificers.[115] So, in more civilized Japan, when the
survivors have placed their offering of unboiled rice and water in a
hollow made for the purpose in a stone of the tomb, it seems to them no
matter that the poor or the birds really carry off the grain.[116]

Such rites as these are especially exposed to dwindle in survival. The
offerings of meals and feasts to the dead may be traced at their last
stage into mere traditional ceremonies, at most tokens of affectionate
remembrance of the dead, or works of charity to the living. The Roman
Feralia in Ovid’s time were a striking example of such transition, for
while the idea was recognized that the ghosts fed upon the offerings,
‘nunc posito pascitur umbra cibo,’ yet there were but ‘parva munera,’
fruits and grains of salt, and corn soaked in wine, set out for their
meal in the middle of the road. ‘Little the manes ask, the pious thought
stands instead of the rich gift, for Styx holds no greedy gods:’—

          ‘Parva petunt manes. Pietas pro divite grata est
            Munere. Non avidos Styx habet ima deos.
          Tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis,
            Et sparsae fruges, parcaque mica salis,
          Inque mero mollita ceres, violaeque solutae:
            Haec habeat media testa relicta via.
          Nec majora veto. Sed et his placabilis umbra est.’[117]

Still farther back, in old Chinese history, Confucius had been called on
to give an opinion as to the sacrifices to the dead. Maintainer of all
ancient rites as he was, he stringently kept up this, ‘he sacrificed to
the dead as if they were present,’ but when he was asked if the dead had
knowledge of what was done or no, he declined to answer the question;
for if he replied yes, then dutiful descendants would injure their
substance by sacrifices, and if no, then undutiful children would leave
their parents unburied. The evasion was characteristic of the teacher
who expressed his theory of worship in this maxim, ‘to give oneself
earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual
beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.’ It is said that
in our own time the Taepings have made a step beyond Confucius; they
have forbidden the sacrifices to the spirits of the dead, yet keep up
the rite of visiting their tombs on the customary day, for prayer and
the renewal of vows.[118] How funeral offerings may pass into
commemorative banquets and feasts to the poor, has been shown already.
If we seek in England for vestiges of the old rite of funeral sacrifice,
we may find a lingering survival into modern centuries, doles of bread
and drink given to the poor at funerals, and ‘soul-mass cakes’ which
peasant girls perhaps to this day beg for at farmhouses with the
traditional formula,

                   ‘Soul, soul, for a soul cake,
                   Pray you, mistress, a soul cake.’[119]

Were it not for our knowledge of the intermediate stages through which
these fragments of old custom have come down, it would seem far-fetched
indeed to trace their origin back to the savage and barbaric times of
the institution of feasts of departed souls.

Footnote 1:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1636, p. 130;
  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75. See Brinton, p. 253.

Footnote 2:

  Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195, see p. 213. Morse, ‘Report on Indian
  Affairs,’ p. 345.

Footnote 3:

  Mayne, ‘British Columbia,’ p. 181.

Footnote 4:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ pp. 248, 258, see p. 212. See also Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ p. 353; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 793.

Footnote 5:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 28.

Footnote 6:

  Bastian, ‘Zur vergl. Psychologie,’ in Lazarus and Steinthal’s
  ‘Zeitschrift,’ vol. v. p. 160, &c., also Papuas and other races.

Footnote 7:

  Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 376.

Footnote 8:

  Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 201.

Footnote 9:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 210; see also R. Clarke, ‘Sierra Leone,’ p.
  159.

Footnote 10:

  Bastian, l. c.

Footnote 11:

  Macpherson, p. 72; also Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix.
  pp. 793, &c.; Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 22 (similar rite
  of Mundas and Oraons).

Footnote 12:

  Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 77; K. Leems, ‘Lapper,’ c. xiv.

Footnote 13:

  R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 284; see Shortland, ‘Traditions,’ p. 145;
  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 353; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 279; see
  also p. 276 (Samoyeds). Compare Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v.
  p. 426; Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 353; Kracheninnikow, ii. 117. See
  Plath, ‘Rel. der alten Chinesen,’ ii. p. 98.

Footnote 14:

  Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. i. p. 301, vol. ii. p. 363 (native’s
  accusation against some foreign sailors who had assaulted him,
  ‘djanga Taal-wurt kyle-gut bomb-gur,’—‘one of the dead struck
  Taal-wurt under the ear,’ &c. The word djanga = the dead, the
  spirits of deceased persons (see Grey, ‘Vocab. of S. W. Australia’),
  had come to be the usual term for a European). Lang, ‘Queensland,’ pp.
  34, 336; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 183; Scherzer, ‘Voy. of Novara,’
  vol. iii. p. 34; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 222, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii.
  pp. 362-3, and in Lazarus and Steinthal’s ‘Zeitschrift,’ l. c.;
  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 424.

Footnote 15:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 85; Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil Blanc,’ &c. p. 234.

Footnote 16:

  Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ ch. xviii., xix., xxi. Souls of the dead appear
  in dreams, either in human or animal forms, p. 174. See also Brinton,
  p. 145.

Footnote 17:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 113.

Footnote 18:

  Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 198.

Footnote 19:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 102.

Footnote 20:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104.

Footnote 21:

  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 174.

Footnote 22:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 23:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 602; Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’
  vol. iii. p. 195.

Footnote 24:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. pp. 74, 270.

Footnote 25:

  Coreal in Brinton, l. c. See also J. G. Müller, pp. 139 (Natchez), 223
  (Caribs), 402 (Peru).

Footnote 26:

  Chomé in ‘Lettres Edif.’ vol. viii.; see also Martius, vol. i. p. 446.

Footnote 27:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 419 (Maravi).

Footnote 28:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 196, &c.; Arbousset and Daumas, p.
  237.

Footnote 29:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 210, 218. See also Brun-Rollet, pp. 200,
  234; Meiners, vol. i. p. 211.

Footnote 30:

  Steinhauser in ‘Mag. der Evang. Miss.’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.

Footnote 31:

  Manu, xi. xii. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 164, vol. ii. pp. 215,
  347-52.

Footnote 32:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 181; Perelaer, ‘Ethnog. Beschr. der
  Dajaks,’ p. 17.

Footnote 33:

  Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See also Shaw in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv.
  p. 46 (Rajmahal tribes).

Footnote 34:

  Abraham Roger, ‘La Porte Ouverte,’ Amst. 1670, p. 107.

Footnote 35:

  Manu, xii. 9: ‘çarîrajaih karmmadoshaih yâti sthâvaratâm narah’—‘for
  crimes done in the body, the man goes to the inert (motionless)
  state;’ xii. 42, ‘sthâvarâh krimakîtâçcha matsyâh sarpâh sakachhapâh
  paçavaçcha mrigaschaiva jaghanyâ tâmasî gatih’—‘inert (motionless)
  things, worms and insects, fish, serpents, tortoises and beasts and
  deer also are the last dark form.’

Footnote 36:

  Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. pp. 35, 289, &c., 318;
  Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Le Bouddha et sa Religion,’ p. 122; Hardy,
  ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 98, &c., 180, 318, 445, &c.

Footnote 37:

  Herod. ii. 123, see Rawlinson’s Tr.; Plutarch. De Iside 31, 72;
  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. ch. xvi.

Footnote 38:

  Plat. Phædo, Timæus, Phædrus, Repub.; Diog. Laert. Empedokles xii.;
  Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4; Ovid. Metam. xv. 160; Lucian. Somn.
  17, &c. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. See also Meyer’s
  Conversations-Lexicon, art. ‘Seelenwanderung.’ For re-birth in old
  Scandinavia, see Helgakvidha, iii., in ‘Edda.’

Footnote 39:

  Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, &c.

Footnote 40:

  Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ &c., vol. i. pp. 245-6, vol. ii. pp.
  496-9; G. Flügel, ‘Mani.’ See Augustin. Contra Faust.; De Hæres.; De
  Quantitate Animæ.

Footnote 41:

  Gul. de Rubruquis in ‘Rec. des Voy. Soc. de Géographie de Paris,’ vol.
  iv. p. 356. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. by Asher, Hebrew 22, Eng.
  p. 62. Niebuhr, ‘Reisebeschr. nach Arabien,’ &c., vol. ii. pp.
  438-443; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.

Footnote 42:

  St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 57. Compare the tenets of the
  Russian sect of Dukhobortzi, in Haxthausen, ‘Russian Empire,’ vol. i.
  p. 288, &c.

Footnote 43:

  Since the first publication of the above remark, M. Louis Figuier has
  supplied a perfect modern instance by his book, entitled ‘Le Lendemain
  de la Mort,’ translated into English as ‘The Day after Death: Our
  Future Life according to Science.’ His attempt to revive the ancient
  belief, and to connect it with the evolution-theory of modern
  naturalists, is carried out with more than Buddhist elaborateness.
  Body is the habitat of soul, which goes out when a man dies, as one
  forsakes a burning house. In the course of development, a soul may
  migrate through bodies stage after stage, zoophyte and oyster,
  grasshopper and eagle, crocodile and dog, till it arrives at man,
  thence ascending to become one of the superhuman beings or angels who
  dwell in the planetary ether, and thence to a still higher state, the
  secret of whose nature M. Figuier does not endeavour to penetrate,
  ‘because our means of investigation fail at this point.’ The ultimate
  destiny of the more glorified being is the Sun; the pure spirits who
  form its mass of burning gases, pour out germs and life to start the
  course of planetary existence. (Note to 2nd edition.)

Footnote 44:

  Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ 13. Compare the notion
  attributed to the followers of Basilides the Gnostic, of men whose
  souls are affected by spirits or dispositions as of wolf, ape, lion,
  or bear, wherefore their souls bear the properties of these, and
  imitate their deeds (Clem. Alex. Stromat. ii. c. 20).

Footnote 45:

  See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 208 (Caribs); but compare
  Rochefort, p. 429. Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269, Castrén, ‘Finnische
  Mythologie,’ p. 119.

Footnote 46:

  For Egyptian evidence see the funeral papyri and translations of the
  ‘Book of the Dead.’ Compare Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 254, &c.

Footnote 47:

  Aryan evidence in ‘Rig-Veda,’ x. 14, 8; xi. 1, 8; Manu, xii. 16-22;
  Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattung,’ pp. xii. xiv.; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 47;
  Muir in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. i. 1865, p. 306; Spiegel,
  ‘Avesta’; Haug, ‘Essays on the Parsis.’

Footnote 48:

  Origen, De Princip. ii. 3, 2: ‘materiæ corporalis, cujus materiæ anima
  usum semper habet, in qualibet qualitate positæ, nunc quidem carnali,
  postmodum vero subtiliori et puriori, quæ spiritalis appellatur.’

Footnote 49:

  Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 345.

Footnote 50:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 84.

Footnote 51:

  Kaufmann, ‘Schilderungen aus Centralafrika,’ p. 124; G. Lejean in
  ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ Apr. 1, 1860, p. 760; see Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil
  Blanc,’ pp. 100, 234. A dialogue by the missionary Beltrame (1859-60),
  in Mitterutzner, ‘Dinka-Sprache,’ p. 57, ascribes to the Dinkas ideas
  of heaven and hell, which, however, show Christian influence.

Footnote 52:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 136; John Smith, ‘Descr. of
  Virginia,’ 33; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 50. The reference to the Laos
  in Meiners, vol. ii. p. 760, is worthless.

Footnote 53:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 259.

Footnote 54:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 244. See ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii.
  p. 113 (Dayaks). Compare wasting and death of souls in depths of
  Hades, Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 232.

Footnote 55:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz,
  ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.); Callaway, ‘Rel. of
  Amazulu,’ p. 355.

Footnote 56:

  Cavazzi, ‘Congo, Matamba, et Angola,’ lib. i. p. 270. See also
  Liebrecht in ‘Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,’ vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary,
  Scandinavia, Greece).

Footnote 57:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 310; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’
  pp. 111, 193; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 235.

Footnote 58:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323.

Footnote 59:

  Kolben, p. 579.

Footnote 60:

  Billings, p. 125.

Footnote 61:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. i. p. 145; Cross, l.c., p. 311. For
  other cases of desertion of dwellings after a death, possibly for the
  same motive, see Bourien, ‘Tribes of Malay Pen.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’
  vol. iii. p. 82; Polack, ‘M. of New Zealanders,’ vol. i. pp. 204, 216;
  Steiler, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271. But the Todas say that the buffaloes
  slaughtered and the hut burnt at the funeral are transferred to the
  spirit of the deceased in the next world; Shortt in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’
  vol. vii. p. 247. See Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199.

Footnote 62:

  Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.

Footnote 63:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323; see pp. 329, 363.

Footnote 64:

  Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 122; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. p.
  258.

Footnote 65:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120.

Footnote 66:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 213-17. Other cases of taking out the
  dead by a gap made on purpose: Arbousset and Daumas, p. 502 (Bushmen);
  Magyar, p. 351 (Kimbunda); Moffat, p. 307 (Bechuanas); Waitz, vol.
  iii. p. 199 (Ojibwas);—their motive is probably that the ghost may not
  find its way back by the door.

Footnote 67:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 228, 236, 245.

Footnote 68:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 221; Schirren, p. 91; see Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ p. 233.

Footnote 69:

  Morgan, ‘League of Iroquois,’ p. 174.

Footnote 70:

  J. G. Müller, p. 286.

Footnote 71:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 126.

Footnote 72:

  Cross in ‘Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 309; Mason in ‘Journ. As.
  Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 203. See also J. Anderson, ‘Exp. to W.
  Yunnan,’ pp. 126, 131 (Shans).

Footnote 73:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 51, 99-101.

Footnote 74:

  Lucian. De Luctu. See Pauly, ‘Real. Encyclop.’ and Smith, ‘Dic. of Gr.
  and Rom. Ant.’ s.v. ‘inferi.’

Footnote 75:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 277.

Footnote 76:

  Calmet, vol. ii. ch. xxxvi.; Brand, vol. iii. p. 67.

Footnote 77:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian
  Tribes,’ part i. pp. 39, 83; part iv. p. 65; Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 293.

Footnote 78:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104.

Footnote 79:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 253, 364. See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’
  p. 220.

Footnote 80:

  Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 150.

Footnote 81:

  T. J. Hutchinson, p. 206.

Footnote 82:

  Cavazzi, ‘Congo, &c.’ lib. i. p. 264. So in ancient Greece, Lucian.
  Charon, 22.

Footnote 83:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 180.

Footnote 84:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 235.

Footnote 85:

  Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix. p. 795; Dalton, ibid.
  1866, part ii. p. 153, &c.; and in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 1, &c.;
  Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 415, &c.

Footnote 86:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 62; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 121.

Footnote 87:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 173, &c.; vol. ii. p. 91, &c.;
  Meiners, vol. i. p. 306.

Footnote 88:

  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 362; Lucian. De Luctu, 21.

Footnote 89:

  Manu, iii.; Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 161, &c.; Pictet,
  ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 600; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p.
  332.

Footnote 90:

  Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘funus.’; Smith’s ‘Dic.’ s.v. ‘funus.’
  See Meiners, vol. i. pp. 305-19.

Footnote 91:

  Augustin. contra Faustum, xx. 4; De Civ. Dei, viii. 27; conf. vi. 2.
  See Beausobre, vol. ii. pp. 633, 685; Bingham, xx. c. 7.

Footnote 92:

  Saint-Foix, ‘Essais Historiques sur Paris,’ in ‘Œuvres,’ vol. iv. p.
  147, &c.

Footnote 93:

  Lady Herbert, ‘Impressions of Spain,’ p. 8.

Footnote 94:

  H. C. Romanoff, ‘Rites and Customs of Greco-Russian Church,’ p. 249;
  Ralston, ‘Songs of the Russian People,’ pp. 135, 320; St. Clair and
  Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 77; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 115.

Footnote 95:

  Beside the accounts of annual festivals of the dead cited here, see
  the following:—Santos, ‘Ethiopia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 685
  (Sept.); Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. pp. 23, 522, 528 (Aug., Oct.,
  Nov.); Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 134 (Peruvian feast dated as
  Nov. 2 in coincidence with All Souls’, but this reckoning is vitiated
  by confusion of seasons of N. and S. hemisphere, see J. G. Müller, p.
  389; moreover, the Peruvian feast may have been originally held at a
  different date, and transferred, as happened elsewhere, to the
  ‘Spanish All Souls’); Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 44, 62 (esp.
  Apr.); Caron, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 629 (Aug.).

Footnote 96:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 238.

Footnote 97:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 147.

Footnote 98:

  Munzinger, ‘Ostafr. Stud.’ p. 473.

Footnote 99:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194.

Footnote 100:

  G. D’Alaux in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ May 15, 1852, p. 76.

Footnote 101:

  Ovid. Fast. ii. 533; v. 420.

Footnote 102:

  Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol. ii. p. ci.; Alger, p. 137.

Footnote 103:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 374, 408; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’
  p. 77; Romanoff, ‘Greco-Roman Church,’ p. 255.

Footnote 104:

  Petrus Damianus, ‘Vita S. Odilonis,’ in the Bollandist ‘Acta
  Sanctorum,’ Jan. 1, has the quaint legend attached to the new
  ordinance. An island hermit dwelt near a volcano, where souls of the
  wicked were tormented in the flames. The holy man heard the
  officiating demons lament that their daily task of new torture was
  interfered with by the prayers and alms of devout persons leagued
  against them to save souls, and especially they complained of the
  Monks of Cluny. Thereupon the hermit sent a message to Abbot Odilo,
  who carried out the work to the efficacy of which he had received such
  perfect spiritual testimony, by decreeing that November 2, the day
  after All Saints’, should be set apart for services for the departed.

Footnote 105:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 336. Meiners, vol. i. p. 316; vol. ii.
  p. 290. Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 216. Cortet, ‘Fêtes
  Religieuses,’ p. 233; ‘Westminster Rev.’ Jan. 1860; Hersart de la
  Villemarqué, ‘Chants de la Bretagne,’ vol. ii. p. 307.

Footnote 106:

  Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1634, p. 16; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.

Footnote 107:

  Cavazzi, ‘Congo,’ &c., book i. 265.

Footnote 108:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 865, but not so in the account of the Feast of the
  Dead in Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergl. Gebr.’ (ed. Kreutzwald), p. 89.
  Compare Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 345 (Gês). The following
  passage from a spiritualist journal, ‘The Medium,’ Feb. 9, 1872, shows
  this primitive notion curiously surviving in modern England. ‘Every
  time we sat at dinner, we had not only spirit-voices calling to us,
  but spirit-hands touching us; and last evening, as it was his
  farewell, they gave us a special manifestation, unasked for and
  unlooked for. He sitting at the right hand of me, a vacant chair
  opposite to him began moving, and, in answer to whether it would have
  some dinner, said “Yes.” I then asked it to select what it would take,
  when it chose croquets des pommes de terre (a French way of dressing
  potatoes, about three inches long and two wide. I will send you one
  that you may see it). I was desired to put this on the chair, either
  in a tablespoon or on a plate. I placed it in a tablespoon, thinking
  that probably the plate might be broken. In a few seconds I was told
  that it was eaten, and looking, found the half of it gone, with the
  marks showing the teeth.’ (Note to 2nd ed.)

Footnote 109:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 220, see 104.

Footnote 110:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 24.

Footnote 111:

  Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 163, &c.; Manu. iii.

Footnote 112:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 408; Hartknoch, ‘Preussen,’ part i. p. 187.

Footnote 113:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 33, 48; Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.

Footnote 114:

  Borri, ‘Relatione della Nuova Missione della Comp. di Giesu,’ Rome,
  1631, p. 208; and in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 822, &c.

Footnote 115:

  Grout, ‘Zulu Land,’ p. 140; see Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 11.

Footnote 116:

  Caron, ‘Japan,’ vol. vii. p. 629; see Turpin, ‘Siam,’ ibid. vol. ix.
  p. 590.

Footnote 117:

  Ovid. Fast. ii. 533.

Footnote 118:

  Legge, ‘Confucius,’ pp. 101-2, 130; Bunsen, ‘God in History,’ p. 271.

Footnote 119:

  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 392, vol. ii. p. 289.

ANIMISM (continued).

    Journey of the Soul to the Land of the Dead—Visits by the Living to
    the Regions of Departed Souls—Connexion of such legends with myths
    of Sunset: the Land of the Dead thus imagined as in the
    West—Realization of current religious ideas, whether of savage or
    civilized theology, in narratives of visits to the Regions of
    Souls—Localization of the Future Life—Distant earthly region:
    Earthly Paradise, Isles of the Blest—Subterranean Hades or
    Sheol—Sun, Moon, Stars—Heaven—Historical course of belief as to such
    localization—Nature of Future Life—Continuance-theory, apparently
    original, belongs especially to the lower races—Transitional
    theories—Retribution-theory, apparently derived, belongs especially
    to the higher races—Doctrine of Moral Retribution as developed in
    the higher culture—Survey of Doctrine of Future State, from savage
    to civilized stages—Its practical effect on the sentiment and
    conduct of Mankind.

The departure of the dead man’s soul from the world of living men, its
journey to the distant land of spirits, the life it will lead in its new
home, are topics on which the lower races for the most part hold
explicit doctrines. When these fall under the inspection of a modern
ethnographer, he treats them as myths; often to a high degree
intelligible and rational in their origin, consistent and regular in
their structure, but not the less myths. Few subjects have aroused the
savage poet’s mind to such bold and vivid imagery as the thought of the
hereafter. Yet also a survey of its details among mankind displays in
the midst of variety a regular recurrence of episode which brings the
ever-recurring question, how far is this correspondence due to
transmission of the same thought from tribe to tribe, and how far to
similar but independent development in distant lands?

From the savage state up into the midst of civilization, the comparison
may be carried through. Low races and high, in region after region, can
point out the very spot whence the flitting souls start to travel toward
their new home. At the extreme western cape of Vanua Levu, a calm and
solemn place of cliff and forest, the souls of the Fijian dead embark
for the judgement-seat of Ndengei, and thither the living come in
pilgrimage, thinking to see their ghosts and gods.[120] The Baperi of
South Africa will venture to creep a little way into their cavern of
Marimatlé, whence men and animals came forth into the world, and whither
souls return at death.[121] In Mexico the cavern of Chalchatongo led to
the plains of paradise, and the Aztec name of Mictlan, ‘Land of the
Dead,’ now Mitla, keeps up the remembrance of another subterranean
temple which opened the way to the sojourn of the blessed.[122] How
naturally a dreary place, fit rather for the dead than the living,
suggests the thought of an entrance to the land of the departed, is seen
in the fictitious travels known under the name of Sir John Mandevill,
where the description of the Vale Perilous, adapted from the terrible
valley which Friar Odoric had seen full of corpses and heard resound
with strange noise of drums, has this appropriate ending: ‘This vale es
full of deuilles and all way has bene; and men saise in that cuntree
that thare es ane entree to hell.’[123] In more genuine folklore, North
German peasants still remember on the banks of the swampy Drömling the
place of access to the land of departed souls.[124] To us Englishmen the
shores of lake Avernus, trodden daily by our tourists, are more familiar
than the Irish analogue of the place, Lough Derg, with its cavern
entrance of St. Patrick’s Purgatory leading down to the awful world
below. The mass of mystic details need not be repeated here of the
soul’s dread journey by caverns and rocky paths and weary plains, over
steep and slippery mountains, by frail bark or giddy bridge across gulfs
or rushing rivers, abiding the fierce onset of the soul-destroyer or the
doom of the stern guardian of the other world. But before describing the
spirit-world which is the end of the soul’s journey, let us see what the
proof is which sustains the belief in both. The lower races claim to
hold their doctrines of the future life on strong tradition, direct
revelation, and even personal experience. To them the land of souls is a
discovered country, from whose bourne many a traveller returns.

Among the legendary visits to the world beyond the grave, there are some
that seem pure myth, without a touch of real personal history. Ojibwa,
the eponymic hero of his North American tribe, as one of his many
exploits descended to the subterranean world of departed spirits, and
came up again to earth.[125] When the Kamchadals were asked how they
knew so well what happens to men after death, they could answer with
their legend of Haetsh the first man. He died and went down into the
world below, and a long while after came up again to his former
dwelling, and there, standing above by the smoke-hole, he talked down to
his kindred in the house and told them about the life to come; it was
then that his two daughters whom he had left below followed him in anger
and smote him so that he died a second time, and now he is chief in the
lower world, and receives the Italmen when they die and rise anew.[126]
Thus, again, in the great Finnish epic, the Kalewala, one great episode
is Wainamoinen’s visit to the land of the dead. Seeking the last
charm-words to build his boat, the hero travelled with quick steps week
after week through bush and wood till he came to the Tuonela river, and
saw before him the island of Tuoni the god of death. Loudly he called to
Tuoni’s daughter to bring the ferry-boat across:—

                  ‘She, the virgin of Manala,
                  She, the washer of the clothing,
                  She, the wringer of the linen,
                  By the river of Tuonela,
                  In the under-world Manala,
                  Spake in words, and this their meaning,
                  This their answer to the hearer:—
                  “Forth the boat shall come from hither,
                  When the reason thou hast given
                  That hath brought thee to Manala,
                  Neither slain by any sickness,
                  Nor by Death dragged from the living,
                  Nor destroyed by other ending.”’

Wainamoinen replies with lying reasons. Iron brought him, he says, but
Tuoni’s daughter answers that no blood drips from his garment; Fire
brought him, he says, but she answers that his locks are unsinged, and
at last he tells his real mission. Then she ferries him over, and
Tuonetar the hostess brings him beer in the two-eared jug, but
Wainamoinen can see the frogs and worms within and will not drink, for
it was not to drain Manala’s beer-jug he had come. He lay in the bed of
Tuoni, and meanwhile they spread the hundred nets of iron and copper
across the river that he might not escape; but he turned into a reed in
the swamp, and as a snake crept through the meshes:—

                  ‘Tuoni’s son with hooked fingers
                  Iron-pointed hooked fingers
                  Went to draw his nets at morning—
                  Salmon-trout he found a hundred,
                  Thousands of the little fishes,
                  But he found no Wainamoinen,
                  Not the old friend of the billows.
                  Then the ancient Wainamoinen,
                  Come from out of Tuoni’s kingdom,
                  Spake in words, and this their meaning,
                  This their answer to the hearer:—
                  “Never mayst thou, God of goodness,
                  Never suffer such another
                  Who of self-will goes to Mana,
                  Thrusts his way to Tuoni’s kingdom.
                  Many they who travel thither,
                  Few who thence have found the home-way,
                  From the houses of Tuoni
                  From the dwellings of Manala.”’[127]

It is enough to name the familiar classic analogues of these mythic
visits to Hades,—the descent of Dionysos to bring back Semele, of
Orpheus to bring back his beloved Eurydike, of Herakles to fetch up the
three-headed Kerberos at the command of his master Eurystheus; above
all, the voyage of Odysseus to the ends of the deep-flowing Ocean, to
the clouded city of Kimmerian men, where shining Helios looks not down
with his rays, and deadly night stretches always over wretched
mortals,—thence they passed along the banks to the entrance of the land
where the shades of the departed, quickened for a while by the taste of
sacrificial blood, talked with the hero and showed him the regions of
their dismal home.[128]

The scene of the descent into Hades is in very deed enacted day by day
before our eyes, as it was before the eyes of the ancient myth-maker,
who watched the sun descend to the dark under-world, and return at dawn
to the land of living men. These heroic legends lie in close-knit
connexion with episodes of solar myth. It is by the simplest poetic
adaptation of the Sun’s daily life, typifying Man’s life in dawning
beauty, in mid-day glory, in evening death, that mythic fancy even fixed
the belief in the religions of the world, that the Land of Departed
Souls lies in the Far West or the World Below. How deeply the myth of
the Sunset has entered into the doctrine of men concerning a Future
State, how the West and the Under-World have become by mere imaginative
analogy Regions of the Dead, how the quaint day-dreams of savage poets
may pass into honoured dogmas of classic sages and modern divines,—all
this the crowd of details here cited from the wide range of culture
stand to prove.

Moreover, visits from or to the dead are matters of personal experience
and personal testimony. When in dream or vision the seer beholds the
spirits of the departed, they give him tidings from the other world, or
he may even rise and travel thither himself, and return to tell the
living what he has seen among the dead. It is sometimes as if the
traveller’s material body went to visit a distant land, and sometimes
all we are told is that the man’s self went, but whether in body or in
spirit is a mere detail of which the story keeps no record. Mostly,
however, it is the seer’s soul which goes forth, leaving his body behind
in ecstasy, sleep, coma, or death. Some of these stories, as we trace
them on from savage into civilized times, are no doubt given in good
faith by the visionary himself, while others are imitations of these
genuine accounts.[129] Now such visions are naturally apt to reproduce
the thoughts with which the seer’s mind was already furnished. Every
idea once lodged in the mind of a savage, a barbarian, or an enthusiast,
is ready thus to be brought back to him from without. It is a vicious
circle; what he believes he therefore sees, and what he sees he
therefore believes. Beholding the reflexion of his own mind like a child
looking at itself in a glass, he humbly receives the teaching of his
second self. The Red Indian visits his happy hunting-grounds, the Tongan
his shadowy island of Bolotu, the Greek enters Hades and looks on the
Elysian Fields, the Christian beholds the heights of Heaven and the
depths of Hell.

Among the North American Indians, and especially the Algonquin tribes,
accounts are not unusual of men whose spirits, travelling in dreams or
in the hallucinations of extreme illness to the land of the dead, have
returned to reanimate their bodies, and tell what they have seen. Their
experiences have been in great measure what they were taught in early
childhood to expect, the journey along the path of the dead, the
monstrous strawberry at which the jebi-ug or ghosts refresh themselves,
but which turns to red rock at the touch of their spoons, the bark
offered them for dried meat and great puff-balls for squashes, the river
of the dead with its snake-bridge or swinging log, the great dog
standing on the other side, the villages of the dead beyond.[130] The
Zulus of our own day tell of men who have gone down by holes in the
ground into the underworld, where mountains and rivers and all things
are as here above, and where a man may find his kindred, for the dead
live in their villages, and may be seen milking their cattle, which are
the cattle killed on earth and come to life anew. The Zulu Umpengula,
who told one of these stories to Dr. Callaway, remembered when he was a
boy seeing an ugly little hairy man called Uncama, who once, chasing a
porcupine that ate his mealies, followed it down a hole in the ground
into the land of the dead. When he came back to his home on earth he
found that he had been given up for dead himself, his wife had duly
burnt and buried his mats and blankets and vessels, and the wondering
people at sight of him again shouted the funeral dirge. Of this Zulu
Dante it used to be continually said, ‘There is the man who went to the
underground people.’[131] One of the most characteristic of these savage
narratives is from New Zealand. This story, which has an especial
interest from the reminiscence it contains of the gigantic extinct Moa,
and which may be repeated at some length as an illustration of the
minute detail and lifelike reality which such visionary legends assume
in barbaric life, was told to Mr. Shortland by a servant of his named Te
Wharewera. An aunt of this man died in a solitary hut near the banks of
Lake Rotorua. Being a lady of rank she was left in her hut, the door and
windows were made fast, and the dwelling was abandoned, as her death had
made it tapu. But a day or two after, Te Wharewera with some others
paddling in a canoe near the place at early morning saw a figure on the
shore beckoning to them. It was the aunt come to life again, but weak
and cold and famished. When sufficiently restored by their timely help,
she told her story. Leaving her body, her spirit had taken flight toward
the North Cape, and arrived at the entrance of Reigna. There, holding on
by the stem of the creeping akeake-plant, she descended the precipice,
and found herself on the sandy beach of a river. Looking round, she
espied in the distance an enormous bird, taller than a man, coming
towards her with rapid strides. This terrible object so frightened her,
that her first thought was to try to return up the steep cliff; but
seeing an old man paddling a small canoe towards her she ran to meet
him, and so escaped the bird. When she had been safely ferried across
she asked the old Charon, mentioning the name of her family, where the
spirits of her kindred dwelt. Following the path the old man pointed
out, she was surprised to find it just such a path as she had been used
to on earth; the aspect of the country, the trees, shrubs, and plants
were all familiar to her. She reached the village and among the crowd
assembled there she found her father and many near relations; they
saluted her, and welcomed her with the wailing chant which Maoris always
address to people met after long absence. But when her father had asked
about his living relatives, and especially about her own child, he told
her she must go back to earth, for no one was left to take care of his
grandchild. By his orders she refused to touch the food that the dead
people offered her, and in spite of their efforts to detain her, her
father got her safely into the canoe, crossed with her, and parting gave
her from under his cloak two enormous sweet potatoes to plant at home
for his grandchild’s especial eating. But as she began to climb the
precipice again, two pursuing infant spirits pulled her back, and she
only escaped by flinging the roots at them, which they stopped to eat,
while she scaled the rock by help of the akeake-stem, till she reached
the earth and flew back to where she had left her body. On returning to
life she found herself in darkness, and what had passed seemed as a
dream, till she perceived that she was deserted and the door fast, and
concluded that she had really died and come to life again. When morning
dawned, a faint light entered by the crevices of the shut-up house, and
she saw on the floor near her a calabash partly full of red ochre mixed
with water; this she eagerly drained to the dregs, and then feeling a
little stronger, succeeded in opening the door and crawling down to the
beach, where her friends soon after found her. Those who listened to her
tale firmly believed the reality of her adventures, but it was much
regretted that she had not brought back at least one of the huge
sweet-potatoes, as evidence of her visit to the land of spirits.[132]
Races of North Asia[133] and West Africa[134] have in like manner their
explorers of the world beyond the grave.

Classic literature continues the series. Lucian’s graphic tales
represent the belief of their age, if not of their author. His Eukrates
looks down the chasm into Hades, and sees the dead reclining on the
asphodel in companies of kinsfolk and friends; among them he recognizes
Sokrates with his bald head and pot-belly, and also his own father,
dressed in the clothes he was buried in. Then Kleodemos caps this story
with his own, how when he was sick, on the seventh day when his fever
was burning like a furnace, every one left him, and the doors were shut.
Then there stood before him an all-beauteous youth in a white garment,
who led him through a chasm into Hades, as he knew by seeing Tantalos
and Tityos and Sisyphos; and bringing him to the court of judgement,
where were Aiakos and the Fates and the Erinyes, the youth set him
before Pluto the King, who sat reading the names of those whose day of
life was over. But Pluto was angry, and said to the guide, ‘This one’s
thread is not run out, that he should depart, but bring me Demylos the
coppersmith, for he is living beyond the spindle.’ So Kleodemos came
back to himself free from his fever and announced that Demylos, who was
a sick neighbour, would die; and accordingly a little while after there
was heard the cry of the mourners wailing for him.[135] Plutarch’s
stories, told more seriously, are yet one in type with the mocking
Lucian’s. The wicked, pleasure-seeking Thespesios lies three days as
dead, and revives to tell his vision of the world below. One Antyllos
was sick, and seemed to the doctors to retain no trace of life; till,
waking without sign of insanity, he declared that he had been indeed
dead, but was ordered back to life, those who brought him being severely
chidden by their lord, and sent to fetch Nikander instead, a well-known
currier, who was accordingly taken with a fever, and died on the third
day.[136] Such stories, old and new, are current among the Hindus at
this day. A certain man’s soul, for instance, is carried to the realm of
Yama by mistake for a namesake, and is sent back in haste to regain his
body before it is burnt; but in the meanwhile he has a glimpse of the
hideous punishments of the wicked, and of the glorious life of those who
had mortified the flesh on earth, and of suttee-widows now sitting in
happiness by their husbands.[137] Mutatis mutandis these tales reappear
in Christian mythology, as when Gregory the Great records that a certain
nobleman named Stephen died, who was taken to the region of Hades, and
saw many things he had heard before but not believed; but when he was
set before the ruler there presiding, he sent him back, saying that it
was this Stephen’s neighbour—Stephen the smith—whom he had commanded to
be brought; and accordingly the one returned to life, and the other
died.[138]

The thought of human visitors revealing the mysteries of the world
beyond the grave, which indeed took no slight hold on Christian belief,
attached itself in a remarkable way to the doctrine of Christ’s descent
into Hades. This dogma had so strongly established itself by the end of
the 4th century, that Augustine could ask, ‘Quis nisi infidelis
negaverit fuisse apud inferos Christum?’[139] A distinct statement of
the dogma was afterwards introduced into the symbol commonly called the
‘Apostles’ Creed:’ ‘Descendit ad inferos,’ ‘Descendit ad inferna,’ ‘He
descended into hell.’[140] The Descent into Hades, which had the
theological use of providing a theory of salvation applicable to the
saints of the old covenant, imprisoned in the limbo of the fathers, is
narrated in full in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and is made
there to rest upon a legend which belongs to the present group of human
visits to the other world. It is related that two sons of Simeon, named
Charinus and Leucius, rose from their tombs at the Resurrection, and
went about silently and prayerfully among men, till Annas and Caiaphas
brought them into the synagogue, and charged them to tell of their
raising from the dead. Then, making the sign of the cross upon their
tongues, the two asked for parchment and wrote their record. They had
been set with all their fathers in the depths of Hades, when on a sudden
there appeared the colour of the sun like gold, and a purple royal light
shining on them; then the patriarchs and prophets, from Adam to Simeon
and John the Baptist, rejoicing proclaimed the coming of the light and
the fulfilment of the prophecies; Satan and Hades wrangled in strife
together; in vain the brazen gates were shut with their iron bars, for
the summons came to open the gates that the king of glory may come in,
who hath broken the gates of brass and cut the bars of iron in sunder;
then the mighty Lord broke the fetters and visited them who sat in
darkness and the shadow of death; Adam and his righteous children were
delivered from Hades, and led into the glorious grace of Paradise.[141]

Dante, elaborating in the ‘Divina Commedia’ the conceptions of paradise,
purgatory, and hell familiar to the actual belief of his age, describes
them once more in the guise of a living visitor to the land of the dead.
Echoes in mediæval legend of such exploring expeditions to the world
below still linger faintly in the popular belief of Europe. It has been
thus with St. Patrick’s Purgatory,[142] the cavern in the island of
Lough Derg, in the county Donegal, which even in the seventeenth century
O’Sullevan could describe first and foremost in his ‘Catholic History’
as ‘the greatest of all memorable things of Ireland.’ Mediæval visits to
the other world were often made in the spirit. But like Ulysses,
Wainamoinen, and Dante, men could here make the journey in body, as did
Sir Owain and the monk Gilbert. When the pilgrim had spent fifteen days
in prayer and fasting in the church, and had been led with litanies and
sprinkling of holy water to the entrance of the purgatory, and the last
warnings of the monks had failed to turn him from his venture, the door
was closed upon him, and if found next morning, he could tell the events
of his awful journey—how he crossed the narrow bridge that spans the
river of death, how he saw the hideous torments of hell, and approached
the joys of paradise. Sir Owain, one of King Stephen’s knights, went
thither in penance for his life of violence and rapine, and this was one
of the scenes he beheld in purgatory:—

                 ‘There come develes other mony mo,
                 And badde the knygth with hem to go,
                 And ladde him into a fowle contreye,
                 Where ever was nygth and never day,
                 For hit was derke and wonther colde:
                 Yette was there never man so bolde,
                 Hadde he never so mony clothes on,
                 But he wolde be colde as ony stone.
                 Wynde herde he none blowe,
                 But faste hit frese bothe hye and lowe.
                 They browgte him to a felde full brode,
                 Overe suche another never he yode,
                 For of the lengthe none ende he knewe
                 Thereover algate he moste nowe.
                 As he wente he herde a crye,
                 He wondered what hit was, and why,
                 He syg ther men and wymmen also
                 That lowde cryed, for hem was woo.
                 They leyen thykke on every londe,
                 Faste nayled bothe fote and honde
                 With nayles glowyng alle of brasse:
                 They ete the erthe so wo hem was;
                 Here face was nayled to the grownde.
                 “Spare,” they cryde, “a lytylle stounde.”
                 The develes wolde hem not spare:
                 To hem peyne they thowgte yare.’

When Owain had seen the other fields of punishment, with their fiery
serpents and toads, and the fires where sinners were hung up by their
offending members, and roasted on spits, and basted with molten metal,
and turned about on a great wheel of fire, and when he had passed the
Devil’s Mouth over the awful bridge, he reached the fair white glassy
wall of the Earthly Paradise, reaching upward and upward, and saw before
him the beautiful gate, whence issued a ravishing perfume. Then he soon
forgot his pains and sorrows.

                  ‘As he stode, and was so fayne,
                  Hym thowgth ther come hym agayne
                  A swyde fayr processyoun
                  Of alle manere menne of relygyoun,
                  Fayre vestementes they hadde on,
                  So ryche syg he never none.
                  Myche joye hym thowgte to se
                  Bysshopes yn here dygnité;
                  Ilkone wente other be and be,
                  Every man yn his degré.
                  He syg ther monkes and chanones,
                  And freres with newe shavene crownes;
                  Ermytes he saw there amonge,
                  And nonnes with fulle mery songe;
                  Persones, prestes, and vycaryes;
                  They made fulle mery melodyes.
                  He syg ther kynges and emperoures,
                  And dukes that had casteles and toures,
                  Erles and barones fele,
                  That some tyme hadde the worldes wele.
                  Other folke he syg also,
                  Never so mony as he dede thoo.
                  Wymmen he syg ther that tyde:
                  Myche was the joye ther on every syde:
                  For alle was joye that with hem ferde,
                  And myche solempnyté he herde.’

The procession welcomed Owain, and led him about, showing him the
beauties of that country:—

                 ‘Hyt was grene, and fulle of flowres
                 Of mony dyvers colowres;
                 Hyt was grene on every syde,
                 As medewus are yn someres tyde.
                 Ther were trees growyng fulle grene
                 Fulle of fruyte ever more, y wene;
                 For ther was frwyte of mony a kynde,
                 Such yn the londe may no mon fynde.
                 Ther they have the tree of lyfe,
                 Theryn ys myrthe, and never stryfe;
                 Frwyte of wysdom also ther ys,
                 Of the whyche Adam and Eve dede amysse:
                 Other manere frwytes ther were fele,
                 And alle manere joye and wele.
                 Moche folke he syg ther dwelle,
                 There was no tongue that mygth hem telle;
                 Alle were they cloded yn ryche wede,
                 What cloth hit was he kowthe not rede.

                 There was no wronge, but ever rygth,
                 Ever day and nevere nygth.
                 They shone as brygth and more clere
                 Than ony sonne yn the day doth here.’

The poem, in fifteenth-century English, from which these passages are
taken, is a version of the original legend of earlier date, and as such
contrasts with a story really dating from early in the fifteenth
century—William Staunton’s descent into Purgatory, where the themes of
the old sincerely-believed visionary lore are fading into moral
allegory, and the traveller sees the gay gold and silver collars and
girdles burning into the wearer’s flesh, and the jags that men were
clothed in now become adders and dragons, sucking and stinging them, and
the fiends drawing down the skin of women’s shoulders into pokes, and
smiting into their heads with burning hammers their gay chaplets of gold
and jewels turned to burning nails, and so forth. Late in this fifteenth
century, St. Patrick’s Purgatory fell into discredit, but even the
destruction of the entrance-building, in 1479, by Papal order, did not
destroy the ideal road. About 1693, an excavation on the spot brought to
light a window with iron stanchions; there was a cry for holy water to
keep the spirits from breaking out from prison, and the priest smelt
brimstone from the dark cavity below, which, however, unfortunately
turned out to be a cellar. In still later times, the yearly pilgrimage
of tens of thousands of votaries to the holy place has kept up this
interesting survival from the lower culture, whereby a communication may
still be traced, if not from Earth to Hades, at least from the belief of
the New Zealander to that of the Irish peasant.

To study and compare the ideal regions where man has placed the abodes
of departed souls is not an unprofitable task. True, geography has now
mapped out into mere earth and water the space that lay beyond the
narrower sea and land known to the older nations, and astronomy no
longer recognizes the flat earth trodden by men as being the roof of
subterranean halls, nor the sky as being a solid firmament, shutting out
men’s gaze from strata or spheres of empyræan regions beyond. Yet if we
carry our minds back to the state of knowledge among the lower races, we
shall not find it hard to understand the early conceptions as to the
locality of the regions beyond the grave. They are no secrets of high
knowledge made known to sages of old; they are the natural fancies which
childlike ignorance would frame in any age. The regularity with which
such conceptions repeat themselves over the world bears testimony to the
regularity of the processes by which opinion is formed among mankind. At
the same time, the student who carefully compares them will find in them
a perfect illustration of an important principle, widely applicable to
the general theory of the formation of human opinion. When a problem has
presented itself to mankind at large, susceptible of a number of
solutions about equally plausible, the result is that the several
opinions thus produced will be found lying scattered in country after
country. The problem here is, given the existence of souls of the dead
who from time to time visit the living, where is the home of these
ghosts? Why men in one district should have preferred the earth, in
another the under-world, in another the sky, as the abode of departed
souls, is a question often difficult to answer. But we may at least see
how again and again the question was taken in hand, and how out of the
three or four available answers some peoples adopted one, some another,
some several at once. Primitive theologians had all the world before
them where to choose their place of rest for the departed, and they used
to the full their speculative liberty.

Firstly, when the land of souls is located on the surface of the earth,
there is choice of fit places among wild and cloudy precipices, in
secluded valleys, in far-off plains and islands. In Borneo, Mr. St. John
visited the heaven of the Idaan race, on the summit of Kina Balu, and
the native guides, who feared to pass the night in this abode of
spirits, showed the traveller the moss on which the souls of their
ancestors fed, and the footprints of the ghostly buffaloes that followed
them. On Gunung Danka, a mountain in West Java, there is such another
‘Earthly Paradise.’ The Sajira who dwell in the district indeed profess
themselves Mohammedans, but they secretly maintain their old belief, and
at death or funeral they enjoin the soul in solemn form to set aside the
Moslem Allah, and to take the way to the dwelling-place of his own
forefathers’ souls:—

      ‘Step up the bed of the river, and cross the neck of land,
      Where the aren trees stand in a clump, and the pinangs in a row,
      Thither direct thy steps, Laillah being set aside.’

Mr. Jonathan Rigg had lived ten years among these people, and knew them
well, yet had never found out that their paradise was on this mountain.
When at last he heard of it, he made the ascent, finding on the top only
a few river-stones, forming one of the balai, or sacred cairns, common
in the district. But the popular belief, that a tiger would devour the
chiefs who permitted a violation of the sacred place, soon received the
sort of confirmation which such beliefs receive everywhere, for a tiger
killed two children a few days later, and the disaster was of course
ascribed to Mr. Rigg’s profanation.[143] The Chilians said that the soul
goes westward over the sea to Gulcheman, the dwelling-place of the dead
beyond the mountains; life, some said, was all pleasure there, but
others thought that part would be happy and part miserable.[144] Hidden
among the mountains of Mexico lay the joyous garden-land of Tlalocan,
where maize, and pumpkins, and chilis, and tomatos never failed, and
where abode the souls of children sacrificed to Tlaloc, its god, and the
souls of such as died by drowning or thunderstroke, or by leprosy or
dropsy, or other acute disease.[145] A survival of such thought may be
traced into mediæval civilization, in the legends of the Earthly
Paradise, the fire-girt abode of saints not yet raised to highest bliss,
localized in the utmost East of Asia, where earth stretches up towards
heaven.[146] When Columbus sailed west-ward across the Atlantic to seek
‘the new heaven and the new earth’ he had read of in Isaiah, he found
them, though not as he sought. It is a quaint coincidence that he found
there also, though not as he sought it, the Earthly Paradise which was
another main object of his venturous quest. The Haitians described to
the white men their Coaibai, the paradise of the dead, in the lovely
Western valleys of their island, where the souls hidden by day among the
cliffs came down at night to feed on the delicious fruit of the
mamey-trees, of which the living ate but sparingly, lest the souls of
their friends should want.[147]

Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit of the dead
hovers awhile on earth and goes at last toward the setting sun, or
westward over the sea to the island of souls, the home of his fathers.
Thus these rudest savages have developed two thoughts which we meet with
again and again far onward in the course of culture—the thought of an
island of the dead, and the thought that the world of departed souls is
in the West, whither the Sun descends at evening to his daily
death.[148] Among the North American Indians, when once upon a time an
Algonquin hunter left his body behind and visited the land of souls in
the sunny south, he saw before him beautiful trees and plants, but found
he could walk right through them. Then he paddled in the canoe of white
shining stone across the lake where wicked souls perish in the storm,
till he reached the beautiful and happy island where there is no cold,
no war, no bloodshed, but the creatures run happily about, nourished by
the air they breathe.[149] Tongan legend says that, long ago, a canoe
returning from Fiji was driven by stress of weather to Bolotu, the
island of gods and souls lying in the ocean north-west of Tonga. That
island is larger than all theirs together, full of all finest fruits and
loveliest flowers, that fill the air with fragrance, and come anew the
moment they are plucked; birds of beauteous plumage are there, and hogs
in plenty, all immortal save when killed for the gods to eat, and then
new living ones appear immediately to fill their places. But when the
hungry crew of the canoe landed, they tried in vain to pluck the shadowy
bread-fruit, they walked through unresisting trees and houses, even as
the souls of chiefs who met them walked unchecked through their solid
bodies. Counselled to hasten home from this land of no earthly food, the
men sailed to Tonga, but the deadly air of Bolotu had infected them, and
they soon all died.[150]

Such ideas took strong hold on classic thought, in the belief in a
paradise in the Fortunate Islands of the far Western Ocean. Hesiod in
the ‘Works and Days’ tells of the half-gods of the Fourth Age, between
the Age of Bronze and the Age of Iron. When death closed on this heroic
race, Zeus granted them at the ends of Earth a life and home, apart from
man and far from the immortals. There Kronos reigns over them, and they
dwell careless in the Islands of the Happy, beside deep-eddying
Ocean—blest heroes, for whom the grain-giving field bears, thrice
blooming yearly, the honey-sweet fruit:—

              ‘Ἔνθ’ ἤτοι τοὺς μὲν θανάτου τέλος ἀμφεκάλυψε·
              Τοîς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπον βίοτον καὶ ἤθἐ ὀπάσσας
              Ζεὺς Κρονίδες κατένασσε πατήρ ἐς πείρατα γαίες,
              Τηλοὐ ἀπ’ ἀθανάτον· τοῖσιν Κρόνος ἐμβασιλεύει·
              Καὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες
              Ἐν μακάρον νήσοισι παρ’ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνεν,
              Ὄλβιοι ἤροες, τοῖσιν μελιεδέα καρπὸν
              Τρὶς ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.’[151]

These Islands of the Blest, assigned as the abode of blessed spirits of
the dead, came indeed to be identified with the Elysian Fields. Thus
Pindar sings of steadfast souls, who through three lives on either side
have endured free from injustice; then they pass by the road of Zeus to
the tower of Kronos, where the ocean breezes blow round the islands of
the happy, blazing with golden flowers of land and water. Thus, also, in
the famous hymn of Kallistratos in honour of Harmodios and Aristogeiton,
who slew the tyrant Hipparchos:—

                ‘Φίλταθ’ Ἁρμόδἰ, οὔ τι πω τέθνηκας
                Νήσοις δ’ ἐν μακάρων σε φασὶν εîναι,
                Ἵνα περ ποδώκες Ἀχιλλεύς,
                Τυδείδεν τε φασὶ τὸν ἐσθλὸν Διομήδεα.’[152]

This group of legends has especial interest to us Englishmen, who
ourselves dwell, it seems, on such an island of the dead. It is not that
we or our country are of a more ghostly nature than others, but the idea
is geographical we are dwellers in the region of the setting sun, the
land of death. The elaborate account by Procopius, the historian of the
Gothic War, dates from the 6th century. The island of Brittia, according
to him, lies opposite the mouths of the Rhine, some 200 stadia off,
between Britannia and Thule, and on it dwell three populous nations, the
Angles, Frisians, and Britons. (By Brittia, it appears, he means our
Great Britain, his Britannia being the coast-land from modern Brittany
to Holland, and his Thule being Scandinavia.) In the course of his
history it seems to him needful to record a story, mythic and dreamlike
as he thinks, yet which numberless men vouch for as having been
themselves witnesses by eye and ear to its facts. This story is that the
souls of the departed are conveyed across the sea to the island of
Brittia. Along the mainland coast are many villages, inhabited by
fishermen and tillers of the soil and traders to this island in their
vessels. They are subject to the Franks, but pay no tribute, having from
of old had to do by turns the burdensome service of transporting the
souls. Those on duty for each night stay at home till they hear a
knocking at the doors, and a voice of one unseen calling them to their
work. Then without delay rising from their beds, compelled by some
unknown power they go down to the beach, and there they see boats, not
their own but others, lying ready but empty of men. Going on board and
taking the oars, they find that by the burden of the multitude of souls
embarked, the vessel lies low in the water, gunwale under within a
finger’s breadth. In an hour they are at the opposite shore, though in
their own boats they would hardly make the voyage in a night and day.
When they reach the island, the vessel becomes empty, till it is so
light that only the keel touches the waves. They see no man on the
voyage, no man at the landing, but a voice is heard that proclaims the
name and rank and parentage of each newly arrived passenger, or if
women, those of their husbands. Traces of this remarkable legend seem to
have survived, thirteen centuries later, in that endmost district of the
Britannia of Procopius which still keeps the name of Bretagne. Near Raz,
where the narrow promontory stretches westward into the ocean, is the
‘Bay of Souls’ (boé ann anavo); in the commune of Plouguel the corpse is
taken to the churchyard, not by the shorter road by land, but in a boat
by the ‘Passage de l’Enfer,’ across a little arm of the sea; and Breton
folk-lore holds fast to the legend of the Curé de Braspar, whose dog
leads over to Great Britain the souls of the departed, when the wheels
of the soul-car are heard creaking in the air. These are but mutilated
fragments, but they seem to piece together with another Keltic myth,
told by Macpherson in the last century, the voyage of the boat of heroes
to Flath-Innis, Noble Island, the green island home of the departed,
which lies calm amid the storms far in the Western Ocean. With full
reason, also, Mr. Wright traces to the situation of Ireland in the
extreme West its especial association with legends of descents to the
land of shades. Claudian placed at the extremity of Gaul the entrance
where Ulysses found a way to Hades—

              ‘Est locus extremum qua pandit Gallia litus,
              Oceani prætentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulysses,’ &c.

No wonder that this spot should have been since identified with St.
Patrick’s Purgatory, and that some ingenious etymologist should have
found in the name of ‘Ulster’ a corruption of ‘Ulyssisterra,’ and a
commemoration of the hero’s visit.[153]

Thirdly, the belief in a subterranean Hades peopled by the ghosts of the
dead is quite common among the lower races. The earth is flat, say the
Italmen of Kamchatka, for if it were round, people would fall off; it is
the wrong side of another heaven, which covers another earth below,
whither the dead will go down to their new life, and so, as Steller
says, their mundane system is like a tub with three bottoms.[154] In
North America, the Tacullis held that the soul goes after death into the
bowels of the earth, whence it can come back in human shape to visit
friends.[155] In South America, Brazilian souls travel down to the world
below in the West, and Patagonian souls will depart to enjoy eternal
drunkenness in the caves of their ancestral deities.[156] The New
Zealander who says ‘The sun has returned to Hades’ (kua hoki mai te Ra
ki te Rua), simply means that it has set. When a Samoan Islander dies,
the host of spirits that surround the house, waiting to convey his soul
away, set out with him crossing the land and swimming the sea, to the
entrance of the spirit-world. This is at the westernmost point of the
westernmost island, Savaii, and there one may see the two circular holes
or basins where souls descend, chiefs by the bigger and plebeians by the
smaller, into the regions of the under-world. There below is a heaven,
earth, and sea, and people with real bodies, planting, fishing, cooking,
as in the present life; but at night their bodies become like a confused
collection of fiery sparks, and in this state during the hours of
darkness they come up to revisit their former abodes, retiring at dawn
to the bush or to the lower regions.[157] For the state of thought on
this subject among rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus,
who at death will descend to live in Hades among their ancestors, the
‘Abapansi,’ the ‘people underground.’[158] Among rude Asiatic tribes,
such an example may be taken from the Karens. They are not quite agreed
where Plu, the land of the dead, is situate; it may be above the earth
or beyond the horizon. But the dominant and seemingly indigenous opinion
is that it is below the earth. When the sun sets on earth, it rises in
the Karen Hades, and when it sets in Hades it rises in this world. Here,
again, the familiar belief of the European peasant is found; the spirits
of the dead may come up from the land of shades by night, but at
daybreak must return.[159]

Such ideas, developed by uncultured races, may be followed up in various
detail, through the stage of religion represented by the Mexican and
Peruvian nations,[160] into higher ranges of culture. The Roman Orcus
was in the bowels of the earth, and when the ‘lapis manalis,’ the stone
that closed the mouth of the world below, was moved away on certain
solemn days, the ghosts of the dead came up to the world above, and
partook of the offerings of their friends.[161] Among the Greeks, the
Land of Hades was in the world below, nor was the thought unknown that
it was the sunset realm of the Western god (πρὸς ἑσπέρου θεοῦ). What
Hades seemed like to the popular mind, Lucian thus describes:—‘The great
crowd, indeed, whom the wise call “idiots,” believing Homer and Hesiod,
and the other myth-makers about these things, and setting up their
poetry as a law, have supposed a certain deep place under the earth,
Hades, and that it is vast, and roomy, and gloomy, and sunless, and how
thought to be lighted up so as to behold every one within, I know
not.’[162] In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the future life, modelled
on solar myth, the region of the departed combines the under-world and
the west, Amenti; the dead passes the gate of the setting sun to
traverse the roads of darkness, and behold his father Osiris; and with
this solar thought the Egyptian priests, representing in symbolic
ceremony the scenes of the other world, carried the corpse in the sacred
boat across to the burial-place, on the western side of the sacred
lake.[163] So, too, the cavernous Sheol of the Israelites, the shadowy
region of departed souls, lay deep below the earth. Through the great
Aryan religious systems, Brahmanism, Zarathustrism, Buddhism, and onward
into the range of Islam and of Christianity, subterranean hells of
purgatory or punishment make the doleful contrast to heavens of light
and glory.

It is, however, a point worthy of special notice that the conception of
hell as a fiery abyss, so familiar to the religions of the higher
civilization, is all but unknown to savage thought, so much so that if
met with, its genuineness is doubtful. Captain John Smith’s ‘History of
Virginia,’ published in 1624, contains two different accounts of the
Indians’ doctrine of a future life. Smith’s own description is of a land
beyond the mountains, toward sunset, where chiefs and medicine-men in
paint and feathers shall smoke, and sing, and dance with their
forefathers, while the common people have no life after death, but rot
in their graves. Heriot’s description is of tabernacles of the gods to
which the good are taken up to perpetual happiness, while the wicked are
carried to ‘Popogusso,’ a great pit which they think to be at the
furthest parts of the world where the sun sets, and there burn
continually.[164] Now knowing so much as we do of the religion of the
Algonquins, to whom these Virginians belonged, we may judge that while
the first account is genuinely native, though perhaps not quite
correctly understood, the second was borrowed by the Indians from the
white men themselves. Yet even here the touch of solar myth is manifest,
and the description of the fiery abyss in the region of sunset may be
compared with one from our own country, in the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of
Saturn and Solomon. ‘Saga me forhwan byth seo sunne read on æfen? Ic the
secge, forthon heo locath on helle.—Tell me, why is the sun red at even?
I tell thee, because she looketh on hell.’[165] To the same belief
belongs another striking mythic feature. The idea of volcanos being
mouths of the under-world seems not unexampled among the lower races,
for we hear of certain New Zealanders casting their dead down into a
crater.[166] But in connexion with the thought of a gehenna of fire and
brimstone, Vesuvius, Etna, and Hecla had spiritual as well as material
terrors to the mind of Christendom, for they were believed to be places
of purgatory or the very mouths of the pit where the souls of the damned
were cast down.[167] The Indians of Nicaragua used in old times to offer
human sacrifices to their volcano Masaya, flinging the corpses into the
crater, and in later years, after the conversion of the country, we hear
of Christian confessors sending their penitents to climb the mountain,
and (as a glimpse of hell) to look down upon the molten lava.[168]

Fourthly, in old times and new, it has come into men’s minds to fix upon
the sun and moon as abodes of departed souls. When we have learnt from
the rude Natchez of the Mississippi and the Apalaches of Florida that
the sun is the bright dwelling of departed chiefs and braves, and have
traced like thoughts on into the theologies of Mexico and Peru, then we
may compare these savage doctrines with Isaac Taylor’s ingenious
supposition in his ‘Physical Theory of Another Life,’—the sun of each
planetary system is the house of the higher and ultimate spiritual
corporeity, and the centre of assembly to those who have passed on the
planets their preliminary era of corruptible organization. Or perhaps
some may prefer the Rev. Tobias Swinden’s book, published in the last
century, and translated into French and German, which proved the sun to
be hell, and its dark spots gatherings of damned souls.[169] And when in
South America the Saliva Indians have pointed out the moon, their
paradise where no mosquitos are, and the Guaycurus have shown it as the
home of chiefs and medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau
in like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and
chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with Plutarch’s
description of the virtuous souls who after purification in the middle
space gain their footing on the moon, and there are crowned as
victors.[170] The converse notion of the moon as the seat of hell, has
been elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. M. F. Tupper:

           ‘I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern’d realm,
           Sad Satellite, thou giant ash of death,
           Blot on God’s firmament, pale home of crime,
           Scarr’d prison-house of sin, where damned souls
           Feed upon punishment. Oh, thought sublime,
           That amid night’s black deeds, when evil prowls
           Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well,
           Glarest o’er all, the wakeful eye of—Hell!’

Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill matched in such speculative
lore with the white philosopher.

Fifthly, as Paradise on the face of the earth, and Hades beneath it
where the sun goes down, are regions whose existence is asserted or not
denied by savage and barbaric science, so it is with Heaven. Among the
examples which display for us the real course of knowledge among
mankind, and the real relation which primitive bears to later culture,
the belief in the existence of a firmament is one of the most
instructive. It arises naturally in the minds of children still, and in
accordance with the simplest childlike thought, the cosmologies of the
North American Indians[171] and the South Sea Islanders[172] describe
their flat earth arched over by the solid vault of heaven. Like thoughts
are to be traced on through such details as the Zulu idea that the blue
heaven is a rock encircling the earth, inside which are the sun, moon,
and stars, and outside which dwell the people of heaven; the modern
negro’s belief that there is a firmament stretched above like a cloth or
web; the Finnish poem which tells how Ilmarinen forged the firmament of
finest steel, and set in it the moon and stars.[173] The New Zealander,
with his notion of a solid firmament, through which the waters can be
let down on earth through a crack or hole from the reservoir of rain
above, could well explain the passage in Herodotus concerning that place
in North Africa where, as the Libyans said, the sky is pierced, as well
as the ancient Jewish conception of a firmament of heaven, ‘strong as a
molten mirror,’ with its windows through which the rain pours down in
deluge from the reservoirs above, windows which late Rabbinical
literature tells us were made by taking out two stars.[174] In nations
where the theory of the firmament prevails, accounts of bodily journeys
or spiritual ascents to heaven are in general meant not as figure, but
as fact. Among the lower races, the tendency to localize the region of
departed souls above the sky seems less strong than that which leads
them to place their world of the dead on or below the earth’s surface.
Yet some well-marked descriptions of a savage Heaven are on record, the
following, and others to be cited presently. Even some Australians seem
to think of going up to the clouds at death, to eat and drink, and hunt
and fish as here.[175] In North America, the Winnebagos placed their
paradise in the sky, where souls travel along that ‘Path of the Dead’
which we call the Milky Way; and working out the ever-recurring solar
idea, the modern Iroquois speak of the soul going upward and westward,
till it comes out on the beauteous plains of heaven, with people and
trees and things as on earth.[176] In South America the Guarayos,
representatives in some sort of the past condition of the Guarani race,
worship Tamoi the Grandfather, the Ancient of Heaven; he was their first
ancestor, who lived among them in old days and taught them to till the
ground; then rising to heaven in the East he disappeared, having
promised to be the helper of his people on earth, and to transport them,
when they died, from the top of a sacred tree into another life, where
they shall find their kindred and have hunting in plenty, and possess
all that they possessed on earth; therefore it is that the Guarayos
adorn their dead, and burn their weapons for them, and bury them with
their faces to the East, whither they are to go.[177] Among American
peoples whose culture rose to a higher level than that of these savage
tribes, we hear of the Peruvian Heaven, the glorious ‘Upper World,’ and
of the temporary abode of Aztec warriors on heavenly wooded plains,
where the sun shines when it is night on earth, wherefore it was a
Mexican saying that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead.[178]
What thoughts of heaven were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this
hymn from the Rig-Veda may show:—

    ‘Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed,
       in that immortal imperishable world place me, O Soma!
    Where king Vaivasvata reigns, where the secret place of heaven is,
       where these mighty waters are, there make me immortal!
    Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds
       are radiant, there make me immortal!
    Where wishes and desires are, where the place of the bright sun is,
       where there is freedom and delight, there make me immortal!
    Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside,
       where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me
       immortal!’[179]

In such bright vague thoughts from the poet’s religion of nature, or in
cosmic schemes of ancient astronomy, with their artificial glories of
barbaric architecture exaggerated in the skies, or in the raptures of
mystic vision, or in the calmer teaching of the theologic doctrine of a
future life, descriptions of realms of blessed souls in heaven are to be
followed through the religions of the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Parsi,
the later Jew, the Moslem, and the Christian.

For the object, not of writing a handbook of religions, but of tracing
the relation which the religion of savages bears to the religion of
cultured nations, these details are enough to show the general line of
human thought regarding the local habitations of departed souls. It
seems plain from the most cursory inspection of these various
localizations, however much we may consider them as inherited or
transmitted from people to people in the complex movements of
theological history, that they are at any rate not derived from any
single religion accepted among ancient or primæval men. They bear
evident traces of independent working out in the varied definition of
the region of souls, as on earth among men, on earth in some distant
country, below the earth, above or beyond the sky. Similar ideas of this
kind are found in different lands, but this similarity seems in large
measure due to independent recurrence of thoughts so obvious. Not less
is independent fancy compatible with the ever-recurring solar myth in
such ideas, placing the land of Death in the land of Evening or of
Night, and its entrance at the gates of Sunset. Barbaric poets of many a
distant land must have gazed into the West to read the tale of Life and
Death, and tell it of Man. If, however, we look more closely into the
stages of intellectual history to which these theories of the Future
World belong, it will appear that the assignment of the realm of
departed souls to the three great regions, Earth, Hades, Heaven, has not
been uniform. Firstly, the doctrine of a land of souls on Earth belongs
widely and deeply to savage culture, but dwindles in the barbaric stage,
and survives but feebly into the mediæval. Secondly, the doctrine of a
subterranean Hades holds as large a place as this in savage belief, and
has held it firmly along the course of higher religions, where, however,
this under-world is looked on less and less as the proper abode of the
dead, but rather as the dismal place of purgatory and hell. Lastly, the
doctrine of a Heaven, floored upon a firmament, or placed in the upper
air, seems in early savage belief less common than the other two, but
yields to neither of them in its vigorous retention by the thought of
modern nations. These local theories appear to be taken, firstly and
mostly, in the most absolute literal sense, and although, under the
influence of physical science, much that was once distinctly-meant
philosophy has now passed among theologians into imagery and metaphor,
yet at low levels of knowledge the new canons of interpretation find
little acceptance, and even in modern Europe the rude cosmology of the
lower races in no small measure retains its place.

Turning now to consider the state of the departed in these their new
homes, we have to examine the definitions of the Future Life which
prevail through the religions of mankind. In these doctrines there is
much similarity caused by the spreading of established beliefs into new
countries, and also much similarity that is beyond what such
transmission can account for. So there is much variety due to local
colour and circumstance, and also much variety beyond the reach of such
explanation. The main causes of both similarity and variety seem to lie
far deeper, in the very origin and inmost meaning of the doctrines. The
details of the future life, among the lower races and upwards, are no
heterogeneous mass of arbitrary fancies. Classified, they range
themselves naturally round central ideas, in groups whose correspondence
seems to indicate the special course of their development. Amongst the
pictures into which this world has shaped its expectations of the next,
two great conceptions are especially to be discerned. The one is that
the future life is, as it were, a reflexion of this; in a new world,
perhaps of dreamy beauty, perhaps of ghostly gloom, men are to retain
their earthly forms and their earthly conditions, to have around them
their earthly friends, to possess their earthly property, to carry on
their earthly occupations. The other is that the future life is a
compensation for this, where men’s conditions are re-allotted as the
consequence, and especially as the reward or punishment, of their
earthly life. The first of these two ideas we may call (with Captain
Burton) the ‘continuance-theory,’ contrasting with it the second as the
‘retribution-theory.’ Separately or combined, these two doctrines are
the keys of the subject, and by grouping typical examples under their
two headings, it will be possible to survey systematically man’s most
characteristic schemes of his life beyond the grave.

To the doctrine of Continuance belongs especially the savage view of the
spirit-land, that it is as the dream-land where the souls of the living
so often go to visit the souls of the dead. There the soul of the dead
Karen, with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his house and cuts
his rice; the shade of the Algonquin hunter hunts souls of beaver and
elk, walking on the souls of his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow;
the fur-wrapped Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge; the Zulu milks his cows
and drives his cattle to kraal; South American tribes live on, whole or
mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world, leading their old
lives, and having their wives with them again, though indeed, as the
Araucanians said, they have no more children, for they are but
souls.[180] Soul-land is dream-land in its shadowy unreal pictures, for
which, nevertheless, material reality so plainly furnished the models,
and it is dream-land also in its vivid idealization of the soberer
thoughts and feelings of waking life.

             ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
                 The earth, and every common sight,
                     To me did seem
                 Apparell’d in celestial light,
             The glory and the freshness of a dream.’

Well might the Mohawk Indian describe the good land of paradise, as he
had seen it in a dream. The shade of the Ojibwa follows a wide and
beaten path that leads toward the West, he crosses a deep and rapid
water, and reaching a country full of game and all things the Indian
covets, he joins his kindred in their long lodge.[181] So, on the
southern continent, the Bolivian Yuracarés will go, all of them, to a
future life where there will be plenty of hunting, and Brazilian
forest-tribes will find a pleasant forest full of calabash-trees and
game, where the souls of the dead will live happily in company.[182] The
Greenlanders hoped that their souls—pale, soft, disembodied forms which
the living could not grasp—would lead a life better than that of earth,
and never ceasing. It might be in heaven, reached by the rainbow, where
the souls pitch their tents round the great lake rich in fish and fowl,
the lake whose waters above the firmament overflowing make rain on
earth, and if its banks broke, there would be another deluge. But
gaining the most and best of their living from the depths of the sea,
they were also apt to think the land of Torngarsuk to be below the sea
or earth, and to be entered by the deep holes in the rocks. Perpetual
summer is there, ever beauteous sunshine, and no night, good water and
superfluity of birds and fish, seals and reindeer to be caught without
difficulty, or found alive seething in a great kettle.[183] In the
Kimbunda country of South-West Africa, souls live on in ‘Kalunga,’ the
world where it is day when it is night here; and with plenty of food and
drink, and women to serve them, and hunting and dancing for pastime,
they lead a life which seems a corrected edition of this.[184] On
comparison of these pictures of the future life with such as have
expressed the longings of more cultured nations, there appear indeed
different details, but the principle is ever the same—the idealization
of earthly good. The Norseman’s ideal is sketched in the few broad
touches which show him in Walhalla, where he and the other warriors
without number ride forth arrayed each morning and hew each other on
Odin’s plain, till the slain have been ‘chosen’ as in earthly battle,
and meal-tide comes, and slayers and slain mount and ride home to feast
on the everlasting boar, and drink mead and ale with the Æsir.[185] To
understand the Moslem’s mind, we must read the two chapters of the Koran
where the Prophet describes the faithful in the garden of delights,
reclining on their couches of gold and gems, served by children ever
young, with bowls of liquor whose fumes will not rise into the drinkers’
heads, living among the thornless lotus-trees and date-palms loaded to
the ground, feasting on the fruits they love and the meat of the rarest
birds, with the houris near them with beautiful black eyes, like pearls
in the shell, where no idle or wicked speech is heard, but only the
words ‘Peace, Peace.’

    ‘They who fear the judgment of God shall have two gardens.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    Adorned with groves.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    In each of them shall spring two fountains.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    In each of them shall grow two kinds of fruits.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    They shall lie on carpets brocaded with silk and embroidered with
       gold; the fruits of the two gardens shall be near, easy to pluck.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    There shall be young virgins with modest looks, unprofaned by man or
       jinn.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    They are like jacinth and coral.
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?
    What is the recompence of good, if not good?
    Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?’ &c.[186]

With these descriptions of Paradise idealized on secular life, it is
interesting to compare others which bear the impress of a priestly
caste, devising a heaven after their manner. We can almost see the
faces of the Jewish rabbis settling their opinions about the high
schools in the firmament of heaven, where Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai and
the great Rabbi Eliezer teach Law and Talmud as they taught when they
were here below, and masters and learners go prosing on with the weary
old disputations of cross question and crooked answer that pleased
their souls on earth.[187] Nor less suggestively do the Buddhist
heavens reflect the minds of the ascetics who devised them. As in
their thoughts sensual pleasure seemed poor and despicable in
comparison with mystic inward joy, rising and rising till
consciousness fades in trance, so, above their heavens of millions of
years of mere divine happiness, they raised other ranges of heavens
where sensual pain and pleasure cease, and enjoyment becomes
intellectual, till at a higher grade even bodily form is gone, and
after the last heaven of ‘Neither-consciousness-nor-unconsciousness’
there follows Nirwâna, as ecstasy passes into swoon.[188]

But the doctrine of the continuance of the soul’s life has another and a
gloomier side. There are conceptions of an abode of the dead
characterized not so much by dreaminess as by ghostliness. The realm of
shades, especially if it be a cavern underground, has seemed a dim and
melancholy place to the dwellers in this ‘white world,’ as the Russian
calls the land of the living. One description of the Hurons tells how
the other world, with its hunting and fishing, its much-prized hatchets
and robes and necklaces, is like this world, yet day and night the souls
groan and lament.[189] Thus the region of Mictlan, the subterranean land
of Hades whither the general mass of the Mexican nation, high and low,
expected to descend from the natural death-bed, was an abode looked
forward to with resignation, but scarcely with cheerfulness. At the
funeral the survivors were bidden not to mourn too much, the dead was
reminded that he had passed and suffered the labours of this life,
transitory as when one warms himself in the sun, and he was bidden to
have no care or anxiety to return to his kinsfolk now that he has
departed for ever and aye, for his consolation must be that they too
will end their labours, and go whither he has gone before.[190] Among
the Basutos, where the belief in a future life in Hades is general, some
imagine in this underworld valleys ever green, and herds of hornless
speckled cattle owned by the dead; but it seems more generally thought
that the shades wander about in silent calm, experiencing neither joy
nor sorrow. Moral retribution there is none.[191] The Hades of the West
African seems no ecstatic paradise, to judge by Captain Burton’s
description: ‘It was said of the old Egyptians that they lived rather in
Hades than upon the banks of the Nile. The Dahomans declare that this
world is man’s plantation, the next is his home,—a home which, however,
no one visits of his own accord. They of course own no future state of
rewards and punishment: there the King will be a King, and the slave a
slave for ever. Ku-to-men, or Deadman’s land, the Dahoman’s other but
not better world, is a country of ghosts, of umbræ, who, like the
spirits of the nineteenth century in Europe, lead a quiet life, except
when by means of mediums they are drawn into the drawing-rooms of the
living.’ With some such hopeless expectation the neighbours of the
Dahomans, the Yorubas, judge the life to come in their simple proverb
that ‘A corner in this world is better than a corner in the world of
spirits.’[192] The Finns, who feared the ghosts of the departed as
unkind, harmful beings, fancied them dwelling with their bodies in the
grave, or else, with what Castrén thinks a later philosophy, assigned
them their dwelling in the subterranean Tuonela. Tuonela was like this
upper earth, the sun shone there, there was no lack of land and water,
wood and field, tilth and meadow, there were bears and wolves, snakes
and pike, but all things were of a hurtful, dismal kind, the woods dark
and swarming with wild beasts, the water black, the cornfields bearing
seed of snakes’ teeth, and there stern pitiless old Tuoni, and his grim
wife and son with the hooked fingers with iron points, kept watch and
ward over the dead lest they should escape.[193] Scarce less dismal was
the classic ideal of the dark realm below, whither the shades of the
dead must go to join the many gone before (ἐς πλεόνων ἱκέσθαι; penetrare
ad plures; andare tra i più). The Roman Orcus holds the pallid souls,
rapacious Orcus, sparing neither good nor bad. Gloomy is the Greek land
of Hades, dark dwelling of the images of departed mortals, where the
shades carry at once their living features and their dying wounds, and
glide and cluster and whisper, and lead the shadow of a life. Like the
savage hunter on his ghostly prairie, the great Orion still bears his
brazen mace, still chases over the meadows of asphodel the flying beasts
he slew of yore in the lonely mountains. Like the rude African of
to-day, the swift-footed Achilles scorns such poor, thin, shadowy life;
rather would he serve a mean man upon earth than be lord of all the
dead.

      ‘Truly, oxen and goodly sheep may be taken for booty,
      Tripods, too, may be bought, and the yellow beauty of horses;
      But from the fence of the teeth when once the soul is departed,
      Never cometh it back, regained by plunder or purchase.’[194]

Where and what was Sheol, the dwelling of the ancient Jewish dead? Of
late years the Biblical critic has no longer to depend on passages of
the Old Testament for realizing its conception, so plainly is it
connected with the seven-circled Irkalla of the Babylonian-Assyrian
religion, the gloomy subterranean abode whence there is no return for
man, though indeed the goddess Isthar passed through its seven gates,
and came back to earth from her errand of saving all life from
destruction. In the history of religions, few passages are more
instructive than those in which the prophets of the Old Testament
recognize the ancestral connexion of their own belief with the national
religions of Babylon-Assyria, as united in the doctrine of a gloomy
prison of ghosts, through whose gates Jew and Gentile alike must pass.
Sheol (שאול from שאל) is, as its name implies, a cavernous recess, yet
it is no mere surface-grave or tomb, but an under-world of awful depth:
‘High as Heaven, what doest thou? deeper than Sheol, what knowest thou?’
Asshur and all her company, Elam and all her multitude, the mighty
fallen of the uncircumcised, lie there. The great king of Babylon must
go down:—

    ‘Sheol from beneath is moved because of thee, to meet thee at thy
       coming:
    He rouseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the
       earth;
    He maketh to rise up from their thrones, all the kings of the
       nations.
    All of them shall accost thee, and shall say unto thee:
    Art thou, even thou too, became weak as we? Art thou made like unto
       us?’

To the Greek Septuagint, Sheol was Hades, and for this the Coptic
translators had their long-inherited Egyptian name of Amenti, while
the Vulgate renders it as Infernus, the lower regions. The Gothic
Ulfilas, translating the Hades of the New Testament, could use Halja
in its old German sense of the dim shadowy home of the dead below the
earth; and the corresponding word Hell, if this its earlier sense be
borne in mind, fairly translates Sheol and Hades in the English version
of the Old and New Testament, though the word has become misleading to
uneducated ears by being used also in the sense of Gehenna, the place of
torment. The early Hebrew historians and prophets, holding out neither
the hope of everlasting glory nor the fear of everlasting agony as
guiding motives for man’s present life, lay down little direct doctrine
of a future state, yet their incidental mentions justify the translators
who regard Sheol as Hades. Sheol is a special locality where dead men go
to their dead ancestors: ‘And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was
gathered unto his people ... and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.’
Abraham, though not even buried in the land of his forefathers, is thus
‘gathered unto his people;’ and Jacob has no thought of his body being
laid with Joseph’s body, torn by wild beasts in the wilderness, when he
says, ‘I shall go down to my son mourning to Sheol (‘εἰς ᾅδου’ in the
LXX., ‘èpesët èàmenti’ in the Coptic, ‘in infernum’ in the Vulgate). The
rephaim, the ‘shades’ of the dead, who dwell in Sheol, love not to be
disturbed from their rest by the necromancer; ‘And Samuel said to Saul,
why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?’ Yet their quiet is
contrasted in a tone of sadness with the life on earth; ‘Whatsoever thy
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor
device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest.’[195]
Such thoughts of the life of the shades below did not disappear when, in
the later years of the Jewish nation, the great change in the doctrine
of the future life passed in so large a measure over the Hebrew mind,
their earlier thoughts of ghostly continuance giving place to the
doctrines of resurrection and retribution. The ancient ideas have even
held their place on into Christian thought, in pictures like that of the
Limbus Patrum, the Hades where Christ descended to set free the
patriarchs.

The Retribution-theory of the future life comprises in a general way the
belief in different grades of future happiness, especially in different
regions of the other world allotted to men according to their lives in
this. This doctrine of retribution is, as we have already seen, far from
universal among mankind, many races recognizing the idea of a spirit
outliving the body, without considering the fate of this spirit to
depend at all upon the conduct of the living man. The doctrine of
retribution indeed hardly seems an original part of the doctrine of the
future life. On the contrary, if we judge that men in a primitive state
of culture arrived at the notion of a surviving spirit, and that some
races, but by no means all, afterwards reached the further stage of
recognizing a retribution for deeds done in the body, this theory will
not, so far as I know, be discountenanced by facts.[196] Even among the
higher savages, however, a connexion between man’s life and his
happiness or misery after death is often held as a definite article of
theology, and thence it is to be traced onward through barbaric
religions, and into the very heart of Christianity. Yet the grounds of
good and evil in the future life are so far from uniform among the
religions of the world, that they may differ widely within what is
considered one and the same creed. The result is more definite than the
cause, the end than the means. Men who alike look forward to a region of
unearthly happiness beyond the grave, hope to reach that happy land by
roads so strangely different, that the path of life which leads one
nation to eternal bliss may seem to the next the very descent into the
pit. In noticing among savage and barbaric peoples the qualifications
which determine future happiness, we may with some distinctness define
these as being excellence, valour, social rank, religious ordinance. On
the whole, however, in the religions of the lower range of culture,
unless where they may have been affected by contact with higher
religions, the destiny of the man after death seems hardly to turn on
judicial reward or punishment for his moral conduct in life. Such
difference as is made between the future conditions of different classes
of souls, seems more often to belong to a remarkable intermediate
doctrine, standing between the earlier continuance-theory and the later
retribution-theory. The idea of the next life being similar to this
seems to have developed into the idea that what gives prosperity and
renown here will give it also there, so that earthly conditions carry on
their contrasts into the changed world after death. Thus a man’s
condition after death will be a result of, rather than a compensation or
retribution for, his condition during life. A comparison of doctrines
held at various stages of culture may justify a tentative speculation as
to their actual sequence in history, favouring the opinion that through
such an intermediate stage the doctrine of simple future existence was
actually developed into the doctrine of future reward and punishment, a
transition which for deep import to human life has scarcely its rival in
the history of religion.

The effect of earthly rank on the future life, as looked at by the lower
races, brings out this intermediate stage in bold relief. Mere transfer
from one life to another makes chiefs and slaves here chiefs and slaves
hereafter, and this natural doctrine is very usual. But there are cases
in which earthly caste is exaggerated into utter difference in the life
to come. The aerial paradise of Raiatea, with its fragrant ever-blooming
flowers, its throngs of youths and girls all perfection, its luxurious
feasts and merrymakings, were for the privileged orders of Areois and
chiefs who could pay the priests their heavy charges, but hardly for the
common populace. This idea reached its height in the Tonga islands,
where aristocratic souls would pass to take their earthly rank and
station in the island paradise of Bolotu, while plebeian souls, if
indeed they existed, would die with the plebeian bodies they dwelt
in.[197] In Vancouver’s Island, the Ahts fancied Quawteaht’s calm sunny
plenteous land in the sky as the resting-place of high chiefs, who live
in one great house as the Creator’s guests, while the slain in battle
have another to themselves. But otherwise all Indians of low degree go
deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with its poor houses
and no salmon and small deer, and blankets so small and thin that when
the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them, to send
them to the world below with the departed soul.[198] The expectation of
royal dignity in the life after death, distinct from the fate of
ordinary mortals, comes well into view among the Natchez of Louisiana,
where the sun-descended royal family would in some way return to the
Sun; thus also in the mightier empire of Peru, where each sun-descended
Inca, feeling the approach of death, announced to his assembled vassals
that he was called to heaven to rest with his father the Sun.[199] But
in the higher religions, the change in this respect from the doctrine of
continuance to the doctrine of retribution is wonderful in its
completeness. The story of that great lady who strengthened her hopes of
future happiness by the assurance, ‘They will think twice before they
refuse a person of my condition,’ is a mere jest to modern ears. Yet,
like many other modern jest, it is only an archaism which in an older
stage of culture had in it nothing ridiculous.

To the happy land of Torngarsuk the Great Spirit, says Cranz, only such
Greenlanders came as have been valiant workers, for other ideas of
virtue they have none; such as have done great deeds, taken many whales
and seals, borne much hardship, been drowned at sea, or died in
childbirth.[200] Thus Charlevoix says of the Indians further south, that
their claim to hunt after death on the prairies of eternal spring is to
have been good hunters and warriors here. Lescarbot, speaking of the
belief among the Indians of Virginia that after death the good will be
at rest and the wicked in pain, remarks that their enemies are the
wicked and themselves the good, so that in their opinion they are after
death much at their ease, and principally when they have well defended
their country and slain their enemies.[201] So Jean de Lery said of the
rude Tubinambas of Brazil, that they think the souls of such as have
lived virtuously, that is to say, who have well avenged themselves and
eaten many of their enemies, will go behind the great mountains and
dance in beautiful gardens with the souls of their fathers, but the
souls of the effeminate and worthless, who have not striven to defend
their country, will go to Aygnan the Evil Spirit, to incessant
torments.[202] More characteristic and probably more genuinely native
than most of these expectations, is that of the Caribs, that the braves
of their nation should go after death to happy islands, where all good
fruits grow wild, there to spend their time in dancing and feasting, and
to have their enemies the Arawaks for slaves; but the cowards who feared
to go to war should go to serve the Arawaks, dwelling in their waste and
barren lands beyond the mountains.[203]

The fate of warriors slain in battle is the subject of two singularly
contrasted theories. We have elsewhere examined the deep-lying belief
that if a man’s body be wounded or mutilated, his soul will arrive in
the same state in the other world. Perhaps it is some such idea of the
soul being injured with the body by a violent death, that leads the
Mintira of the Malay Peninsula, though not believing in a future reward
and punishment, to exclude from the happy paradise of ‘Fruit Island’
(Pulo Bua) the souls of such as die a bloody death, condemning them to
dwell on ‘Red Land’ (Tana Mera), a desolate barren place, whence they
must even go to the fortunate island to fetch their food.[204] In North
America, the idea is mentioned among the Hurons that the souls of the
slain in war live in a band apart, neither they nor suicides being
admitted to the spirit-villages of their tribe. A belief ascribed to
certain Indians of California may be cited here, though less as a sample
of real native doctrine than to illustrate that borrowing of Christian
ideas which so often spoils such evidence for ethnological purposes.
They held, it is said, that Niparaya, the Great Spirit, hates war, and
will have no warriors in his paradise, but that his adversary Wac, shut
up for rebellion in a great cave, takes thither to himself the slain in
battle.[205] On the other hand, the thought which shows out in such bold
relief in the savage mind, that courage is virtue, and battle and
bloodshed the hero’s noblest pursuit, leads naturally to a hope of glory
for his soul when his body has been slain in fight. Such expectation was
not strange in North America, to that Indian tribe, for instance, who
talked of the Great Spirit walking in the moonlight on his island in
Lake Superior, whither slain warriors will go to him to take their
pleasure in the chace.[206] The Nicaraguans declared that men who died
in their houses went underground, but the slain in war went to serve the
gods in the east, where the sun comes from. This corresponds in part
with a remarkable threefold contrast of the future life among their
Aztec kinsfolk. Mictlan, the Hades of the general dead, and Tlalocan,
the Earthly Paradise, reached by certain special and acute ways of
death, have been mentioned here already. But the souls of warriors slain
in battle or sacrificed as captives, and of women who died in
child-birth, were transported to the heavenly plains; there the heroes,
peeping through the holes in their bucklers pierced by arrows in earthly
fight, watched the Sun arise and saluted him with shout and clash of
arms, and at noon the mothers received him with music and dance to
escort him on his western way.[207] In such wise, to the old Norseman,
to die the ‘straw-death’ of sickness or old age was to go down into the
dismal loathly house of Hela the Death-goddess; if the warrior’s fate on
the field of battle were denied him, and death came to fetch him from a
peaceful couch, yet at least he could have the scratch of the spear,
Odin’s mark, and so contrive to go with a blood-stained soul to the
glorious Walhalla. Surely then if ever, says a modern writer, the
kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by
force.[208] Thence we follow the idea onward to the battle-fields of
holy war, where the soldier earned with his blood the unfading crown of
martyrdom, and Christian and Moslem were urged in mutual onset and
upheld in agony by the glimpse of paradise opening to receive the slayer
of the infidel.

Such ideas, current among the lower races as to the soul’s future
happiness or misery, do not seem, setting aside some exceptional points,
to be thoughts adopted or degraded from doctrines of cultured nations.
They rather belong to the intellectual stratum in which they are found.
If so, we must neither ignore nor exaggerate their standing in the lower
ethics. ‘The good are good warriors and hunters,’ said a Pawnee chief;
whereupon the author who mentions the saying remarks that this would
also be the opinion of a wolf, if he could express it.[209]
Nevertheless, if experience has led societies of savage men to fix on
certain qualities, such as courage, skill, and industry, as being
virtues, then many moralists will say that such a theory is not only
ethical, but lying at the very foundation of ethics. And if these savage
societies further conclude that such virtues obtain their reward in
another world as in this, then their theories of future happiness and
misery, destined for what they call good and bad men, may be looked on
in this sense as belonging to morality, though at no high stage of
development. But many or most writers, when they mention morality,
assume a narrower definition of it. This must be borne in mind in
appreciating what is meant by the statements of several well-qualified
ethnologists, who have, in more or less degree, denied a moral character
to the future retribution as conceived in savage religion. Mr. Ellis,
describing the Society Islanders, at least gives an explicit definition.
When he tried to ascertain whether they connected a person’s condition
in a future state with his disposition and conduct in this, he never
could learn that they expected in the world of spirits any difference in
the treatment of a kind, generous, peaceful man, and that of a cruel,
parsimonious, quarrelsome one.[210] This remark, it seems to me, applies
to savage religion far and wide. Dr. Brinton, commenting on the native
religions of America, draws his line in a somewhat different place.
Nowhere, he says, was any well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was
judged and punished in the next world. No contrast is discoverable
between a place of torments and a realm of joy; at the worst but a
negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard.[211]
Professor J. G. Müller, in his ‘American Religions,’ yet more pointedly
denies any ‘ethical meaning’ in the contrasts of the savage future life,
and looks upon what he well calls its ‘light-side’ and ‘shadow-side’ not
as recompensing earthly virtue and vice, but rather as carrying on
earthly conditions in a new existence.[212]

The idea that admission to the happier region depends on the performance
of religious rites and the giving of offerings, seems scarcely known to
the lowest savages. It is worth while, however, to notice some
statements which seem to mark its appearance at the level of high
savagery or low barbarism. Thus in the Society Islands, though the
destiny of man’s spirit to the region of night or to elysium was
irrespective of moral character, we hear of neglect of rites and
offerings as being visited by the displeasure of deities.[213] In
Florida, the belief of the Sun-worshipping people of Achalaque was thus
described: those who had lived well, and well served the Sun, and given
many gifts to the poor in his honour, would be happy after death and be
changed into stars, whereas the wicked would be carried to a destitute
and wretched existence among mountain precipices, where fierce wild
beasts have their dens.[214] According to Bosman, the souls of Guinea
negroes reaching the river of death must answer to the divine judge how
they have lived; have they religiously observed the holy days dedicated
to their god, have they abstained from all forbidden meats and kept
their vows inviolate, they are wafted across to paradise; but if they
have sinned against these laws they are plunged in the river and there
drowned for ever.[215] Such statements among peoples at these stages of
culture are not frequent, and perhaps not very valid as accounts of
original native doctrine. It is in the elaborate religious systems of
more organized nations, in modern Brahmanism and Buddhism, and degraded
forms of Christianity, that the special adaptation of the doctrine of
retribution to the purposes of priestcraft and ceremonialism has become
a commonplace of missionary reports.

It is well not to speak too positively on a subject so difficult and
doubtful as this of the history of the belief in future retribution.
Careful criticism of the evidence is above all necessary. For instance,
we have to deal with several statements recorded among low races,
explicitly assigning reward or punishment to men after death, according
as they were good or bad in life. Here the first thing to be done is to
clear up, if possible, the question whether the doctrine of retribution
may have been borrowed from some more cultured neighbouring religion, as
the very details often show to have been the case. Examples of direct
adoption of foreign dogmas on this subject are not uncommon in the
world. When among the Dayaks of Borneo it is said that a dead man
becomes a spirit and lives in the jungle, or haunts the place of burial
or burning, or when some distant mountain-top is pointed to as the abode
of spirits of departed friends, it is hardly needful to question the
originality of ideas so characteristically savage. But one of these
Dayak tribes, burning the dead, says that ‘as the smoke of the funeral
pile of a good man rises, the soul ascends with it to the sky, and that
the smoke from the pile of a wicked man descends, and his soul with it
is borne down to the earth, and through it to the regions below.’[216]
Did not this exceptional idea come into the Dayak’s mind by contact with
Hinduism? In Orissa, again, Khond souls have to leap across the black
unfathomable river to gain a footing on the slippery Leaping Rock, where
Dinga Pennu, the judge of the dead, sits writing his register of all
men’s daily lives and actions, sending virtuous souls to become blessed
spirits, keeping back wicked ones and sending them to suffer their
penalties in new births on earth.[217] Here the striking myth of the
leaping rock is perfectly savage, but the ideas of a judgment, moral
retribution, and transmigration, may have come from the Hindus of the
plains, as the accompanying notion of the written book unquestionably
did. Dr. Mason is no doubt right in taking as the indigenous doctrine of
the Karens their notion of an under-world where the ghosts of the dead
live on as here, while he sets down to Hindu influence the idea of
Tha-ma, the judge of the dead (the Hindu Yama), as allotting their fate
according to their lives, sending those who have done deeds of merit to
heaven, those who have done wickedness to hell, and keeping in Hades the
neither good nor bad.[218] How the theory of moral retribution may be
superposed on more primitive doctrines of the future life, comes
remarkably into view in Turanian religion. Among the Lapps, Jabme-Aimo,
the subterranean ‘home of the dead’ below the earth, where the departed
have their cattle and follow their livelihood like Lapps above, though
they are richer, wiser, stronger folk, and also Saivo-Aimo, a yet
happier ‘home of the gods,’ are conceptions thoroughly in the spirit of
the lower culture. But in one account the subterranean abode becomes a
place of transition, where the dead stay awhile, and then with bodies
renewed are taken up to the Heaven-god, or if misdoers, are flung into
the abyss. Castrén is evidently right in rejecting this doctrine as not
native, but due to Catholic influence. So, at the end of the 16th Rune
of the Finnish Kalewala, which tells of Wainamoinen’s visit to the
dismal land of the dead, there is put into the hero’s mouth a second
speech, warning the children of men to harm not the innocent, for sad
payment is in Tuoni’s dwelling—the bed of evil-doers is there, with its
glowing red-hot stones below and its canopy of snakes above. But the
same critic condemns this moral ‘tag,’ as a later addition to the
genuine heathen picture of Manala, the under-world of the dead.[219] Nor
did Christianity scorn to borrow details from the religions it
abolished. The narrative of a mediæval visit to the other world would be
incomplete without its description of the awful Bridge of Death; Acheron
and Charon’s bark were restored to their places in Tartarus by the
visionary and the poet; the wailing of sinful souls might be heard as
they were hammered white-hot in Vulcan’s smithies; and the weighing of
good and wicked souls, as we may see it figured on every Egyptian
mummy-case, now passed into the charge of St. Paul and the Devil.[220]

The foregoing considerations having been duly weighed, it remains to
call attention to the final problem, at what state of religious history
the full theological doctrine of judicial retribution and moral
compensation in a future life may have arisen. It is hard, however, to
define where this development takes place even at a barbaric stage of
culture. Thus among the barbaric nations of West Africa, there appear
such beliefs as that in Nuffi, that criminals who escape their
punishment here will receive it in the other world; the division of the
Yoruba under-world into an upper and a lower region for the righteous
and wicked; the Kru doctrine that only the good will rejoin their
ancestors in heaven; the Oji doctrine that only the good will dwell
after death in the heavenly house or city of the Deity whom they call
the ‘Highest.’[221] How far is all this to be taken as native
conception, and how far as due to ages of Christian and Moslem
intercourse, to which at any rate few will scruple to refer the last
case?

In the lower ranges of civilization, some of the most remarkable
doctrines of this class are recorded in North America. Thus they appear
in connexion with the fancy of a river or gulf to be passed by the
departing soul on its way to the land of the dead, one of the most
remarkable traits of the mythology of the world. This seems in its
origin a nature-myth, connected probably with the Sun’s passage across
the sea into Hades, and in many of its versions it appears as a mere
episode of the soul’s journey without any moral sense attached to it.
Brebeuf, the same early Jesuit missionary who says explicitly of the
Hurons that there is no difference in their future life between the fate
of the virtuous and the vicious, mentions also among them the tree-trunk
that bridges the river of death; here the dead must cross, the dog that
guards it attacks some souls, and they fall. Yet in other versions this
myth has a moral sense attached to it, and the passage of the
heaven-gulf becomes an ordeal to separate good and wicked. To take but
one instance, there is Catlin’s account of the Choctaw souls journeying
far westward, to whom the long slippery barkless pine-log, stretching
from hill to hill, bridges over the deep and dreadful river; the good
pass safely to a beauteous Indian paradise, the wicked fall into the
abyss of waters, and go the dark hungry wretched land where they are
henceforth to dwell.[222] This and many similar beliefs current in the
religions of the world, which need not be particularised here, seem best
explained as originally nature-myths, afterwards adapted to a religious
purpose. A different conception was recorded so early as 1623, by
Captain John Smith among the Massachusetts, whose name is still borne by
the New England district they once inhabited: They say, at first there
was no king but Kiehtan, that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens,
whither all good men go when they die, and have plenty of all things.
The bad men go thither also and knock at the door, but he bids them go
wander in endless want and misery, for they shall not stay there.[223]
Lastly, the Salish Indians of Oregon say that the good go to a happy
hunting-ground of endless game, while the bad go to a place where there
is eternal snow, hunger, and thirst, and are tantalised by the sight of
game they cannot kill, and water they cannot drink.[224] If, now, in
looking at these records, the doubts which beset them can be put aside,
and the accounts of the different fates assigned to the good and wicked
can be accepted as belonging to genuine native American religion and if,
moreover, it be considered that the goodness and wickedness for which
men are to be thus rewarded and punished are moral qualities, however
undeveloped in definition, this will amount to an admission that the
doctrine of moral retribution at any rate appears within the range of
savage theology. Such a view, however, by no means invalidates the view
here put forward as to the historical development of the doctrine, but
only goes to prove at how early a stage it may have begun to take place.
The general mass of evidence still remains to show the savage doctrine
of the future state, as originally involving no moral retribution, or
arriving at this through transitional and rudimentary stages.

In strong contrast with the schemes of savage future existence, I need
but set before the reader’s mind a salient point here and there in the
doctrine of distinct and unquestionable moral retribution, as held in
religions of the higher culture. The inner mystic doctrines of ancient
Egypt may perhaps never be extracted now from the pictures and
hieroglyphic formulas of the ‘Book of the Dead.’ But the ethnographer
may satisfy himself of two important points as to the place which the
Egyptian view of the future life occupies in the history of religion. On
the one hand, the soul’s quitting and revisiting the corpse, the placing
of the image in the tomb, the offering of meat and drink, the fearful
journey to the regions of the departed, the renewed life like that on
earth, with its houses to dwell in and fields to cultivate—all these are
conceptions which connect the Egyptian religion with the religions of
the ruder races of mankind. But on the other hand, the mixed ethical and
ceremonial standard by which the dead are to be judged adapts these
primitive and even savage thoughts to a higher social development, such
as may be shown by fragments from that remarkable ‘negative confession’
which the dead must make before Osiris and the forty-two judges in
Amenti. ‘O ye Lords of Truth! let me know you!... Rub ye away my faults.
I have not privily done evil against mankind.... I have not told
falsehoods in the tribunal of Truth.... I have not done any wicked
thing. I have not made the labouring man do more than his task daily....
I have not calumniated the slave to his master.... I have not
murdered.... I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed measures
of the country. I have not injured the images of the gods. I have not
taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery.
I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not hunted
wild animals in the pasturages. I have not netted sacred birds.... I am
pure! I am pure! I am pure!’[225]

The Vedic hymns, again, tell of endless happiness for the good in heaven
with the gods, and speak also of the deep pit where the liars, the
lawless, they who give no sacrifice, will be cast.[226] The rival
theories of continuance and retribution are seen in instructive
coexistence in classic Greece and Rome. What seems the older belief
holds its ground in the realm of Hades; that dim region of bodiless,
smoke-like ghosts remains the home of the undistinguished crowd in the
μέσος βίος, the ‘middle life.’ Yet at the same time the judgment-seat of
Minos and Rhadamanthos, the joys of Elysium for the just and good, fiery
Tartarus echoing with the wail of the wicked, represent the newer
doctrine of a moral retribution. The idea of purgatorial suffering,
which hardly seems to have entered the minds of the lower races, expands
in immense vigour in the great Aryan religions of Asia. In Brahmanism
and Buddhism, the working out of good and evil actions into their
necessary consequence of happiness and misery is the very key to the
philosophy of life, whether life’s successive transmigrations be in
animal, or human, or demon births on earth, or in luxurious
heaven-palaces of gold and jewels, or in the agonizing hells where
Oriental fancy riots in the hideous inventory of torture—caldrons of
boiling oil and liquid fire; black dungeons and rivers of filth; vipers,
and vultures, and cannibals; thorns, and spears, and red-hot pincers,
and whips of flame. To the modern Hindu, it is true, ceremonial morality
seems to take the upper hand, and the question of happiness or misery
after death turns rather on ablutions and fasts, on sacrifices and gifts
to brahmans, than on purity and beneficence of life. Buddhism in South
East Asia, sadly degenerate from its once high estate, is apt to work
out the doctrine of merit and demerit into debtor and creditor accounts
kept in good and bad marks from day to day; to serve out so much tea in
hot weather counts 1 to the merit-side, and putting a stop to one’s
women scolding for a month counts 1 likewise, but this may be balanced
by the offence of letting them keep the bowls and plates dirty for a
day, which counts 1 the wrong way; and it appears that giving wood for
two coffins, which count 30 marks each, and burying four bones, at 10
marks a-piece, would just be balanced by murdering a child, which counts
100 to the bad.[227] It need hardly be said here that these two great
religions of Asia must be judged rather in their records of long past
ages, than in the lingering degeneration of their modern reality.

In the Khordah-Avesta, a document of the old Persian religion, the fate
of good and wicked souls at death is pictured in a dialogue between
Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu (Ormuzd and
Ahriman). Zarathustra asks,’Ahura-Mazda, Heavenly, Holiest, Creator of
the corporeal world, Pure! When a pure man dies, where does his soul
dwell during this night?’ Then answers Ahura-Mazda: ‘Near his head it
sits down, reciting the Gâthâ Ustavaiti, praying happiness for itself;
“Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of each. May
Ahura-Mazda create, ruling after his wish.”’ On this night the soul sees
as much joyfulness as the whole living world possesses; and so the
second and the third night. When the lapse of the third night turns
itself to light, then the soul of the pure man goes forward,
recollecting itself by the perfume of plants. A wind blows to meet it
from the mid-day regions, a sweet-scented one, more sweet-scented than
the other winds, and the soul of the pure man receives it—‘Whence blows
this wind, the sweetest-scented which I ever have smelt with the nose?’
Then comes to meet him his own law (his rule of life) in the figure of a
maiden beautiful, shining, with shining arms, powerful, well-grown,
slender, large-bosomed, with praiseworthy body, noble, with brilliant
face, one of fifteen years, as fair in her growth as the fairest
creatures. Then to her speaks the soul of the pure man, asking, ‘What
maiden art thou whom I have seen here as the fairest of maidens in
body?’ She answers, ‘I am, O youth, thy good thoughts, words, and works,
thy good law, the own law of thine own body. Thou hast made the pleasant
yet pleasanter to me, the fair yet fairer, the desirable yet more
desirable, the sitting in a high place sitting in a yet higher place.’
Then the soul of the pure man takes the first step and comes to the
first paradise, the second and third step to the second and third
paradise, the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal Lights. To the soul
speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it, ‘How art thou, O pure
deceased, come away from the fleshly dwellings, from the corporeal world
hither to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
imperishable. Hail! has it happened to thee long?’ ‘Then speaks
Ahura-Mazda: “Ask not him whom thou askest, for he is come on the
fearful way of trembling, the separation of body and soul. Bring him
hither of the food, of the full fatness, that is the food for a youth
who thinks, speaks, and does good, who is devoted to the good law after
death—that is the food for a woman who especially thinks good, speaks
good, does good, the following, obedient, pure after death.”’ And now
Zarathustra asks, when a wicked one dies, where his soul dwells? He is
told how, running about near the head, it utters the prayer, Ke
maúm:—‘Which land shall I praise, whither shall I go praying, O
Ahura-Mazda?’ In this night it sees as much unjoyfulness as the whole
living world; and so the second and the third night, and it goes at dawn
to the impure place, recollecting itself by the stench. An evil-smelling
wind comes towards the dead from the north, and with it the ugly hateful
maiden who is his own wicked deeds, and the soul takes the fourth step
into the darkness without beginning, and a wicked soul asks how long—woe
to thee!—art thou come? and the mocking Anra-Mainyu, answering in words
like the words of Ahura-Mazda to the good, bids food to be
brought—poison, and mixed with poison, for them who think and speak and
do evil, and follow the wicked law. The Parsi of our own time, following
in obscure tradition the ancient Zoroastrian faith, before he prays for
forgiveness for all that he ought to have thought, and said, and done,
and has not, for all that he ought not to have thought, and said, and
done, and has, confesses thus his faith of the future life:—‘I am wholly
without doubt in the existence of the good Mazadayaçnian faith, in the
coming of the resurrection and the later body, in the stepping over the
bridge Chinvat, in an invariable recompense of good deeds and their
reward, and of bad deeds and their punishment.’[228]

In Jewish theology, the doctrine of future retribution appears after the
Babylonish captivity, not in ambiguous terms, but as the
strongly-expressed and intensely-felt religious conviction it has since
remained among the children of Israel. Not long afterward, it received
the sanction of Christianity.

A broad survey of the doctrine of the Future Life among the various
nations of the world shows at once how difficult and how important is a
systematic theory of its development. Looked at ethnographically, the
general relations of the lower to the higher culture as to the belief in
future existence may be defined somewhat as follows:—If we draw a line
dividing civilization at the junction of savagery and barbarism—about
where the Carib and New Zealander ends and the Aztec or Tatar begins, we
may see clearly the difference of prevalent doctrine on either side. On
the savage side, the theory of hovering ghosts is strong, rebirth in
human or animal bodies is often thought of, but above all there prevails
the expectation of a new life, most often located in some distant
earthly region, or less commonly in the under-world or on the sky. On
the cultured side, the theory of hovering ghosts continues, but tends to
subside from philosophy into folklore, the theory of re-birth is
elaborated into great philosophic systems, but eventually dies out under
the opposition of scientific biology, while the doctrine of a new life
after death maintains its place with immense power in the human mind,
although the dead have been ousted by geography from any earthly
district, and the regions of heaven and hell are more and more
spiritualized out of definite locality into vague expressions of future
happiness and misery. Again, on the savage side we find the dominant
idea to be a continuance of the soul in a new existence, like the
present life, or idealized and exaggerated on its model; while on the
cultured side the doctrine of judgment and moral retribution prevails
with paramount, though not indeed absolute sway. What, then, has been
the historical course of theological opinion, to have produced in
different stages of culture these contrasted phases of doctrine?

In some respects, theories deriving savage from more civilized ideas are
tenable. In certain cases, to consider a particular savage doctrine of
the future state as a fragmentary, or changed, or corrupted outcome of
the religion of higher races, seems as easy as to reverse this view by
taking savagery as representing the starting-point. It is open to anyone
to suppose that the doctrine of transmigration among American savages
and African barbarians may have been degraded from elaborate systems of
metempsychosis established among philosophic nations like the Hindus;
that the North American and South African doctrine of continued
existence in a subterranean world may be derived from similar beliefs
held by races at the level of the ancient Greeks; that when rude tribes
in the Old or New World assign among the dead a life of happiness to
some, and of misery to others, this idea may have been inherited or
adopted from cultured nations holding more strongly and systematically
the doctrine of retribution. In such cases the argument is to a great
extent the same, whether the lower race be considered degenerate
descendants of a higher nation, or whether the simpler supposition be
put forward that they have adopted the ideas of some more cultured
people. These views ought to have full attention, for degenerate and
borrowed beliefs form no small item in the opinions of uncivilized
races. Yet this kind of explanation is more adapted to meet special
cases than general conditions; it is rather suited to piecemeal
treatment, than to comprehensive study, of the religions of mankind.
Worked out on a large scale, it would endeavour to account for the
doctrines of the savage world, as being a patchwork of fragments from
various religions of high nations, transported by not easily-conceived
means from their distant homes and set down in remote regions of the
earth. It may be safely said that no hypothesis can account for the
varied doctrines current among the lower tribes, without the admission
that religious ideas have been in no small measure developed and
modified in the districts where they are current.

Now this theory of development, in its fullest scope, combined with an
accessory theory of degeneration and adoption, seems best to meet the
general facts of the case. A hypothesis which finds the origin of the
doctrine of the future life in the primitive animism of the lower
races, and thence traces it along the course of religious thought, in
varied developments fitted to exacter knowledge and forming part of
loftier creeds, may well be maintained as in reasonable accordance
with the evidence. Such a theory, as has been sufficiently shown in
the foregoing chapters, affords a satisfactory explanation of the
occurrence, in the midst of cultured religions, of intellectually low
superstitions, such as that of offerings to the dead, and various
others. These, which the development theory treats naturally as
survivals from a low stage of education lingering on in a higher, are
by no means so readily accounted for by the degeneration theory. There
are more special arguments which favour the priority of the savage to
the civilized phases of the doctrine of a future life. If savages did
in general receive their views of another existence from the religious
systems of cultured nations, these systems can hardly have been such
as recognize the dominant doctrines of heaven and hell. For, as to the
locality of the future world, savage races especially favour a view
little represented in civilized belief, namely, that the life to come
is in some distant earthly country. Moreover, the belief in a fiery
abyss or Gehenna, which excites so intensely and lays hold so firmly
of the imagination of the most ignorant men, would have been
especially adapted to the minds of savages, had it come down to them
by tradition from an ancestral faith. Yet, in fact, the lower races so
seldom recognize such an idea, that even the few cases in which it
occurs lie open to suspicion of not being purely native. The
proposition that the savage doctrines descend from the more civilized
seems thus to involve the improbable supposition, that tribes capable
of keeping up traditions of Paradise, Heaven, or Hades, should
nevertheless have forgotten or discarded a tradition of Hell. Still
more important is the contrast between the continuance-theory and the
retribution-theory of the future existence, in the sections of culture
where they respectively predominate. On the one hand, the
continuance-theory, with its ideas of a ghostly life like this, is
directly vouched for by the evidence of the senses in dreams and
visions of the dead, and may be claimed as part of the ‘Natural
Religion,’ properly so called, of the lower races. On the other hand,
the retribution-theory is a dogma which this evidence of apparitions
could hardly set on foot, though capable of afterwards supporting it.
Throughout the present study of animistic religion, it constantly
comes into view that doctrines which in the lower culture are
philosophical, tend in the higher to become ethical; that what among
savages is a science of nature, passes among civilized nations into a
moral engine. Herein lies the distinction of deepest import between
the two great theories of the soul’s existence after bodily death.
According to a development theory of culture, the savage, unethical
doctrine of continuance would be taken as the more primitive,
succeeded in higher civilization by the ethical doctrine of
retribution. Now this theory of the course of religion in the distant
and obscure past is conformable with experience of its actual history,
so far as this lies within our knowledge. Whether we compare the early
Greek with the later Greek, the early Jew with the later Jew, the
ruder races of the world in their older condition with the same races
as affected by the three missionary religions of Buddhism,
Mohammedanism, Christianity, the testimony of history vouches for the
like transition towards ethical dogma.

In conclusion, though theological argument on the actual validity of
doctrines relating to the future life can have no place here, it will be
well not to pass by without further remark one great practical question
which lies fairly within the province of Ethnography. How, in the
various stages of culture, has the character and conduct of the living
been affected by the thought of a life to come? If we take the savage
beliefs as a starting-point, it will appear that these belong rather to
speculative philosophy than to practical rule of life. The lower races
hold opinions as to a future state because they think them true, but it
is not surprising that men who take so little thought of a contingency
three days off, should receive little practical impulse from vague
anticipations of a life beyond the grave. Setting aside the
consideration of possible races devoid of all thought of a future
existence, there unquestionably has been and is a great mass of mankind
whose lives are scarcely affected by such expectations of another life
as they do hold. The doctrine of continuance, making death as it were a
mere journey into a new country, can have little direct action on men’s
conduct, though indirectly it has indeed an enormous and disastrous
influence on society, leading as it does to the slaughter of wives and
slaves, and the destruction of property, for the use of the dead in the
next world. If this world to come be thought a happier region, the
looking forward to it makes men more willing to risk their lives in
battle, promotes the habit of despatching the sick and aged into a
better life, and encourages suicide when life is very hateful here. When
the half-way house between continuance and retribution is reached, and
the idea prevails that the manly virtues which give rank and wealth and
honour here will lead hereafter to yet brighter glory, then this belief
must add new force to the earthly motives which make bold warriors and
mighty chiefs. But among men who expect to become hovering ghosts at
death, or to depart to some gloomy land of shades, such expectation
strengthens the natural horror and hatred of dissolution. They tend
toward the state of mind frequent among modern Africans, whose thought
of death is that he shall drink no more rum, wear no more fine clothes,
have no more wives. The negro of our own day would feel to the utmost
the sense of those lines in the beginning of the Iliad, which describe
the heroes’ ‘souls’ being cast down to Hades, but ‘themselves’ left a
prey to dogs and carrion birds.

Rising to the level of the higher races, we mark the thought of future
existence taking a larger and larger place in the convictions of
religion, the expectation of a judgment after death gaining in intensity
and becoming, what it scarcely seems to the savage, a real motive in
life. Yet this change is not to be measured as proceeding throughout in
any direct proportion with the development of culture. The doctrine of
the future life has hardly taken deeper and stronger root in the higher
than in the middle levels of civilization. In the language of ancient
Egypt, it is the dead who are emphatically called the ‘living,’ for
their life is everlasting, whether in the world of the departed, or
nearer home in the tomb, the ‘eternal dwelling.’ The Moslem says that
men sleep in life and wake in death; the Hindu likens the body which a
soul has quitted to the bed he rises from in the morning. The story of
the ancient Getæ, who wept at births and laughed at funerals, embodies
an idea of the relation of this life to the next which comes to the
surface again and again in the history of religion, nowhere perhaps
touched in with a lighter hand than in the Arabian Nights’ tale where
Abdallah of the Sea indignantly breaks off his friendship with Abdallah
of the Land, when he hears that the dwellers on the land do not feast
and sing when one of them dies, like the dwellers in the sea, but mourn
and weep and tear their garments. Such thoughts lead on into the morbid
asceticism that culminates in the life of the Buddhist saint, eating his
food with loathing from the alms-bowl that he carries as though it held
medicine, wrapping himself in grave-clothes from the cemetery, or
putting on his disfigured robe as though it were a bandage to cover a
sore, whose looking forward is to death for deliverance from the misery
of life, whose dreamiest hope is that after an inconceivable series of
successive existences he may find in utter dissolution and not-being a
refuge even from heaven.

The belief in future retribution has been indeed a powerful engine in
shaping the life of nations. Powerful both for good and evil, it has
been made the servant-of-all-work of many faiths. Priesthoods have used
it unscrupulously for their professional ends, to gain wealth and power
for their own caste, to stop intellectual and social progress beyond the
barriers of their consecrated systems. On the banks of the river of
death, a band of priests has stood for ages to bar the passage against
all poor souls who cannot satisfy their demands for ceremonies, and
formulas, and fees. This is the dark side of the picture. On the bright
side, as we study the moral standards of the higher nations, and see how
the hopes and fears of the life to come have been brought to enforce
their teachings, it is plain that through most widely differing
religions the doctrine of future judgment has been made to further
goodness and to check wickedness, according to the shifting rules by
which men have divided right from wrong. The philosophic schools which
from classic times onward have rejected the belief in a future
existence, appear to have come back by a new road to the very
starting-point which perhaps the rudest races of men never quitted. At
least this seems true as regards the doctrine of future retribution,
which is alike absent from the belief of classes of men at the two
extremes of culture. How far the moral standard of life may have been
adjusted throughout the higher races with reference to a life hereafter,
is a problem difficult of solution, so largely do unbelievers in this
second life share ethical principles which have been more or less shaped
under its influence. Men who live for one world or for two, have high
motives of virtue in common; the noble self-respect which impels them to
the life they feel worthy of them; the love of goodness for its own sake
and for its immediate results; and beyond this, the desire to do good
that shall survive the doer, who will not indeed be in the land of the
living to see his work, but who can yet discount his expectations into
some measure of present satisfaction. Yet he who believes that his
thread of life will be severed once and for ever by the fatal shears,
well knows that he wants a purpose and a joy in life, which belong to
him who looks for a life to come. Few men feel real contentment in the
expectation of vanishing out of conscious existence, henceforth, like
the great Buddha, to exist only in their works. To remain incarnate in
the memory of friends is something. A few great spirits may enjoy in the
reverence of future ages a thousand years or so of ‘subjective
immortality;’ though as for mankind at large, the individual’s personal
interest hardly extends beyond those who have lived in his time, while
his own memory scarce outlives the third and fourth generation. But over
and above these secular motives, the belief in immortality extends its
powerful influence through life, and culminates at the last hour, when,
setting aside the very evidence of their senses, the mourners smile
through their tears, and say it is not death but life.

Footnote 120:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 239; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 398.

Footnote 121:

  Arbousset and Daumas, p. 347; Casalis, p. 247.

Footnote 122:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 20, &c.

Footnote 123:

  See ‘The Buke of John Mandeuill,’ 31, edited by Geo. F. Warner,
  published by the Roxburghe Club, 1889; Yule, ‘Cathay,’ Hakluyt Soc.
  (Note to 3rd ed.)

Footnote 124:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 215. Other cases in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’
  vol. ii. pp. 58, 369, &c.

Footnote 125:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 32, 64, and see ante, vol. i.
  p. 312.

Footnote 126:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271; Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. ii. p. 312.

Footnote 127:

  Kalewala, Rune xvi.; see Schiefner’s German Translation, and Castrén,
  ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 128, 134. A Slavonic myth in Hanusch, p. 412.

Footnote 128:

  Homer. Odyss. xi. On the vivification of ghosts by sacrifice of blood,
  and on libations of milk and blood, see Meiners, vol. i. p. 315, vol.
  ii. p. 89; J. G. Müller, p. 85; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube und
  Brauch,’ vol. i. p. 1, &c.

Footnote 129:

  See for example, various details in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp.
  369-75, &c.

Footnote 130:

  See vol. i. p. 481; also below, p. 52, note. Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 290;
  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 233; Keating, vol. ii. p.
  154; Loskiel, part i. p. 35; Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in Pinkerton, vol.
  xiii. p. 14. See Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 269.

Footnote 131:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 316-20.

Footnote 132:

  Shortland, ‘Traditions of New Zealand,’ p. 150; R. Taylor, ‘New
  Zealand,’ p. 423. The idea, of which the classic representative
  belongs to the myth of Persephone, that the living who tastes the food
  of the dead may not return, and which is so clearly stated in this
  Maori story, appears again among the Sioux of North America. Ahak-tah
  (‘Male Elk’) seems to die, but after two days comes down from the
  funeral-scaffold where his body had been laid, and tells his tale. His
  soul had travelled by the path of braves through the beautiful land of
  great trees and gay loud-singing birds, till he reached the river, and
  saw the homes of the spirits of his forefathers on the shore beyond.
  Swimming across, he entered the nearest house, where he found his
  uncle sitting in a corner. Very hungry, he noticed some wild rice in a
  bark dish. ‘I asked my uncle for some rice to eat, but he did not give
  it to me. Had I eaten of the food for spirits, I never should have
  returned to earth.’ Eastman, ‘Dacotah,’ p. 177.

Footnote 133:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 139, &c.

Footnote 134:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ Letter 19, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 501; Burton,
  ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 158. For modern visits to hell and heaven by
  Christianized negro visionaries in America, see Macrae, ‘Americans at
  Home,’ vol. ii. p. 91.

Footnote 135:

  Lucian. Philopseudes, c. 17-28.

Footnote 136:

  Plutarch. De Sera Numinis Vindicta, xxii.; and in Euseb. Præp. Evang.
  xi. 36.

Footnote 137:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 63.

Footnote 138:

  Gregor. Dial. iv. 36. See Calmet, vol. ii. ch. 49.

Footnote 139:

  Augustin. Epist. clxiv. 2.

Footnote 140:

  See Pearson, ‘Exposition of the Creed;’ Bingham, ‘Ant. Ch. Ch.’ book
  x. ch. iii. Art. iii. of the Church of England was reduced to its
  present state by Archbp. Parker’s revision.

Footnote 141:

  Codex Apocr. N. T. Evang. Nicod. ed. Giles. ‘Apocryphal Gospels,’ &c.
  tr. by A. Walker; ‘Gospel of Nicodemus.’ The Greek and Latin texts
  differ much.

Footnote 142:

  The following details mostly from T. Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory’
  (an elaborate critical dissertation on the mediæval legends of visits
  to the other world).

Footnote 143:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 278. Rigg. in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’
  vol. iv. p. 119. See also Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 397;
  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 83; Irving, ‘Astoria,’ p. 142.

Footnote 144:

  Molina, ‘Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 89.

Footnote 145:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 496; Sahagun, iii. App. c. 2, x. c.
  29; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 146:

  See Wright, l.c. &c.; Alger, p. 391; &c.

Footnote 147:

  ‘History of Colon,’ ch. 61; Pet. Martyr. Dec. i. lib. ix.; Irving,
  ‘Life of Columbus,’ vol. ii. p. 121.

Footnote 148:

  Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 299; G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab. W.
  Austr.’ p. 83; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 181.

Footnote 149:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 321; see part iii. p. 229.

Footnote 150:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 107. See also Burton, ‘W. and W. fr.
  W. Africa,’ p. 154 (Gold Coast).

Footnote 151:

  Hesiod. Opera et Dies, Pindar, Olymp. ii. antistr. 4. Callistrat.
  Hymn. in Ilgen, Scolia Græca, 10. Strabo, iii. 2, 13; Plin. iv. 36.

Footnote 152:

  Loc. cit.

Footnote 153:

  Procop. De Bello Goth. iv. 20; Plut. Fragm. Comm. in Hesiod. 2; Grimm,
  ‘D. M.’ p. 793; Hersart de Villemarqué, vol. i. p. 136; Souvestre,
  ‘Derniers Bretons,’ p. 37; Jas. Macpherson, ‘Introd. to Hist. of Great
  Britain and Ireland,’ 2nd ed. London, 1772, p. 180; Wright, ‘St.
  Patrick’s Purgatory,’ pp. 64, 129.

Footnote 154:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269.

Footnote 155:

  Harmon, ‘Journal,’ p. 299; see Lewis and Clarke, p. 139 (Mandans).

Footnote 156:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 140, 287; see Humboldt and
  Bonpland, ‘Voy.’ vol. iii. p. 132; Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 114.

Footnote 157:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 232; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 235.

Footnote 158:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 317, &c.; Arbousset and Daumas, p.
  474. See also Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 157.

Footnote 159:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 195; Cross, l.c. p. 313. Turanian examples in
  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 119.

Footnote 160:

  See below, pp. 79, 85.

Footnote 161:

  Festus, s.v. ‘manalis,’ &c.

Footnote 162:

  Sophocl. Œdip. Tyrann. 178; Lucian. De Luctu, 2. See classic details
  in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ art. ‘inferi.’

Footnote 163:

  Birch in Bunsen’s ‘Egypt,’ vol. v.; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii.
  p. 368; Alger, p. 101.

Footnote 164:

  Smith, ‘History of Virginia,’ in ‘Works’ ed. by Arber; Pinkerton, vol.
  xiii. pp. 14, 41; vol. xii. p. 604; see below, p. 95.

Footnote 165:

  Thorpe, ‘Analecta Anglo-Saxonica,’ p. 115.

Footnote 166:

  Schirren, p. 151. See Taylor, ‘N. Z.’ p. 525.

Footnote 167:

  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 781; Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c. p. 170.

Footnote 168:

  Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 160; Brinton, p. 288.

Footnote 169:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 138, see also 220 (Caribs), 402
  (Peru), 505, 660 (Mexico); Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 233;
  Taylor, ‘Physical Theory,’ ch. xvi.; Alger, ‘Future Life,’ p. 590; see
  also above, p. 16, note.

Footnote 170:

  Humboldt and Bonpland, ‘Voy.’ vol. v. p. 90; Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’
  vol. i. p. 233; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 531; Plutarch. De Facie in
  Orbe Lunæ; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 80, 89 (souls in stars).

Footnote 171:

  See Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. pp. 269, 311; Smith,
  ‘Virginia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 54; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 223;
  Squier, ‘Abor. Mon. of N. Y.’ p. 156; Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p.
  180.

Footnote 172:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 134; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 103;
  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 101, 114, 256.

Footnote 173:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 393; Burton, ‘W. and W. fr. W. Afr.’
  p. 454; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 295.

Footnote 174:

  Herodot. iv. 158, see 185, and Rawlinson’s note. See Smith’s ‘Dic. of
  the Bible,’ s.v. ‘firmament.’ Eisenmenger, part i. p. 408.

Footnote 175:

  Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 367.

Footnote 176:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 240 (but compare part v. p.
  403); Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 176; Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 209.

Footnote 177:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 319, 328; see Martius,
  vol. i. p. 485 (Jumanas).

Footnote 178:

  J. G. Müller, p. 403; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 496;
  Kingsborough, ‘Mexico,’ Cod. Letellier, fol. 20.

Footnote 179:

  Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 46; Roth in ‘Zeitschr. d. Deutsch.
  Morgenl. Ges.’ vol. iv. p. 427.

Footnote 180:

  Cross, ‘Karens,’ l.c. pp. 309, 313; Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1634,
  p. 16; Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 272; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i.
  p. 316; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. ii. pp. 310, 315; J. G. Müller,
  ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 139, 286.

Footnote 181:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 224; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii.
  p. 135.

Footnote 182:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 364; Spix and Martius,
  ‘Brasilien,’ vol. i. p. 383; De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.

Footnote 183:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 258.

Footnote 184:

  Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 336.

Footnote 185:

  Edda: ‘Gylfaginning.’

Footnote 186:

  ‘Koran,’ ch. lv. lvi.

Footnote 187:

  Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’ part i. p. 7.

Footnote 188:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 5, 24; Köppen, ‘Rel. des Buddha,’ vol.
  i. p. 235, &c.

Footnote 189:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 105.

Footnote 190:

  Sahagun, ‘Hist. de Nueva España,’ book iii. appendix ch. i., in
  Kingsborough, vol. vii.; Brasseur, vol. iii. p. 571.

Footnote 191:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ pp. 247, 254.

Footnote 192:

  Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 156; ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 403;
  ‘Wit and Wisdom from W. Afr.’ pp. 280, 449; see J. G. Müller, p. 140.

Footnote 193:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 126, &c.; Kalewala, Rune xv. xvi. xlv. &c.;
  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 780.

Footnote 194:

  Homer. Il. ix. 405; Odyss. xi. 218, 475; Virg. Æn. vi. 243, &c., &c.

Footnote 195:

  Gen. xxxv. 29; xxv. 8; xxxvii. 35; Job xi. 8; Amos ix. 2; Psalm
  lxxxix. 48; Ezek. xxxi., xxxii.; Isaiah xiv. 9, xxxviii. 10-18; 1
  Sam., xxviii. 15; Eccles. ix. 10. ‘Records of the Past,’ vol. i. pp.
  141-9; Sayce ‘Lectures on Hist. of Rel.’ part ii.; Alger, ‘Critical
  History of the Doctrine of a Future Life,’ ch. viii.

Footnote 196:

  The doctrine of reversal, as in Kamchatka, where rich and poor will
  change places in the other world (Steller, pp. 269-72), is too
  exceptional in the lower culture to be generalized. See Steinhauser,
  ‘Rel. des Negers,’ l. c., p. 135. A Wolof proverb is ‘The more
  powerful one is in this world, the more servile one will be in the
  next.’ (Burton, ‘Wit and Wisdom,’ p. 28.)

Footnote 197:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 245, 397; see also Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ p. 237 (Samoans); Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 105.

Footnote 198:

  Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 209.

Footnote 199:

  ‘Rec. des Voy. au Nord,’ vol. v. p. 23 (Natchez); Garcilaso de la
  Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ lib. i. c. 23, tr. by C. R. Markham;
  Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. pp. 29, 83; J. G. Müller, p. 402, &c.

Footnote 200:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 259.

Footnote 201:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 77; Lescarbot, ‘Hist. de la
  Nouvelle France,’ Paris, 1619, p. 679.

Footnote 202:

  Lery, ‘Hist. d’un Voy. en Brésil,’ p. 234; Coreal, ‘Voi. aux Indes
  Occ.’ i. p. 224.

Footnote 203:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 430.

Footnote 204:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 325.

Footnote 205:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104; see also Meiners, vol. ii. p.
  769; J. G. Müller, pp. 89, 139.

Footnote 206:

  Chateaubriand, ‘Voy. en Amérique’ (Religion).

Footnote 207:

  Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 22; Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ book
  xiii. c. 48; Sahagun, book iii. app. ch. i.-iii. in Kingsborough, vol.
  vii. Compare Anderson, ‘Exp. to W. Yunnan,’ p. 125. (Shans, good men
  and mothers dying in child-birth to heaven, bad men and those killed
  by the sword to hell.)

Footnote 208:

  Alger, ‘Future Life,’ p. 93.

Footnote 209:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 300.

Footnote 210:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 397; see also Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol.
  i. p. 243.

Footnote 211:

  Brinton, p. 242, &c.

Footnote 212:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 87, 224. See also the opinions of
  Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Religion,’ vol. ii. p. 768; Wuttke. ‘Gesch. des
  Heidenthums,’ vol. i. p. 115.

Footnote 213:

  Ellis, l. c.; Moerenhout, ‘Voyage,’ vol. i. p. 433.

Footnote 214:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 378.

Footnote 215:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter x.; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401.

Footnote 216:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 181; see Mundy, ‘Narrative,’ vol. i.
  p. 332.

Footnote 217:

  Macpherson, p. 92. Compare Moerenhout, l. c. (Tahiti).

Footnote 218:

  Mason, l. c. p. 195. See also De Brosses, ‘Nav. aux Terres Australes,’
  vol. ii. p. 482 (Caroline Is.).

Footnote 219:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 136, 144. See Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ.
  Reich,’ vol. i. p. 278. Compare accounts of Purgatory among the North
  American Indians, apparently derived from missionaries, in Morgan,
  ‘Iroquois,’ p. 169; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 345.

Footnote 220:

  See T. Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory.’

Footnote 221:

  Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 171, 191; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ p. xvi. See J. L.
  Wilson, p. 210.

Footnote 222:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1635, p. 35; 1636, p. 105. Catlin, ‘N. A.
  Ind.’ vol. ii. p. 127; Long’s ‘Exp.’ vol. i. p. 180. See Brinton, p.
  247; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191, vol. iii. p. 197; and the collection of
  myths of the Heaven-Bridge and Heaven-Gulf in ‘Early History of
  Mankind,’ chap. xii.

Footnote 223:

  Smith, ‘New England,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 244.

Footnote 224:

  Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 303.

Footnote 225:

  Birch, Introduction to and translation of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ in
  Bunsen, vol. v.; Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. v.

Footnote 226:

  For references to Rig Veda see Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ sec. xviii.;
  Max Müller, Lecture on Vedas in ‘Essays,’ vol. ii.

Footnote 227:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ new ser. vol. ii. p. 210. See Bastian, ‘Oestl.
  Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 387.

Footnote 228:

  Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ ed. Bleek, vol. iii. pp. 136, 163; see vol. i. pp.
  xviii. 90, 141; vol. ii. p. 68.

ANIMISM (continued).

    Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider Doctrine
    of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural
    Religion—Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled on
    that of Souls—Transition stage: classes of Souls passing
    into good and evil Demons—Manes-Worship—Doctrine of
    Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert
    bodies—Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and
    Oracle-inspiration—Fetishism—Disease-spirits embodied—Ghost attached
    to remains of Corpse—Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in,
    attached to, or operating through, an Object—Analogues
    of Fetish-doctrine in Modern Science—Stock-and-Stone
    Worship—Idolatry—Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern
    Language—Decline of Animistic theory of Nature.

The general scheme of Animism, of which the doctrine of souls hitherto
discussed forms part, thence expands to complete the full general
philosophy of Natural Religion among mankind. Conformably with that
early childlike philosophy in which human life seems the direct key to
the understanding of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe
refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading
personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable
inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men of old
days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts,
and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified
causes. As men’s ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by
souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect mankind, as well
as the manifold physical operations of the outer-world, were accounted
for as caused by soul-like beings, spirits whose essential similarity of
origin is evident through all their wondrous variety of power and
function. Much that the primitive animistic view thus explains, has been
indeed given over by more advanced education to the ‘metaphysical’ and
‘positive’ stages of thought. Yet animism is still plainly to be traced
onward from the intellectual state of the lower races, along the course
of the higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued and
modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or whether they have
dwindled into mere survivals in popular superstition. Though all I here
undertake is to sketch in outline such features of this spiritualistic
philosophy as I can see plainly enough to draw at all, scarcely
attempting to clear away the haze that covers great parts of the
subject, yet even so much as I venture on is a hard task, made yet
harder by the responsibility attaching to it. For it appears that to
follow the course of animism on from its more primitive stages, is to
account for much of mediæval and modern opinion whose meaning and reason
could hardly be comprehended without the aid of a development-theory of
culture, taking in the various processes of new formation, abolition,
survival, and revival. Thus even the despised ideas of savage races
become a practically important topic to the modern world, for here, as
usual, whatever bears on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also
on its validity.

At this point of the investigation, we come fully into sight of the
principle which has been all along implied in the use of the word
Animism, in a sense beyond its narrower meaning of the doctrine of
souls. By using it to express the doctrine of spirits generally, it is
practically asserted that the idea of souls, demons, deities, and any
other classes of spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature
throughout, the conceptions of souls being the original ones of the
series. It was best, from this point of view, to begin with a careful
study of souls, which are the spirits proper to men, animals, and
things, before extending the survey of the spirit-world to its fullest
range. If it be admitted that souls and other spiritual beings are
conceived of as essentially similar in their nature, it may be
reasonably argued that the class of conceptions based on evidence most
direct and accessible to ancient men, is the earlier and fundamental
class. To grant this, is in effect to agree that the doctrine of souls,
founded on the natural perceptions of primitive man, gave rise to the
doctrine of spirits, which extends and modifies its general theory for
new purposes, but in developments less authenticated and consistent,
more fanciful and far-fetched. It seems as though the conception of a
human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type or model on
which he framed not only his ideas of other souls of lower grade, but
also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that
sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the
world, the Great Spirit.

The doctrines of the lower races fully justify us in classing their
spiritual beings in general as similar in nature to the souls of men. It
will be incidentally shown here, again and again, that souls have the
same qualities attributed to them as other spirits, are treated in like
fashion, and pass without distinct breaks into every part of the general
spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other spirit is, in
fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from its rudest to its most
cultured stages. It ranges from the native New Zealanders’ and West
Indians’ conceptions of the ‘atua’ and the ‘cemi,’ beings which require
special definition to show whether they are human souls or demons or
deities of some other class,[229] and so onward to the declaration of
Philo Judæus, that souls, demons, and angels differ indeed in name, but
are in reality one,[230] and to the state of mind of the modern Roman
Catholic priest, who is cautioned in the rubric concerning the
examination of a possessed patient, not to believe the demon if he
pretends to be the soul of some saint or deceased person, or a good
angel (neque ei credatur, si dæmon simularet se esse animam alicujus
Sancti, vel defuncti, vel Angelum bonum).[231] Nothing can bring more
broadly into view the similar nature of souls and other spiritual beings
than the existence of a full transitional series of ideas. Souls of dead
men are in fact considered as actually forming one of the most important
classes of demons and deities.

It is quite usual for savage tribes to live in terror of the souls of
the dead as harmful spirits. Thus Australians have been known to
consider the ghosts of the unburied dead as becoming malignant
demons.[232] New Zealanders have supposed the souls of their dead to
become so changed in nature as to be malignant to their nearest and
dearest friends in life;[233] the Caribs said that, of man’s various
souls, some go to the seashore and capsize boats, others to the forest
to be evil spirits;[234] among the Sioux Indians the fear of a ghost’s
vengeance has been found to act as a check on murder;[235] of some
tribes in Central Africa it may be said that their main religious
doctrine is the belief in ghosts, and that the main characteristic of
these ghosts is to do harm to the living.[236] The Patagonians lived in
terror of the souls of their wizards, which become evil demons after
death;[237] Turanian tribes of North Asia fear their shamans even more
when dead than when alive, for they become a special class of spirits
who are the hurtfullest in all nature, and who among the Mongols plague
the living on purpose to make them bring offerings.[238] In China it is
held that the multitudes of wretched destitute spirits in the world
below, such as souls of lepers and beggars, can sorely annoy the living;
therefore at certain times they are to be appeased with offerings of
food, scant and beggarly; and a man who feels unwell, or fears a mishap
in business, will prudently have some mock-clothing and mock-money burnt
for these ‘gentlemen of the lower regions.’[239] Notions of this sort
are widely prevalent in Indo-China and India; whole orders of demons
there were formerly human souls, especially of people left unburied or
slain by plague or violence, of bachelors or of women who died in
childbirth, and who henceforth wreak their vengeance on the living. They
may, however, be propitiated by temples and offerings, and thus have
become in fact a regular class of local deities.[240] Among them may be
counted the diabolic soul of a certain wicked British officer, whom
native worshippers in the Tinnevelly district still propitiate by
offering at his grave the brandy and cheroots he loved in life.[241]
India even carried theory into practice by an actual manufacture of
demons, as witness the two following accounts. A certain brahman, on
whose lands a kshatriya raja had built a house, ripped himself up in
revenge, and became a demon of the kind called brahmadasyu, who has been
ever since the terror of the whole country, and is the most common
village deity in Kharakpur.[242] Toward the close of the last century
there were two brahmans, out of whose house a man had wrongfully, as
they thought, taken forty rupees; whereupon one of the brahmans
proceeded to cut off his own mother’s head, with the professed view,
entertained by both mother and son, that her spirit, excited by the
beating of a large drum during forty days, might haunt, torment, and
pursue to death the taker of their money and those concerned with him.
Declaring with her last words that she would blast the thief, the
spiteful hag deliberately gave up her life to take ghostly vengeance for
those forty rupees.[243] By instances like these it appears that we may
trace up from the psychology of the lower races the familiar ancient and
modern European tales of baleful ghost-demons. The old fear even now
continues to vouch for the old belief.

Happily for man’s anticipation of death, and for the treatment of the
sick and aged, thoughts of horror and hatred do not preponderate in
ideas of deified ancestors, who are regarded on the whole as kindly
patron spirits, at least to their own kinsfolk and worshippers.
Manes-worship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind.
Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up
the social relations of the living world. The dead ancestor, now passed
into a deity, simply goes on protecting his own family and receiving
suit and service from them as of old; the dead chief still watches over
his own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and harming
enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong. It will
be enough to show by a few characteristic examples the general position
of manes-worship among mankind, from the lower culture upward.[244] In
the two Americas it appears not unfrequently, from the low savage level
of the Brazilian Camacans, to the somewhat higher stage of northern
Indian tribes whom we hear of as praying to the spirits of their
forefathers for good weather or luck in hunting, and fancying when an
Indian falls into the fire that the ancestral spirits pushed him in to
punish neglect of the customary gifts, while the Natchez of Louisiana
are said to have even gone so far as to build temples for dead men.[245]
Turning to the dark races of the Pacific, we find the Tasmanians laying
their sick round a corpse on the funeral pile, that the dead might come
in the night and take out the devils that caused the diseases; it is
asserted in a general way of the natives, that they believed most
implicitly in the return of the spirits of their departed friends or
relations to bless or injure them as the case might be.[246] In Tanna,
the gods are spirits of departed ancestors, aged chiefs becoming deities
after death, presiding over the growth of yams and fruit trees, and
receiving from the islanders prayer and offerings of first fruits.[247]
Nor are the fairer Polynesians behind in this respect. Below the great
mythological gods of Tonga and New Zealand, the souls of chiefs and
warriors form a lower but active and powerful order of deities, who in
the Tongan paradise intercede for man’s benefit with the higher deities,
who direct the Maori war parties on the march, hover over them and give
them courage in the fight, and, watching jealously their own tribes and
families, punish any violation of the sacred laws of tapu.[248] Thence
we trace the doctrine into the Malay islands, where the souls of
deceased ancestors are looked to for prosperity in life and help in
distress.[249] In Madagascar, the worship of the spirits of the dead is
remarkably associated with the Vazimbas, the aborigines of the island,
who are said still to survive as a distinct race in the interior, and
whose peculiar graves testify to their former occupancy of other
districts. These graves, small in size, and distinguished by a cairn and
an upright stone slab or altar, are places which the Malagasy regard
with equal fear and veneration, and their faces become sad and serious
when they even pass near. To take a stone or pluck a twig from one of
these graves, to stumble against one in the dark, would be resented by
the angry Vazimba inflicting disease, or coming in the night to carry
off the offender to the region of ghosts. The Malagasy is thus enabled
to account for every otherwise unaccountable ailment by his having
knowingly or unknowingly given offence to some Vazimba. They are not
indeed always malevolent, they may be placable or implacable, or partake
of both characters. Thus it comes to pass, that at the altar-slab which
long ago some rude native family set up for commemoration or dutiful
offering of food to a dead kinsman, a barbaric supplanting race now
comes to smear the burnt fat of sacrifice, and set up the heads of
poultry and sheep and the horns of bullocks, that the mysterious tenant
may be kind, not cruel, with his superhuman powers.[250]

On the continent of Africa, manes-worship appears with extremest
definiteness and strength. Thus Zulu warriors, aided by the ‘amatongo,’
the spirits of their ancestors, conquer in the battle; but if the dead
turn their backs on the living, the living fall in the fight, to become
ancestral spirits in their turn. In anger the ‘itongo’ seizes a living
man’s body and inflicts disease and death; in beneficence he gives
health, and cattle, and corn, and all men wish. Even the little children
and old women, of small account in life, become at death spirits having
much power, the infants for kindness, the crones for malice. But it is
especially the head of each family who receives the worship of his kin.
Why it is naturally and reasonably so, a Zulu thus explains. ‘Although
they worship the many Amatongo of their tribe, making a great fence
around them for their protection; yet their father is far before all
others when they worship the Amatongo. Their father is a great treasure
to them even when he is dead. And those of his children who are already
grown up know him thoroughly, his gentleness, and his bravery.’ ‘Black
people do not worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is, all the dead
of their tribe. Speaking generally, the head of each house is worshipped
by the children of that house; for they do not know the ancients who are
dead, nor their laud-giving names, nor their names. But their father
whom they knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their prayer,
for they know him best, and his love for his children; they remember his
kindness to them whilst he was living; they compare his treatment of
them whilst he was living, support themselves by it, and say, “He will
still treat us in the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he
should regard others besides us; he will regard us only.”’[251] It will
be seen in another place how the Zulu follows up the doctrine of divine
ancestors till he reaches a first ancestor of man and creator of the
world, the primæval Unkulunkulu. In West Africa, manes-worship displays
in contrast its two special types. On the one hand, we see the North
Guinea negroes transferring the souls of the dead, according to their
lives, to the rank of good and evil spirits, and if evil worshipping
them the more zealously, as fear is to their minds a stronger impulse
than love. On the other hand, in Southern Guinea, we see the deep
respect paid to the aged during life, passing into worship when death
has raised them to yet higher influence. There the living bring to the
images of the dead food and drink, and even a small portion of their
profits gained in trade; they look especially to dead relatives for help
in the trials of life, and ‘it is no uncommon thing to see large groups
of men and women, in times of peril or distress, assembled along the
brow of some commanding eminence, or along the skirts of some dense
forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones upon the spirits
of their ancestors.’[252]

In Asia, manes-worship comes to the surface in all directions. The rude
Veddas of Ceylon believe in the guardianship of the spirits of the dead;
these, they say, are ‘ever watchful, coming to them in sickness,
visiting them in dreams, giving them flesh when hunting;’ and in every
calamity and want they call for aid on the ‘kindred spirits,’ and
especially the shades of departed children, the ‘infant spirits.’[253]
Among non-Hindu tribes of India, whose religions more or less represent
præ-Brahmanic and præ-Buddhistic conditions, wide and deep traces appear
of an ancient and surviving cultus of ancestors.[254] Among Turanian
tribes spread over the northern regions of the Old World, a similar
state of things may be instanced from the Mongols, worshipping as good
deities the princely souls of Genghis Khan’s family, at whose head
stands the divine Genghis himself.[255] Nor have nations of the higher
Asiatic culture generally rejected the time-honoured rite. In Japan the
‘Way of the Kami,’ better known to foreigners as the Sin-tu religion, is
one of the officially recognized faiths, and in it there is still kept
up in hut and palace the religion of the rude old mountain-tribes of the
land, who worshipped their divine ancestors, the Kami, and prayed to
them for help and blessing. To the time of these ancient Kami, say the
modern Japanese, the rude stone implements belong which are found in the
ground in Japan as elsewhere: to modern ethnologists, however, these
bear witness not of divine but savage parentage.[256] In Siam the lower
orders scruple to worship the great gods, lest through ignorance they
should blunder in the complex ritual; they prefer to pray to the
‘theparak,’ a lower class of deities among whom the souls of great men
take their places at death.[257] In China, as every one knows,
ancestor-worship is the dominant religion of the land, and interesting
problems are opened out to the Western mind by the spectacle of a great
people who for thousands of years have been thus seeking the living
among the dead. Nowhere is the connexion between parental authority and
conservatism more graphically shown. The worship of ancestors, begun
during their life, is not interrupted but intensified when death makes
them deities. The Chinese, prostrate bodily and mentally before the
memorial tablets that contain the souls of his ancestors, little thinks
that he is all the while proving to mankind how vast a power unlimited
filial obedience, prohibiting change from ancestral institutions, may
exert in stopping the advance of civilization. The thought of the souls
of the dead as sharing the happiness and glory of their descendants is
one which widely pervades the world, but most such ideas would seem
vague and weak to the Chinese, who will try hard for honour in his
competitive examination with the special motive of glorifying his dead
ancestors, and whose titles of rank will raise his deceased father and
grandfather a grade above himself, as though, with us, Zachary Macaulay
and Copley the painter should now have viscounts’ coronets officially
placed on their tombstones. As so often happens, what is jest to one
people is sober sense to another. There are 300 millions of Chinese who
would hardly see a joke in Charles Lamb reviling the stupid age that
would not read him, and declaring that he would write for antiquity. Had
he been a Chinese himself, he might have written his book in all
seriousness for the benefit of his great-great-grandfather. Among the
Chinese, manes-worship is no rite of mere affection. The living want the
help of the ancestral spirits, who reward virtue and punish vice: ‘The
exalted ancestor will bring thee, O Prince, much good!’—‘Ancestors and
fathers will abandon you and give you up, and come not to help, and ye
will die.’ If no help comes in time of need, the Chinese will reproach
his ancestor, or even come to doubt his existence. Thus in a Chinese ode
the sufferers in a dreadful drought cry, ‘Heu-tsi cannot or will not
help.... Our ancestors have surely perished.... Father, mother,
ancestors, how could you calmly bear this?’ Nor does manes-worship stop
short with direct family ties; it is naturally developed to produce, by
deification of the heroic dead, a series of superior gods to whom
worship is given by the public at large. Thus, according to legend, the
War-god or Military Sage was once in human life a distinguished soldier,
the Mechanics’ god was a skilful workman and inventor of tools, the
Swine-god was a hog-breeder who lost his pigs and died of sorrow, and
the Gamblers’ god, a desperate gamester who lost his all and died of
want, is represented by a hideous image called a ‘devil gambling for
cash,’ and in this shape receives the prayers and offerings of confirmed
gamblers, his votaries. The spirits of San-kea Ta-te, and Chang-yuen-sze
go to partake of the offerings set out in their temples, returning
flushed and florid from their meal; and the spirit of Confucius is
present in the temple, where twice a year the Emperor does sacrifice to
him.[258]

The Hindu unites in some degree with the Chinese as to ancestor-worship,
and especially as to the necessity of having a son by blood or adoption,
who shall offer the proper sacrifices to him after death. ‘May there be
born in our lineage,’ the manes are supposed to say, ‘a man to offer to
us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and
ghee.’ Offerings made to the divine manes, the ‘pitaras’ (patres,
fathers) as they are called, preceded and followed by offerings to the
greater deities, give to the worshipper merit and happiness.[259] In
classic Europe, apotheosis lies part within the limits of myth, where it
was applied to fabled ancestors, and part within the limits of actual
history, as where Julius and Augustus shared its honours with the vile
Domitian and Commodus. The most special representatives of
ancestor-worship in Europe were perhaps the ancient Romans, whose word
‘manes’ has become the recognized name for ancestral deities in modern
civilized language; they embodied them as images, set them up as
household patrons, gratified them with offerings and solemn homage, and
counting them as or among the infernal gods, inscribed on tombs D. M.,
‘Diis Manibus.’[260] The occurrence of this D. M. in Christian epitaphs
is an often-noticed case of religious survival.

Although full ancestor-worship is not practised in modern Christendom,
there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the
dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order
of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men and receiving from
them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of
manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the
older manes-worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course
of religious transition in Europe. The local gods, the patron gods of
particular ranks and crafts, the gods from whom men sought special help
in special needs, were too near and dear to the inmost heart of
præ-Christian Europe to be done away with without substitutes. It proved
easier to replace them by saints who could undertake their particular
professions, and even succeed them in their sacred dwellings. The system
of spiritual division of labour was in time worked out with wonderful
minuteness in the vast array of professional saints, among whom the most
familiar to modern English ears are St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians;
St. Luke, patron of painters; St. Peter, of fishmongers; St. Valentine,
of lovers; St. Sebastian, of archers; St. Crispin, of cobblers; St.
Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs; St. Vitus, who delivers madmen
and sufferers from the disease which bears his name; St. Fiacre, whose
name is now less known by his shrine than by the hackney-coaches called
after him in the seventeenth century. Not to dwell here minutely on an
often-treated topic, it will be enough to touch on two particular
points. First, as to the direct historical succession of the Christian
saint to the heathen deity, the following are two very perfect
illustrations. It is well known that Romulus, mindful of his own
adventurous infancy, became after death a Roman deity propitious to the
health and safety of young children, so that nurses and mothers would
carry sickly infants to present them in his little round temple at the
foot of the Palatine. In after ages the temple was replaced by the
church of St. Theodorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew
public attention to its curious history, used to look in and see ten or
a dozen women, each with a sick child in her lap, sitting in silent
reverence before the altar of the saint. The ceremony of blessing
children, especially after vaccination, may still be seen there on
Thursday mornings.[261] Again, Sts. Cosmas and Damianus, according to
Maury, owe their recognized office to a similar curious train of events.
They were martyrs who suffered under Diocletian, at Ægææ in Cilicia. Now
this place was celebrated for the worship of Æsculapius, in whose temple
incubation, i.e. sleeping for oracular dreams, was practised. It seems
as though the idea was transferred on the spot to the two local saints,
for we next hear of them as appearing in a dream to the Emperor
Justinian, when he was ill at Byzantium. They cured him, he built them a
temple, their cultus spread far and wide, and they frequently appeared
to the sick to show them what they should do. Legend settled that Cosmas
and Damianus were physicians while they lived on earth, and at any rate
they are patron-saints of the profession of medicine to this day.[262]
Second, as to the actual state of hagiolatry in modern Europe, it is
obvious on a broad view that it is declining among the educated classes.
Yet modern examples may be brought forward to show ideas as extreme as
those which prevailed more widely a thousand years ago. In the Church of
the Jesuit College at Rome lies buried St. Aloysius Gonzaga, on whose
festival it is customary especially for the college students to write
letters to him, which are placed on his gaily decorated and illuminated
altar, and afterwards burnt unopened. The miraculous answering of these
letters is vouched for in an English book of 1870. To the same year
belongs an English tract commemorating a late miraculous cure. An
Italian lady afflicted with a tumour and incipient cancer of the breast
was exhorted by a Jesuit priest to recommend herself to the Blessed John
Berchmans, a pious Jesuit novice from Belgium, who died in 1621, and was
beatified in 1865. Her adviser procured for her ‘three small packets of
dust gathered from the coffin of this saintly innocent, a little cross
made of the boards of the room the blessed youth occupied, as well as
some portion of the wadding in which his venerable head was wrapped.’
During nine days’ devotion the patient accordingly invoked the Blessed
John, swallowed small portions of his dust in water, and at last pressed
the cross to her breast so vehemently that she was seized with sickness,
went to sleep, and awoke without a symptom of the complaint. And when
Dr. Panegrossi the physician beheld the incredible cure, and heard that
the patient had addressed herself to the Blessed Berchmans, he bowed his
head, saying, ‘When such physicians interfere, we have nothing more to
say!’[263] To sum up the whole history of manes-worship, it is plain
that in our time the dead still receive worship from far the larger half
of mankind, and it may have been much the same ever since the remote
periods of primitive culture in which the religion of the manes probably
took its rise.

It has now been seen that the theory of souls recognizes them as capable
either of independent existence, or of inhabiting human, animal, or
other bodies. On the principle here maintained, that the general theory
of spirits is modelled on the theory of souls, we shall be able to
account for several important branches of the lower philosophy of
religion, which without such explanation may appear in great measure
obscure or absurd. Like souls, other spirits are supposed able either to
exist and act flitting free about the world, or to become incorporate
for more or less time in solid bodies. It will be well at once to get a
secure grasp of this theory of Embodiment, for without it we shall be
stopped every moment by a difficulty in understanding the nature of
spirits, as defined in the lower animism. The theory of embodiment
serves several highly important purposes in savage and barbarian
philosophy. On the one hand it provides an explanation of the phenomena
of morbid exaltation and derangement, especially as connected with
abnormal utterance, and this view is so far extended as to produce an
almost general doctrine of disease. On the other hand, it enables the
savage either to ‘lay’ a hurtful spirit in some foreign body, and so get
rid of it, or to carry about a useful spirit for his service in a
material object, to set it up as a deity for worship in the body of an
animal, or in a block or stone or image or other thing, which contains
the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid: this is the key to strict
fetishism, and in no small measure to idolatry. In briefly considering
these various branches of the Embodiment-theory, there may be
conveniently included certain groups of cases often impossible to
distinguish apart. These cases belong theoretically rather to obsession
than possession, the spirits not actually inhabiting the bodies, but
hanging or hovering about them and affecting them from the outside.

As in normal conditions the man’s soul, inhabiting his body, is held to
give it life, to think, speak, and act through it, so an adaptation of
the self-same principle explains abnormal conditions of body or mind, by
considering the new symptoms as due to the operation of a second
soul-like being, a strange spirit. The possessed man, tossed and shaken
in fever, pained and wrenched as though some live creature were tearing
or twisting him within, pining as though it were devouring his vitals
day by day, rationally finds a personal spiritual cause for his
sufferings. In hideous dreams he may even sometimes see the very ghost
or nightmare-fiend that plagues him. Especially when the mysterious
unseen power throws him helpless on the ground, jerks and writhes him in
convulsions, makes him leap upon the bystanders with a giant’s strength
and a wild beast’s ferocity, impels him, with distorted face and frantic
gesture, and voice not his own nor seemingly even human, to pour forth
wild incoherent raving, or with thought and eloquence beyond his sober
faculties to command, to counsel, to foretell—such a one seems to those
who watch him, and even to himself, to have become the mere instrument
of a spirit which has seized him or entered into him, a possessing demon
in whose personality the patient believes so implicitly that he often
imagines a personal name for it, which it can declare when it speaks in
its own voice and character through his organs of speech; at last,
quitting the medium’s spent and jaded body, the intruding spirit departs
as it came. This is the savage theory of dæmoniacal possession and
obsession, which has been for ages, and still remains, the dominant
theory of disease and inspiration among the lower races. It is obviously
based on an animistic interpretation, most genuine and rational in its
proper place in man’s intellectual history, of the actual symptoms of
the cases. The general doctrine of disease-spirits and oracle-spirits
appears to have its earliest, broadest, and most consistent position
within the limits of savagery. When we have gained a clear idea of it in
this its original home, we shall be able to trace it along from grade to
grade of civilization, breaking away piecemeal under the influence of
new medical theories, yet sometimes expanding in revival, and at least
in lingering survival holding its place into the midst of our modern
life. The possession-theory is not merely known to us by the statements
of those who describe diseases in accordance with it. Disease being
accounted for by attack of spirits, it naturally follows that to get rid
of these spirits is the proper means of cure. Thus the practices of the
exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession, from its
first appearance in savagery to its survival in modern civilization; and
nothing could display more vividly the conception of a disease or a
mental affection as caused by a personal spiritual being than the
proceedings of the exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it,
makes offerings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient’s body,
and induces it to take up its abode in some other. That the two great
effects ascribed to such spiritual influence in obsession and
possession, namely, the infliction of ailments and the inspiration of
oracles, are not only mixed up together but often run into absolute
coincidence, accords with the view that both results are referred to one
common cause. Also that the intruding or invading spirit may be either a
human soul or may belong to some other class in the spiritual hierarchy,
countenances the opinion that the possession-theory is derived from, and
indeed modelled on, the ordinary theory of the soul acting on the body.
In illustrating the doctrine by typical examples from the enormous mass
of available details, it will hardly be possible to discriminate among
the operating spirits, between those which are souls and those which are
demons, nor to draw an exact line between obsession by a demon outside
and possession by a demon inside, nor between the condition of the
demon-tormented patient and the demon-actuated doctor, seer, or priest.
In a word, the confusion of these conceptions in the savage mind only
fairly represents their intimate connexion in the Possession-theory
itself.

In the Australian-Tasmanian district, disease and death are ascribed to
more or less defined spiritual influences; descriptions of a demon
working a sorcerer’s wicked will by coming slyly behind his victim and
hitting him with his club on the back of his neck, and of a dead man’s
ghost angered by having his name uttered, and creeping up into the
utterer’s body to consume his liver, are indeed peculiarly graphic
details of savage animism.[264] The theory of disease-spirits is well
stated in its extreme form among the Mintira, a low race of the Malay
peninsula. Their ‘hantu’ or spirits have among their functions that of
causing ailments; thus the ‘hantu kalumbahan’ causes small-pox; the
‘hantu kamang’ brings on inflammation and swellings in the hands and
feet; when a person is wounded, the ‘hantu pari’ fastens on the wound
and sucks, and this is the cause of the blood flowing. And thus, as the
describer says, ‘To enumerate the remainder of the hantus would be
merely to convert the name of every species of disease known to the
Mintira into a proper one. If any new disease appeared, it would be
ascribed to a hantu bearing the same name.’[265] It will help us to an
idea of the distinct personality which the disease-demon has in the
minds of the lower races, to notice the Orang Laut of this district
placing thorns and brush in the paths leading to a part where small-pox
had broken out, to keep the demons off; just as the Khonds of Orissa try
with thorns, and ditches, and stinking oil poured on the ground, to
barricade the paths to their hamlets against the goddess of small-pox,
Jugah Pennu.[266] Among the Dayaks of Borneo, ‘to have been smitten by a
spirit’ is to be ill; sickness may be caused by invisible spirits
inflicting invisible wounds with invisible spears, or entering men’s
bodies and driving out their souls, or lodging in their hearts and
making them raving mad. In the Indian Archipelago, the personal
semi-human nature of the disease-spirits is clearly acknowledged by
appeasing them with feasts and dances and offerings of food set out for
them away in the woods, to induce them to quit their victims, or by
sending tiny proas to sea with offerings, that spirits which have taken
up their abode in sick men’s bowels may embark and not come back.[267]
The animistic theory of disease is strongly marked in Polynesia, where
every sickness is ascribed to spiritual action of deities, brought on by
the offerings of enemies, or by the victim’s violation of the laws of
tapu. Thus in New Zealand each ailment is caused by a spirit,
particularly an infant or undeveloped human spirit, which sent into the
patient’s body gnaws and feeds inside; and the exorcist, finding the
path by which such a disease-spirit came from below to feed on the
vitals of a sick relative, will persuade it by a charm to get upon a
flax-stalk and set off home. We hear, too, of an idea of the parts of
the body—forehead, breast, stomach, feet, &c.—being apportioned each to
a deity who inflicts aches and pains and ailments there.[268] So in the
Samoan group, when a man was near death, people were anxious to part on
good terms with him, feeling assured that if he died with angry feelings
towards any one, he would certainly return and bring calamity on that
person or some one closely allied to him. This was considered a frequent
source of disease and death, the spirit of a departed member of the
family returning and taking up his abode in the head, chest, or stomach
of a living man, and so causing sickness and death. If a man died
suddenly, it was thought that he was eaten by the spirit that took him;
and though the soul of one thus devoured would go to the common
spirit-land of the departed, yet it would have no power of speech there,
and if questioned could but beat its breast. It completes this account
to notice that the disease-inflicting souls of the departed were the
same which possessed the living under more favourable circumstances,
coming to talk through a certain member of the family, prophesying
future events, and giving directions as to family affairs.[269] Farther
east, in the Georgian and Society Islands, evil demons are sent to
scratch and tear people into convulsions and hysterics, to torment poor
wretches as with barbed hooks, or to twist and knot inside them till
they die writhing in agony. But madmen are to be treated with great
respect, as entered by a god, and idiots owe the kindness with which
they are appeased and coaxed to the belief in their superhuman
inspiration.[270] Here, and elsewhere in the lower culture, the old real
belief has survived which has passed into a jest of civilized men in the
famous phrase of the ‘inspired idiot.’

American ethnography carries on the record of rude races ascribing
disease to the action of evil spirits. Thus the Dacotas believe that the
spirits punish them for misconduct, especially for neglecting to make
feasts for the dead; these spirits have the power to send the spirit of
something, as of a bear, deer, turtle, fish, tree, stone, worm, or
deceased person, which entering the patient causes disease; the
medicine-man’s cure consists in reciting charms over him, singing
‘He-le-li-lah, &c.,’ to the accompaniment of a gourd-rattle with beads
inside, ceremonially shooting a symbolic bark representation of the
intruding creature, sucking over the seat of pain to get the spirit out,
and firing guns at it as it is supposed to be escaping.[271] Such
processes were in full vogue in the West Indies in the time of Columbus,
when Friar Roman Pane put on record his quaint account of the native
sorcerer pulling the disease off the patient’s legs (as one pulls off a
pair of trousers), going out of doors to blow it away, and bidding it
begone to the mountain or the sea; the performance concluding with the
regular sucking-cure and the pretended extraction of some stone or bit
of flesh, or such thing, which the patient is assured that his
patron-spirit or deity (cemi) put into him to cause the disease, in
punishment for neglect to build him a temple or honour him with prayer
or offerings of goods.[272] Patagonians considered sickness as caused by
a spirit entering the patient’s body; ‘they believe every sick person to
be possessed of an evil demon; hence their physicians always carry a
drum with figures of devils painted on it, which they strike at the beds
of sick persons to drive out from the body the evil demon which causes
the disorder.’[273] In Africa, according to the philosophy of the
Basutos and the Zulus, the causes of disease are the ghosts of the dead,
come to draw the living to themselves, or to compel them to sacrifice
meat-offerings. They are recognized by the diviners, or by the patient
himself, who sees in dreams the departed spirit come to torment him.
Congo tribes in like manner consider the souls of the dead, passed into
the ranks of powerful spirits, to cause disease and death among mankind.
Thus, in both these districts, medicine becomes an almost entirely
religious matter of propitiatory sacrifice and prayer addressed to the
disease-inflicting manes. The Barolong give a kind of worship to
deranged persons, as being under the direct influence of a deity; while
in East Africa the explanation of madness and idiocy is simple and
typical—‘he has fiends.’[274] Negroes of West Africa, on the supposition
that an attack of illness has been caused by some spiritual being, can
ascertain to their satisfaction what manner of spirit has done it, and
why. The patient may have neglected his ‘wong’ or fetish-spirit, who has
therefore made him ill; or it may be his own ‘kla’ or personal
guardian-spirit, who on being summoned explains that he has not been
treated respectfully enough, &c.; or it may be a ‘sisa’ or ghost of some
dead man, who has taken this means of making known that he wants perhaps
a gold ornament that was left behind when he died.[275] Of course, the
means of cure will then be to satisfy the demands of the spirit. Another
aspect of the negro doctrine of disease-spirits is displayed in the
following description from Guinea, by the Rev. J. L. Wilson, the
missionary:—‘Demoniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed
by those who are supposed to be under such influence are certainly not
unlike those described in the New Testament. Frantic gestures,
convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats of supernatural strength,
furious ravings, bodily lacerations, gnashing of teeth, and other things
of a similar character, may be witnessed in most of the cases which are
supposed to be under diabolical influence.’[276] The remark several
times made by travellers is no doubt true, that the spiritualistic
theory of disease has tended strongly to prevent progress in the medical
art among the lower races. Thus among the Bodo and Dhimal of North-East
India, who ascribe all diseases to a deity tormenting the patient for
some impiety or neglect, the exorcists divine the offended god and
appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog; these exorcists are a
class of priests, and the people have no other doctors.[277] Where the
world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men’s minds, full
of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and
regimen.

The cases in which disease-possession passes into oracle-possession are
especially connected with hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic
affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a Tasmanian native sorcerer,
‘affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one
breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the
devil’; this malady served to prove his inspiration to his people.[278]
When Dr. Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man fell
down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come over him to
forbid the people to listen to the missionary, and he sang out his
denunciations like one frantic. This man was afterwards converted, and
told the missionary that ‘he could not account for his former exercises,
but that it certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he
must tell what was communicated.’ In this Karen district flourishes the
native ‘wee’ or prophet, whose business is to work himself into the
state in which he can see departed spirits, visit their distant home,
and even recall them to the body, thus raising the dead; these wees are
nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums, and in giving
oracles they go into actual convulsions.[279] Dr. Callaway’s details of
the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly instructive. Their
symptoms are ascribed to possession by ‘amatongo’ or ancestral spirits;
the disease is common, from some it departs of its own accord, others
have the ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take
its course and become professional diviners, whose powers of finding
hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible information are vouched
for by native witnesses, who at the same time are not blind to their
tricks and their failures. The most perfect description is that of a
hysterical visionary, who had ‘the disease which precedes the power to
divine.’ This man describes that well-known symptom of hysteria, the
heavy weight creeping up within him to his shoulders, his vivid dreams,
his waking visions of objects that are not there when he approaches, the
songs that come to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the
air. This man was ‘of a family who are very sensitive, and become
doctors.’[280] Persons whose constitutional unsoundness induces morbid
manifestations are indeed marked out by nature to become seers and
sorcerers. Among the Patagonians, patients seized with falling sickness
or St. Vitus’s dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by
the demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed them.[281]
Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children liable to convulsions
as suitable to be brought up to the profession, which is apt to become
hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it belongs to.[282] Thus, even
in the lower culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to
have that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which they have
kept in so remarkable a way through the course of history.

Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on purpose, and
moreover the professional sorcerer commonly exaggerates or wholly feigns
them. In the more genuine manifestations the medium may be so intensely
wrought upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from
within him, that he may not only give this spirit’s name and speak in
its character, but possibly may in good faith alter his voice to suit
the spiritual utterance. This gift of spirit-utterance, which belongs to
‘ventriloquism’ in the ancient and proper sense of the term, of course
lapses into sheer trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus
artificially excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than
alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details of
oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The Patagonian wizard
begins his performance with drumming and rattling till the real or
pretended epileptic fit comes on by the demon entering him, who then
answers questions from within him with a faint and mournful voice.[283]
In Southern India and Ceylon the so-called ‘devil-dancers’ have to work
themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess
to cure their patients.[284] So, with furious dancing to the music and
chanting of the attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of
maniacal inspiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles
through him.[285] In Kamchatka the female shamans, when Billukai came
down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy; or, receiving spirits
with a cry of ‘hush!’ their teeth chattered as in fever, and they were
ready to divine.[286] Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the
‘natzo’ or conjurer is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his ‘nat’
or demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends into him
and gives the required answers.[287] In the Pacific Islands, spirits of
the dead would enter for a time the body of a living man, inspiring him
to declare future events, or to execute some commission from the higher
deities. The symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been
especially well described in this region of the world. The Fijian priest
sits looking steadfastly at a whale’s tooth ornament, amid dead silence.
In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come
on, which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of the veins,
murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered him, and with eyes rolling and
protruding, unnatural voice, pale face and livid lips, sweat streaming
from every pore, and the whole aspect of a furious madman, he gives the
divine answer, and then, the symptoms subsiding, he looks round with a
vacant stare, and the deity returns to the land of spirits. In the
Sandwich Islands, where the god Oro thus gave his oracles, his priest
ceased to act or speak as a voluntary agent, but with his limbs
convulsed, his features distorted and terrific, his eyes wild and
strained, he would roll on the ground foaming at the mouth, and reveal
the will of the possessing god in shrill cries and sounds violent and
indistinct, which the attending priests duly interpreted to the people.
In Tahiti, it was often noticed that men who in the natural state showed
neither ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium burst
forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will and answers of
the gods, and prophesying future events, in well-knit harangues full of
the poetic figure and metaphor of the professional orator. But when the
fit was over, and sober reason returned, the prophet’s gifts were
gone.[288] Lastly, the accounts of oracular possession in Africa show
the primitive ventriloquist in perfect types of morbid knavery. In
Sofala, after a king’s funeral, his soul would enter into a sorcerer,
and speaking in the familiar tones that all the bystanders recognized,
would give counsel to the new monarch how to govern his people.[289]
About a century ago, a negro fetish-woman of Guinea is thus described in
the act of answering an enquirer who has come to consult her. She is
crouching on the earth, with her head between her knees and her hands up
to her face, till, becoming inspired by the fetish, she snorts and foams
and gasps. Then the suppliant may put his question, ‘Will my friend or
brother get well of this sickness?’—‘What shall I give thee to set him
free from his sickness?’ and so forth. Then the fetish-woman answers in
a thin, whistling voice, and with the old-fashioned idioms of
generations past; and thus the suppliant receives his command, perhaps
to kill a white cock and put him at a four-cross way, or tie him up for
the fetish to come and fetch him, or perhaps merely to drive a dozen
wooden pegs into the ground, so to bury his friend’s disease with
them.[290]

The details of demoniacal possession among barbaric and civilized
nations need no elaborate description, so simply do they continue the
savage cases.[291] But the state of things we notice here agrees with
the conclusion that the possession-theory belongs originally to the
lower culture, and is gradually superseded by higher medical knowledge.
Surveying its course through the middle and higher civilization, we
shall notice first a tendency to limit it to certain peculiar and severe
affections, especially connected with mental disorder, such as epilepsy,
hysteria, delirium, idiocy, madness; and after this a tendency to
abandon it altogether, in consequence of the persistent opposition of
the medical faculty. Among the nations of South-East Asia, obsession and
possessions by demons is strong at least in popular belief. The Chinese
attacked with dizziness, or loss of the use of his limbs, or other
unaccountable disease, knows that he has been influenced by a malignant
demon, or punished for some offence by a deity whose name he will
mention, or affected by his wife of a former existence, whose spirit has
after a long search discovered him. Exorcism of course exists, and when
the evil spirit or influence is expelled, it is especially apt to enter
some person standing near; hence the common saying, ‘idle spectators
should not be present at an exorcism.’ Divination by possessed mediums
is usual in China: among such is the professional woman who sits at a
table in contemplation, till the soul of a deceased person from whom
communication is desired enters her body and talks through her to the
living; also the man into whom a deity is brought by invocations and
mesmeric passes, when, assuming the divine figure and attitude, he
pronounces the oracle.[292] In Burma, the fever-demon of the jungle
seizes trespassers on his domain, and shakes them in ague till he is
exorcised, while falls and apoplectic fits are the work of other
spirits. The dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated by the
doctor covering their heads with a garment, and thrashing them soundly
with a stick, the demon and not the patient being considered to feel the
blows; the possessing spirit may be prevented from escaping by a knotted
and charmed cord hung round the bewitched person’s neck, and when a
sufficient beating has induced it to speak by the patient’s voice and
declare its name and business, it may either be allowed to depart, or
the doctor tramples on the patient’s stomach till the demon is stamped
to death. For an example of invocation and offerings, one characteristic
story told by Dr. Bastian will suffice. A Bengali cook was seized with
an apoplectic fit, which his Burmese wife declared was but a just
retribution, for the godless fellow had gone day after day to market to
buy pounds and pounds of meat, yet in spite of her remonstrances would
never give a morsel to the patron-spirit of the town; as a good wife,
however, she now did her best for her suffering husband, placing near
him little heaps of coloured rice for the ‘nat,’ and putting on his
fingers rings with prayers addressed to the same offended being—‘Oh ride
him not!’—‘Ah let him go!’—‘Grip him not so hard!’—‘Thou shalt have
rice!’—‘Ah, how good that tastes!’ How explicitly Buddhism recognizes
such ideas, may be judged from one of the questions officially put to
candidates for admission as monks or talapoins—‘Art thou afflicted by
madness or the other ills caused by giants, witches, or evil demons of
the forest and mountain?’[293] Within our own domain of British India,
the possession-theory and the rite of exorcism belonging to it may be
perfectly studied to this day. There the doctrine of sudden ailment or
nervous disease being due to a blast or possession by a ‘bhut,’ or
being, that is, a demon, is recognized as of old; there the old witch
who has possessed a man and made him sick or deranged, will answer
spiritually out of his body and say who she is and where she lives;
there the frenzied demoniac may be seen raving, writhing, tearing,
bursting his bonds, till, subdued by the exorcist, his fury subsides, he
stares and sighs, falls helpless to the ground, and comes to himself;
and there the deities caused by excitement, singing, and incense to
enter into men’s bodies, manifest their presence with the usual
hysterical or epileptic symptoms, and speaking in their own divine name
and personality, deliver oracles by the vocal organs of the inspired
medium.[294]

In the Ancient Babylonian-Assyrian texts, the exorcism-formulas show the
doctrine of disease-demons in full development, and similar opinions
were current in ancient Greece and Rome, to whose languages indeed our
own owes the technical terms of the subject, such as ‘demoniac’ and
‘exorcist.’ Homer’s sick men racked with pain are tormented by a hateful
demon (στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων). ‘Epilepsy’ (ἐπίληψις) was, as its
name imports, the ‘seizure’ of the patient by a superhuman agent: the
agent being more exactly defined in ‘nympholepsy,’ the state of being
seized or possessed by a nymph, i.e., rapt or entranced (νυμφόληπτος,
lymphatus). The causation of mental derangement and delirious utterance
by spiritual possession was an accepted tenet of Greek philosophy. To be
insane was simply to have an evil spirit, as when Sokrates said of those
who denied demonic or spiritual knowledge, that they themselves were
demoniac (δαιμονᾶν ἔφη), and Alexander ascribed to the influence of
offended Dionysos the ungovernable drunken fury in which he killed his
friend Kleitos; raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil
demon (κἀκοδαιμονία). So the Romans called madmen ‘larvati,’ ‘larvarum
pleni,’ full of ghosts. Patients possessed by demons stared and foamed,
and the spirits spoke from within them by their voices. The craft of the
exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its theory and
practice remained in fullest vigour through the classic world, scarce
altered from the times of lowest barbarism. Could a South Sea Islander
have gone to Delphi to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and
listen to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed no
explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own
savage philosophy.[295]

The Jewish doctrine of possession[296] at no time in its long course
exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the civilized world
comparable to that produced by the mentions of demoniacal possession in
the New Testament. It is needless to quote here even a selection from
the familiar passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner
in which certain described symptoms were currently accounted for in
public opinion. Regarding these documents from an ethnographic point of
view, it need only be said that they prove, incidentally but absolutely,
that Jews and Christians at that time held the doctrine which had
prevailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages after,
referring to possession and obsession by spirits the symptoms of mania,
epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and oracular utterance, and other morbid
conditions, mental and bodily.[297] Modern missionary works, such as
have been cited here, give the most striking evidence of the
correspondence of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be
observed among uncivilized races. During the early centuries of
Christianity, demoniacal possession indeed becomes peculiarly
conspicuous, perhaps not from unusual prevalence of the animistic theory
of disease, but simply because a period of intense religious excitement
brought it more than usually into requisition. Ancient ecclesiastical
records describe, under the well-known names of ‘dæmoniacs’
(δαιμονιζόμενοι), ‘possessed’ (κατεχόμενοι), ‘energumens’
(ἐνεργούμενοι), the class of persons whose bodies are seized or
possessed by an evil spirit; such attacks being frequently attended with
great commotions and vexations and disturbances of the body, occasioning
sometimes frenzy and madness, sometimes epileptic fits, and other
violent tossings and contortions. These energumens formed a recognised
part of an early Christian congregation, a standing-place apart being
assigned to them in the church. The church indeed seems to have been the
principal habitation of these afflicted creatures, they were occupied
out of service-time in such work as sweeping, daily food was provided
for them, and they were under the charge of a special order of clergy,
the exorcists, whose religious function was to cast out devils by prayer
and adjuration and laying on of hands. As to the usual symptoms of
possession, Justin, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Minucius, Cyprian,
and other early Fathers, give copious descriptions of demons entering
into the bodies of men, disordering their health and minds, driving them
to wander among the tombs, forcing them to writhe and wallow and rave
and foam, howling and declaring their own diabolical names by the
patients’ voices, but when overcome by conjuration or by blows
administered to their victims, quitting the bodies they had entered, and
acknowledging the pagan deities to be but devils.[298]

On a subject so familiar to educated readers I may be excused from
citing at length a vast mass of documents, barbaric in nature and only
more or less civilized in circumstance, to illustrate the continuance of
the doctrine of possession and the rite of exorcism through the middle
ages and into modern times. A few salient examples will suffice. For a
type of medical details, we may instance the recipes in the ‘Early
English Leechdoms’: a cake of the ‘thost’ of a white hound baked with
meal is to be taken against the attack by dwarves (i.e. convulsions); a
drink of herbs worked up off clear ale with the aid of garlic, holy
water, and singing of masses, is to be drunk by a fiend-sick patient out
of a church bell. Philosophical argument may be followed in the
dissertations of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ concerning demons
substantially inhabiting men and causing illness in them, enquiries
which may be pursued under the auspices of Glanvil in the ‘Saducismus
Triumphatus.’ Historical anecdote bears record of the convulsive
clairvoyant demon who possessed Nicola Aubry, and under the Bishop of
Laon’s exorcism testified in an edifying manner to the falsity of
Calvinism; of Charles VI. of France, who was possessed, and whose demon
a certain priest tried in vain to transfer into the bodies of twelve men
who were chained up to receive it; of the German woman at Elbingerode
who in a fit of toothache wished the devil might enter into her teeth,
and who was possessed by six demons accordingly, which gave their names
as Schalk der Wahrheit, Wirk, Widerkraut, Myrrha, Knip, Stüp; of George
Lukins of Yatton, whom seven devils threw into fits and talked and sang
and barked out of, and who was delivered by a solemn exorcism by seven
clergymen at the Temple Church at Bristol in the year 1788.[299] A
strong sense of the permanence of the ancient doctrine may be gained
from accounts of the state of public opinion in Europe, from Greece and
Italy to France, where within the last century derangement and hysteria
were still popularly ascribed to possession and treated by exorcism,
just as in the dark ages.[300] In the year 1861, at Morzine, at the
south of the Lake of Geneva, there might be seen in full fury an
epidemic of diabolical possession worthy of a Red Indian settlement or a
negro kingdom of West Africa, an outburst which the exorcisms of a
superstitious priest had so aggravated that there were a hundred and ten
raving demoniacs in that single village.[301] The following is from a
letter written in 1862 by Mgr. Anouilh, a French missionary-bishop in
China. ‘Le croiriez-vous? dix villages se sont convertis. Le diable est
furieux et fait les cent coups. Il y a eu, pendant les quinze jours que
je viens de prêcher, cinq ou six possessions. Nos catéchumènes avec
l’eau bénite chassent les diables, guérissent les malades. J’ai vu des
choses merveilleuses. Le diable m’est d’un grand secours pour convertir
les païens. Comme au temps de Notre-Seigneur, quoique père du mensonge,
il ne peut s’empêcher de dire la vérité. Voyez ce pauvre possédé faisant
mille contorsions et disant à grands cris: “Pourquoi prêches-tu la vraie
religion? Je ne puis souffrir que tu m’enlèves mes disciples.”—“Comment
t’appelles-tu?” lui demande le catéchiste. Après quelques refus: “Je
suis l’envoyé de Lucifer”—“Combien êtes-vous?”—“Nous sommes vingt-deux.”
“L’eau bénite et le signe de la croix ont délivré ce possédé.”’[302] To
conclude the series with a modern spiritualistic instance, one of those
where the mediums feel themselves entered and acted through by a spirit
other than their own soul. The Rev. Mr. West of Philadelphia describes
how a certain possessed medium went through the sword exercise, and fell
down senseless; when he came to himself again, the spirit within him
declared itself to be the soul of a deceased ancestor of the minister’s,
who had fought and died in the American War.[303] We in England now
hardly hear of demoniacal possession except as a historical doctrine of
divines. We have discarded from religious services the solemn ceremony
of casting out devils from the bodies of the possessed, a rite to this
day officially retained in the Rituals of the Greek and Roman Churches.
Cases of diabolical influence alleged from time to time among ourselves
are little noticed except by newspaper paragraphs on superstition and
imposture. If, however, we desire to understand the doctrine of
possession, its origin and influence in the world, we must look beyond
countries where public opinion has passed into this stage, and must
study the demoniac theory as it still prevails in lower and lowest
levels of culture.

It has to be thoroughly understood that the changed aspect of the
subject in modern opinion is not due to disappearance of the actual
manifestations which early philosophy attributed to demoniacal
influence. Hysteria and epilepsy, delirium and mania, and such like
bodily and mental derangement, still exist. Not only do they still
exist, but among the lower races, and in superstitious districts among
the higher, they are still explained and treated as of old. It is not
too much to assert that the doctrine of demoniacal possession is kept
up, substantially the same theory to account for substantially the same
facts, by half the human race, who thus stand as consistent
representatives of their forefathers back into primitive antiquity. It
is in the civilized world, under the influence of the medical doctrines
which have been developing since classic times, that the early animistic
theory of these morbid phenomena has been gradually superseded by views
more in accordance with modern science, to the great gain of our health
and happiness. The transition which has taken place in the famous insane
colony of Gheel in Belgium is typical. In old days, the lunatics were
carried there in crowds to be exorcised from their demons at the church
of St. Dymphna; to Gheel they still go, but the physician reigns in the
stead of the exorcist. Yet wherever, in times old or new, demoniacal
influences are brought forward to account for affections which
scientific physicians now explain on a different principle, care must be
taken not to misjudge the ancient doctrine and its place in history. As
belonging to the lower culture it is a perfectly rational philosophical
theory to account for certain pathological facts. But just as mechanical
astronomy gradually superseded the animistic astronomy of the lower
races, so biological pathology gradually supersedes animistic pathology,
the immediate operation of personal spiritual beings in both cases
giving place to the operation of natural processes.

We now pass to the consideration of another great branch of the lower
religion of the world, a development of the same principles of spiritual
operation with which we have become familiar in the study of the
possession-theory. This is the doctrine of Fetishism. Centuries ago, the
Portuguese in West Africa, noticing the veneration paid by the negroes
to certain objects, such as trees, fish, plants, idols, pebbles, claws
of beasts, sticks and so forth, very fairly compared these objects to
the amulets or talismans with which they were themselves familiar, and
called them feitiço or ‘charm,’ a word derived from Latin factitius,
in the sense of ‘magically artful.’ Modern French and English adopted
this word from the Portuguese as fétiche, fetish, although curiously
enough both languages had already possessed the word for ages in a
different sense, Old French faitis, ‘well made, beautiful,’ which Old
English adopted as fetys, ‘well made, neat.’ It occurs in the
commonest of all quotations from Chaucer:

              ‘And Frensch sche spak ful faire and fetysly,
              Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
              For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.’

The President de Brosses, a most original thinker of the 18th century,
struck by the descriptions of the African worship of material and
terrestrial objects, introduced the word Fétichisme as a general
descriptive term,[304] and since then it has obtained great currency by
Comte’s use of it to denote a general theory of primitive religion, in
which external objects are regarded as animated by a life analogous to
man’s. It seems to me, however, more convenient to use the word Animism
for the doctrine of spirits in general, and to confine the word
Fetishism to that subordinate department which it properly belongs to,
namely, the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or
conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be
taken as including the worship of ‘stocks and stones,’ and thence it
passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry.

Any object whatsoever may be a fetish. Of course, among the endless
multitude of objects, not as we should say physically active, but to
which ignorant men ascribe mysterious power, we are not to apply
indiscriminately the idea of their being considered vessels or vehicles
or instruments of spiritual beings. They may be mere signs or tokens set
up to represent ideal notions or ideal beings, as fingers or sticks are
set up to represent numbers. Or they may be symbolic charms working by
imagined conveyance of their special properties, as an iron ring to give
firmness, or a kite’s foot to give swift flight. Or they may be merely
regarded in some undefined way as wondrous ornaments or curiosities. The
tendency runs through all human nature to collect and admire objects
remarkable in beauty, form, quality, or scarceness. The shelves of
ethnological museums show heaps of the objects which the lower races
treasure up and hang about their persons—teeth and claws, roots and
berries, shells and stones, and the like. Now fetishes are in great
measure selected from among such things as these, and the principle of
their attraction for savage minds is clearly the same which still guides
the superstitious peasant in collecting curious trifles ‘for luck.’ The
principle is one which retains its force in far higher ranges of culture
than the peasant’s. Compare the Ostyak’s veneration for any peculiar
little stone he has picked up, with the Chinese love of collecting
curious varieties of tortoise-shell, or an old-fashioned English
conchologist’s delight in a reversed shell. The turn of mind which in a
Gold-Coast negro would manifest itself in a museum of monstrous and most
potent fetishes, might impel an Englishman to collect scarce
postage-stamps or queer walking-sticks. In the love of abnormal
curiosities there shows itself a craving for the marvellous, an
endeavour to get free from the tedious sense of law and uniformity in
nature. As to the lower races, were evidence more plentiful as to the
exact meaning they attach to objects which they treat with mysterious
respect, it would very likely appear more often and more certainly than
it does now, that these objects seem to them connected with the action
of spirits, so as to be, in the strict sense in which the word is here
used, real fetishes. But this must not be taken for granted. To class an
object as a fetish, demands explicit statement that a spirit is
considered as embodied in it or acting through it or communicating by
it, or at least that the people it belongs to do habitually think this
of such objects; or it must be shown that the object is treated as
having personal consciousness and power, is talked with, worshipped,
prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or ill-treated with reference to its
past or future behaviour to its votaries. In the instances now selected,
it will be seen that in one way or another they more or less satisfy
such conditions. In investigating the exact significance of fetishes in
use among men, savage or more civilized, the peculiar difficulty is to
know whether the effect of the object is thought due to a whole personal
spirit embodied in or attached to it, or to some less definable
influence exerted through it. In some cases this point is made clear,
but in many it remains doubtful.

It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to
glance at a curious group of nations which connect a disease at once
with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object.
They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease
or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or
such-like material object. Among the natives of Australia, one hears of
the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies by passes and
manipulations a magical essence called ‘boylya,’ which they can make to
enter the patient’s body like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there
and consumes the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as
invisible or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the
waters, ‘nguk-wonga,’ which had caused an attack of erysipelas in a
boy’s leg (he had been bathing too long when heated) is declared to have
been extracted by the conjurers from the affected part in the shape of a
sharp stone.[305] The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases to
the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar sorcerer’s
process of extracting thorns or splinters from the affected part as the
peccant causes, and it is said that in the Antilles morsels of stone and
bone so extracted were wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective
fetishes in childbirth.[306] The Malagasy, considering all diseases as
inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method is often to
remove the disease by means of a ‘faditra;’ this is some object, such as
a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a pumpkin, the water the patient has
rinsed his mouth with, or what not, and when the priest has counted on
it the evils that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to
take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it.[307]
Among those strong believers in disease-spirits, the Dayaks of Borneo,
the priest, waving and jingling charms over the affected part of the
patient, pretends to extract stones, splinters, and bits of rag, which
he declares are spirits; of such evil spirits he will occasionally bring
half-a-dozen out of a man’s stomach, and as he is paid a fee of six
gallons of rice for each, he is probably disposed (like a chiropodist
under similar circumstances) to extract a good many.[308] The most
instructive accounts of this kind are those which reach us from Africa.
Dr. Callaway has taken down at length a Zulu account of the method of
stopping out disease caused by spirits of the dead. If a widow is
troubled by her late husband’s ghost coming and talking to her night
after night as though still alive, till her health is affected and she
begins to waste away, they find a ‘nyanga’ or sorcerer who can bar out
the disease. He bids her not lose the spittle collected in her mouth
while she is dreaming, and gives her medicine to chew when she wakes.
Then he goes with her to lay the ‘itongo,’ or ghost; perhaps he shuts it
up in a bulb of the inkomfe plant, making a hole in the side of this,
putting in the medicine and the dream-spittle, closing the hole with a
stopper, and re-planting the bulb. Leaving the place, he charges her not
to look back till she gets home. Thus the dream is barred; it may still
come occasionally, but no longer infests the woman; the doctor prevails
over the dead man as regards that dream. In other cases the cure of a
sick man attacked by the ancestral spirits may be effected with some of
his blood put into a hole in an anthill by the doctor, who closes the
hole with a stone, and departs without looking back; or the patient may
be scarified over the painful place, and the blood put into the mouth of
a frog, caught for the purpose and carried back. So the disease is
barred out from the man.[309] In West Africa, a case in point is the
practice of transferring a sick man’s ailment to a live fowl, which is
set free with it, and if any one catches the fowl, the disease goes to
him.[310] Captain Burton’s account from Central Africa is as follows.
Disease being possession by a spirit or ghost, the ‘mganga’ or sorcerer
has to expel it, the principal remedies being drumming, dancing, and
drinking, till at last the spirit is enticed from the body of the
patient into some inanimate article, technically called a ‘keti’ or
stool for it. This may be an ornament, such as a peculiar bead or a
leopard’s claw, or it may be a nail or rag, which by being driven into
or hung to a ‘devil’s tree’ has the effect of laying the disease-spirit.
Or disease-spirits may be extracted by chants, one departing at the end
of each stave, when a little painted stick made for it is flung on the
ground, and some patients may have as many as a dozen ghosts extracted,
for here also the fee is so much apiece.[311] In Siam, the Laos sorcerer
can send his ‘phi phob’ or demon into a victim’s body, where it turns
into a fleshy or leathery lump, and causes disease ending in death.[312]
Thus, on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is seen to be
connected with that sorcerer’s practice prevalent among the lower races,
of pretending to extract objects from the patient’s body, such as
stones, bones, balls of hair, &c., which are declared to be causes of
disease conveyed by magical means into him; of this proceeding I have
given a detailed account elsewhere, under the name of the
‘sucking-cure.’[313] On the other hand, there appears among the lower
races that well-known conception of a disease or evil influence as an
individual being, which may be not merely conveyed by an infected object
(though this of course may have much to do with the idea), but may be
removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other animal or
object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the stomach may be cured by
transmitting the ailment from the patient’s body into a puppy or duck,
which will probably die of it;[314] it is considered baneful to a Hindu
woman to be a man’s third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of
first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;[315] after the
birth of a Chinese baby, its father’s trousers are hung in the room
wrong side up, that all evil influences may enter into them instead of
into the child.[316] Modern folklore still cherishes such ideas. The
ethnographer may still study in the ‘white witchcraft’ of European
peasants the arts of curing a man’s fever or headache by transferring it
to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout or warts by
giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree, with suitable charms,
‘Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de Kolde,’ ‘Goden Abend, Herr Fleder,
hier bring ick mien Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan,’ ‘Ash-tree,
ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me,’ and so forth; or of nailing or
plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or conveying it away by some of
the patient’s hair or nail-parings or some such thing, and so burying
it. Looking at these proceedings from a moral point of view, the
practice of transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and
burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a very pattern of
wicked selfishness. In England, warts may be touched each with a pebble,
and the pebbles in a bag left on the road to church, to give up their
ailments to the unlucky finder; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may
be left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by; I am told
on medical authority that the bunches of flowers which children offer to
travellers in Southern Europe are sometimes intended for the ungracious
purpose of sending some disease away from their homes.[317] One case of
this group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particularly
interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a string of
rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched by a sick person and
then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any
person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person
from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton’s
suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not, hung on trees
near sacred places by the superstitious from Mexico to India and from
Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles of
disease; the African ‘devil’s trees’ and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung
with rags through which votaries have transferred their complaints,
being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands of higher culture.

The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to objects may be
human souls. Indeed one of the most natural cases of the fetish-theory
is when a soul inhabits or haunts what is left of its former body. It is
plain enough that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is
imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus we read of the
Mandan women going year after year to take food to the skulls of their
dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their most
endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child;[318] thus the
Guinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk
with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.[319] And thus,
from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the
cleaned bones of his forefathers,[320] to the mourner among ourselves
who goes to weep at the grave of one beloved, imagination keeps together
the personality and the relics of the dead. Here, then, is a course of
thought open to the animistic thinker, leading him on from fancied
association to a belief in the real presence of a spiritual being in a
material object. Thus there is no difficulty in understanding how the
Karens thought the spirits of the dead might come back from the other
world to reanimate their bodies;[321] nor how the Marian islanders
should have kept the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts
as household gods, and even expected them to give oracles out of their
skulls;[322] nor how the soul of a dead Carib might be thought to abide
in one of his bones, taken from the grave and carefully wrapped in
cotton, in which state it could answer questions, and even bewitch an
enemy if a morsel of his property were wrapped up with it;[323] nor how
the dead Santal should be sent to his fathers by the ceremony of
committing to the sacred river morsels of his skull from the
funeral-pile.[324] Such ideas are of great interest in studying the
burial rites of mankind, especially the habit of keeping relics of the
dead as vehicles of superhuman power, and of even preserving the whole
body as a mummy, as in Peru and Egypt. The conception of such human
relics becoming fetishes, inhabited or at least acted through by the
souls which formerly belonged to them, will give a rational explanation
of much relic-worship otherwise obscure.

A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races to associate
the souls of the dead with mere objects, a practice which may have had
its origin in the merest childish make-believe, but which would lead a
thorough savage animist straight on to the conception of the soul
entering the object as a body. Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling
Island who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll; this
spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired
at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table
or a hat at a modern spirit-séance.[325] Among the Salish Indians of
Oregon, the conjurers bring back men’s lost souls as little stones or
bones or splinters, and pretend to pass them down through the tops of
their heads into their hearts, but great care must be taken to remove
the spirits of any dead people that may be in the lot, for the patient
receiving one would die.[326] There are indigenous Kol tribes of India
who work out this idea curiously in bringing back the soul of a deceased
man into the house after the funeral, apparently to be worshipped as a
household spirit; while some catch the spirit re-embodied in a fowl or
fish, the Binjwar of Raepore bring it home in a pot of water, and the
Bunjia in a pot of flour.[327] The Chinese hold such theories with
extreme distinctness, considering one of a man’s three spirits to take
up its abode in the ancestral tablet, where it receives messages and
worship from the survivors; while the long keeping of the dead man’s
gilt and lacquered coffin, and the reverence and offerings continued at
the tomb, are connected with the thought of a spirit lingering about the
corpse. Consistent with these quaint ideas are ceremonies in vogue in
China, of bringing home in a cock (live or artificial) the spirit of a
man deceased in a distant place, and of enticing into a sick man’s coat
the departing spirit which has already left his body, and so conveying
it back.[328] Tatar folklore illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment in
the quaint but intelligible story of the demon-giant who could not be
slain, for he did not keep his soul in his body, but in a twelve-headed
snake carried in a bag on his horse’s back; the hero finds out the
secret and kills the snake, and then the giant dies too. This tale is
curious, as very likely indicating the original sense of a well-known
group of stories in European folklore, the Scandinavian one, for
instance, where the giant cannot be made an end of, because he keeps his
heart not in his body, but in a duck’s egg in a well far away; at last
the young champion finds the egg and crushes it, and the giant
bursts.[329] Following the notion of soul-embodiment into civilized
times, we learn that ‘A ghost may be laid for any term less than an
hundred years, and in any place or body, full or empty; as, a solid
oak—the pommel of a sword—a barrel of beer, if a yeoman or simple
gentleman—or a pipe of wine, if an esquire or a justice.’ This is from
Grose’s bantering description in the 18th century of the art of ‘laying’
ghosts,[330] and it is one of the many good instances of articles of
serious savage belief surviving as jests among civilized men.

Thus other spiritual beings, roaming free about the world, find
fetish-objects to act through, to embody themselves in, to present them
visibly to their votaries. It is extremely difficult to draw a distinct
line of separation between the two prevailing sets of ideas relating to
spiritual action through what we call inanimate objects. Theoretically
we can distinguish the notion of the object acting as it were by the
will and force of its own proper soul or spirit, from the notion of some
foreign spirit entering its substance or acting on it from without, and
so using it as a body or instrument. But in practice these conceptions
blend almost inextricably. This state of things is again a confirmation
of the theory of animism here advanced, which treats both sets of ideas
as similar developments of the same original idea, that of the human
soul, so that they may well shade imperceptibly into one another. To
depend on some typical descriptions of fetishism and its allied
doctrines in different grades of culture, is a safer mode of treatment
than to attempt too accurate a general definition.

There is a quaint story, dating from the time of Columbus, which shows
what mysterious personality and power rude tribes could attach to
lifeless matter. The cacique Hatuey, it is related, heard by his spies
in Hispaniola that the Spaniards were coming to Cuba. So he called his
people together, and talked to them of the Spaniards—how they persecuted
the natives of the islands, and how they did such things for the sake of
a great lord whom they much desired and loved. Then, taking out a basket
with gold in it, he said, ‘Ye see here their lord whom they serve and go
after; and, as ye have heard, they are coming hither to seek this lord.
Therefore let us make him a feast, that when they come he may tell them
not to do us harm.’ So they danced and sang from night to morning before
the gold-basket, and then the cacique told them not to keep the
Christian’s lord anywhere, for if they kept him in their very bowels
they would have to bring him out; so he bade them cast him to the bottom
of the river, and this they did.[331] If this story be thought too good
to be true, at any rate it does not exaggerate authentic savage ideas.
The ‘maraca’ or ceremonial rattle, used by certain rude Brazilian
tribes, was an eminent fetish. It was a calabash with a handle and a
hole for a mouth, and stones inside; yet to its votaries it seemed no
mere rattle, but the receptacle of a spirit that spoke from it when
shaken; therefore the Indians set up their maracas, talked to them, set
food and drink and burned incense before them, held annual feasts in
their honour, and would even go to war with their neighbours to satisfy
the rattle-spirits’ demand for human victims.[332] Among the North
American Indians, the fetish-theory seems involved in that remarkable
and general proceeding known as getting ‘medicine.’ Each youth obtains
in a vision or dream a sight of his medicine, and considering how
thoroughly the idea prevails that the forms seen in visions and dreams
are spirits, this of itself shows the animistic nature of the matter.
The medicine thus seen may be an animal, or part of one, such as skin or
claws, feather or shell, or such a thing as a plant, a stone, a knife, a
pipe; this object he must obtain, and thenceforward through life it
becomes his protector. Considered as a vehicle or receptacle of a
spirit, its fetish-nature is shown in many ways; its owner will do
homage to it, make feasts in its honour, sacrifice horses, dogs, and
other valuable objects to it or its spirit, fast to appease it if
offended, have it burned with him to conduct him as a guardian-spirit to
the happy hunting-grounds. Beside these special protective objects, the
Indians, especially the medicine-men (the word is French, ‘médecin,’
applied to these native doctors or conjurers, and since stretched to
take in all that concerns their art), use multitudes of other fetishes
as means of spiritual influence.[333] Among the Turanian tribes of
Northern Asia, where Castrén describes the idea of spirits contained in
material objects, to which they belong, and wherein they dwell in the
same incomprehensible way as the souls in a man’s body, we may notice
the Ostyak’s worship of objects of scarce or peculiar quality, and also
the connexion of the shamans or sorcerers with fetish-objects, as where
the Tatars consider the innumerable rags and tags, bells and bits of
iron, that adorn the shaman’s magic costume, to contain spirits helpful
to their owner in his magic craft.[334] John Bell, in his journey across
Asia in 1719, relates a story which well illustrates Mongol ideas as to
the action of self-moving objects. A certain Russian merchant told him
that once some pieces of damask were stolen out of his tent. He
complained, and the Kutuchtu Lama ordered the proper steps to be taken
to find out the thief. One of the Lamas took a bench with four feet, and
after turning it several times in different directions, at last it
pointed directly to the tent where the stolen goods lay concealed. The
Lama now mounted astride the bench, and soon carried it, or, as was
commonly believed, it carried him, to the very tent, where he ordered
the damask to be produced. The demand was directly complied with: for it
is vain in such cases to offer any excuse.[335]

A more recent account from Central Africa may be placed as a pendant to
this Asiatic account of divination by a fetish-object. The Rev. H.
Rowley says of the Manganja, that they believed the medicine-men could
impart a power for good or evil to objects either animate or inanimate,
which objects the people feared, though they did not worship them. This
missionary once saw this art employed to detect the thief who had stolen
some corn. The people assembled round a large fig-tree. The magician, a
wild-looking man, produced two sticks, like our broomsticks, which after
mysterious manipulation and gibberish he delivered to four young men,
two holding each stick. A zebra-tail and a calabash-rattle were given to
a young man and a boy. The medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous
fashion, and chanted an unceasing incantation; the bearers of the tail
and rattle went round the stick-holders, and shook these implements over
their heads. After a while the men with the sticks had spasmodic
twitchings of the arms and legs, these increased nearly to convulsions,
they foamed at the mouth, their eyes seemed starting from their heads,
they realized to the full the idea of demoniacal possession. According
to the native notion, it was the sticks which were possessed primarily,
and through them the men, who could hardly hold them. The sticks whirled
and dragged the men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny
shrub, and over every obstacle, nothing stopped them, their bodies were
torn and bleeding; at last they came back to the assembly, whirled round
again, and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut
of one of a chief’s wives, the sticks rolling to her very feet,
denouncing her as the thief. She denied it, but the medicine-man
answered, ‘The spirit has declared her guilty, the spirit never lies.’
However, the ‘muavi’ or ordeal-poison was administered to a cock, as
deputy for the woman; the bird threw it up, and she was acquitted.[336]

Fetishism in the lower civilization is thus by no means confined to the
West African negro with whom we specially associate the term. Yet, what
with its being in fact extremely prevalent there, and what with the
attention of foreign observers having been particularly drawn to it, the
accounts from West Africa are certainly the fullest and most minute on
record. The late Professor Waitz’s generalization of the principle
involved in these is much to the purpose. He thus describes the negro’s
conception of his fetish. ‘According to his view, a spirit dwells or can
dwell in every sensible object, and often a very great and mighty one in
an insignificant thing. This spirit he does not consider as bound fast
and unchangeably to the corporeal thing it dwells in, but it has only
its usual or principal abode in it. The negro indeed in his conception
not uncommonly separates the spirit from the sensible object which it
inhabits, he even sometimes contrasts the one with the other, but most
usually combines the two as forming a whole, and this whole is (as the
Europeans call it) the “fetish,” the object of his religious worship.’
Some further particulars will show how this principle is worked out.
Fetishes (native names for them are ‘grigri,’ ‘juju,’ &c.) may be mere
curious mysterious objects that strike a negro’s fancy, or they may be
consecrated or affected by a priest or fetish-man; the theory of their
influence is that they belong to or are made effectual by a spirit or
demon yet they have to stand the test of experience, and if they fail to
bring their owner luck and safety, he discards them for some more
powerful medium. The fetish can see and hear and understand and act, its
possessor worships it, talks familiarly with it as a dear and faithful
friend, pours libations of rum over it, and in times of danger calls
loudly and earnestly on it as if to wake up its spirit and energy. To
give an idea of the sort of things which are chosen as fetishes, and of
the manner in which they are associated with spiritual influences,
Römer’s account from Guinea about a century ago may serve. In the
fetish-house, he says, there hang or lie thousands of rubbishy trifles,
a pot with red earth and a cock’s feather stuck in it, pegs wound over
with yarn, red parrots’ feathers, men’s hair, and so forth. The
principal thing in the hut is the stool for the fetish to sit on, and
the mattress for him to rest on, the mattress being no bigger than a
man’s hand and the stool in proportion, and there is a little bottle of
brandy always ready for him. Here the word fetish is used as it often
is, to denote the spirit which dwells in this rudimentary temple, but we
see that the innumerable quaint trifles which we call fetishes were
associated with the deity in his house. Römer once peeped in at an open
door, and found an old negro caboceer sitting amid twenty thousand
fetishes in his private fetish-museum, thus performing his devotions.
The old man told him he did not know the hundredth part of the use they
had been to him; his ancestors and he had collected them, each had done
some service. The visitor took up a stone about as big as a hen’s egg,
and its owner told its history. He was once going out on important
business, but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt
himself. Ha ha! thought he, art thou here? So he took the stone, and it
helped him through his undertaking for days. In our own time, West
Africa is still a world of fetishes. The traveller finds them on every
path, at every ford, on every house-door, they hang as amulets round
every man’s neck, they guard against sickness or inflict it if
neglected, they bring rain, they fill the sea with fishes willing to
swim into the fisherman’s net, they catch and punish thieves, they give
their owner a bold heart and confound his enemies, there is nothing that
the fetish cannot do or undo, if it be but the right fetish. Thus the
one-sided logic of the barbarian, making the most of all that fits and
glossing over all that fails, has shaped a universal fetish-philosophy
of the events of life. So strong is the pervading influence, that the
European in Africa is apt to catch it from the negro, and himself, as
the saying is, ‘become black.’ Thus even yet some traveller, watching a
white companion asleep, may catch a glimpse of some claw or bone or
such-like sorcerer’s trash secretly fastened round his neck.[337]

European life, lastly, shows well-marked traces of the ancient doctrine
of spirits or mysterious influences inhabiting objects. Thus a mediæval
devil might go into an old sow, a straw, a barleycorn, or a willow-tree.
A spirit might be carried about in a solid receptacle for use:—

     ‘Besides in glistering glasses fayre, or else in christall cleare,
     They sprightes enclose.’

Modern peasant folklore knows that spirits must have some animal body or
other object to dwell in, a feather, a bag, a bush, for instance. The
Tyrolese object to using grass for toothpicks because of the demons that
may have taken up their abode in the straws. The Bulgarians hold it a
great sin not to fumigate the flour when it is brought from the mill
(particularly if the mill be kept by a Turk) in order to prevent the
devil from entering into it.[338] Amulets are still carried in the most
civilized countries of the world, by the ignorant and superstitious with
real savage faith in their mysterious virtues, by the more enlightened
in quaint survival from the past. The mental and physical phenomena of
what is now called ‘table-turning’ belong to a class of proceedings
which have here been shown to be familiar to the lower races, and
accounted for by them on a theory of extra-human influence which is in
the most extreme sense spiritualistic.

In giving its place in the history of mental development to the doctrine
of the lower races as to embodiment in or penetration of an object by a
spirit or an influence, there is no slight interest in comparing it with
theories familiar to the philosophy of cultured nations. Thus Bishop
Berkeley remarks on the obscure expressions of those who have described
the relation of power to the objects which exert it. He cites Torricelli
as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle
of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts
and refined quintessences, that they cannot be enclosed in any other
vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; also Leibnitz as
comparing active primitive power to soul or substantial form. Thus, says
Berkeley, must even the greatest men, when they give way to abstraction,
have recourse to words having no certain signification, and indeed mere
scholastic shadows.[339] We may fairly add that such passages show the
civilized metaphysician falling back on such primitive conceptions as
still occupy the minds of the rude natives of Siberia and Guinea. To go
yet farther, I will venture to assert that the scientific conceptions
current in my own schoolboy days, of heat and electricity as invisible
fluids passing in and out of solid bodies, are ideas which reproduce
with extreme closeness the special doctrine of Fetishism.

Under the general heading of Fetishism, but for convenience’ sake
separately, may be considered the worship of ‘stocks and stones.’ Such
objects, if merely used as altars, are not of the nature of fetishes,
and it is first necessary to ascertain that worship is actually
addressed to them. Then arises the difficult question, are the stocks
and stones set up as mere ideal representatives of deities, or are these
deities considered as physically connected with them, embodied in them,
hovering about them, acting through them? In other words, are they only
symbols, or have they passed in the minds of their votaries into real
fetishes? The conceptions of the worshippers are sometimes in this
respect explicitly stated, may sometimes be fairly inferred from the
circumstances, and are often doubtful.

Among the lower races of America, the Dacotas would pick up a round
boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make
offerings to it and pray to it to deliver them from danger;[340] in the
West India Islands, mention is made of three stones to which the natives
paid great devotion—one was profitable for the crops, another for women
to be delivered without pain, the third for sunshine and rain when they
were wanted;[341] and we hear of Brazilian tribes setting up stakes in
the ground, and making offerings before them to appease their deities or
demons.[342] Stone-worship held an important place in the midst of the
comparatively high culture of Peru, where not only was reverence given
to especial curious pebbles and the like, but stones were placed to
represent the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages.
It is related by Montesinos that when the worship of a certain sacred
stone was given up, a parrot flew from it into another stone, to which
adoration was paid: and though this author is not of good credit, he can
hardly have invented a story which, as we shall see, so curiously
coincides with the Polynesian idea of a bird conveying to and from an
idol the spirit which embodies itself in it.[343]

In Africa, stock-and-stone worship is found among the Damaras of the
South, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by
stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the
meat is first offered;[344] among the Dinkas of the White Nile, where
the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her
food and drink before a short thick staff planted in the ground, that
the demon might not hurt her;[345] among the Gallas of Abyssinia, a
people with a well-marked doctrine of deities, and who are known to
worship stones and logs, but not idols.[346] In the island of Sambawa,
the Orang Dongo attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible force to
the sun, moon, trees, &c., but especially to stones, and when troubled
by accident or disease, they carry offerings to certain stones to
implore the favour of their genius or dewa.[347] Similar ideas are to be
traced through the Pacific islands, both among the lighter and the
darker races. Thus in the Society Islands, rude logs or fragments of
basalt columns, clothed in native cloth and anointed with oil, received
adoration and sacrifice as divinely powerful by virtue of the atua or
deity which had filled them.[348] So in the New Hebrides worship was
given to water-worn pebbles,[349] while Fijian gods and goddesses had
their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones,
and there received their offerings of food.[350] The curiously
anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having
children, is familiar to the Fijians as it is to the Peruvians and the
Lapps.

The Turanian tribes of North Asia display stock-and-stone worship in
full sense and vigour. Not only were stones, especially curious ones and
such as were like men or animals, objects of veneration, but we learn
that they were venerated because mighty spirits dwelt in them. The
Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, with its two deities, one with a stone
head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red
lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood, may serve as a type of
stone-worship. And as for the Ostyaks, had the famous King Log presented
himself among them, they would without more ado have wrapped his sacred
person in rags, and set him up for worship on a mountain-top or in the
forest.[351] The frequent stock-and-stone worship of modern India
belongs especially to races non-Hindu or part-Hindu in race and culture.
Among such may serve as examples the bamboo which stands for the Bodo
goddess Mainou, and for her receives the annual hog, and the monthly
eggs offered by the women;[352] the stone under the great cotton-tree of
every Khond village, shrine of Nadzu Pennu the village deity;[353] the
clod or stone under a tree, which in Behar will represent the deified
soul of some dead personage who receives worship and inspires oracles
there;[354] the stone kept in every house by the Bakadâra and Betadâra,
which represents their god Bûta, whom they induce by sacrifice to
restrain the demon-souls of the dead from troubling them;[355] the two
rude stones placed under a shed among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, by the
medium of which the great god and goddess receive sacrifice, but which
are thrown away or neglected when done with.[356] The remarkable groups
of standing-stones in India are, in many cases at least, set up for each
stone to represent or embody a deity. Mr. Hislop remarks that in every
part of Southern India, four or five stones may often be seen in the
ryot’s field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which they
consider as guardians of the field and call the five Pândus; he
reasonably takes these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient
native appellations. In the Indian groups it is a usual practice to daub
each stone with red paint, forming as it were a great blood-spot where
the face would be if it were a shaped idol.[357] In India, moreover, the
rites of stone-worship are not unexampled among the Hindus proper.
Shashtî, protectress of children, receives worship, vows, and offerings,
especially from women; yet they provide her with no idol or temple, but
her proper representative is a rough stone as big as a man’s head,
smeared with red paint and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree. Even
Siva is worshipped as a stone, especially that Siva who will afflict a
child with epileptic fits, and then, speaking by its voice, will
announce that he is Panchânana the Five-faced, and is punishing the
child for insulting his image; to this Siva, in the form of a clay idol
or of a stone beneath a sacred tree, there are offered not only flowers
and fruits, but also bloody sacrifices.[358]

This stone-worship among the Hindus seems a survival of a rite belonging
originally to a low civilization, probably a rite of the rude indigenes
of the land, whose religion, largely incorporated into the religion of
the Aryan invaders, has contributed so much to form the Hinduism of
to-day. It is especially interesting to survey the stock-and-stone
worship of the lower culture, for it enables us to explain by the theory
of survival the appearance in the Old World, in the very midst of
classic doctrine and classic art, of the worship of the same rude
objects, whose veneration no doubt dated from remote barbaric antiquity.
As Mr. Grote says, speaking of Greek worship, ‘The primitive memorial
erected to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often
nothing more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone or a post,
receiving care and decoration from the neighbourhood, as well as
worship.’ Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Eubœa, the stake
that represented Pallas Athene, ‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe
lignum,’ the unwrought stone (λίθος ἀργός) at Hyettos which ‘after the
ancient manner’ represented Herakles, the thirty such stones which the
Pharæans in like archaic fashion worshipped for the gods, and that one
which received such honour in Bœotian festivals as representing the
Thespian Eros. Theophrastus, in the 4th century B.C., depicts the
superstitious Greek passing the anointed stones in the streets, taking
out his phial and pouring oil on them, falling on his knees to adore,
and going his way. Six centuries later, Arnobius could describe from his
own heathen life the state of mind of the stock-and-stone worshipper,
telling how when he saw one of the stones anointed with oil, he accosted
it in flattering words, and asked benefits from the senseless thing as
though it contained a present power.[359] The ancient and graphic
passage in the book of Isaiah well marks stone-worship within the range
of the Semitic race:

           ‘Among the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion:
           They, they are thy lot:
           Even to them hast thou poured a drink-offering,
           Hast thou offered a meat-offering.’[360]

Long afterwards, among the local deities which Mohammed found in Arabia,
and which Dr. Sprenger thinks he even acknowledged as divine during a
moment when he well-nigh broke down in his career, were Manah and Lât,
the one a rock, the other a stone or a stone idol; while the veneration
of the black stone of the Kaaba, which Captain Burton thinks an
aërolite, was undoubtedly a local rite which the Prophet transplanted
into his new religion, where it flourishes to this day.[361] The curious
passage in Sanchoniathon which speaks of the Heaven-god forming the
‘bætyls, animated stones’ (θεὸς Οὐρανὸς Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους,
μηχανησάμενος) perhaps refers to meteorites or supposed thunderbolts
fallen from the clouds. To the old Phœnician religion, which made so
deep a contact with the Jewish world on the one side and the Greek and
Roman on the other, there belonged the stone pillars of Baal and the
wooden ashera-posts, but how far these objects were of the character of
altars, symbols, or fetishes, is a riddle.[362] We may still say with
Tacitus, describing the conical pillar which stood instead of an image
to represent the Paphian Venus—‘et ratio in obscuro.’

There are accounts of formal Christian prohibitions of stone-worship in
France and England, reaching on into the early middle ages,[363] which
show this barbaric cultus as then distinctly lingering in popular
religion. Coupling this fact with the accounts of the groups of
standing-stones set up to represent deities in South India, a
corresponding explanation has been suggested in Europe. Are the menhirs,
cromlechs, &c., idols, and circles and lines of idols, worshipped by
remotely ancient dwellers in the land as representatives or embodiments
of their gods? The question at least deserves consideration, although
the ideas with which stone-worship is carried on by different races are
multifarious, and the analogy may be misleading. It is remarkable to
what late times full and genuine stone-worship has survived in Europe.
In certain mountain districts of Norway, up to the end of the last
century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every
Thursday evening (which seems to show some connection with Thor),
smeared them with butter before the fire, laid them in the seat of
honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the year steeped them in
ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the house.[364] In an
account dating from 1851, the islanders of Inniskea, off Mayo, are
declared to have a stone carefully wrapped in flannel, which is brought
out and worshipped at certain periods, and when a storm arises it is
supplicated to send a wreck on the coast.[365] No savage ever showed
more clearly by his treatment of a fetish that he considered it a
personal being, than did these Norwegians and Irishmen. The ethnographic
argument from the existence of stock-and-stone worship among so many
nations of comparatively high culture seems to me of great weight as
bearing on religious development among mankind. To imagine that peoples
skilled in carving wood and stone, and using these arts habitually in
making idols, should have gone out of their way to invent a practice of
worshipping logs and pebbles, is not a likely theory. But on the other
hand, when it is considered how such a rude object serves to uncultured
men as a divine image or receptacle, there is nothing strange in its
being a relic of early barbarism holding its place against more artistic
models through ages of advancing civilization, by virtue of the
traditional sanctity which belongs to survival from remote antiquity.

By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry. A few chips
or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert the rude post or stone
into an idol. Difficulties which complicate the study of stock-and-stone
worship disappear in the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal
images, which can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least
be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a remarkable district
in the history of religion. It hardly belongs to the lowest savagery,
which simply seems not to have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to
the highest civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is
intermediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first clearly
appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches its extreme
development, and thenceforward its continuance is in dwindling survival
and sometimes expanding revival. The position thus outlined is, however,
very difficult to map exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in
uniformly among the higher savages; it belongs, for instance, fully to
the Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians. Among higher
nations, its presence or absence does not necessarily agree with
particular national affinities or levels of culture—compare the
idol-worshipping Hindu with his ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or
the idolatrous Phœnician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among
whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed image-worship
was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its tendency to revive is
ethnographically embarrassing. The ancient Vedic religion seems not to
recognize idolatry, yet the modern Brahmans, professed followers of
Vedic doctrine, are among the greatest idolators of the world. Early
Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against image-worship,
yet image-worship became and still remains widely spread and deeply
rooted in Christendom.

Of Idolatry, so far as its nature is symbolic or representative, I have
given some account elsewhere.[366] The old and greatest difficulty in
investigating the general subject is this, that an image may be, even to
two votaries kneeling side by side before it, two utterly different
things; to the one it may be only a symbol, a portrait, a memento; while
to the other it is an intelligent and active being, by virtue of a life
or spirit dwelling in it or acting through it. In both cases
Image-worship is connected with the belief in spiritual beings, and is
in fact a subordinate development of animism. But it is only so far as
the image approximates to the nature of a material body provided for a
spirit, that Idolatry comes properly into connexion with Fetishism. It
is from this point of view that it is proposed to examine here its
purpose and its place in history. An idol, so far as it belongs to the
theory of spirit-embodiment, must combine the characters of portrait and
fetish. Bearing this in mind, and noticing how far the idol is looked on
as in some way itself an energetic object, or as the very receptacle
enshrining a spiritual god, let us proceed to judge how far, along the
course of civilization, the idea of the image itself exerting power or
being personally animate has prevailed in the mind of the idolater.

As to the actual origin of idolatry, it need not be supposed that the
earliest idols made by man seemed to their maker living or even active
things. It is quite likely that the primary intention of the image was
simply to serve as a sign or representative of some soul or deity, and
certainly this original character is more or less maintained in the
world through the long history of image-worship. At a stage succeeding
this original condition, it may be argued, the tendency to identify the
symbol and the symbolized, a tendency so strong among children and the
ignorant everywhere, led to the idol being treated as a living powerful
being, and thence even to explicit doctrines as to the manner of its
energy or animation. It is, then, in this secondary stage, where the
once merely representative image is passing into the active
image-fetish, that we are particularly concerned to understand it. Here
it is reasonable to judge the idolater by his distinct actions and
beliefs. A line of illustrative examples will carry the personality of
the idol through grade after grade of civilization. Among the lower
races, such thoughts are displayed by the Kurile islander throwing his
idol into the sea to calm the storm; by the negro who feeds ancestral
images and brings them a share of his trade profits, but will beat an
idol or fling it into the fire if it cannot give him luck or preserve
him from sickness; by famous idols of Madagascar, of which one goes
about of himself or guides his bearers, and another answers when spoken
to—at least, they did this till they were ignominiously found out a few
years ago. Among Tatar peoples of North Asia and Europe, conceptions of
this class are illustrated by the Ostyak, who clothes his puppet and
feeds it with broth, but if it brings him no sport will try the effect
of a good thrashing on it, after which he will clothe and feed it again;
by the Lapps, who fancied their uncouth images could go about at will;
or the Esths, who wondered that their idols did not bleed when Dieterich
the Christian priest hewed them down. Among high Asiatic nations, what
could be more anthropomorphic than the rites of modern Hinduism, the
dances of the nautch-girls before the idols, the taking out of Jagannath
in procession to pay visits, the spinning of tops before Krishna to
amuse him? Buddhism is a religion in its principles little favourable to
idolatry. Yet, from setting up portrait-statues of Gautama and other
saints, there developed itself the full worship of images, and even of
images with hidden joints and cavities, which moved and spoke as in our
own middle ages. In China, we read stories of worshippers abusing some
idol that has failed in its duty. ‘How now,’ they say, ‘you dog of a
spirit; we have given you an abode in a splendid temple, we gild you and
feed you and fumigate you with incense, and yet you are so ungrateful
that you won’t listen to our prayers!’ So they drag him in the dirt, and
then, if they get what they want, it is but to clean him and set him up
again, with apologies and promises of a new coat of gilding. There is
what appears a genuine story of a Chinaman who had paid an idol priest
to cure his daughter, but she died; whereupon the swindled worshipper
brought an action at law against the god, who for his fraud was banished
from the province. The classic instances, again, are perfect—the
dressing and anointing of statues, feeding them with delicacies and
diverting them with raree-shows, summoning them as witnesses; the story
of the Arkadian youths coming back from a bad day’s hunting and
revenging themselves by scourging and pricking Pan’s statue, and the
companion tale of the image which fell upon the man who ill-treated it;
the Tyrians chaining the statue of the Sun-god that he might not abandon
their city; Augustus chastising in effigy the ill-behaved Neptune;
Apollo’s statue that moved when it would give an oracle; and the rest of
the images which brandished weapons, or wept, or sweated, to prove their
supernatural powers. Such ideas continued to hold their place in
Christendom, as was natural, considering how directly the holy image or
picture took the place of the household god or the mightier idol of the
temple. The Russian boor covering up the saint’s picture that it may not
see him do wrong; the Mingrelian borrowing a successful neighbour’s
saint when his own crop fails, or when about to perjure himself choosing
for the witness of his deceitful oath a saint of mild countenance and
merciful repute; the peasant of Southern Europe, alternately coaxing and
trampling on his special saint-fetish, and ducking the Virgin or St.
Peter for rain; the winking and weeping images that are worked, even at
this day, to the greater glory of God, or rather to the greater shame of
Man—these are but the extreme instances of the worshipper’s endowment of
the sacred image with a life and personality modelled on his own.[367]

The appearance of idolatry at a grade above the lowest of known human
culture, and its development in extent and elaborateness under higher
conditions of civilization, are well displayed among the native races of
America. ‘Conspicuous by its absence’ among many of the lower tribes,
image-worship comes plainly into view toward the upper levels of
savagery, as where, for instance, Brazilian native tribes set up in
their huts, or in the recesses of the forest, their pygmy
heaven-descended figures of wax or wood;[368] or where the Mandans,
howling and whining, made their prayers before puppets of grass and
skins; or where the spiritual beings of the Algonquins (manitu) or the
Hurons (oki) were represented by, and in language identified with, the
carved wooden heads or more complete images to which worship and
sacrifice were offered. Among the Virginians and other of the more
cultured Southern tribes, these idols even had temples to dwell in.[369]
The discoverers of the New World found idolatry an accepted institution
among the islanders of the West Indies. These strong animists are
recorded to have carved their little images in the shapes in which they
believed the spirits themselves to have appeared to them; and some human
figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them. The images of
such ‘cemi’ or spirits, some animal, but most of human type, were found
by thousands; and it is even declared that an island near Hayti had a
population of idol-makers, who especially made images of nocturnal
spectres. The spirit could be conveyed with the image, both were called
‘cemi,’ and in the local accounts of sacrifices, oracles, and miracles,
the deity and the idol are mixed together in a way which at least shows
the extreme closeness of their connexion in the native mind.[370] If we
pass to the far higher culture of Peru, we find idols in full reverence,
some of them complete figures, but the great deities of Sun and Moon
figured by discs with human countenances, like those which to this day
represent them in symbol among ourselves. As for the conquered
neighbouring tribes brought under the dominion of the Incas, their idols
were carried, half trophies and half hostages, to Cuzco, to rank among
the inferior deities of the Peruvian Pantheon.[371] In Mexico, idolatry
had attained to its full barbaric development. As in the Aztec mind the
world swarmed with spiritual deities, so their material representatives,
the idols, stood in the houses at the corners of the streets, on every
hill and rock, to receive from passers-by some little offering—a
nosegay, a whiff of incense, a drop or two of blood; while in the
temples more huge and elaborate images enjoyed the dances and
processions in their honour, were fed by the bloody sacrifice of men and
beasts, and received the tribute and reverence paid to the great
national gods.[372] Up to a certain point, such evidence bears upon the
present question. We learn that the native races of the New World had
idols, that those idols in some sort represented ancestral souls and
other deities, and for them received adoration and sacrifice. But
whether the native ideas of the connexion of spirit and image were
obscure, or whether the foreign observers did not get at these ideas, or
partly for both reasons, there is a general want of express statement
how far the idols of America remained mere symbols or portraits, or how
far they had come to be considered the animated bodies of the gods.

It is not always thus, however. In the island regions of the Southern
Hemisphere, while image-worship scarcely appears among the Andaman
islanders, Tasmanians, or Australians, and is absent or rare in various
Papuan and Polynesian districts, it prevails among the majority of the
island tribes who have attained to middle and high savage levels. In
Polynesian islands, where the meaning of the native idolatry has been
carefully examined, it is found to rest on the most absolute theory of
spirit-embodiment. Thus, New-Zealanders set up memorial idols of
deceased persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them
as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they passed by,
also they preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each
dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor. It is distinctly held that such
an atua or ancestral deity enters into the substance of an image in
order to hold converse with the living. A priest can by repeating charms
cause the spirit to enter into the idol, which he will even jerk by a
string round its neck to arrest its attention; it is the same atua or
spirit which will at times enter not the image but the priest himself,
throw him into convulsions, and deliver oracles through him; while it is
quite understood that the images themselves are not objects of worship,
nor do they possess in themselves any virtue, but derive their
sacredness from being the temporary abodes of spirits.[373] In the
Society Islands, it was noticed in Captain Cook’s exploration that the
carved wooden images at burial-places were not considered mere
memorials, but abodes into which the souls of the departed retired. In
Mr. Ellis’s account of the Polynesian idolatry, relating as it seems
especially to this group, the sacred objects might be either mere stocks
and stones, or carved wooden images, from six or eight feet long down to
as many inches. Some of these were to represent ‘tii,’ divine manes or
spirits of the dead, while others were to represent ‘tu,’ or deities of
higher rank and power. At certain seasons, or in answer to the prayers
of the priests, these spiritual beings entered into the idols, which
then became very powerful, but when the spirit departed, the idol
remained only a sacred object. A god often came to and passed from an
image in the body of a bird, and spiritual influence could be
transmitted from an idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued
kinds of feathers, which could be carried away in this ‘inhabited’
state, and thus exert power elsewhere, and transfer it to new idols.
Here then we have the similarity of souls to other spirits shown by the
similar way in which both become embodied in images, just as these same
people consider both to enter into human bodies. And we have the pure
fetish, which here is a feather or a log or stone, brought together with
the more elaborate carved idol, all under one common principle of
spirit-embodiment.[374] In Borneo, notwithstanding the Moslem
prohibition of idolatry, not only do images remain in use, but the
doctrine of spirit-embodiment is distinctly applied to them. Among the
tribes of Western Sarawak the priestesses have made for them rude
figures of birds, which none but they may touch. These are supposed to
become inhabited by spirits, and at the great harvest feasts are hung up
in bunches of ten or twenty in the long common room, carefully veiled
with coloured handkerchiefs. Again, among some Dayak tribes, they will
make rude figures of a naked man and woman, and place these opposite to
one another on the path to the farms. On their heads are head-dresses of
bark, by their sides is the betel-nut basket, and in their hands a short
wooden spear. These figures are said to be inhabited each by a spirit
who prevents inimical influences from passing on to the farms, and
likewise from the farms to the village, and evil betide the profane
wretch who lifts his hand against them—violent fever and sickness would
be sure to follow.[375]

West Africa naturally applies its familiar fetish-doctrine of
spirit-embodiment to images or idols. How an image may be considered a
receptacle for a spirit, is well shown here by the straw and rag figures
of men and beasts made in Calabar at the great triennial purification,
for the expelled spirits to take refuge in, whereupon they are got rid
of over the border.[376] As to positive idols, nothing could be more
explicit than the Gold-Coast account of certain wooden figures called
‘amagai,’ which are specially treated by a ‘wong-man’ or priest, and
have a ‘wong’ or deity in connexion with them; so close is the connexion
conceived between spirit and image, that the idol is itself called
‘wong.’[377] So in the Ewe district, the same ‘edro’ or deity who
inspires the priest is also present in the idol, and ‘edro’ signifies
both god and idol.[378] Waitz sums up the principles of West African
idolatry in a distinct theory of embodiment, as follows: ‘The god
himself is invisible, but the devotional feeling and especially the
lively fancy of the negro demands a visible object to which worship may
be directed. He wishes really and sensibly to behold the god, and seeks
to shape in wood or clay the conception he has formed of him. Now if the
priest, whom the god himself at times inspires and takes possession of,
consecrates this figure to him, the idea has only to follow that the god
may in consequence be pleased to take up his abode in the figure, to
which he may be specially invited by the consecration, and thus
image-worship is seen to be comprehensible enough. Denham found that
even to take a man’s portrait was dangerous and caused mistrust, from
the fear that a part of the living man’s soul might be conveyed by magic
into the artificial figure. The idols are not, as Bosman thinks,
deputies of the gods, but merely objects in which the god loves to place
himself, and which at the same time display him in sensible presence to
his adorers. The god is also by no means bound fast to his dwelling in
the image, he goes out and in, or rather is present in it sometimes with
more and sometimes with less intensity.’[379]

Castrén’s wide and careful researches among the rude Turanian tribes of
North Asia led him to form a similar conception of the origin and nature
of their idolatry. The idols of these people are uncouth objects, often
mere stones or logs with some sort of human countenance, or sometimes
more finished images, even of metal; some are large, some mere dolls;
they belong to individuals, or families, or tribes; they may be kept in
the yurts for private use, or set up in sacred groves or on the steppes
or near the hunting and fishing places they preside over, or they may
even have special temple-houses; some open-air gods are left naked, not
to spoil good clothes, but others under cover are decked out with all an
Ostyak’s or Samoyed’s wealth of scarlet cloths and costly furs,
necklaces and trinkets; and lastly, to the idols are made rich offerings
of food, clothes, furs, kettles, pipes, and the rest of the inventory of
Siberian nomade riches. Now these idols are not to be taken as mere
symbols or portraits of deities, but the worshippers mostly imagine that
the deity dwells in the image or, so to speak, is embodied in it,
whereby the idol becomes a real god capable of giving health and
prosperity to man. On the one hand, the deity becomes serviceable to the
worshipper by being thus contained and kept for his use, and on the
other hand, the god profits by receiving richer offerings, failing which
it would depart from its receptacle. We even hear of numerous spirits
being contained in one image, and flying off at the death of the shaman
who owned it. In Buddhist Tibet, as in West Africa, the practice of
conjuring into puppets the demons which molest men is a recognized rite;
while in Siam the making of clay puppets to be exposed on trees or by
the roadside, or set adrift with food-offerings in baskets, is a
recognized manner of expelling disease-spirits.[380] In the
image-worship of modern India, there crop up traces of the
embodiment-theory. It is possible for the intelligent Hindu to attach as
little real personality to a divine image, as to the man of straw which
he makes in order to celebrate the funeral rites of a relative whose
body cannot be recovered. He can even protest against being treated as
an idolater at all, declaring the images of his gods to be but symbols,
bringing to his mind thoughts of the real deities, as a portrait reminds
one of a friend no longer to be seen in the body. Yet in the popular
religion of his country, what could be more in conformity with the
fetish-theory than the practice of making temporary hollow clay idols by
tens of thousands, which receive no veneration for themselves, and only
become objects of worship when the officiating brahman has invited the
deity to dwell in the image, performing the ceremony of the ‘adhivâsa’
or inhabitation, after which he puts in the eyes and the ‘prâna,’ i.e.,
breath, life, or soul.[381]

Nowhere, perhaps, in the wide history of religion, can we find
definitions more full and absolute of the theory of deities actually
animating their images, than in those passages from early Christian
writers which describe the nature and operation of the heathen idols.
Arnobius introduces the heathen as declaring that it is not the bronze
or gold and silver material they consider to be gods, but they worship
in them those beings which sacred dedication introduces, and causes to
inhabit the artificial images.[382] Augustine cites as follows the
opinions attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. This Egyptian, he tells us,
considers some gods as made by the highest Deity, and some by men; ‘he
asserts the visible and tangible images to be as it were bodies of gods,
for there are within them certain invited spirits, of some avail for
doing harm or for fulfilling certain desires of those who pay them
divine honours and rites of worship. By a certain art to connect these
invisible spirits with visible objects of corporeal matter, that such
may be as it were animated bodies, effigies dedicate and subservient to
the spirits—this is what he calls making gods, and men have received
this great and wondrous power.’ And further, this Trismegistus is made
to speak of ‘statues animated with sense and full of spirit, doing so
great things; statues prescient of the future, and predicting it by
lots, by priests, by dreams, and by many other ways.’[383] This idea, as
accepted by the early Christians themselves, with the qualification that
the spiritual beings inhabiting the idols were not beneficent deities
but devils, is explicitly stated by Minucius Felix, in a passage in the
‘Octavius,’ which gives an instructive account of the animistic
philosophy of Christianity towards the beginning of the third century:
‘Thus these impure spirits or demons, as shown by the magi, by the
philosophers, and by Plato, are concealed by consecration in statues and
images, and by their afflatus obtain the authority as of a present deity
when at times they inspire priests, inhabit temples, occasionally
animate the filaments of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, guide
the falling of lots, give oracles enveloped in many falsehoods ... also
secretly creeping into (men’s) bodies as thin spirits, they feign
diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, in order to compel men to their
worship; that fattening on the steam of altars or their offered victims
from the flocks, they may seem to have cured the ailments which they had
constrained. And these are the madmen whom ye see rush forth into public
places; and the very priests without the temple thus go mad, thus rave,
thus whirl about.... All these things most of you know, how the very
demons confess of themselves, so often as they are expelled by us from
the patients’ bodies with torments of word and fires of prayer. Saturn
himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatsoever demons ye worship,
overcome by pain declare what they are; nor surely do they lie
concerning their iniquity, above all when several of you are present.
Believe these witnesses, confessing the truth of themselves, that they
are demons. For adjured by the true and only God, they shudder reluctant
in the wretched bodies; and either they issue forth at once, or vanish
gradually, according as the faith of the patient aids, or the grace of
the curer favours.’[384]

The strangeness with which such words now fall upon our ears is full of
significance. It is one symptom of that vast quiet change which has come
over animistic philosophy in the modern educated world. Whole orders of
spiritual beings, worshipped in polytheistic religion, and degraded in
early Christendom to real but evil demons, have since passed from
objective to subjective existence, have faded from the Spiritual into
the Ideal. By the operation of similar intellectual changes, the general
theory of spirit-embodiment, having fulfilled the great work it had for
ages to do in religion and philosophy, has now dwindled within the
limits of the educated world to near its vanishing-point. The doctrines
of Disease-possession and Oracle-possession, once integral parts of the
higher philosophy, and still maintaining a vigorous existence in the
lower culture, seem to be dying out within the influence of the higher
into dogmatic survival, conscious metaphor, and popular superstition.
The doctrine of spirit-embodiment in objects, Fetishism, now scarcely
appears outside barbaric regions save in the peasant folklore which
keeps it up amongst us with so many other remnants of barbaric thought.
And the like theory of spiritual influence as applied to Idolatry,
though still to be studied among savages and barbarians, and on record
in past ages of the civilized world, has perished so utterly amongst
ourselves, that few but students are aware of its ever having existed.

To bring home to our minds the vastness of the intellectual tract
which separates modern from savage philosophy, and to enable us to
look back along the path where step by step the mind’s journey was
made, it will serve us to glance over the landmarks which language to
this day keeps standing. Our modern languages reach back through the
middle ages to classic and barbaric times, where in this matter the
transition from the crudest primæval animism is quite manifest. We
keep in daily use, and turn to modern meaning, old words and idioms
which carry us home to the philosophy of ancient days. We talk of
‘genius’ still, but with thought how changed. The genius of Augustus
was a tutelary demon, to be sworn by and to receive offerings on an
altar as a deity. In modern English, Shakspere, Newton, or Wellington,
is said to be led and prompted by his genius, but that genius is a
shrivelled philosophic metaphor. So the word ‘spirit’ and its kindred
terms keep up with wondrous pertinacity the traces which connect the
thought of the savage with its hereditary successor, the thought of
the philosopher. Barbaric philosophy retains as real what civilized
language has reduced to simile. The Siamese is made drunk with the
demon of the arrack that possesses the drinker, while we with so
different sense still extract the ‘spirit of wine.’[385] Look at the
saying ascribed to Pythagoras, and mentioned by Porphyry. ‘The sound
indeed which is given by striking brass, is the voice of a certain
demon contained in that brass.’ These might have been the
representative words of some savage animistic philosopher; but with
the changed meaning brought by centuries of philosophizing, Oken hit
upon a definition almost identical in form, that ‘What sounds,
announces its spirit’ (‘Was tönt, gibt seinen Geist kund’).[386] What
the savage would have meant, or Porphyry after him did mean, was that
the brass was actually animated by a spirit of the brass apart from
its matter, but when a modern philosopher takes up the old phrase, all
he means is the qualities of the brass. As in other animistic phrases
of thought and feeling such as ‘animal spirits,’ or being in ‘good and
bad spirits,’ the term only recalls with an effort the long-past
philosophy which it once expressed. The modern theory of the mind
considers it capable of performing even exalted and unusual functions
without the intervention of prompting or exciting demons; yet the old
recognition of such beings crops up here and there in phrases which
adapt animistic ideas to commonplaces of human disposition, as when a
man is still said to be animated by a patriotic spirit, or possessed
by a spirit of disobedience. In old times the ἐγγαστρίμυθος, or
‘ventriloquus’ was really held to have a spirit rumbling or talking
from inside his body, as when Eurykles the soothsayer was inspired by
such a familiar; or when a certain Patriarch mentioning a demon heard
to speak out of a man’s belly, remarks on the worthy place it had
chosen to dwell in. In the time of Hippokrates, the giving of oracular
responses by such ventriloquism was practised by certain women as a
profession. To this day in China one may get an oracular response from
a spirit apparently talking out of a medium’s stomach, for a fee of
about twopence-halfpenny. How changed a philosophy it marks, that
among ourselves the word ‘ventriloquist’ should have sunk to its
present meaning.[387] Nor is that change less significant which,
starting with the conception of a man being really ἔνθεος, possessed
by a deity within him, carries on a metamorphosed relic of this
thorough animistic thought, from ἐνθουσιασμός to ‘enthusiasm.’ With
all this, let it not be supposed that such change of opinion in the
educated world has come about through wanton incredulity or decay of
the religious temperament. Its source is the alteration in natural
science, assigning new causes for the operations of nature and the
events of life. The theory of the immediate action of personal spirits
has here, as so widely elsewhere, given place to ideas of force and
law. No indwelling deity now regulates the life of the burning sun, no
guardian angels drive the stars across the arching firmament, the
divine Ganges is water flowing down into the sea to evaporate into
cloud and descend again in rain. No deity simmers in the boiling pot,
no presiding spirits dwell in the volcano, no howling demon shrieks
from the mouth of the lunatic. There was a period of human thought
when the whole universe seemed actuated by spiritual life. For our
knowledge of our own history, it is deeply interesting that there
should remain rude races yet living under the philosophy which we have
so far passed from, since Physics, Chemistry, Biology, have seized
whole provinces of the ancient Animism, setting force for life and law
for will.

Footnote 229:

  See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 134; J. G. Müller, ‘Amerikanische
  Urreligionen,’ p. 171.

Footnote 230:

  Philo Jud. de Gigantibus, iv.

Footnote 231:

  Rituale Romanum: De Exorcizandis Obsessis a Dæmonio.

Footnote 232:

  Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Australia’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 236.
  See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 181.

Footnote 233:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 104.

Footnote 234:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 429.

Footnote 235:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 195; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’
  p. 72.

Footnote 236:

  Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 344; Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p.
  xxv.

Footnote 237:

  Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116; but cf. Musters, p. 180.

Footnote 238:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122.

Footnote 239:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 206.

Footnote 240:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. pp. 129, 416; vol. iii. pp. 29, 257,
  278; ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 77, 99; Cross, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 316; Elliot
  in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 115; Buchanan, ‘Mysore, &c.,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 677.

Footnote 241:

  Shortt, ‘Tribes of India,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 192;
  Tinling, ‘Tour round India,’ p. 19.

Footnote 242:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 101.

Footnote 243:

  Sir J. Shore in ‘Asiatic Res.’ vol. iv. p. 331.

Footnote 244:

  For some collections of details of manes-worship, see Meiners,
  ‘Geschichte der Religionen,’ vol. i. book 3; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.
  ii. pp. 402-11; ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 72-114.

Footnote 245:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 73, 173, 209, 261; Schoolcraft,
  ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 39, part iii. p. 237; Waitz,
  ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. pp. 191, 204.

Footnote 246:

  Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 105; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

Footnote 247:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 88.

Footnote 248:

  Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 104; S. S. Farmer, p. 126; Shortland,
  ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 81; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 108.

Footnote 249:

  J. R. Forster, ‘Observations,’ p. 604; Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 258;
  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 234.

Footnote 250:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 123, 423. As to the connexion of the
  Vazimbas with the Mazimba of East Africa, see Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 360,
  426.

Footnote 251:

  Callaway, ‘Religious System of Amazulu,’ part ii.; see also Arbousset
  and Daumas, p. 469; Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ pp. 248-54; Waitz,
  ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. pp. 411, 419; Magyar, ‘Reisen in
  Süd-Afrika,’ pp. 21, 335 (Congo); Cavazzi, ‘Congo,’ lib. i.

Footnote 252:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388-93. See Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 181,
  194.

Footnote 253:

  Bailey in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 301. Compare Taylor, ‘New
  Zealand,’ p. 153.

Footnote 254:

  Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. pp. 674-7. See
  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 95 (Khonds); Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 183
  (Santals).

Footnote 255:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 122; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90. See
  Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 373.

Footnote 256:

  Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ vol. i. p. 3, vol. ii. p. 51; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. vii. pp. 672, 680, 723, 755.

Footnote 257:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 250.

Footnote 258:

  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 65, part ii. p. 89;
  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. vi. viii.; vol. ii. p. 373; ‘Journ.
  Ind. Archip.’ New Ser. vol. ii. p. 363; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 92.

Footnote 259:

  Manu, book iii.

Footnote 260:

  Details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘inferi’; Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr.
  and Rom. Biog. and Myth.’; Meiners, Hartung, &c.

Footnote 261:

  Middleton, ‘Letter from Rome’; Murray’s ‘Handbook of Rome.’

Footnote 262:

  L. F. Alfred Maury, ‘Magie, &c.,’ p. 249; ‘Acta Sanctorum,’ 27 Sep.;
  Gregor. Turon. De Gloria Martyr, i. 98.

Footnote 263:

  J. R. Beste, ‘Nowadays at Home and Abroad,’ London, 1870, vol. ii. p.
  44; ‘A New Miracle at Rome; being an Account of a Miraculous Cure,
  &c., &c.,’ London (Washbourne), 1870.

Footnote 264:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235; see Grey, ‘Australia,’
  vol. ii. p. 337. Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ pp. 183, 195.

Footnote 265:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

Footnote 266:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 204; ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 73, see p. 125
  (Battas); Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 370. See also Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c.
  p. 201.

Footnote 267:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 110, vol. iv. p. 194; St. John,
  ‘Far East,’ vol. i. pp. 71, 87; Beeckman in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p.
  133; Meiners, vol. i. p. 278. See also Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i.
  p. 159.

Footnote 268:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ pp. 97, 114, 125; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’
  pp. 48, 137.

Footnote 269:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 236.

Footnote 270:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 363, 395, &c., vol. ii. pp. 193, 274;
  Cook, ‘3rd Voy.’ vol. iii. p. 131. Details of the superhuman character
  ascribed to weak or deranged persons among other races, in
  Schoolcraft, part iv. p. 49; Martius, vol. i. p. 633; Meiners, vol. i.
  p. 323; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 181.

Footnote 271:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 250, part ii. pp. 179, 199,
  part iii. p. 498; M. Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ pp. xxiii. 34, 41, 72. See
  also Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. p. 297 (Comanches);
  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 163; Sproat, p. 174 (Ahts); Egede, ‘Greenland,’
  p. 186; Cranz, p. 269.

Footnote 272:

  Roman Pane, xix. in ‘Life of Colon’; in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 273:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 73, 168; Musters,
  ‘Patagonians,’ p. 180. See also J. G. Müller, pp. 207, 231 (Caribs);
  Spix and Martius, ‘Brasilien,’ vol. i. p. 70; Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’
  vol. i. p. 646 (Marcusis).

Footnote 274:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 247; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 147, &c.;
  Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 21, &c.; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. pp.
  320, 354; Steere in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. i. 1871, p. cxlvii.

Footnote 275:

  Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missions und
  Bibel-Gesellschaften,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 139.

Footnote 276:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 388.

Footnote 277:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 163, 170.

Footnote 278:

  Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 103.

Footnote 279:

  Mason, ‘Burmah,’ p. 107, &c. Cross, l.c. p. 305.

Footnote 280:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 183, &c., 259, &c.

Footnote 281:

  Falkner, ‘Patagonia,’ p. 116. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p.
  418 (Caribs).

Footnote 282:

  Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. p. 280; Meiners, vol. ii. p.
  488.

Footnote 283:

  Falkner, l.c.

Footnote 284:

  Caldwell, ‘Dravidian Languages,’ App.; Latham, vol. ii. p. 469.

Footnote 285:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 172.

Footnote 286:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 278.

Footnote 287:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 328, see vol. iii. p. 201,
  ‘Psychologie,’ p. 139. See also Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 59.

Footnote 288:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 352, 373; Moerenhout, ‘Voyage,’ vol.
  i. p. 479; Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands,’ vol. i. p. 105; Williams, ‘Fiji,’
  vol. i. p. 373.

Footnote 289:

  Dos Santos, ‘Ethiopia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 686.

Footnote 290:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 57. See also Steinhauser, l.c. pp. 132, 139; J. B.
  Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xvi.

Footnote 291:

  Details from Tatar races in Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 164, 173, &c.;
  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 90; from Abyssinia in Parkyns, ‘Life in
  A.,’ ch. xxxiii.

Footnote 292:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. 110, 320.

Footnote 293:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p.
  247, &c. See also Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 139; ‘Journ. Ind.
  Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 507, vol. vi. p. 614; Turpin, in Pinkerton, vol.
  ix. p. 761; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ ibid. vol. vii. pp. 701, 730, &c.

Footnote 294:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 155, vol. ii. p. 183; Roberts, ‘Oriental
  Illustrations of the Scriptures,’ p. 529; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp.
  164, 184-7. Sanskrit paiçâcha-graha = demon-seizure, possession.
  Ancient evidence in Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. ch. v.

Footnote 295:

  Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64; Plat. Phædr. Tim. &c.; Pausan. iv. 27, 2;
  Xen. Mem. I. i. 9; Plutarch. Vit. Alex.; De Orac. Def.; Lucian.
  Philopseudes; Petron. Arbiter, Sat.; &c., &c.

Footnote 296:

  Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’
  part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.

Footnote 297:

  Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17; Luke,
  iv. 33, 39, vii. 33, viii. 27, ix. 39, xiii. 11; John, x. 20; Acts,
  xvi. 16, xix. 13; &c.

Footnote 298:

  For general evidence see Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church,’
  book iii. ch. iv.; Calmet, ‘Dissertation sur les Esprits’; Maury,
  ‘Magie,’ &c.; Lecky, ‘Hist. of Rationalism.’ Among particular passages
  are Tertull. Apolog. 23; De Spectaculis, 26; Chrysostom. Homil.
  xxviii. in Matth. iv.; Cyril. Hierosol. Catech. xvi. 16; Minuc. Fel.
  Octavius. xxi.; Concil. Carthag. iv.; &c., &c.

Footnote 299:

  Details in Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms, &c., of Early England,’ vol. i. p.
  365, vol. ii. p. 137, 355; Sprenger, ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ part ii.;
  Calmet, ‘Dissertation,’ vol. i. ch. xxiv.; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek’;
  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 557, &c.; ‘Psychologie,’ p. 115, &c.;
  Voltaire, ‘Questions sur l’Encyclopédie,’ art., ‘Superstition’;
  ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ 5th ed. art. ‘Possession.’

Footnote 300:

  See Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., part ii. ch. ii.

Footnote 301:

  A. Constans, ‘Rel. sur une Epidémie d’Hystéro-Démonopathie, en 1861.’
  2nd ed. Paris, 1863. For descriptions of such outbreaks, among the
  North American Indians, see Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la
  Nouvelle France,’ 1639; Brinton, p. 275; and in Guinea, see J. L.
  Wilson, ‘Western Africa,’ p. 217.

Footnote 302:

  Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite au Dix-Neuvième Siècle,’ 3rd ed. Paris, 1866, p.
  353.

Footnote 303:

  West, in ‘Spiritual Telegraph,’ cited by Bastian.

Footnote 304:

  (C. de Brosses.) ‘Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de
  l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de
  Nigritie.’ 1760. (De Brosses supposed the word fétiche connected
  with chose fée, fatum.)

Footnote 305:

  Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 337; Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p.
  362; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 235, &c.; G. F. Moore,
  ‘Vocab. of S. W. Austr.’ pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’
  p. 195.

Footnote 306:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 419, 508; J. G. Müller, pp. 173, 207,
  217.

Footnote 307:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.

Footnote 308:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 211, see 72.

Footnote 309:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 314.

Footnote 310:

  Steinhauser, l.c. p. 141. See also Steere, ‘East Afr. Tribes,’ in
  ‘Journ. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. cxlviii.

Footnote 311:

  Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 352. See ‘Sindh,’ p. 177.

Footnote 312:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 275.

Footnote 313:

  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. x. See Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p.
  116, &c.

Footnote 314:

  Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, ‘De Var. Rerum,’ cap. xliii.

Footnote 315:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.

Footnote 316:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 122.

Footnote 317:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 1118-23; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 155-70;
  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286; Halliwell, ‘Pop.
  Rhymes,’ p. 208; R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Romances,’ 2nd Series, p. 211;
  Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i. p. 173. It is said,
  however, that rags fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by
  avoid with horror as having diseases thus banned into them, are only
  signs left for the information of fellow vagrants; Liebich, ‘Die
  Zigeuner,’ p. 96.

Footnote 318:

  Catlin, ‘N. A. Indians,’ vol. i. p. 90.

Footnote 319:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Africa,’ p. 394.

Footnote 320:

  Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. p. 305; J. G. Müller, p. 209.

Footnote 321:

  Mason, Karens, l.c. p. 231.

Footnote 322:

  Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 721-3.

Footnote 323:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 418. See Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol.
  i. p. 485 (Yumanas swallow ashes of deceased with liquor, that he may
  live again in them).

Footnote 324:

  Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 73; J.
  G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 209, 262, 289, 401, 419.

Footnote 325:

  Darwin, ‘Journal,’ p. 458.

Footnote 326:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 320.

Footnote 327:

  ‘Report of Jubbulpore Ethnological Committee,’ Nagpore, 1868, part i.
  p. 5.

Footnote 328:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. 151, 207, 214, vol. ii. p. 401; see
  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 59, part ii. p. 101.

Footnote 329:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 187; Dasent, ‘Norse Tales,’ p. 69; Lane,
  ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. iii. p. 316; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1033.
  See also Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 213. Eisenmenger, ‘Judenthum,’
  part ii. p. 39.

Footnote 330:

  Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 72.

Footnote 331:

  Herrera, ‘Hist. de las Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. i. ix. 3.

Footnote 332:

  Lery, Brésil, p. 249; J. G. Müller, pp. 210, 262.

Footnote 333:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes’; Waitz, vol. iii.; Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’
  vol. i. p. 36; Keating, ‘Narrative,’ vol. i. p. 421; J. G. Müller, p.
  74, &c. See Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 274.

Footnote 334:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 162, 221, 230; Meiners, vol. i. p. 170.

Footnote 335:

  Bell, in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 357.

Footnote 336:

  H. Rowley, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa,’ p. 217.

Footnote 337:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 174; Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 56, &c.;
  J. L. Wilson, ‘West Africa,’ pp. 135, 211-6, 275, 338; Burton, ‘Wit
  and Wisdom from W. Afr.’ pp. 174, 455; Steinhauser, l.c. p. 134;
  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 397; Meiners, ‘Gesch. der
  Relig.’ vol. i. p. 173. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 396;
  Flacourt, ‘Madag.’ p. 191.

Footnote 338:

  Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. iii. p. 255, &c. Bastian,
  ‘Psychologie,’ p. 171. Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 75-95,
  225, &c. St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 46.

Footnote 339:

  Berkeley, ‘Concerning Motion,’ in ‘Works,’ vol. ii. p. 86.

Footnote 340:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 196, part iii. p. 229.

Footnote 341:

  Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ dec. i. iii. 3.

Footnote 342:

  De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.

Footnote 343:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 9; J. G. Müller, pp.
  263, 311, 371, 387; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 454; see below, p. 175.

Footnote 344:

  Hahn, ‘Gramm. des Hereró,’ s.v. ‘omu-makisina.’

Footnote 345:

  Kaufmann, ‘Central-Afrika,’ (White Nile), p. 131.

Footnote 346:

  Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 518, 523.

Footnote 347:

  Zollinger in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 692.

Footnote 348:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 337. See also Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’
  vol. i. p. 399.

Footnote 349:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 347, 526.

Footnote 350:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 220; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ pp. 66, 89.

Footnote 351:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, &c., 204, &c.; ‘Voyages au Nord,’ vol.
  viii. pp. 103, 410; Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 120. See also Steller,
  ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 265, 276.

Footnote 352:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 174. See also Macrae in ‘As. Res.’ vol.
  vii. p. 196; Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 33.

Footnote 353:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 103, 358.

Footnote 354:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 177. See also Shortt, ‘Tribes of
  Neilgherries,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 281.

Footnote 355:

  Elliot in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. 1869, p. 115.

Footnote 356:

  Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 739.

Footnote 357:

  Elliot in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. pp. 96, 115, 125. Lubbock,
  ‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 222. Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of
  Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 462, &c. Prof. Liebrecht, in ‘Ztschr. für
  Ethnologie,’ vol. v. p. 100, compares the field-protecting
  Priapos-hermes of ancient Italy, daubed with minium.

Footnote 358:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 142, 182, &c., see 221. See also Latham,
  ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 239. (Siah-push, stone offered to the
  representative of deity.)

Footnote 359:

  Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. iv. p. 132; Welcker, ‘Griechische
  Götterlehre,’ vol. i. p. 220. Meiners, vol. i. p. 150, &c. Details
  esp. in Pausanias; Theophrast. Charact. xvi.; Tacit. Hist. ii. 3;
  Arnobius, Adv. Gent.; Tertullianus; Clemens Alexandr.

Footnote 360:

  Is. lvii. 6. The first line, ‘behhalkey-nahhal hhêlkech,’ turns on the
  pun on hhlk = smooth (stone), and also lot or portion; a double sense
  probably connected with the use of smooth pebbles for casting lots.

Footnote 361:

  Sprenger, ‘Mohammad,’ vol. ii. p. 7, &c. Burton, ‘El Medinah,’ &c.,
  vol. ii. p. 157.

Footnote 362:

  Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 10. Deut. xii. 3; Micah v. 13, &c. Movers,
  ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. pp. 105, 569, and see index, ‘Säule,’ &c. See De
  Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 135 (considers bætyl = beth-el, &c.).

Footnote 363:

  For references see Ducange s.v. ‘petra’; Leslie, ‘Early Races of
  Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 256.

Footnote 364:

  Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,’ p. 241. See also
  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 671 (speaking stones in Norway, &c.).

Footnote 365:

  Earl of Roden, ‘Progress of Reformation in Ireland,’ London, 1851, p.
  51. Sir J. E. Tennent in ‘Notes and Queries,’ Feb. 7, 1852. See
  Borlase, ‘Antiquities of Cornwall,’ Oxford, 1754, book iii. ch. 2.

Footnote 366:

  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ chap. vi.

Footnote 367:

  For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners,
  ‘Geschichte der Religionen,’ vol. i. books i. and v.; Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii.; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie;’ De Brosses, ‘Dieux
  Fétiches,’ &c. Particular details in J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 393;
  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 395; Castrén, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’
  p. 193, &c.; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii.; Köppen, ‘Rel. des Buddha,’
  vol. i. p. 493, &c.; Grote, ‘Hist, of Greece.’

Footnote 368:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 263; Meiners, vol. i. p. 163.

Footnote 369:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ vol. i. p. 39; Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 14; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 203; J. G. Müller,
  pp. 95-8, 128.

Footnote 370:

  Fernando Colombo, ‘Vita del Amm. Cristoforo Colombo,’ Venice, 1571, p.
  127, &c.; and ‘Life of Colon,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84. Herrera,
  dec. i. iii. 3. Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 421-4. Waitz, vol.
  iii. p. 384; J. G. Müller, pp. 171-6, 182, 210, 232.

Footnote 371:

  Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. pp. 71, 89; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 458; J. G.
  Müller, pp. 322, 371.

Footnote 372:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 486; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 148; J. G.
  Müller, p. 642.

Footnote 373:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ &c., p. 83; Taylor, pp. 171, 183, 212.

Footnote 374:

  J. R. Forster, ‘Obs. during Voyage,’ London, 1778, p. 534, &c.; Ellis,
  ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 281, &c., 323, &c. See also Earl, ‘Papuans,’
  p. 84; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 78 (Nias).

Footnote 375:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 198.

Footnote 376:

  Hutchinson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 336; see Bastian,
  ‘Psychologie,’ p. 172.

Footnote 377:

  Steinhauser, in ‘Magaz. der Evang. Missionen,’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p.
  131.

Footnote 378:

  Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xvi.

Footnote 379:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 183; Denham, ‘Travels,’ vol. i. p.
  113; Römer, ‘Guinea’; Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. See
  also Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 282 (Balonda).

Footnote 380:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 193, &c.; Bastian, ‘Psych.’ p. 34, 208,
  ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. pp. 293, 486. See ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol.
  ii. p. 350 (Chinese).

Footnote 381:

  Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. xvii.; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p.
  198, vol. ii. pp. xxxv, 164, 234, 292, 485.

Footnote 382:

  Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, vi. 17-19.

Footnote 383:

  Augustinus ‘De Civ. Dei,’ viii. 23: ‘at ille visibilia et
  contrectabilia simulacra, velut corpora deorum esse asserit; inesse
  autem his quosdam spiritus invitatos, &c.... Hos ergo spiritus
  invisibiles per artem quandam visibilibus rebus corporalis materiæ
  copulare, ut sint quasi animata corpora, illis spiritibus dicata et
  subdita simulacra, &c.’ See also Tertullianus De Spectaculis, xii.:
  ‘In mortuorum autem idolis dæmonia consistunt, &c.’

Footnote 384:

  Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius, cap. xxvii.: ‘Isti igitur impuri
  spiritus, dæmones, ut ostensum a magis, a philosophis, et a Platone
  sub statuis et imaginibus consecrati delitescunt, &c.’

Footnote 385:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 455. See Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol.
  ii. p. 54.

Footnote 386:

  Porphyr. de Vita Pythagoræ. Oken, ‘Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,’
  2753.

Footnote 387:

  Suidas, s.v. ἐγγαστρίμυθος; Isidor. Gloss. s.v. ‘præcantatores’;
  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 578. Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c. p. 269.
  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 115.

ANIMISM (continued).

    Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the
    World—Pervading Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting
    man—Spirits manifest in Dreams and Visions: Nightmares; Incubi and
    Succubi; Vampires; Visionary Demons—Demons of darkness repelled by
    fire—Demons otherwise manifest: seen by animals; detected by
    footprints—Spirits conceived and treated as material—Guardian and
    Familiar Spirits—Nature-Spirits; historical course of the
    doctrine—Spirits of Volcanoes, Whirlpools, Rocks—Water-Worship:
    Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c.—Tree-Worship: Spirits
    embodied in or inhabiting Trees; Spirits of Groves and
    Forests—Animal-Worship: Animals worshipped, directly, or as
    incarnations or representatives of Deities; Totem-Worship;
    Serpent-Worship—Species-Deities; their relation to Archetypal
    Ideas.

We have now to enter on the final topic of the investigation of Animism,
by completing the classified survey of spiritual beings in general, from
the myriad souls, elves, fairies, genii, conceived as filling their
multifarious offices in man’s life and the world’s, up to the deities
who reign, few and mighty, over the spiritual hierarchy. In spite of
endless diversity of detail, the general principles of this
investigation seem comparatively easy of access to the enquirer, if he
will use the two keys which the foregoing studies supply: first, that
spiritual beings are modelled by man on his primary conception of his
own human soul, and second, that their purpose is to explain nature on
the primitive childlike theory that it is truly and throughout ‘Animated
Nature.’ If, as the poet says, ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere
causas,’ then rude tribes of ancient men had within them this source of
happiness, that they could explain to their own content the causes of
things. For to them spiritual beings, elves and gnomes, ghosts and
manes, demons and deities, were the living personal causes of universal
life. ‘The first men found everything easy, the mysteries of nature were
not so hidden from them as from us,’ said Jacob Böhme the mystic. True,
we may well answer, if these primitive men believed in that animistic
philosophy of nature which even now survives in the savage mind. They
could ascribe to kind or hostile spirits all good and evil of their own
lives, and all striking operations of nature; they lived in familiar
intercourse with the living and powerful souls of their dead ancestors,
with the spirits of the stream and grove, plain and mountain, they knew
well the living mighty Sun pouring his beams of light and heat upon
them, the living mighty Sea dashing her fierce billows on the shore, the
great personal Heaven and Earth protecting and producing all things. For
as the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own
inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be
carried on by the influence of other spirits. And thus Animism, starting
as a philosophy of human life, extended and expanded itself till it
became a philosophy of nature at large.

To the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed,
pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings. In seeking by a few types to
give an idea of this conception of pervading Spirits in its savage and
barbaric stage, it is not indeed possible to draw an absolute line of
separation between spirits occupied in affecting for good and ill the
life of Man, and spirits specially concerned in carrying on the
operations of Nature. In fact these two classes of spiritual beings
blend into one another as inextricably as do the original animistic
doctrines they are based on. As, however, the spirits considered
directly to affect the life and fortune of Man lie closest to the centre
of the animistic scheme, it is well to give them precedence. The
description and function of these beings extend upwards from among the
rudest human tribes. Milligan writes of the Tasmanians: ‘They were
polytheists; that is, they believed in guardian angels or spirits, and
in a plurality of powerful but generally evil-disposed beings,
inhabiting crevices and caverns of rocky mountains, and making temporary
abode in hollow trees and solitary valleys; of these a few were supposed
to be of great power, while to the majority were imputed much of the
nature and attributes of the goblins and elves of our native land.’[388]
Oldfield writes of the aborigines of Australia, ‘The number of
supernatural beings, feared if not loved, that they acknowledge, is
exceedingly great; for not only are the heavens peopled with such, but
the whole face of the country swarms with them; every thicket, most
watering-places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. In like
manner, every natural phenomenon is believed to be the work of demons,
none of which seem of a benign nature, one and all apparently striving
to do all imaginable mischief to the poor black fellow.’[389] It must be
indeed an unhappy race among whom such a demonology could shape itself,
and it is a relief to find that other people of low culture, while
recognizing the same spiritual world swarming about them, do not hold
its main attribute to be spite against themselves. Among the Algonquin
Indians of North America, Schoolcraft finds the very groundwork of their
religion in the belief ‘that the whole visible and invisible creation is
animated with various orders of malignant or benign spirits, who preside
over the daily affairs and over the final destinies of men.’[390] Among
the Khonds of Orissa, Macpherson describes the greater gods and tribal
manes, and below these the order of minor and local deities: ‘They are
the tutelary gods of every spot on earth, having power over the
functions of nature which operate there, and over everything relating to
human life in it. Their number is unlimited. They fill all nature, in
which no power or object, from the sea to the clods of the field, is
without its deity. They are the guardians of hills, groves, streams,
fountains, paths, and hamlets, and are cognizant of every human action,
want, and interest in the locality, where they preside.’[391] Describing
the animistic mythology of the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe,
Castrén has said that every land, mountain, rock, river, brook, spring,
tree, or whatsoever it may be, has a spirit for an inhabitant; the
spirits of the trees and stones, of the lakes and brooks, hear with
pleasure the wild man’s pious prayers and accept his offerings.[392]
Such are the conceptions of the Guinea negro, who finds the abodes of
his good and evil spirits in great rocks, hollow trees, mountains, deep
rivers, dense groves, echoing caverns, and who passing silently by these
sacred places leaves some offering, if it be but a leaf or a shell
picked up on the beach.[393] Such are examples which not unfairly
picture the belief of the lower races in a world of spirits on earth,
and such descriptions apply to the state of men’s minds along the course
of civilization.

The doctrine of ancient philosophers such as Philo[394] and
Iamblichus,[395] of spiritual beings swarming through the atmosphere we
breathe, was carried on and developed in special directions in the
discussions concerning the nature and functions of the world-pervading
host of angels and devils, in the writings of the early Christian
Fathers.[396] Theologians of modern centuries have for the most part
seen reason to reduce within comparatively narrow limits the action
ascribed to external spiritual beings on mankind; yet there are some who
retain to the full the angelology and demonology of Origen and
Tertullian. These two views may be well contrasted by setting side by
side the judgments of two ecclesiastics of the Roman Church, as to the
belief in pervading demons prevalent in uncivilized countries. The
celebrated commentator, Dom Calmet, lays down in the most explicit terms
the doctrine of angels and demons, as a matter of dogmatic theology. But
he is less inclined to receive unquestioned the narratives of particular
manifestations in the mediæval and modern world. He mentions indeed the
testimony of Louis Vivez, that in the newly discovered countries of
America, nothing is more common than to see spirits which appear at
noon-day, not only in the country but in towns and villages, speaking,
commanding, sometimes even striking men; and the account by Olaus Magnus
of the spectres or spirits seen in Sweden and Norway, Finland and
Lapland, which do wonderful things, some even serving men as domestics
and driving the cattle out to pasture. But what Calmet remarks on these
stories, is that the greater ignorance prevails in a country, the more
superstition reigns there.[397] It seems that in our own day, however,
the tendency is to encourage less sceptical views. Monsignor Gaume’s
book on ‘Holy Water,’ which not long since received the special and
formal approval of Pius IX., appears ‘at an epoch when the millions of
evil angels which surround us are more enterprising than ever;’ and here
Olaus Magnus’ story of the demons infesting Northern Europe is not only
cited but corroborated.[398] On the whole, the survey of the doctrine of
pervading spirits through all the grades of culture is a remarkable
display of intellectual continuity. Most justly does Ellis the
missionary, depicting the South Sea Islanders’ world crowded with its
innumerable pervading spirits, point out the closeness of correspondence
here between doctrines of the savage and the civilized animist,
expressed as both may be in Milton’s familiar lines:—

            ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
            Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.’[399]

As with souls, so with other spirits, man’s most distinct and direct
intercourse is had where they become actually present to his senses in
dreams and visions. The belief that such phantoms are real and personal
spirits, suggested and maintained as it is by the direct evidence of the
senses of sight, touch, and hearing, is naturally an opinion usual in
savage philosophy, and indeed elsewhere, long and obstinately resisting
the attacks of the later scientific doctrine. The demon Koin strives to
throttle the dreaming Australian;[400] the evil ‘na’ crouches on the
stomach of the Karen;[401] the North American Indian, gorged with
feasting, is visited by nocturnal spirits;[402] the Caribs, subject to
hideous dreams, often woke declaring that the demon Maboya had beaten
them in their sleep, and they could still feel the pain.[403] These
demons are the very elves and nightmares that to this day in benighted
districts of Europe ride and throttle the snoring peasant, and whose
names, not forgotten among the educated, have only made the transition
from belief to jest.[404] A not less distinct product of the savage
animistic theory of dreams as real visits from personal spiritual
beings, lasted on without a shift or break into the belief of mediæval
Christendom. This is the doctrine of the incubi and succubi, those male
and female nocturnal demons which consort sexually with men and women.
We may set out with their descriptions among the islanders of the
Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when
clutched;[405] in New Zealand, where ancestral deities ‘form attachments
with females and pay them repeated visits,’ while in the Samoan Islands
such intercourse of mischievious inferior gods caused ‘many supernatural
conceptions;’[406] and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme
class have also been placed on record.[407] From these lower grades of
culture the idea may be followed onward. Formal rites are specified in
the Hindu Tantra, which enable a man to obtain a companion-nymph by
worshipping her and repeating her name by night in a cemetery.[408]
Augustine, in an instructive passage, states the popular notions of the
visits of incubi, vouched for, he tells us, by testimony of such
quantity and quality that it may seem impudence to deny it; yet he is
careful not to commit himself to a positive belief in such spirits.[409]
Later theologians were less cautious, and grave argumentation on
nocturnal intercourse with incubi and succubi was carried on till, at
the height of mediæval civilization, it is found accepted in full belief
by ecclesiastics and lawyers. Nor is it to be counted as an ugly but
harmless superstition, when for example it is set forth in the Bull of
Pope Innocent VIII. in 1484, as an accepted accusation against ‘many
persons of both sexes, forgetful of their own salvation, and falling
away from the Catholic faith.’ The practical outcome of this belief is
known to students who have traced the consequence of the Papal Bull in
the legal manual of the witchcraft tribunals, drawn up by the three
appointed Inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum; and have
followed the results of this again into those dreadful records which
relate in their bald matter-of-fact phraseology the confessions of the
crime of diabolic intercourse, wrung from the wretched victims worked on
by threat and persuasion in the intervals of the rack, till enough
evidence was accumulated for clear judgment, and sentence of the
stake.[410] I need not dwell on the mingled obscenity and horror of
these details, which here only have their bearing on the history of
animism. But it will aid the ethnographer to understand the relation of
modern to savage philosophy, if he will read Richard Burton’s seriously
believing account in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ where he concludes
with acquiescence in a declaration lately made by Lipsius, that on the
showing of daily narratives and judicial sentences, in no age had these
lecherous demons appeared in such numbers as in his own time—and this
was about A.D. 1600.[411]

In connexion with the nightmare and the incubus, another variety of
nocturnal demon requires notice, the vampire. Inasmuch as certain
patients are seen becoming day by day, without apparent cause, thin,
weak, and bloodless, savage animism is called upon to produce a
satisfactory explanation, and does so in the doctrine that there exist
certain demons which eat out the souls or hearts or suck the blood of
their victims. The Polynesians said that it was the departed souls (tii)
which quitted the graves and grave-idols to creep by night into the
houses, and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, and these
died.[412] The Karens tell of the ‘kephu,’ which is a wizard’s stomach
going forth in the shape of a head and entrails, to devour the souls of
men, and they die.[413] The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula have their
‘hantu penyadin;’ he is a water-demon, with a dog’s head and an
alligator’s mouth, who sucks blood from men’s thumbs and great toes, and
they die.[414] It is in Slavonia and Hungary that the demon
blood-suckers have their principal abode, and to this district belongs
their special name of vampire, Polish upior, Russian upir. There
is a whole literature of hideous vampire-stories, which the student will
find elaborately discussed in Calmet. The shortest way of treating the
belief is to refer it directly to the principles of savage animism. We
shall see that most of its details fall into their places at once, and
that vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes
conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts of wasting
disease. As to their nature and physical action, there are two principal
theories, but both keep close to the original animistic idea of
spiritual beings, and consider these demons to be human souls. The first
theory is that the soul of a living man, often a sorcerer, leaves its
proper body asleep and goes forth, perhaps in the visible form of a
straw or fluff of down, slips through keyholes and attacks its sleeping
victim. If the sleeper should wake in time to clutch this tiny
soul-embodiment, he may through it have his revenge by maltreating or
destroying its bodily owner. Some say these ‘mury’ come by night to men,
sit upon their breasts and suck their blood, while others think it is
only children’s blood they suck, they being to grown people mere
nightmares. Here we have the actual phenomenon of nightmare, adapted to
a particular purpose. The second theory is that the soul of a dead man
goes out from its buried corpse and sucks the blood of living men. The
victim becomes thin, languid, and bloodless, falls into a rapid decline
and dies. Here again is actual experience, but a new fancy is developed
to complete the idea. The corpse thus supplied by its returning soul
with blood, is imagined to remain unnaturally fresh and supple and
ruddy; and accordingly the means of detecting a vampire is to open his
grave, where the reanimated corpse may be found to bleed when cut, and
even to move and shriek. One way to lay a vampire is to stake down the
corpse (as with suicides and with the same intention); but the more
effectual plan is to behead and burn it. This is the substance of the
doctrine of vampires. Still, as one order of demons is apt to blend into
others, the vampire-legends are much mixed with other animistic
folklore. Vampires appear in the character of the poltergeist or
knocker, as causing those disturbances in houses which modern
spiritualism refers in like manner to souls of the departed. Such was
the ghost of a certain surly peasant who came out of his grave in the
island of Mycone in 1700, after he had been buried but two days; he came
into the houses, upset the furniture, put the lamps out, and carried on
his tricks till the whole population went wild with terror. Tournefort
happened to be there and was present at the exhumation; his account is
curious evidence of the way an excited mob could persuade themselves,
without the least foundation of fact, that the body was warm and its
blood red. Again, the blood-sucker is very generally described under the
Slavonic names of werewolf (wilkodlak, brukolaka, &c.); the descriptions
of the two creatures are inextricably mixed up, and a man whose eyebrows
meet, as if his soul were taking flight like a butterfly, to enter some
other body, may be marked by this sign either as a werewolf or a
vampire. A modern account of vampirism in Bulgaria well illustrates the
nature of spirits as conceived in such beliefs as these. A sorcerer
armed with a saint’s picture will hunt a vampire into a bottle
containing some of the filthy food that the demon loves; as soon as he
is fairly inside he is corked down, the bottle is thrown into the fire,
and the vampire disappears for ever.[415]

As to the savage visionary and the phantoms he beholds, the Greenlander
preparing for the profession of sorcerer may stand as type, when, rapt
in contemplation in his desert solitude, emaciated by fasting and
disordered by fits, he sees before him scenes with figures of men and
animals, which he believes to be spirits. Thus it is interesting to read
the descriptions by Zulu converts of the dreadful creatures which they
see in moments of intense religious exaltation, the snake with great
eyes and very fearful, the leopard creeping stealthily, the enemy
approaching with his long assagai in his hand—these coming one after
another to the place where the man has gone to pray in secret, and
striving to frighten him from his knees.[416] Thus the visionary
temptations of the Hindu ascetic and the mediæval saint are happening in
our own day, though their place is now rather in the medical handbook
than in the record of miracle. Like the disease-demons and the
oracle-demons, these spiritual groups have their origin not in fancy,
but in real phenomena interpreted on animistic principles.

In the dark especially, harmful spirits swarm. Round native Australian
encampments, Sir George Grey used to see the bush dotted with little
moving points of fire; these were the firesticks carried by the old
women sent to look after the young ones, but who dared not quit the
firelight without a brand to protect them from the evil spirits.[417] So
South American Indians would carry brands or torches for fear of evil
demons when they ventured into the dark.[418] Tribes of the Malay
Peninsula light fires near a mother at childbirth, to scare away the
evil spirits.[419] Such notions extend to higher levels of civilization.
In Southern India, where for fear of pervading spirits only pressing
need will induce a man to go abroad after sundown, the unlucky wight who
has to venture into the dark will carry a fire-brand to keep off the
spectral foes. Even in broad daylight, the Hindu lights lamps to keep
off the demons,[420] a ceremony which is to be noticed again at a
Chinese wedding.[421] In Europe, the details of the use of fire to drive
off demons and witches are minute and explicit. The ancient Norse
colonists in Iceland carried fire round the lands they intended to
occupy, to expel the evil spirits. Such ideas have brought into
existence a whole group of Scandinavian customs, still remembered in the
country, but dying out in practice. Till a child is baptized, the fire
must never be let out, lest the trolls should be able to steal the
infant; a live coal must be cast after the mother as she goes to be
churched, to prevent the trolls from carrying her off bodily or
bewitching her; a live coal is to be thrown after a troll-wife or witch
as she quits a house, and so forth.[422] Into modern times, the people
of the Hebrides continued to protect the mother and child from evil
spirits, by carrying fire round them.[423] In modern Bulgaria, on the
Feast of St. Demetrius, lighted candles are placed in the stables and
the wood-shed, to prevent evil spirits from entering into the domestic
animals.[424] Nor did this ancient idea remain a mere lingering notion
of peasant folklore. Its adoption by the Church is obvious in the
ceremonial benediction of candles in the Roman Ritual: ‘Ut quibuscumque
locis accensæ, sive positæ fuerint, discedant principes tenebrarum, et
contremiscant, et fugiant pavidi cum omnibus ministris suis ab
habitationibus illis, &c.’ The metrical translation of Naogeorgus shows
perfectly the retention of primitive animistic ideas in the middle
ages:—

            ‘... a wondrous force and might
    Doth in these candels lie, which if at any time they light,
    They sure beleve that neyther storm or tempest dare abide,
    Nor thunder in the skies be heard, nor any devil’s spide,
    Nor fearefull sprightes that walke by night, nor hurts of frost or
       haile.’[425]

Animals stare and startle when we see no cause; is it that they see
spirits invisible to man? Thus the Greenlander says that the seals and
wildfowl are scared by spectres, which no human eye but the sorcerer’s
can behold;[426] and thus the Khonds hold that their flitting ethereal
gods, invisible to man, are seen by beasts.[427] The thought holds no
small place in the folklore of the world. Telemachos could not discern
Athene standing near him, for not to all do the gods visibly appear; but
Odysseus saw her, and the dogs, and they did not bark, but with low
whine slunk across the dwelling to the further side.[428] So in old
Scandinavia, the dogs could see Hela the death-goddess move unseen by
men;[429] so Jew and Moslem, hearing the dogs howl, know that they have
seen the Angel of Death come on his awful errand;[430] while the beliefs
that animals see spirits, and that a dog’s melancholy howl means death
somewhere near, are still familiar to our own popular superstition.

Another means by which men may detect the presence of invisible spirits,
is to adopt the thief-catcher’s well-known device of strewing ashes.
According to the ideas of a certain stage of animism, a spirit is
considered substantial enough to leave a footprint. The following
instances relate sometimes to souls, sometimes to other beings. The
Philippine islanders expected the dead to return on the third day to his
dwelling, wherefore they set a vessel of water for him to wash himself
clean from the grave-mould, and strewed ashes to see footprints.[431] A
more elaborate rite forms part of the funeral customs of the Hos of
North-East India. On the evening of a death, the near relatives perform
the ceremony of calling the dead. Boiled rice and a pot of water are
placed in an inner room, and ashes sprinkled from thence to the
threshold. Two relatives go to the place where the body was burnt, and
walk round it beating ploughshares and chanting a plaintive dirge to
call the spirit home; while two others watch the rice and water to see
if they are disturbed, and look for the spirit-footsteps in the ashes.
If a sign appears, it is received with shivering horror and weeping, the
mourners outside coming in to join. Till the survivors are thus
satisfied of the spirit’s return, the rite must be repeated.[432] In
Yucatan there is mention of the custom of leaving a child alone at night
in a place strewn with ashes; if the footprint of an animal were found
next morning, this animal was the guardian deity of the child.[433]
Beside this may be placed the Aztec ceremony at the second festival of
the Sun-god Tezcatlipoca, when they sprinkled maize-flour before his
sanctuary, and his high-priest watched till he beheld the divine
footprints, and then shouted to announce, ‘Our great god is come.’[434]
Among such rites in the Old World, the Talmud contains a salient
instance; there are a great multitude of devils, it is said; and he who
will be aware of them let him take sifted ashes and strew them by his
bed, and in the early morning he shall see as it were marks of cocks’
feet.[435] This is an idea that has widely spread in the modern world,
as where in German folklore the little ‘earth-men’ make footprints like
a duck’s or goose’s in the strewn ashes. Other marks, too, betoken the
passage of spirit-visitors;[436] and as for ghosts, our own superstition
is among the most striking of the series. On St. Mark’s Eve, ashes are
to be sifted over the hearth, and the footprints will be seen of any one
who is to die within the year; many a mischievous wight has made a
superstitious family miserable by slily coming down stairs and marking
the print of some one’s shoe.[437] Such details as these may justify us
in thinking that the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in
general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they
attribute to souls. Explicit statements on the subject are scarce till
we reach the level of early Christian theology. The ideas of Tertullian
and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and
demons, probably represent the conceptions of primitive animism far more
clearly than the doctrine which Calmet lays down with the weight of
theological dogma, that angels, demons, and disembodied souls are pure
immaterial spirit; but that when by divine permission spirits appear,
act, speak, walk, eat, they must produce tangible bodies by either
condensing the air, or substituting other terrestrial solid bodies
capable of performing these functions.[438]

No wonder that men should attack such material beings by material means,
and even sometimes try to rid themselves by a general clearance from the
legion of ethereal beings hovering around them. As the Australians
annually drive from their midst the accumulated ghosts of the last
year’s dead, so the Gold Coast negroes from time to time turn out with
clubs and torches to drive the evil spirits from their towns; rushing
about and beating the air with frantic howling, they drive the demons
into the woods, and then come home and sleep more easily, and for a
while afterwards enjoy better health.[439] When a baby was born in a
Kalmuk horde, the neighbours would rush about crying and brandishing
cudgels about the tents, to drive off the harmful spirits who might hurt
mother and child.[440] Keeping up a closely allied idea in modern
Europe, the Bohemians at Pentecost, and the Tyrolese on Walpurgisnacht,
hunt the witches, invisible and imaginary, out of house and stall.[441]

Closely allied to the doctrine of souls, and almost rivalling it in the
permanence with which it has held its place through all the grades of
animism, is the doctrine of patron, guardian, or familiar spirits. These
are beings specially attached to individual men, soul-like in their
nature, and sometimes considered as actually being human souls. These
beings have, like all others of the spiritual world as originally
conceived, their reason and purpose. The special functions which they
perform are twofold. First, while man’s own proper soul serves him for
the ordinary purposes of life and thought, there are times when powers
and impressions out of the course of the mind’s normal action, and words
that seem spoken to him by a voice from without, messages of mysterious
knowledge, of counsel or warning, seem to indicate the intervention of
as it were a second superior soul, a familiar demon. And as enthusiasts,
seers, sorcerers, are the men whose minds most often show such
conditions, so to these classes more than to others the informing and
controlling patron-spirits are attached. Second, while the common
expected events of daily life pass unnoticed as in the regular course of
things, such events as seem to fall out with especial reference to an
individual, demand an intervening agent; and thus the decisions,
discoveries, and deliverances, which civilized men variously ascribe to
their own judgment, to luck, and to special interposition of Providence,
are accounted for in the lower culture by the action of the
patron-spirit or guardian-genius. Not to crowd examples from all the
districts of animism to which this doctrine belongs, let us follow it by
a few illustrations from the lower grades of savagery upward. Among the
Watchandis of Australia, it is held that when a warrior slays his first
man, the spirit of the dead enters the slayer’s body and becomes his
‘woorie’ or warning spirit; taking up its abode near his liver, it
informs him by a scratching or tickling sensation of the approach of
danger.[442] In Tasmania, Dr. Milligan heard a native ascribe his
deliverance from an accident to the preserving care of his deceased
father’s spirit, his guardian angel.[443] That the most important act of
the North American Indian’s religion is to obtain his individual patron
genius or deity, is well known. Among the Esquimaux, the sorcerer
qualifies for his profession by getting a ‘torngak’ or spirit which will
henceforth be his familiar demon, and this spirit may be the soul of a
deceased parent.[444] In Chili, as to guardian spirits, it has been
remarked that every Araucanian imagines he has one in his service; ‘I
keep my amchi-malghen (guardian nymph) still,’ being a common expression
when they succeed in any undertaking.[445] The Caribs display the
doctrine well in both its general and special forms. On the one hand,
there is a guardian deity for each man, which accompanies his soul to
the next life; on the other hand, each sorcerer has his familiar demon,
which he evokes in mysterious darkness by chants and tobacco-smoke; and
when several sorcerers call up their familiars together, the consequence
is apt to be a quarrel among the demons, and a fight.[446] In Africa,
the negro has his guardian spirit—how far identified with what Europeans
call soul or conscience, it may be hard to determine; but he certainly
looks upon it as a being separate from himself, for he summons it by
sorcery, builds a little fetish-hut for it by the wayside, rewards and
propitiates it by libations of liquor and bits of food.[447] In Asia,
the Mongols, each with his patron genius,[448] and the Laos sorcerers
who can send their familiar spirits into others’ bodies to cause
disease,[449] are examples equally to the purpose.

Among the Aryan nations of Northern Europe,[450] the old doctrine of
man’s guardian spirit may be traced, and in classic Greece and Rome it
renews with philosophic eloquence and cultured custom the ideas of the
Australian and the African. The thought of the spiritual guide and
protector of the individual man is happily defined by Menander, who
calls the attendant genius, which each man has from the hour of birth,
the good mystagogue (i.e. the novice’s guide to the mysteries) of this
life.

                Ἄπαντι δαίμον ἀνδρὶ συμπαρίσταται
                Εὐθὺς γενομένῳ μυσταγωγὸς τοῦ βίου.
                Ἀγαθός; κακὸν γὰρ δαίμον’ οὐ νομιστέον
                Εἶναι τὸν βίον βλάπτοντα χρηστόν. Πάντα γὰρ
                Δεῖ ἀγαθὸν εἶναι τὸν Θεόν.

The divine warning voice which Sokrates used to hear, is a salient
example of the mental impressions leading to the belief in guardian
spirits.[451] In the Roman world, the doctrine came to be accepted as a
philosophy of human life. Each man had his ‘genius natalis,’ associated
with him from birth to death, influencing his action and his fate,
standing represented by its proper image as a lar among the household
gods; and at weddings and joyous times, and especially on the
anniversary of the birthday when genius and man began their united
career, worship was paid with song and dance to the divine image,
adorned with garlands, and propitiated with incense and libations of
wine. The demon or genius was, as it were, the man’s companion soul, a
second spiritual ego. The Egyptian astrologer warned Antonius to keep
far from the young Octavius, ‘for thy demon,’ said he, ‘is in fear of
his;’ and truly in after years that genius of Augustus had become an
imperial deity, by whom Romans swore solemn oaths, not to be
broken.[452] The doctrine which could thus personify the character and
fate of the individual man, proved capable of a yet further development.
Converting into animistic entities the inmost operations of the human
mind, a dualistic philosophy conceived as attached to every mortal a
good and an evil genius, whose efforts through life drew him backward
and forward toward virtue and vice, happiness and misery. It was the
kakodaimōn of Brutus which appeared to him by night in his tent: ‘I am
thy evil genius,’ it said, ‘we meet again at Philippi.’[453]

As we study the shapes which the attendant spirits of the individual man
assumed in early and mediæval Christendom, it is plain that the good and
evil angels contending for man from birth to death, the guardian angel
watching and protecting him, the familiar spirit giving occult knowledge
or serving with magic art, continue in principle, and even in detail,
the philosophy of earlier culture. Such beings even take visible form.
St. Francisca had a familiar angel, not merely that domestic one that is
given as a guardian to every man, but this was as it were a boy of nine
years old, with a face more splendid than the sun, clad in a little
white tunic; it was in after years that there came to her a second
angel, with a column of splendour rising to the sky, and three golden
palm-branches in his hands. Or such attendant beings, though invisible,
make their presence evident by their actions, as in Calmet’s account of
that Cistercian monk whose familiar genius waited on him, and used to
get his chamber ready when he was coming back from the country, so that
people knew when to expect him home.[454] There is a pleasant quaintness
in Luther’s remark concerning guardian angels, that a prince must have a
greater, stronger, wiser angel than a count, and a count than a common
man.[455] Bishop Bull, in one of his vigorous sermons, thus sums up a
learned argument: ‘I cannot but judge it highly probable, that every
faithful person at least hath his particular good Genius or Angel,
appointed by God over him, as the Guardian and Guide of his Life.’ But
he will not insist on the belief, provided that the general ministry of
angels be accepted.[456] Swedenborg will go beyond this. ‘Every man,’ he
says, ‘is attended by an associate spirit; for without such an
associate, a man would be incapable of thinking analytically,
rationally, and spiritually.’[457] Yet in the modern educated world at
large, this group of beliefs has passed into the stage of survival. The
conception of the good and evil genius contending for man through life,
indeed, perhaps never had much beyond the idealistic meaning which art
and poetry still give it. The traveller in France may hear in our own
day the peasant’s salutation, ‘Bonjour à vous et à votre compagnie!’
(i.e. your guardian angel).[458] But at the birthday festivals of
English children, how few are even aware of the historical sequence,
plain as it is, from the rites of the classic natal genius and the
mediæval natal saint! Among us, the doctrine of guardian angels is to be
found in commentaries, and may be sometimes mentioned in the pulpit; but
the once distant conception of a present guardian spirit, acting on each
individual man and interfering with circumstances on his behalf, has all
but lost its old reality. The familiar demon which gave occult knowledge
and did wicked work for the magician, and sucked blood from miserable
hags by witch-teats, was two centuries ago as real to the popular mind
as the alembic or the black cat with which it was associated. Now, it
has been cast down to the limbo of unhallowed superstitions.

To turn from Man to Nature. General mention has been made already of the
local spirits which belong to mountain and rock and valley, to well and
stream and lake, in brief to those natural objects and places which in
early ages aroused the savage mind to mythological ideas, such as modern
poets in their altered intellectual atmosphere strive to reproduce. In
discussing these imaginary beings, it is above all things needful to
bring our minds into sympathy with the lower philosophy. Here we must
seek to realize to the utmost the definition of the Nature-Spirits, to
understand with what distinct and full conviction savage philosophy
believes in their reality, to discern how, as living causes, they can
fill their places and do their daily work in the natural philosophy of
primæval man. Seeing how the Iroquois at their festivals could thank the
invisible aids or good spirits, and with them the trees, shrubs, and
plants, the springs and streams, the fire and wind, the sun, moon, and
stars—in a word, every object that ministered to their wants—we may
judge what real personality they attached to the myriad spirits which
gave animated life to the world around them.[459] The Gold Coast negro’s
generic name for a fetish-spirit is ‘wong;’ these aerial beings dwell in
temple-huts and consume sacrifices, enter into and inspire their
priests, cause health and sickness among men, and execute the behests of
the mighty Heaven-god. But part or all of them are connected with
material objects, and the negro can say, ‘In this river, or tree, or
amulet, there is a wong.’ But he more usually says, ‘This river, or
tree, or amulet is a wong.’ Thus among the wongs of the land are rivers,
lakes, and springs, districts of land, termite-hills, trees, crocodiles,
apes, snakes, elephants, birds.[460] In a word, his conceptions of
animating souls and presiding spirits as efficient causes of all nature
are two groups of ideas which we may well find it hard to distinguish,
for the sufficient reason that they are but varying developments of the
same fundamental animism.

In the doctrine of nature-spirits among nations which have reached a
higher grade of culture, are found at once traces of such primitive
thought, and of its change under new intellectual conditions. Knowing
the thoughts of rude Turanian tribes of Siberia as to pervading spirits
of nature, we are prepared to look for remodelled ideas of the same
class among a nation whose religion shows plain traces of evolution from
the low Turanian stage. The archaic system of manes-worship and
nature-worship, which survives as the state religion of China, fully
recognizes the worship of the numberless spirits which pervade the
universe. The belief in their personality is vouched for by the
sacrifices offered to them. ‘One must sacrifice to the spirits,’ says
Confucius, ‘as though they were present at the sacrifice.’ At the same
time, spirits were conceived as embodied in material objects. Confucius
says, again: ‘The action of the spirits, how perfect is it! Thou
perceivest it, and yet seest it not! Incorporated or immembered in
things, they cannot quit them. They cause men, clean and pure and better
clothed, to bring them sacrifice. Many, many, are there of them, as the
broad sea, as though they were above and right and left.’ Here are
traces of such a primitive doctrine of personal and embodied
nature-spirits as is still at home in the religion of rude Siberian
hordes. But it was natural that Chinese philosophers should find means
of refining into mere ideality these ruder animistic creations. Spirit
(shin), they tell us, is the fine or tender part in all the ten thousand
things; all that is extraordinary or supernatural is called spirit; the
unsearchable of the male and female principles is called spirit; he who
knows the way of passing away and coming to be, he knows the working of
spirit.[461]

The classic Greeks had inherited from their barbaric ancestors a
doctrine of the universe essentially similar to that of the North
American Indian, the West African, and the Siberian. We know, more
intimately than the heathen religion of our own land, the ancient Greek
scheme of nature-spirits impelling and directing by their personal power
and will the functions of the universe, the ancient Greek religion of
nature, developed by imagination, adorned by poetry, and consecrated by
faith. History records for our instruction, how out of the midst of this
splendid and honoured creed there were evolved the germs of the new
philosophy. Led by minuter insight and stricter reason, thoughtful
Greeks began the piecemeal supersession of the archaic scheme, and set
in movement the transformation of animistic into physical science, which
thence pervaded the whole cultured world. Such, in brief, is the history
of the doctrine of nature-spirits from first to last. Let us endeavour,
by classifying some of its principal special groups, to understand its
place in the history of the human intellect.

What causes volcanos? The Australians account for volcanic rocks by the
tradition that the sulky underground ‘ingna’ or demons made great fires
and threw up red-hot stones.[462] The Kamchadals say that just as they
themselves warm up their winter-houses, so the ‘kamuli’ or
mountain-spirits heat up the mountains in which they dwell, and fling
the brands out of the chimney.[463] The Nicaraguans offered human
sacrifices to Masaya or Popogatepec (Smoking-Mountain), by throwing the
bodies into the crater. It seems as though it were a controlling deity,
not the mountain itself, that they worshipped; for one reads of the
chiefs going to the crater, whence a hideous old naked woman came out
and gave them counsel and oracle; at the edge were placed earthen
vessels of food to please her, or to appease her when there was a storm
or earthquake.[464] Thus animism provided a theory of volcanoes, and so
it was likewise with whirlpools and rocks. In the Vei country in West
Africa, there is a dangerous rock on the Mafa river, which is never
passed without offering a tribute to the spirit of the flood—a leaf of
tobacco, a handful of rice, or a drink of rum.[465] An early missionary
account of a rock-demon worshipped by the Huron Indians will show with
what absolute personality savages can conceive such a being. In the
hollow of a certain sacred rock, it is related, dwells an ‘oki’ or
spirit who can give success to travellers, wherefore they put tobacco
into one of the cracks, and pray thus: ‘Demon who dwellest in this
place, behold tobacco I present to thee; help us, keep us from
shipwreck, defend us against our enemies, and vouchsafe that when we
have made a good trade, we may return safe and sound to our village.’
Father Marquette relates how, travelling on a river in the then little
known region of North America, he was told of a dreadful place to which
the canoe was just drawing near, where dwells a demon waiting to devour
such as dare to approach; this terrific manitu proved on arrival to be
some high rocks in the bend of the river, against which the current runs
violently.[466] Thus the missionary found in living belief among the
savage Indians the very thought which had so long before passed into the
classic tale of Skylla and Charybdis.

In those moments of the civilized man’s life when he casts off hard dull
science, and returns to childhood’s fancy, the world-old book of
animated nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come
back fresh to him, of the stream’s life that is so like his own; once
more he can see the rill leap down the hillside like a child, to wander
playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it
rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to
carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that water does, the poet’s
fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher,
and crops to the husbandman; it swells in fury and lays waste the land;
it grips the bather with chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable
grasp its drowning victim:[467]

                   “Tweed said to Till,
                           ‘What gars ye rin sae still?’
                   Till said to Tweed,
                           ‘Though ye rin wi’ speed,
                   And I rin slaw,
                           Yet, where ye drown ae man,
                   I drown twa.’”

What ethnography has to teach of that great element of the religion of
mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply
this—that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man; that to his
mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will; that the
water-spirits of primæval mythology are as souls which cause the water’s
rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that lastly man finds, in
the beings which with such power can work him weal and woe, deities with
a wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to be
prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts.

In Australia, special water-demons infest pools and watering-places. In
the native theory of disease and death, no personage is more prominent
than the water-spirit, which afflicts those who go into unlawful pools
or bathe at unlawful times, the creature which causes women to pine and
die, and whose very presence is death to the beholder, save to the
native doctors, who may visit the water-spirit’s subaqueous abode and
return with bleared eyes and wet clothes to tell the wonders of their
stay.[468] It would seem that creatures with such attributes come
naturally into the category of spiritual beings, but in such stories as
that of the bunyip living in the lakes and rivers and seen floating as
big as a calf, which carries off native women to his retreat below the
waters, there appears that confusion between the spiritual water-demon
and the material water-monster, which runs on into the midst of European
mythology in such conceptions as that of the water-kelpie and the
sea-serpent.[469] America gives cases of other principal animistic ideas
concerning water. The water has its own spirits, writes Cranz, among the
Greenlanders, so when they come to an untried spring, an angekok or the
oldest man must drink first, to free it from a harmful spirit.[470] ‘Who
makes this river flow?’ asks the Algonquin hunter in a medicine-song,
and his answer is, ‘The spirit, he makes this river flow.’ In any great
river, or lake, or cascade, there dwell such spirits, looked upon as
mighty manitus. Thus Carver mentions the habit of the Red Indians, when
they reached the shores of Lake Superior or the banks of the
Mississippi, or any other great body of water, to present to the spirit
who resides there some kind of offering; this he saw done by a Winnebago
chief who went with him to the Falls of St. Anthony. Franklin saw a
similar sacrifice made by an Indian, whose wife had been afflicted with
sickness by the water-spirits, and who accordingly to appease them tied
up in a small bundle a knife and a piece of tobacco and some other
trifling articles, and committed them to the rapids.[471] On the
river-bank, the Peruvians would scoop up a handful of water and drink
it, praying the river-deity to let them cross or to give them fish, and
they threw maize into the stream as a propitiatory offering; even to
this day the Indians of the Cordilleras perform the ceremonial sip
before they will pass a river on foot or horseback.[472] Africa displays
well the rites of water-worship. In the East, among the Wanika, every
spring has its spirit, to which oblations are made; in the West, in the
Akra district, lakes, ponds, and rivers received worship as local
deities. In the South, among the Kafirs, streams are venerated as
personal beings, or the abodes of personal deities, as when a man
crossing a river will ask leave of its spirit, or having crossed will
throw in a stone; or when the dwellers by a stream will sacrifice a
beast to it in time of drought, or, warned by illness in the tribe that
their river is angry, will cast into it a few handfuls of millet or the
entrails of a slaughtered ox.[473] Not less strongly marked are such
ideas among the Tatar races of the North. Thus the Ostyaks venerate the
river Ob, and when fish is scanty will hang a stone about a reindeer’s
neck and cast it in for a sacrifice. Among the Buraets, who are
professing Buddhists, the old worship may still be seen at the
picturesque little mountain lake of Ikeougoun, where they come to the
wooden temple on the shore to offer sacrifices of milk and butter and
the fat of the animals which they burn on the altars. So across in
Northern Europe, almost every Esthonian village has its sacred
sacrificial spring. The Esths could at times even see the churl with
blue and yellow stockings rise from the holy brook Wöhhanda, no doubt
that same spirit of the brook to whom in older days there were
sacrificed beasts and little children; in newer times, when a German
landowner dared to build a mill and dishonour the sacred water, there
came bad seasons that lasted year after year, and the country people
burned down the abominable thing.[474] As for the water-worship
prevailing among non-Aryan indigenes of British India, it seems to reach
its climax among the Bodo and Dhimal of the North-East, tribes to whom
the local rivers are the local deities,[475] so that men worship
according to their water-sheds, and the map is a pantheon.

Nor is such reverence strange to Aryan nations. To the modern Hindu,
looking as he still does on a river as a living personal being to be
adored and sworn by, the Ganges is no solitary water deity, but only the
first and most familiar of the long list of sacred streams.[476] Turn to
the classic world, and we but find the beliefs and rites of a lower
barbaric culture holding their place, consecrated by venerable antiquity
and glorified by new poetry and art. To the great Olympian assembly in
the halls of cloud-compelling Zeus, came the Rivers, all save Ocean, and
thither came the nymphs who dwell in lovely groves and at the springs of
streams, and in the grassy meads; and they sate upon the polished
seats:—

                ‘Οὔτε τις οὖν Ποταμῶν ἀπέην, νόσφ’ Ὠκεανοῖο,
                Οὔτ’ ἅρα Νυμφαών ταί τ’ ἄλσεα καλὰ νέμονται,
                Καὶ πηγὰς ποταμῶν, καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα.
                Ἐλθόντες δ’ ἐς δῶμα Διὸς νεφεληγερέταο,
                Ξεστῇς αἰθούσῃσιν ἐφίζανον, ἃσ Διὶ πατρὶ
                Ἤφαιστος ποίησεν ἰδυίῃσι πραπίδεσσιν.’

Even against Hephaistos the Fire-god, a River-god dared to stand
opposed, deep-eddying Xanthos, called of men Skamandros. He rushed down
to overwhelm Achilles and bury him in sand and slime, and though
Hephaistos prevailed against him with his flames, and forced him, with
the fish skurrying hither and thither in his boiling waves and the
willows scorched upon his banks, to rush on no more but stand, yet at
the word of white-armed Here, that it was not fit for mortals’ sake to
handle so roughly an immortal god, Hephaistos quenched his furious fire,
and the returning flood sped again along his channel:—

              ‘Ἤφαιστε, σχέο, τέκνον ἀγακλέες; οὐ γὰρ ἔοικεν
              Ἀθάνατον θεὸν ὧδε βροτῶν ἕνεκα στυφελίζειν.
              Ὣς ἔφαθ’·  Ἥφαιστος δὲ κατέσβεσε θεσπιδαὲς πῦρ·
              Ἄψορρον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα κατέσσυτο καλὰ ῥέεθρα.’

To beings thus conceived in personal divinity, full worship was given.
Odysseus invokes the river of Scheria; Skamandros had his priest and
Spercheios his grove; and sacrifice was done to the rival of Herakles,
the river-god Acheloos, eldest of the three thousand river-children of
old Okeanos.[477] Through the ages of the classic world, the river-gods
and the water-nymphs held their places, till within the bounds of
Christendom they came to be classed with ideal beings like them in the
mythology of the northern nations, the kindly sprites to whom offerings
were given at springs and lakes, and the treacherous nixes who entice
men to a watery death. In times of transition, the new Christian
authorities made protest against the old worship, passing laws to forbid
adoration and sacrifice to fountains—as when Duke Bretislav forbade the
still half-pagan country folk of Bohemia to offer libations and
sacrifice victims at springs,[478] and in England Ecgbert’s
Poenitentiale proscribed the like rites, ‘if any man vow or bring his
offerings to any well,’ ‘if one hold his vigils at any well.’[479] But
the old veneration was too strong to be put down, and with a varnish of
Christianity and sometimes the substitution of a saint’s name,
water-worship has held its own to our day. The Bohemians will go to pray
on the river-bank where a man has been drowned, and there they will cast
in an offering, a loaf of new bread and a pair of wax-candles. On
Christmas Eve they will put a spoonful of each dish on a plate, and
after supper throw the food into the well, with an appointed formula,
somewhat thus:—

                  ‘House-father gives thee greeting,
                  Thee by me entreating:
                  Springlet, share our feast of Yule,
                  But give us water to the full;
                  When the land is plagued with drought,
                  Drive it with thy well-spring out.’[480]

It well shows the unchanged survival of savage thought in modern
peasants’ minds, to find still in Slavonic lands the very same fear of
drinking a harmful spirit in the water, that has been noticed among the
Esquimaux. It is a sin for a Bulgarian not to throw some water out of
every bucket brought from the fountain; some elemental spirit might be
floating on the surface, and if not thrown out, might take up his abode
in the house, or enter into the body of some one drinking from the
vessel.[481] Elsewhere in Europe, the list of still existing water-rites
may be extended. The ancient lake-offerings of the South of France seem
not yet forgotten in La Lozère, the Bretons venerate as of old their
sacred springs, and Scotland and Ireland can show in parish after parish
the sites and even the actual survivals of such observance at the holy
wells. Perhaps Welshmen no longer offer cocks and hens to St. Tecla at
her sacred well and church of Llandegla, but Cornish folk still drop
into the old holy-wells offerings of pins, nails, and rags, expecting
from their waters cure for disease, and omens from their bubbles as to
health and marriage.[482]

The spirits of the tree and grove no less deserve our study for their
illustrations of man’s primitive animistic theory of nature. This is
remarkably displayed in that stage of thought where the individual tree
is regarded as a conscious personal being, and as such receives
adoration and sacrifice. Whether such a tree is looked on as inhabited,
like a man, by its own proper life or soul, or as possessed, like a
fetish, by some other spirit which has entered it and uses it for a
body, is often hard to determine. Shelley’s lines well express a
doubting conception familiar to old barbaric thought—

                 ‘Whether the sensitive plant, or that
                 Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
                 Ere its outward form had known decay,
                 Now felt this change, I cannot say.’

But this vagueness is yet again a proof of the principle which I have
confidently put forward here, that the conceptions of the inherent soul
and of the embodied spirit are but modifications of one and the same
deep-lying animistic thought. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe
in ‘hantu kayu,’ i.e. ‘tree-spirits,’ or ‘tree-demons,’ which frequent
every species of tree, and afflict men with diseases; some trees are
noted for the malignity of their demons.[483] Among the Dayaks of
Borneo, certain trees possessed by spirits must not be cut down; if a
missionary ventured to fell one, any death that happened afterwards
would naturally be set down to this crime.[484] The belief of certain
Malays of Sumatra is expressly stated, that certain venerable trees are
the residence, or rather the material frame, of spirits of the
woods.[485] In the Tonga Islands, we hear of natives laying offerings at
the foot of particular trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by
spirits.[486] So in America, the Ojibwa medicine-man has heard the tree
utter its complaint when wantonly cut down.[487] A curious and
suggestive description bearing on this point is given in Friar Roman
Pane’s account of the religion of the Antilles islanders, drawn up by
order of Columbus. Certain trees, he declares, were believed to send for
sorcerers, to whom they gave orders how to shape their trunks into
idols, and these ‘cemi’ being then installed in temple-huts, received
prayer and inspired their priests with oracles.[488] Africa shows as
well-defined examples. The negro woodman cuts down certain trees in fear
of the anger of their inhabiting demons, but he finds his way out of the
difficulty by a sacrifice to his own good genius, or, when he is giving
the first cuts to the great asorin-tree, and its indwelling spirit comes
out to chase him, he cunningly drops palm-oil on the ground, and makes
his escape while the spirit is licking it up.[489] A negro was once
worshipping a tree with an offering of food, when some one pointed out
to him that the tree did not eat; the negro answered, ‘O the tree is not
fetish, the fetish is a spirit and invisible, but he has descended into
this tree. Certainly he cannot devour our bodily food, but he enjoys its
spiritual part and leaves behind the bodily which we see.’[490]
Tree-worship is largely prevalent in Africa, and much of it may be of
this fully animistic kind; as where in Whidah Bosman says that ‘the
trees, which are the gods of the second rank of this country, are only
prayed to and presented with offerings in time of sickness, more
especially fevers, in order to restore the patients to health;’[491] or
where in Abyssinia the Gallas made pilgrimage from all quarters to their
sacred tree Wodanabe on the banks of the Hawash, worshipping it and
praying to it for riches, health, life, and every blessing.[492]

The position of tree-worship in Southern Asia in relation to Buddhism is
of particular interest. To this day there are districts of this region,
Buddhist or under strong Buddhist influence, where tree-worship is still
displayed with absolute clearness of theory and practice. Here in legend
a dryad is a being capable of marriage with a human hero, while in
actual fact a tree-deity is considered human enough to be pleased with
dolls set up to swing in the branches. The Talein of Burmah, before they
cut down a tree, offer prayers to its ‘kaluk’ (i.q., ‘kelah’), its
inhabiting spirit or soul. The Siamese offer cakes and rice to the
takhien-tree before they fell it, and believe the inhabiting nymphs or
mothers of trees to pass into guardian-spirits of the boats built of
their wood, so that they actually go on offering sacrifice to them in
this their new condition.[493] These people have indeed little to learn
from any other race, however savage, of the principles of the lower
animism. The question now arises, did such tree-worship belong to the
local religions among which Buddhism established itself? There is strong
evidence that this was the case. Philosophic Buddhism, as known to us by
its theological books, does not include trees among sentient beings
possessing mind, but it goes so far as to acknowledge the existence of
the ‘dewa’ or genius of a tree. Buddha, it is related, told a story of a
tree crying out to the brahman carpenter who was going to cut it down,
‘I have a word to say, hear my word!’ but then the teacher goes on to
explain that it was not really the tree that spoke, but a dewa dwelling
in it. Buddha himself was a tree-genius forty-three times in the course
of his transmigrations. Legend says that during one such existence, a
certain brahman used to pray for protection to the tree which Buddha was
attached to; but the transformed teacher reproved the tree-worshipper
for thus addressing himself to a senseless thing which hears and knows
nothing.[494] As for the famous Bo tree, its miraculous glories are not
confined to the ancient Buddhist annals; for its surviving descendant,
grown from the branch of the parent tree sent by King Asoka from India
to Ceylon in the 3rd century B.C., to this day receives the worship of
the pilgrims who come by thousands to do it honour, and offer prayer
before it. Beyond these hints and relics of the old worship, however,
Mr. Fergusson’s recent investigations, published in his ‘Tree and
Serpent Worship,’ have brought to light an ancient state of things which
the orthodox Buddhist literature gives little idea of. It appears from
the sculptures of the Sanchi tope in Central India, that in the Buddhism
of about the 1st century A.D., sacred trees had no small place as
objects of authorized worship. It is especially notable that the
representatives of indigenous race and religion in India, the Nagas,
characterized by their tutelary snakes issuing from their backs between
their shoulders and curving over their heads, and other tribes actually
drawn as human apes, are seen adoring the divine tree in the midst of
unquestionable Buddhist surroundings.[495] Tree-worship, even now well
marked among the indigenous tribes of India, was obviously not abolished
on the Buddhist conversion. The new philosophic religion seems to have
amalgamated, as new religions ever do, with older native thoughts and
rites. And it is quite consistent with the habits of the Buddhist
theologians and hagiologists, that when tree-worship was suppressed,
they should have slurred over the fact of its former prevalence, and
should even have used the recollection of it as a gibe against the
hostile Brahmans.

Conceptions like those of the lower races in character, and rivalling
them in vivacity, belong to the mythology of Greece and Rome. The
classic thought of the tree inhabited by a deity and uttering oracles,
is like that of other regions. Thus the sacred palm of Negra in Yemen,
whose demon was propitiated by prayer and sacrifice to give oracular
response,[496] or the tall oaks inhabited by the gods, where old
Slavonic people used to ask questions and hear the answers,[497] have
their analogue in the prophetic oak of Dodona, wherein dwelt the deity,
‘ναῖεν δ’ ἐνὶ πυθμένι φηγοῦ.’[498] The Homeric hymn to Aphrodite tells
of the tree-nymphs, long-lived yet not immortal—they grow with their
high-topped leafy pines and oaks upon the mountains, but when the lot of
death draws nigh, and the lovely trees are sapless, and the bark rots
away and the branches fall, then their spirits depart from the light of
the sun:—

             ‘Νύμφαι μιν θρέψουσιν ὀρεσκῷοι βαθύκολποι,
             αἵ τόδε ναιετάυσιν ὄρος μέγα τε ζάθεόν τε·
             αἵ ῥ’ οὔτε θνητοῖς οὔτ’ ἀθανάτοισιν ἕπονται·
             δηρὸν μὲν ζώουσι καὶ ἄμβροτον εἷδαρ ἔδουσι,
             καί τε μετ’ ἀθανάτοισι καλὸν χορὸν ἐρρώσαντο.
             τῇσι δὲ Σειληνοί τε καὶ εὔσκοπος Ἀργειφόντης
             μίσγοντ’ ἐν φιλότητι μυχῷ σπείων ἐροέντων.
             τῇσι δ’ ἅμ’ ἢ ἐλάται ἠὲ δρύς ὑψικάρηνοι
             γεινομένῃσιν ἔφυσαν ἐπὶ χθονὶ βωτιανείρῃ,
             καλαί, τηλεθάουσαι, ἐν οὔρεσιν ὑψηλοῖσιν·

             ἀλλ’ ὅτε κεν δὴ μοῖρα παρεστήκῃ θανάτοιο,
             ἀζάνεται μὲν πρῶτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ δένδρεα καλά,
             φλοιὸς δ’ ἀμφιπεριφθινύθει, πίπτουσι δ’ ἄπ’ ὄζοι,
             τῶν δὲ θ’ ὁμοῦ ψυχὴ λείπει φαός ἠελίοιο.’[499]

The hamadryad’s life is bound to her tree, she is hurt when it is
wounded, she cries when the axe threatens, she dies with the fallen
trunk:—

           ‘Non sine hamadryadis fato cadit arborea trabs.’[500]

How personal a creature the tree-nymph was to the classic mind, is shown
in legends like that of Paraibios, whose father, regardless of the
hamadryad’s entreaties, cut down her ancient trunk, and in himself and
in his offspring suffered her dire vengeance.[501] The ethnographic
student finds a curious interest in transformation-myths like Ovid’s,
keeping up as they do vestiges of philosophy of archaic type—Daphne
turned into the laurel that Apollo honours for her sake, the sorrowing
sisters of Phaethon changing into trees, yet still dropping blood and
crying for mercy when their shoots are torn.[502] Such episodes mediæval
poetry could still adapt, as in the pathless infernal forest whose
knotted dusk-leaved trees revealed their human animation to the
Florentine when he plucked a twig,

              ‘Allor porsi la mano un poco avante,
              E colsi un ramoscel da un gran pruno:
              E’ l tronco suo gridò: Perchè mi schiante?’[503]

or the myrtle to which Ruggiero tied his hippogriff, who tugged at the
poor trunk till it murmured and oped its mouth, and with doleful voice
told that it was Astolfo, enchanted by the wicked Alcina among her other
lovers,

        ‘D’ entrar o in fera o in fonte o in legno o in sasso.’[504]

If these seem to us now conceits over quaint for beauty, we need not
scruple to say so. They are not of Dante and Ariosto, they are sham
antiques from classic models. And if even the classic originals have
become unpleasing, we need not perhaps reproach ourselves with decline
of poetic taste. We have lost something, and the loss has spoiled our
appreciation of many an old poetic theme, yet it is not always our sense
of the beautiful that has dwindled, but the old animistic philosophy of
nature that is gone from us, dissipating from such fancies their
meaning, and with their meaning their loveliness. Still, if we look for
living men to whom trees are, as they were to our distant forefathers,
the habitations and embodiments of spirits, we shall not look in vain.
The peasant folklore of Europe still knows of willows that bleed and
weep and speak when hewn, of the fairy maiden that sits within the
fir-tree, of that old tree in Rugaard forest that must not be felled,
for an elf dwells within, of that old tree on the Heinzenberg near Zell,
which uttered its complaint when the woodman cut it down, for in it was
Our Lady, whose chapel now stands upon the spot.[505] One may still look
on where Franconian damsels go to a tree on St. Thomas’s Day, knock
thrice solemnly, and listen for the indwelling spirit to give answer by
raps from within, what manner of husbands they are to have.[506]

In the remarkable document of mythic cosmogony, preserved by Eusebius
under the alleged authorship of the Phœnician Sanchoniathon, is the
following passage: ‘But these first men consecrated the plants of the
earth, and judged them gods, and worshipped the things upon which they
themselves lived and their posterity, and all before them, and (to
these) they made libations and sacrifices.’[507] From examples such as
have been here reviewed, it seems that direct and absolute tree-worship
of this kind may indeed lie very wide and deep in the early history of
religion. But the whole tree-cultus of the world must by no means be
thrown indiscriminately into this one category. It is only on such
distinct evidence as has been here put forward, that a sacred tree may
be taken as having a spirit embodied in or attached to it. Beyond this
limit, there is a wider range of animistic conceptions connected with
tree and forest worship. The tree may be the spirit’s perch or shelter
or favourite haunt. Under this definition come the trees hung with
objects which are the receptacles of disease-spirits. As places of
spiritual resort, there is no real distinction between the sacred tree
and the sacred grove. The tree may serve as a scaffold or altar, at once
convenient and conspicuous, where offerings can be set out for some
spiritual being, who may be a tree-spirit, or perhaps the local deity,
living there just as a man might do who had his hut and owned his plot
of land around. The shelter of some single tree, or the solemn seclusion
of a forest grove, is a place of worship set apart by nature, of some
tribes the only temple, of many tribes perhaps the earliest. Lastly, the
tree may be merely a sacred object patronized by or associated with or
symbolizing some divinity, often one of those which we shall presently
notice as presiding over a whole species of trees or other things. How
all these conceptions, from actual embodiment or local residence or
visit of a demon or deity, down to mere ideal association, can blend
together, how hard it often is to distinguish them, and yet how in spite
of this confusion they conform to the animistic theology in which all
have their essential principles, a few examples will show better than
any theoretical comment.[508] Take the groups of malicious wood-fiends
so obviously devised to account for the mysterious influences that beset
the forest wanderer. In the Australian bush, demons whistle in the
branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the trunks to
seize the wayfarer; the lame demon leads astray the hunter in the
Brazilian forest; the Karen crossing a fever-haunted jungle shudders in
the grip of the spiteful ‘phi,’ and runs to lay an offering by the tree
he rested under last, from whose boughs the malaria-fiend came down upon
him; the negro of Senegambia seeks to pacify the long-haired tree-demons
that send diseases; the terrific cry of the wood-demon is heard in the
Finland forest; the baleful shapes of terror that glide at night through
our own woodland are familiar still to peasant and poet.[509] The North
American Indians of the Far West, entering the defiles of the Black
Mountains of Nebraska, will often hang offerings on the trees or place
them on the rocks, to propitiate the spirits and procure good weather
and hunting.[510] In South America, Mr. Darwin describes the Indians
offering their adorations by loud shouts when they came in sight of the
sacred tree standing solitary on a high part of the Pampas, a landmark
visible from afar. To this tree were hanging by threads numberless
offerings such as cigars, bread, meat, pieces of cloth, &c., down to the
mere thread pulled from his poncho by the poor wayfarer who had nothing
better to give. Men would pour libations of spirits and maté into a
certain hole, and smoke upwards to gratify Walleechu, and all around lay
the bleached bones of the horses slaughtered as sacrifices. All Indians
made their offerings here, that their horses might not tire, and that
they themselves might prosper. Mr. Darwin reasonably judges on this
evidence that it was to the deity Walleechu that the worship was paid,
the sacred tree being only his altar; but he mentions that the Gauchos
think the Indians consider the tree as the god itself, a good example of
the misunderstanding possible in such cases.[511] The New Zealanders
would hang an offering of food or a lock of hair on a branch at a
landing place, or near remarkable rocks or trees would throw a bunch of
rushes as an offering to the spirit dwelling there.[512] The Dayaks
fasten rags of their clothes on trees at cross roads, fearing for their
health if they neglect the custom;[513] the Macassar man halting to eat
in the forest will put a morsel of rice or fish on a leaf, and lay it on
a stone or stump.[514] The divinities of African tribes may dwell in
trees remarkable for size and age, or inhabit sacred groves where the
priest alone may enter.[515] Trees treated as idols by the Congo people,
who put calabashes of palm wine at their feet in case they should be
thirsty,[516] and amongst West African negro tribes farther north, trees
hung with rags by the passers-by, and the great baobabs pegged to hang
offerings to, and serving as shrines before which sheep are
sacrificed,[517] display well the rites of tree sacrifice, though
leaving undefined the precise relation conceived between deity and tree.

The forest theology that befits a race of hunters is dominant still
among Turanian tribes of Siberia, as of old it was across to Lapland.
Full well these tribes know the gods of the forest. The Yakuts hang on
any remarkably fine tree iron, brass, and other trinkets; they choose a
green spot shaded by a tree for their spring sacrifice of horses and
oxen, whose heads are set up in the boughs; they chant their
extemporised songs to the Spirit of the Forest, and hang for him on the
branches of the trees along the roadside offerings of horsehair, emblems
of their most valued possession. A clump of larches on a Siberian
steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a
Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur-coats, each set up
beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless
reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and
spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings
before the gods—such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the
stage when the contact of foreign civilization has begun by ornamenting
the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing.[518] A race
ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture,
kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In
Esthonian districts, during the last century, the traveller might often
see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing
inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house, and old memories
are handed down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast
was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an
offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the
worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back,
which stone he kissed thrice when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an
offering!’ It may well have been an indwelling tree-deity for whom this
worship was intended, for folklore shows that the Esths recognized such
a conception with the utmost distinctness; they have a tale of the
tree-elf who appeared in personal shape outside his crooked birch-tree,
whence he could be summoned by three knocks on the trunk and the
inquiry, ‘Is the crooked one at home?’ But also it may have been the
Wood-Father or Tree-King, or some other deity, who received sacrifice
and answered prayer beneath his sacred tree, as in a temple.[519] If,
again, we glance at the tree-and-grove worship of the non-Aryan
indigenous tribes of British India, we shall gather clear and
instructive hints of its inner significance. In the courtyard of a Bodo
house is planted the sacred ‘sij’ or euphorbia of Batho, the national
god, to whom under this representation the ‘deoshi’ or priest offers
prayer and kills a pig.[520] When the Khonds settle a new village, the
sacred cotton-tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is
placed the stone which enshrines the village deity.[521] Nowhere,
perhaps, in the world in these modern days is the original meaning of
the sacred grove more picturesquely shown than among the Mundas of
Chota-Nagpur, in whose settlements a sacred grove of sal-trees, a
remnant of the primæval forest spared by the woodman’s axe, is left as a
home for the spirits, and in this hallowed place offerings to the gods
are made.[522]

Here, then, among the lower races, is surely evidence enough to put on
their true historic footing the rites of tree and grove which are found
flourishing or surviving within the range of Semitic or Aryan culture.
Mentions in the Old Testament record the Canaanitish Ashera-worship, the
sacrifice under every green tree, the incense rising beneath oak and
willow and shady terebinth, rites whose obstinate revival proves how
deeply they were rooted in the old religion of the land.[523] The
evidence of these Biblical passages is corroborated by other evidence
from Semitic regions, as in the lines by Silius Italicus which mention
the prayer and sacrifice in the Numidian holy groves, and the records of
the council of Carthage which show that in the 5th century, an age after
Augustine’s time, it was still needful to urge that the relics of
idolatry in trees and groves should be done away.[524] From the more
precise descriptions which lie within the range of Aryan descent and
influence, examples may be drawn to illustrate every class of belief and
rite of the forest. Modern Hinduism is so largely derived from the
religions of the non-Aryan indigenes, that we may fairly explain thus a
considerable part of the tree-worship of modern India, as where in the
Birbhûm district of Bengal a great annual pilgrimage is made to a shrine
in a jungle, to give offerings of rice and money and sacrifice animals
to a certain ghost who dwells in a bela-tree.[525] In thoroughly Hindu
districts may be seen the pippala (Ficus religiosa) planted as the
village tree, the ‘chaityataru’ of Sanskrit literature, while the Hindu
in private life plants the banyan and other trees and worships them with
divine honours.[526] Greek and Roman mythology give perfect types not
only of the beings attached to individual trees, but of the dryads,
fauns, and satyrs living and roaming in the forest—creatures whose
analogues are our own elves and fairies of the woods. Above these
graceful fantastic beings are the higher deities who have trees for
shrines and groves for temples. Witness the description in Ovid’s story
of Erisichthon:—

             ‘And Ceres’ grove he ravaged with the axe,
             They say, and shame with iron the ancient glades.
             There stood a mighty oak of age-long strength,
             Festooned with garlands, bearing on its trunk
             Memorial tablets, proofs of helpful vows.
             Beneath, the dryads led their festive dance,
             And circled hand-in-hand the giant bole.’[527]

In more prosaic fashion, Cato instructs the woodman how to gain
indemnity for thinning a holy grove; he must offer a hog in sacrifice
with this prayer, ‘Be thou god or goddess to whom this grove is sacred,
permit me, by the expiation of this pig, and in order to restrain the
overgrowth of this wood, &c., &c.’[528] Slavonic lands had their groves
where burned the everlasting fire of Piorun the Heaven-god; the old
Prussians venerated the holy oak of Romowe, with its drapery and images
of the gods, standing in the midst of the sacred inviolate forest where
no twig might be broken nor beast slain; and so on down to the
elder-tree beneath which Pushkait was worshipped with offerings of bread
and beer.[529] The Keltic Heaven-god, whose image was a mighty oak, the
white-robed Druids climbing the sacred tree to cut the mistletoe, and
sacrificing the two white bulls beneath, are types from another national
group.[530] Teutonic descriptions begin with Tacitus, ‘Lucos ac nemora
consecrant, deorumque nominibus adpellant secretum illud, quod sola
reverentia vident,’ and the curious passage which describes the Semnones
entering the sacred grove in bonds, a homage to the deity that dwelt
there; many a century after, the Swedes were still holding solemn
sacrifice and hanging the carcases of the slaughtered beasts in the
grove hard by the temple of Upsal.[531] With Christianity comes a
crusade against the holy trees and groves. Boniface hews down in the
presence of the priest the huge oak of the Hessian Heaven-god, and
builds of the timber a chapel to St. Peter. Amator expostulated with the
hunters who hung the heads of wild beasts to the boughs of the sacred
pear-tree of Auxerre, ‘Hoc opus idololatriæ culturæ est, non christianæ
elegantissimæ disciplinæ;’ but this mild persuasion not availing, he
chopped it down and burned it. In spite of all such efforts, the old
religion of the tree and grove survived in Europe often in most pristine
form. Within the last two hundred years, there were old men in Gothland
who would ‘go to pray under a great tree, as their forefathers had done
in their time;’ and to this day the sacrificial rite of pouring milk and
beer over the roots of trees is said to be kept up on out-of-the-way
Swedish farms.[532] In Russia, the Lyeshy or wood-demon still protects
the birds and beasts in his domain, and drives his flocks of field-mice
and squirrels from forest to forest, when we should say they are
migrating. The hunter’s luck depends on his treatment of the
forest-spirit, wherefore he will leave him as a sacrifice the first game
he kills, or some smaller offering of bread or salted pancake on a
stump. Or if one falls ill on returning from the forest, it is known
that this is the Lyeshy’s doing, so the patient carries to the wood some
bread and salt in a clean rag, and leaving it with a prayer, comes home
cured.[533] Names like Holyoake and Holywood record our own old
memories of the holy trees and groves, memories long lingering in the
tenacious peasant mind; and it was a great and sacred linden-tree with
three stems, standing in the parish of Hvitaryd in South Sweden, which
with curious fitness gave a name to the family of Linnæus. Lastly,
Jakob Grimm even ventures to connect historically the ancient sacred
inviolate wood with the later royal forest, an ethnological argument
which would begin with the savage adoring the Spirit of the Forest, and
end with the modern landowner preserving his pheasants.[534]

To the modern educated world, few phenomena of the lower civilization
seem more pitiable than the spectacle of a man worshipping a beast. We
have learnt the lessons of Natural History at last thoroughly enough to
recognize our superiority to our ‘younger brothers,’ as the Red Indians
call them, the creatures whom it is our place not to adore but to
understand and use. By men at lower levels of culture, however, the
inferior animals are viewed with a very different eye. For various
motives, they have become objects of veneration ranking among the most
important in the lower ranges of religion. Yet I must here speak shortly
and slightly of Animal-worship, not as wanting in interest, but as
over-abounding in difficulty. Wishing rather to bring general principles
into view than to mass uninterpreted facts, all I can satisfactorily do
is to give some select examples from the various groups of evidence, so
as at once to display the more striking features of the subject, and to
trace the ancient ideas upward from the savage level far into the higher
civilization.

First and foremost, uncultured man seems capable of simply worshipping a
beast as beast, looking on it as possessed of power, courage, cunning,
beyond his own, and animated like a man by a soul which continues to
exist after bodily death, powerful as ever for good and harm. Then this
idea blends with the thought of the creature as being an incarnate
deity, seeing, hearing, and acting even at a distance, and continuing
its power after the death of the animal body to which the divine spirit
was attached. Thus the Kamchadals, in their simple veneration of all
things that could do them harm or good, worshipped the whales that could
overturn their boats, and the bears and wolves of whom they stood in
fear. The beasts, they thought, could understand their language, and
therefore they abstained from calling them by their names when they met
them, but propitiated them with certain appointed formulas.[535] Tribes
of Peru, says Garcilaso de la Vega, worshipped the fish and vicuñas that
provided them food, the monkeys for their cunning, the sparrowhawks for
their keen sight. The tiger and the bear were to them ferocious deities,
and mankind, mere strangers and intruders in the land, might well adore
these beings, its old inhabitants and lords.[536] How, indeed, can one
wonder that in direct and simple awe, the Philippine islanders, when
they saw an alligator, should have prayed him with great tenderness to
do them no harm, and to this end offered him of whatever they had in
their boats, casting it into the water.[537] Such rites display at least
a partial truth in the famous apophthegm which attributes to fear the
origin of religion: ‘Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.’[538] In
discussing the question of the souls of animals in a previous chapter,
instances were adduced of men seeking to appease by apologetic phrase
and rite the animals they killed.[539] It is instructive to observe how
naturally such personal intercourse between man and animal may pass into
full worship, when the creature is powerful or dangerous enough to claim
it. When the Stiêns of Kambodia asked pardon of the beast they killed,
and offered sacrifice in expiation, they expressly did so through fear
lest the creature’s disembodied soul should come and torment them.[540]
Yet, strange to say, even the worship of the animal as divine does not
prevent the propitiatory ceremony from passing into utter mockery. Thus
Charlevoix describes North American Indians who, when they had killed a
bear, would set up its head painted with many colours, and offer it
homage and praise while they performed the painful duty of feasting on
its body.[541] So among the Ainos, the indigenes of Yesso, the bear is a
great divinity. It is true they slay him when they can, but while they
are cutting him up they salute him with obeisances and fair speeches,
and set up his head outside the house to preserve them from
misfortune.[542] In Siberia, the Yakuts worship the bear in common with
the spirits of the forest, bowing toward his favourite haunts with
appropriate phrases of prose and verse, in praise of the bravery and
generosity of their ‘beloved uncle.’ Their kindred the Ostyaks swear in
the Russian courts of law on a bear’s head, for the bear, they say, is
all-knowing, and will slay them if they lie. This idea actually serves
the people as a philosophical, though one would say rather superfluous,
explanation of a whole class of accidents: when a hunter is killed by a
bear, it is considered that he must at some time have forsworn himself,
and now has met his doom. Yet these Ostyaks, when they have overcome and
slain their deity, will stuff its skin with hay, kick it, spit on it,
insult and mock it till they have satiated their hatred and revenge, and
are ready to set it up in a yurt as an object of worship.[543]

Whether an animal be worshipped as the receptacle or incarnation of an
indwelling divine soul or other deity, or as one of the myriad
representatives of the presiding god of its class, the case is included
under and explained by the general theory of fetish-worship already
discussed. Evidence which displays these two conceptions and their
blending is singularly perfect in the islands of the Pacific. In the
Georgian group, certain herons, kingfishers, and woodpeckers were held
sacred and fed on the sacrifices, with the distinct view that the
deities were embodied in the birds, and in this form came to eat the
offered food and give the oracular responses by their cries.[544] The
Tongans never killed certain birds, or the shark, whale, &c., as being
sacred shrines in which gods were in the habit of visiting earth; and if
they chanced in sailing to pass near a whale they would offer scented
oil or kava to him.[545] In the Fiji Islands, certain birds, fish,
plants, and some men, were supposed to have deities closely connected
with or residing in them. Thus the hawk, fowl, eel, shark, and nearly
every other animal became the shrine of some deity, which the worshipper
of that deity might not eat, so that some were even tabued from eating
human flesh, the shrine of their god being a man. Ndengei, the dull and
otiose supreme deity, had his shrine or incarnation in the serpent.[546]
Every Samoan islander had his tutelary deity or ‘aitu,’ appearing in
some animal, an eel, shark, dog, turtle, &c., which species became his
fetish, not to be slighted or injured or eaten, an offence which the
deity would avenge by entering the sinner’s body and generating his
proper incarnation within him till he died.[547] The ‘atua’ of the New
Zealander, corresponding with this in name, is a divine ancestral soul,
and is also apt to appear in the body of an animal.[548] If we pass to
Sumatra, we shall find that the veneration paid by the Malays to the
tiger, and their habit of apologizing to it when a trap is laid, is
connected with the idea of tigers being animated by the souls of
departed men.[549] In other districts of the world, one of the most
important cases connected with these is the worship paid by the North
American Indian to his medicine-animal, of which he kills one specimen
to preserve its skin, which thenceforth receives adoration and grants
protection as a fetish.[550] In South Africa, as has been already
mentioned, the Zulus hold that divine ancestral shades are embodied in
certain tame and harmless snakes, whom their human kinsfolk receive with
kindly respect and propitiate with food.[551] In West Africa, monkeys
near a grave-yard are supposed to be animated by the spirits of the
dead, and the general theory of sacred and worshipped crocodiles,
snakes, birds, bats, elephants, hyænas, leopards, &c., is divided
between the two great departments of the fetish-theory, in some cases
the creature being the actual embodiment or personation of the spirit,
and in other cases sacred to it or under its protection.[552] Hardly any
region of the world displays so perfectly as this the worship of
serpents as fetish-animals endowed with high spiritual qualities, to
kill one of whom would be an offence unpardonable. For a single
description of negro ophiolatry, may be cited Bosman’s description from
Whydah in the Bight of Benin; here the highest order of deities were a
kind of snakes which swarm in the villages, reigned over by that huge
chief monster, uppermost and greatest and as it were the grandfather of
all, who dwelt in his snake-house beneath a lofty tree, and there
received the royal offerings of meat and drink, cattle and money and
stuffs. So heartfelt was the veneration of the snakes, that the Dutchmen
made it a means of clearing their warehouses of tiresome visitors; as
Bosman says, ‘If we are ever tired with the natives of this country, and
would fain be rid of them, we need only speak ill of the snake, at which
they immediately stop their ears and run out of doors.’[553] Lastly,
among the Tatar tribes of Siberia, Castrén finds the explanation of the
veneration which the nomade pays to certain animals, in a distinct
fetish-theory which he thus sums up: ‘Can he also contrive to propitiate
the snake, bear, wolf, swan, and various other birds of the air and
beasts of the field, he has in them good protectors, for in them are
hidden mighty spirits.’[554]

In the lower levels of civilization the social institution known as
Totemism is of frequent occurrence. Its anthropological importance was
especially brought into notice by J. F. McLennan, whose views as to an
early totem-period of society have much influenced opinion since his
time.[555] The totemic tribe is divided into clans, the members of each
clan connecting themselves with, calling themselves by the name of, and
even deriving their mythic pedigree from some animal, plant, or thing,
but most often an animal; these totem-clans are exogamous, marriage not
being permissible within the clan, while permissible or obligatory
between clan and clan. Thus among the Ojibwa Indians of North America,
the names of such clan-animals, Bear, Wolf, Tortoise, Deer, Rabbit, &c.,
served to designate the intermarrying clans into which the tribes were
divided, Indians being actually spoken of as bears, wolves, &c., and the
figures of these animals indicating their clans in the native
picture-writing. The Ojibwa word for such a clan-name has passed into
English in the form ‘totem,’ and thus has become an accepted term among
anthropologists to denote similar clan-names customary over the world,
this system of dividing tribes being called Totemism. Unfortunately for
the study of the subject, John Long, the trader interpreter who
introduced the Ojibwa word totem into Europe in 1791, does not seem to
have grasped its meaning in the native law of marriage and clanship, but
to have confused the totem-animal of the clan with the patron or
guardian animal of the individual hunter, his manitu or ‘medicine.’[556]
Even when the North American totem-clans came to be better understood as
social institutions regulating marriage, the notion of the guardian
spirit still clung to them. Sir George Grey, who knew of the American
totem-clans from the ‘Archæologia Americana,’ put on record in 1841 a
list of exogamous classes in West Australia, and mentioned the opinion
frequently given by the natives as to the origin of these class-names,
that they were derived from some animal or vegetable being very common
in the district which the family inhabited, so that the name of this
animal or vegetable came to be applied to the family. This seems so far
valuable evidence, but Grey was evidently led by John Long’s mistaken
statement, which he quotes, to fall himself into the same confusion
between the tribal name and the patron animal or vegetable, the ‘kobong’
of his natives, which he regarded as a tribal totem.[557] In Mr. J. G.
Frazer’s valuable collection of information on totemism,[558] the use of
the self-contradictory term ‘individual totem’ has unfortunately tended
to perpetuate this confusion. In the present state of the problem of
totemism, it would be premature to discuss at length its development and
purpose. Mention may however be made of observations which tend to place
it on a new footing, as being distinctly related to the transmigration
of souls. In Melanesia men may say that after death they will reappear
for instance as sharks or bananas, and the family will acknowledge the
kinship by feeding the sharks and abstaining from the bananas. It is not
unreasonable that Dr. Codrington should suggest such practices as
throwing light on the origin of totemism.[559] The late investigations
of Spencer and Gillen, conducted with scrupulous care in an almost
untouched district of Central Australia, show totemism in the Arunta
tribe, not as the means of regulating the intermarriage of clans, but as
based on a native theory of the ancestry of the race, as descended from
the Alcheringa, quasi-human animal or vegetable ancestors, whose souls
are still reborn in human form in successive generations.[560] This
careful and definite account may be the starting-point of a new study.
Savages would be alive to the absurdity of naming clans after animals in
order to indicate a prohibition of marrying-in, opposed to the habit of
the animals themselves. Indeed, it seems more likely that such
animal-names may have commonly belonged to inbred clans, before the rule
of exogamy was developed. At present the plainest fact as to Totemism is
its historical position as shown by its immense geographical
distribution. Its presence in North America and Australia has been
noticed. It extends its organization through the forest-region of South
America from Guyana to Patagonia. Northward of Australia it is to be
traced among the more unchanged of the Malay populations, who underneath
foreign influence still keep remains of a totemic system like that of
the American tribes. Thence we follow the totem-clan into India, when it
appears among non-Aryan hill-tribes such as the Oraons and Mundas, who
have clans named after Eel, Hawk, Heron, and so on, and must not kill or
eat these creatures. North of the Himalaya it appears among Mongoloid
tribes in their native low cultured state, such as the Yakuts with their
intermarrying totem-clans Swan, Raven, and the like. In Africa totemism
appears in the Bantu district up to the West Coast. For example, the
Bechuana are divided into Bakuena, men of the crocodile; Batlapi, of the
fish; Balaung, of the lion; Bamorara, of the wild vine. A man does not
eat his tribe-animal, or clothe himself in its skin, and if he must kill
it as hurtful, the lion for instance, he asks pardon of it, and purifies
himself from the sacrilege. These few instances illustrate the
generalization that totemism in its complete form belongs to the savage
and early barbaric stages of culture, only partial remains or survivals
of it having lasted into the civilized period. Though appearing in all
other quarters of the globe, it is interesting to notice that there is
no distinct case of totemism found or recorded in Europe.[561]

The three motives of animal-worship which have been described, viz.,
direct worship of the animal for itself, indirect worship of it as a
fetish acted through by a deity, and veneration for it as a totem or
representative of a tribe-ancestor, no doubt account in no small measure
for the phenomena of Zoolatry among the lower races, due allowance being
also made for the effects of myth and symbolism, of which we may gain
frequent glimpses. Notwithstanding the obscurity and complexity of the
subject, a survey of Animal-worship as a whole may yet justify an
ethnographic view of its place in the history of civilization. If we
turn from its appearances among the less cultured races to notice the
shapes in which it has held its place among peoples advanced to the
stage of national organization and stereotyped religion, we shall find a
reasonable cause for its new position in the theory of development and
survival, whereby ideas at first belonging to savage theology have in
part continued to spread and solidify in their original manner, while in
part they have been changed to accommodate them to more advanced ideas,
or have been defended from the attacks of reason by being set up as
sacred mysteries. Ancient Egypt was a land of sacred cats and jackals
and hawks, whose mummies are among us to this day, but the reason of
whose worship was a subject too sacred for the Father of History to
discuss. Egyptian animal-worship seems to show, in a double line, traces
of a savage ancestry extending into ages lying far behind even the
remote antiquity of the Pyramids. Deities patronising special sacred
animals, incarnate in their bodies, or represented in their figures,
have nowhere better examples than the divine bull-dynasty of Apis, the
sacred hawks caged and fed in the temple of Horus, Thoth and his
cynocephalus and ibis, Hathor the cow and Sebek the crocodile. Moreover,
the local character of many of the sacred creatures, worshipped in
certain nomes yet killed and eaten with impunity elsewhere, fits
remarkably with that character of tribe-fetishes and deified totems with
which Mr. McLennan’s argument is concerned. See the men of Oxyrynchos
reverencing and sparing the fish oxyrynchos, and those of Latopolis
likewise worshipping the latos. At Apollinopolis men hated crocodiles
and never lost a chance of killing them, while the people of the
Arsinoite nome dressed geese and fish for these sacred creatures,
adorned them with necklaces and bracelets, and mummified them
sumptuously when they died.[562] In the modern world the most civilized
people among whom animal-worship vigorously survives, lie within the
range of Brahmanism, where the sacred animal, the deity incarnate in an
animal or invested with or symbolized by its shape, may to this day be
studied in clear example. The sacred cow is not merely to be spared, she
is as a deity worshipped in annual ceremony, daily perambulated and
bowed to by the pious Hindu, who offers her fresh grass and flowers;
Hanuman the monkey-god has his temples and his idols, and in him Siva is
incarnate, as Durga is in the jackal; the wise Ganesa wears the
elephant’s head; the divine king of birds, Garuda, is Vishnu’s vehicle;
the forms of fish, and boar, and tortoise, were assumed in those
avatar-legends of Vishnu which are at the intellectual level of the Red
Indian myths they so curiously resemble.[563] The conceptions which
underlie the Hindu creed of divine animals were not ill displayed by
that Hindu who, being shown the pictures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John with their respective man, lion, ox, and eagle, explained these
quite naturally and satisfactorily as the avatars or vehicles of the
four evangelists.

In Animal-worship, some of the most remarkable cases of development and
survival belong to a class from which striking instances have already
been taken. Serpent-worship unfortunately fell years ago into the hands
of speculative writers, who mixed it up with occult philosophies,
Druidical mysteries, and that portentous nonsense called the ‘Arkite
Symbolism,’ till now sober students hear the very name of Ophiolatry
with a shiver. Yet it is in itself a rational and instructive subject of
inquiry, especially notable for its width of range in mythology and
religion. We may set out among the lower races, with such accounts as
those of the Red Indian’s reverence to the rattlesnake, as grandfather
and king of snakes, as a divine protector able to give fair winds or
cause tempests;[564] or of the worship of great snakes among the tribes
of Peru before they received the religion of the Incas, as to whom an
old author says, ‘They adore the demon when he presents himself to them
in the figure of some beast or serpent, and talks with them.’[565]
Thenceforth such examples of direct Ophiolatry may be traced on into
classic and barbaric Europe; the great serpent which defended the
citadel of Athens and enjoyed its monthly honey-cakes;[566] the Roman
genius loci appearing in the form of the snake (Nullus enim locus sine
genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur);[567] the old Prussian
serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes;[568] the
golden viper adored by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it in his hands
and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice.[569] To this day,
Europe has not forgotten in nursery tales or more serious belief the
snake that comes with its golden crown and drinks milk out of the
child’s porringer; the house-snake, tame and kindly but seldom seen,
that cares for the cows and the children and gives omens of a death in
the family; the pair of household snakes which have a mystic connexion
of life and death with the husband and housewife themselves.[570]
Serpent-worship, apparently of the directest sort, was prominent in the
indigenous religions of Southern Asia. It now even appears to have
maintained no mean place in early Indian Buddhism, for the sculptures of
the Sanchi tope show scenes of adoration of the five-headed snake-deity
in his temple, performed by a race of serpent-worshippers, figuratively
represented with snakes growing from their shoulders, and whose raja
himself has a five-headed snake arching hood-wise over his head. Here,
moreover, the totem-theory comes into contact with ophiolatry. The
Sanskrit name of the snake, ‘nâga,’ becomes also the accepted
designation of its adorers, and thus mythological interpretation has to
reduce to reasonable sense legends of serpent-races who turn out to be
simply serpent-worshippers, tribes who have from the divine reptiles at
once their generic name of Nâgas, and with it their imagined ancestral
descent from serpents.[571] In different ways, these Nâga tribes of
South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the Snake Indians of
America, and on the other of the Ophiogenes or Serpent-race of the
Troad, kindred of the vipers whose bite they could cure by touch, and
descendants of an ancient hero transformed into a snake.[572]

Serpents hold a prominent place in the religions of the world, as the
incarnations, shrines, or symbols of high deities. Such were the
rattlesnake worshipped in the Natchez temple of the Sun, and the snake
belonging in name and figure to the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl;[573] the
snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for itself but
for its indwelling deity;[574] the snake kept and fed with milk in the
temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos;[575] the serpent-symbol of the
healing deity Asklepios, who abode in or manifested himself through the
huge tame snakes kept in his temples[576] (it is doubtful whether this
had any original connexion with the adoption of the snake, from its
renewal by casting its old slough, as the accepted emblem of new life or
immortality in later symbolism); and lastly, the Phœnician serpent with
its tail in its mouth, symbol of the world and of the Heaven-god Taaut,
in its original meaning perhaps a mythic world-snake like the
Scandinavian Midgard-worm, but in the changed fancy of later ages
adapted into an emblem of eternity.[577] It scarcely seems proved that
savage races, in all their mystic contemplations of the serpent, ever
developed out of their own minds the idea, to us so familiar, of
adopting it as a personification of evil.[578] In ancient times, we may
ascribe this character perhaps to the monster whose well-known form is
to be seen on the mummy-cases, the Apophis-serpent of the Egyptian
Hades;[579] and it unequivocally belongs to the destroying serpent of
the Zarathustrians, Azhi Dahâka,[580] a figure which bears so remarkable
a relation to that of the Semitic serpent of Eden, which may possibly
stand in historical connexion with it. A wondrous blending of the
ancient rites of Ophiolatry with mystic conceptions of Gnosticism
appears in the cultus which tradition (in truth or slander) declares the
semi-Christian sect of Ophites to have rendered to their tame snake,
enticing it out of its chest to coil round the sacramental bread, and
worshipping it as representing the great king from heaven who in the
beginning gave to the man and woman the knowledge of the mysteries.[581]
Thus the extreme types of religious veneration, from the soberest
matter-of-fact to the dreamiest mysticism, find their places in the
worship of animals.[582]

Hitherto in the study of animistic doctrine, our attention has been
turned especially to those minor spirits whose functions concern the
closer and narrower detail of man’s life and its surroundings. In
passing thence to the consideration of divine beings whose functions
have a wider scope, the transition may be well made through a special
group. An acute remark of Auguste Comte’s calls attention to an
important process of theological thought, which we may here endeavour to
bring as clearly as possible before our minds. In his ‘Philosophie
Positive,’ he defines deities proper as differing by their general and
abstract character from pure fetishes (i.e., animated objects), the
humble fetish governing but a single object from which it is
inseparable, while the gods administer a special order of phenomena at
once in different bodies. When, he continues, the similar vegetation of
the different oaks of a forest led to a theological generalization from
their common phenomena, the abstract being thus produced was no longer
the fetish of a single tree, but became the god of the forest; here,
then, is the intellectual passage from fetishism to polytheism, reduced
to the inevitable preponderance of specific over individual ideas.[583]
Now this observation of Comte’s may be more immediately applied to a
class of divine beings which may be accurately called species-deities.
It is highly suggestive to study the crude attempts of barbaric theology
to account for the uniformity observed in large classes of objects, by
making this generalization from individual to specific ideas. To explain
the existence of what we call a species, they would refer it to a common
ancestral stock, or to an original archetype, or to a species-deity, or
they combined these conceptions. For such speculations, classes of
plants and animals offered perhaps an early and certainly an easy
subject. The uniformity of each kind not only suggested a common
parentage, but also the notion that creatures so wanting in
individuality, with qualities so measured out as it were by line and
rule, might not be independent arbitrary agents, but mere copies from a
common model, or mere instruments used by controlling deities. Thus in
Polynesia, as has been just mentioned, certain species of animals were
considered as incarnations of certain deities, and among the Samoans it
appears that the question as to the individuality of such creatures was
actually asked and answered. If, for instance, a village god were
accustomed to appear as an owl, and one of his votaries found a dead owl
by the roadside, he would mourn over the sacred bird and bury it with
much ceremony, but the god himself would not be thought to be dead, for
he remains incarnate in all existing owls.[584] According to Father
Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a
curious parallel to this notion. They worshipped the ‘panes’ bird, which
seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of
each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood,
and the body burned. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was
the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this,
that the same bird was slain by each of the villages.[585] Among the
comparatively cultured Peruvians, Acosta describes another theory of
celestial archetypes. Speaking of star-deities, he says that shepherds
venerated a certain star called Sheep, another star called Tiger
protected men from tigers, &c.: ‘And generally, of all the animals and
birds there are on the earth, they believed that a like one lived in
heaven, in whose charge were their procreation and increase, and thus
they accounted of divers stars, such as that they call Chacana, and
Topatorca, and Mamana, and Mizco, and Miquiquiray, and other such, so
that in a manner it appears that they were drawing towards the dogma of
the Platonic ideas.’[586] The North American Indians also have
speculated as to the common ancestors or deities of species. One
missionary notes down their idea as he found it in 1634. ‘They say,
moreover, that all the animals of each species have an elder brother,
who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and
this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. The elder brother
of the beavers, they told me, is perhaps as large as our cabin.’ Another
early account is that each species of animals has its archetype in the
land of souls; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all
oxen, which animates all oxen.[587] Here, again, occurs a noteworthy
correspondence with the ideas of a distant race. In Buyán, the island
paradise of Russian myth, there are to be found the Snake older than all
snakes, and the prophetic Raven, elder brother of all ravens, and the
Bird, the largest and oldest of all birds, with iron beak and copper
claws, and the Mother of Bees, eldest among bees.[588] Morgan’s
comparatively modern account of the Iroquois mentions their belief in a
spirit of each species of trees and plants, as of oak, hemlock, maple,
whortleberry, raspberry, spearmint, tobacco; most objects of nature
being thus under the care of protecting spirits.[589] The doctrine of
such species-deities is perhaps nowhere more definitely stated than by
Castrén in his ‘Finnish Mythology.’ In his description of the Siberian
nature-worship, the lowest level is exemplified by the Samoyeds, whose
direct worship of natural objects for themselves may perhaps indicate
the original religious condition of the whole Turanian race. But the
doctrine of the comparatively cultured heathen Finns was at a different
stage. Here every object in nature has a ‘haltia,’ a guardian deity or
genius, a being which was its creator and thenceforth became attached to
it. These deities or genii are, however, not bound to each single
transitory object, but are free personal beings which have movement,
form, body, and soul. Their existence in no wise depends on the
existence of the individual objects, for although no object in nature is
without its guardian deity, this deity extends to the whole race or
species. This ash-tree, this stone, this house, has indeed its
particular ‘haltia,’ yet these same ‘haltiat’ concern themselves with
other ash-trees, stones, and houses, of which the individuals may
perish, but their presiding genii live on in the species.[590] It seems
as though some similar view ran through the doctrine of more civilized
races, as in the well-known Egyptian and Greek examples where whole
species of animals, plants, or things, stand as symbolic of, and as
protected by, particular deities. The thought appears with most perfect
clearness in the Rabbinical philosophy which apportions to each of the
2100 species, of plants for instance, a presiding angel in heaven, and
assigns this as the motive of the Levitical prohibition of mixtures
among animals and plants.[591] The interesting likeness pointed out by
Father Acosta between these crude theological conceptions and the
civilized philosophical conceptions which have replaced them, was again
brought into view in the last century by the President De Brosses, in
comparing the Red Indians’ archetypes of species with the Platonic
archetypal ideas.[592] As for animals and plants, the desire of
naturalists to ascend to primal unity to some extent finds satisfaction
in a theory tracing each species to an origin in a single pair. And
though this is out of the question with inanimate objects, our language
seems in suggestive metaphor to lay hold on the same thought, when we
say of a dozen similar swords, or garments, or chairs, that they have
the same pattern (patronus, as it were father), whereby they were
shaped from their matter (materia, or mother substance).

Footnote 388:

  F. R. Nixon, ‘Cruise of the Beacon’; Bonwick, p. 182.

Footnote 389:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 228.

Footnote 390:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 41. ‘Indian Tribes,’ vol. iii. p.
  327. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 191. See also J. G. Müller, p. 175. (Antilles
  Islanders); Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 482.

Footnote 391:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 90. See also Cross, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. Amer.
  Or. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 315; Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 239.

Footnote 392:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 114, 182, &c.

Footnote 393:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 218, 388; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171.

Footnote 394:

  Philo, De Gigant. I. iv.

Footnote 395:

  Iamblichus, ii.

Footnote 396:

  Collected passages in Calmet, ‘Diss. sur les Esprits’; Horst,
  ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. ii. p. 263, &c.; vol. vi. p. 49, &c.; see
  Migne’s Dictionaries.

Footnote 397:

  Calmet, ‘Dissertation sur les Esprits,’ vol. i. ch. xlviii.

Footnote 398:

  Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite au XIXme Siècle,’ pp. 295, 341.

Footnote 399:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 331.

Footnote 400:

  Backhouse, ‘Australia,’ p. 555; Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 337.

Footnote 401:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 211.

Footnote 402:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 226.

Footnote 403:

  Rochefort, ‘Antilles,’ p. 419.

Footnote 404:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1193; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 332; St. Clair and
  Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 59; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 122; Bastian,
  ‘Psychologie,’ p. 103; Brand, vol. iii. p. 279. The mare in
  nightmare means spirit, elf, or nymph; compare Anglo-Sax. wudumære
  (wood-mare) = echo.

Footnote 405:

  ‘Vita del Amm. Christoforo Colombo,’ ch. xiii.; and ‘Life of Colon,’
  in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 84.

Footnote 406:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 149, 389. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p.
  119.

Footnote 407:

  Högström, ‘Lapmark,’ ch. xi.

Footnote 408:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 151. See also Borri, ‘Cochin-China,’ in
  Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 823.

Footnote 409:

  Augustin. ‘De Civ. Dei,’ xv. 23: ‘Et quoniam creberrima fama est,
  multique se expertos, vel ab eis qui experti essent, de quorum fide
  dubitandum non esset, audisse confirmant, Silvanos et Faunos, quos
  vulgo incubos vocant, improbos sæpe extitisse mulieribus, et earum
  appetisse ac peregisse concubitum; et quosdam dæmones, quos Dusios
  Galli nuncupant, hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare et efficere;
  plures talesque asseverant, ut hoc negare impudentiæ videatur; non
  hinc aliquid audeo definire, utrum aliqui spiritus ... possint etiam
  hanc pati libidinem; ut ... sentientibus feminibus misceantur.’ See
  also Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 449, 479; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 332;
  Cockayne, ‘Leechdoms of Early England,’ vol. i. p. xxxviii., vol. ii.
  p. 345.

Footnote 410:

  The ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ was published about 1489. See on the general
  subject, Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. vi.; Ennemoser, ‘Magic,’
  vol. ii.; Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c. p. 256; Lecky, ‘Hist, of Rationalism,’
  vol. i.

Footnote 411:

  Burton, ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ iii. 2. ‘Unum dixero, non opinari me
  ullo retro ævo tantam copiam Satyrorum, et salacium istorum Geniorum
  se ostendisse, quantum nunc quotidianæ narrationes, et judiciales
  sententiæ proferunt.’

Footnote 412:

  J. R. Forster, ‘Observations during Voyage round World,’ p. 543.

Footnote 413:

  Cross, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 312.

Footnote 414:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

Footnote 415:

  J. V. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ &c., p. 24; Calmet, ‘Diss.
  sur les Esprits,’ vol. ii.; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1048, &c.; St. Clair and
  Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 49; see Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p.
  409.

Footnote 416:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 268. Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 246, &c.

Footnote 417:

  Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 302. See also Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p.
  180.

Footnote 418:

  Southey, ‘Brazil,’ part i. p. 238. See also Rochefort, p. 418; J. G.
  Müller, p. 273 (Caribs); Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 301; Schoolcraft,
  ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 140.

Footnote 419:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. pp. 270, 298; vol. ii. ‘N. S.’ p. 117.

Footnote 420:

  Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 531; Colebrook in ‘As. Res.’
  vol. vii. p. 274.

Footnote 421:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 77.

Footnote 422:

  Hylten-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ vol. i. p. 191; Atkinson,
  ‘Glossary of Cleveland Dial.’ p. 597. (Prof. Liebrecht, in
  ‘Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,’ vol. v. 1873, p. 99, adds comparison of
  the still usual German custom of keeping a light burning in the
  lying-in room till the child is baptized (Wuttke, 2nd ed. No. 583),
  and the similar ancient Roman practice whence the goddess Candelifera
  had her name (note to 2nd. ed.).)

Footnote 423:

  Martin, ‘Western Islands,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 612.

Footnote 424:

  St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 44.

Footnote 425:

  Rituale Romanum; Benedictio Candelarum. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’
  vol. i. p. 46.

Footnote 426:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267, see 296.

Footnote 427:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 100.

Footnote 428:

  Homer, Odyss, xvi. 160.

Footnote 429:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 632.

Footnote 430:

  Eisenmenger, ‘Judenthum,’ part i. p. 872. Lane, ‘Thousand and One
  Nights,’ vol. ii. p. 56.

Footnote 431:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 162. Other localities in ‘Journ. Ind.
  Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 333.

Footnote 432:

  Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix. p. 795. The dirge is
  given above, p. 32.

Footnote 433:

  De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 46.

Footnote 434:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 79.

Footnote 435:

  Tractat. Berachoth.

Footnote 436:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 420, 1117; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 54.
  See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 325; Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ vol. ii.
  p. 355.

Footnote 437:

  Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p. 193. See Boecler, ‘Ehsten
  Abergl.’ p. 73.

Footnote 438:

  Tertullian, De Carne Christi, vi.; Adv. Marcion, ii.; Origen, De
  Princip. i. 7. See Horst, l.c. Calmet, ‘Dissertation,’ vol. i. ch.
  xlvi.

Footnote 439:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 217. See Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton,
  vol. xvi. p. 402.

Footnote 440:

  Pallas, ‘Reisen,’ vol. i. p. 360.

Footnote 441:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1212; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 119; see
  Hyltén-Cavallius, part i. p. 178 (Sweden).

Footnote 442:

  Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Australia,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 240.

Footnote 443:

  Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 182.

Footnote 444:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 268; Egede, p. 187.

Footnote 445:

  Molina, ‘Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 86.

Footnote 446:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 416, 429; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’
  pp. 171, 217.

Footnote 447:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 182; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 387; Steinhauser,
  l.c. p. 134. Compare Callaway, p. 327, &c.

Footnote 448:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 77.

Footnote 449:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 275.

Footnote 450:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 829; Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ part i. p. 92;
  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 247.

Footnote 451:

  Menander, 205, in Clement. Stromat.; Xenophon, Memor. Socr.; Plato,
  Apol. Socr. &c. See Plotin. Ennead. iii. 4; Porphyr. Plotin.

Footnote 452:

  Paulus Diaconus: ‘Genium appellant Deum, qui vim obtineret rerum
  omnium generandarum.’ Censorin. de Die Natali, 3: ‘Eundem esse
  genium et larem, multi veteres memoriæ prodiderunt.’ Tibull. Eleg. i.
  2, 7; Ovid. Trist. iii. 13, 18, v. 5, 10; Horat. Epist. ii. 1, 140,
  Od. iv. 11, 7. Appian. de Bellis Parth. p. 156. Tertullian, Apol.
  xxiii.

Footnote 453:

  Serv. in Virg. Æn. vi. 743: ‘Cum nascimur, duos genios sortimur: unus
  hortatur ad bona, alter depravat ad mala, quibus assistentibus post
  mortem aut asserimur in meliorem vitam, aut condemnamur in
  deteriorem.’ Horat. Epist. ii. 187; Valer. Max. i. 7; Plutarch,
  Brutus. See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.;’ Smith’s ‘Dic. of Biog. & Myth.’
  s.v. ‘genius.’

Footnote 454:

  Acta Sanctorum Bolland.: S. Francisca Romana ix. Mart. Calmet,
  ‘Dissertation,’ ch. iv. xxx.; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 140,
  347, vol. iii. p. 10; Wright, ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory,’ p. 33.

Footnote 455:

  Rochholz, p. 93.

Footnote 456:

  Bull, ‘Sermons,’ 2nd ed. London, 1714, vol. ii. p. 506.

Footnote 457:

  Swedenborg, ‘True Christian Religion,’ p. 380. See also A. J. Davis,
  ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse,’ p. 38.

Footnote 458:

  D. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 7.

Footnote 459:

  L. H. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 64. Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p.
  107. See Schoolcraft, ‘Tribes,’ vol. iii. p. 337.

Footnote 460:

  Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ in ‘Magazin der Evang. Missionen,’
  Basel, 1856; No. 2, p. 127, &c.

Footnote 461:

  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 44.

Footnote 462:

  Oldfield, ‘Abor. of Austr.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 232.

Footnote 463:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ pp. 47, 265.

Footnote 464:

  Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ in Ternaux-Compans, part xiv. pp. 132, 160.
  Compare Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. ii. p. 169.

Footnote 465:

  Creswick, ‘Veys,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 359. See Du Chaillu,
  ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 106.

Footnote 466:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 108. Long’s Exp. vol. i. p. 46.
  See Loskiel, ‘Indians of N. A.’ part i. p. 45.

Footnote 467:

  For details of the belief in water-spirits as the cause of drowning,
  see ante, vol. i. p. 109.

Footnote 468:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 328; Eyre, vol. ii. p. 362;
  Grey, vol. ii. p. 339; Bastian, ‘Vorstellungen von Wasser und Feuer,’
  in ‘Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,’ vol. i. (contains a general
  collection of details as to water-worship).

Footnote 469:

  Compare John Morgan, ‘Life of William Buckley’; Bonwick, p. 203;
  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 48, with Forbes Leslie, Brand, &c.

Footnote 470:

  Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267.

Footnote 471:

  Tanner, ‘Narr.’ p. 341; Carver, ‘Travels,’ p. 383; Franklin, ‘Journey
  to Polar Sea,’ vol. ii. p. 245; Lubbock, ‘Origin of Civilization,’ pp.
  213-20 (contains details as to water-worship); see Brinton, p. 124.

Footnote 472:

  Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Ant.’ p. 161; Garcilaso de la Vega,
  ‘Comm. Real.’ i. 10. See also J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 258,
  260, 282.

Footnote 473:

  Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 198; Steinhauser, l.c. p. 131; Villault in Astley,
  vol. i. p. 668; Backhouse, ‘Afr.’ p. 230; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol.
  i. p. 90; Bastian, l.c.

Footnote 474:

  Castrén, ‘Vorlesungen über die Altaischen Völker,’ p. 114. ‘Finn.
  Myth.’ p. 70. Atkinson, ‘Siberia,’ p. 444. Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergläub.
  Gebräuche,’ ed. Kreutzwald, p. 6.

Footnote 475:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 164; Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal.’ p. 184. See
  also Lubbock, l.c.; Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i.
  p. 163, vol. ii. p. 497.

Footnote 476:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 206, &c.

Footnote 477:

  Homer, Il. xx. xxi. See Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi,’ pp. 190, 345,
  &c., &c.

Footnote 478:

  Cosmas, book iii. p. 197, ‘superstitiosas institutiones, quas villani
  adhuc semipagani in Pentecosten tertia sive quarta feria observabant
  offerentes libamina super fontes mactabant victimas et dæmonibus
  immolabant.’

Footnote 479:

  Poenitentiale Ecgberti, ii. 22, ‘gif hwilc man his ælmessan gehâte
  oththe bringe to hwilcon wylle;’ iv. 19, ‘gif hwâ his wæccan æt ænigum
  wylle hæbbe.’ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 549, &c. See Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend
  och Wirdarne,’ part i. pp. 131, 171 (Sweden).

Footnote 480:

  Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen und Mähren,’ p. 43, &c. Hanusch,
  ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 291, &c. Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 139,
  &c.

Footnote 481:

  St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 46. Similar ideas in Grohmann, p.
  44. Eisenmenger, ‘Entd. Judenthum,’ part i. p. 426.

Footnote 482:

  Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., p. 158. Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. ii. p. 366, &c.
  Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. 2nd Series,’ p. 40, &c. Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races
  of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 156, &c.

Footnote 483:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 307.

Footnote 484:

  Beeker, ‘Dyaks,’ in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 111.

Footnote 485:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 301.

Footnote 486:

  S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 127.

Footnote 487:

  Bastian, ‘Der Baum in vergleichender Ethnologie,’ in Lazarus and
  Steinthal’s ‘Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,’ &c., vol. v. 1868.

Footnote 488:

  Chr. Colombo, ch. xix.; and in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 489:

  Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ pp. 205, 243.

Footnote 490:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 188.

Footnote 491:

  Bosman, letter 19, and in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 500.

Footnote 492:

  Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 77; Prichard, ‘N. H. of Man,’ p. 290; Waitz, vol.
  ii. p. 518. See also Merolla, ‘Congo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 236.

Footnote 493:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. pp. 457, 461, vol. iii. pp. 187,
  251, 289, 497. For details of tree-worship from other Asiatic
  districts, see Ainsworth, ‘Yezidis,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 23;
  Jno. Wilson, ‘Parsi Religion,’ p. 262.

Footnote 494:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 100, 443.

Footnote 495:

  Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ pl. xxiv. xxvi. &c.

Footnote 496:

  Tabary in Bastian, l.c. p. 295.

Footnote 497:

  Hartknoch, ‘Alt. und Neues Preussen,’ part i. ch. v.

Footnote 498:

  See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclopedie.’ Homer. Odyss. xiv. 327, xix. 296.

Footnote 499:

  Hymn. Homer. Aphrod. 257.

Footnote 500:

  Ausonii Idyll. De Histor. 7.

Footnote 501:

  Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 476. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’
  vol. iii. p. 57.

Footnote 502:

  Ovid. Metamm. i. 452, ii. 345, xi. 67.

Footnote 503:

  Dante, ‘Divina Commedia,’ ‘Inferno,’ canto xiii.

Footnote 504:

  Ariosto, ‘Orlando Furioso,’ canto vi.

Footnote 505:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 615, &c. Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ l.c. p. 297; Hanusch,
  ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 313.

Footnote 506:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 57, see 183.

Footnote 507:

  Euseb. ‘Præp. Evang.’ i. 10.

Footnote 508:

  Further details as to tree-worship in Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ &c., here
  cited; Lubbock, ‘Origin of Civilization,’ p. 206, &c.; Fergusson,
  ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ &c.

Footnote 509:

  Bastian, ‘Der Baum,’ l.c. &c.

Footnote 510:

  Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. viii.

Footnote 511:

  Darwin, ‘Journal,’ p. 68.

Footnote 512:

  Polack, ‘New Z.’ vol. ii. p. 6; Taylor, p. 171, see 99.

Footnote 513:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 89.

Footnote 514:

  Wallace, ‘Eastern Archipelago,’ vol. i. p. 338.

Footnote 515:

  Prichard, ‘Nat. Hist. of Man,’ p. 531.

Footnote 516:

  Merolla in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 236.

Footnote 517:

  Lubbock, p. 193; Bastian, l.c.; Park, ‘Travels,’ vol. i. pp. 64, 106.

Footnote 518:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86, &c., 191, &c.; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’
  vol. i. p. 363; Simpson, ‘Journey,’ vol. ii. p. 261.

Footnote 519:

  Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergläubische Gebräuche,’ &c., ed. Kreutzwald, pp.
  2, 112, 146.

Footnote 520:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 165, 173.

Footnote 521:

  Macpherson, p. 61.

Footnote 522:

  Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 34. Bastian, ‘Oestl.
  Asien.’ vol. i. p. 134, vol. iii. p. 252.

Footnote 523:

  Deut. xii. 3; xvi. 21. Judges vi. 25. 1 Kings xiv. 23; xv. 13; xviii.
  19. 2 Kings xvii. 10; xxiii. 4. Is. lvii. 5. Jerem. xvii. 2. Ezek. vi.
  13; xx. 28. Hos. iv. 13, &c., &c.

Footnote 524:

  Sil. Ital. Punica, iii. 675, 690. Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. i.
  For further evidence as to Semitic tree-and-grove worship, see Movers,
  ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 560, &c.

Footnote 525:

  Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ pp. 131, 194.

Footnote 526:

  Boehtlingk and Roth, s.v. ‘chaityataru.’ Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p.
  204.

Footnote 527:

  Ovid. Metamm. viii. 741.

Footnote 528:

  Cato de Re Rustica, 139; Plin. xvii. 47.

Footnote 529:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 98, 229. Hartknoch, part i. ch. v. vii.;
  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 67.

Footnote 530:

  Maxim. Tyr. viii.; Plin. xvi. 95.

Footnote 531:

  Tacit. Germania, 9, 39, &c.; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 66.

Footnote 532:

  Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ part i. p. 142.

Footnote 533:

  Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 153, see 238.

Footnote 534:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 62, &c.

Footnote 535:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 276.

Footnote 536:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comentarios Reales,’ i. ch. ix. &c.

Footnote 537:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 303.

Footnote 538:

  Petron. Arb. Fragm.; Statius, iii. Theb. 661.

Footnote 539:

  See ante, ch. xi.

Footnote 540:

  Mouhot, ‘Indo-China,’ vol. i. p. 252.

Footnote 541:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v. p. 443.

Footnote 542:

  W. M. Wood in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 36.

Footnote 543:

  Simpson, ‘Journey,’ vol. ii. p. 269; Erman, ‘Siberia,’ vol. i. p. 492;
  Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 456; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv.
  p. 590.

Footnote 544:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 336.

Footnote 545:

  Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 126; Mariner, vol. ii. p. 106.

Footnote 546:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 217, &c.

Footnote 547:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 238.

Footnote 548:

  Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ ch. iv.

Footnote 549:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 292.

Footnote 550:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 40; Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i.
  p. 36; Schoolcraft, ‘Tribes,’ part i. p. 34, part v. p. 652; Waitz,
  vol. iii. p. 190.

Footnote 551:

  See ante, p. 8; Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 196.

Footnote 552:

  Steinhauser, ‘Religion des Negers,’ l.c. p. 133. J. L. Wilson, ‘W.
  Afr.’ pp. 210, 218. Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xv.

Footnote 553:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter 19; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 499. See
  Burton, ‘Dahome,’ ch. iv., xvii. An account of the Vaudoux
  serpent-worship still carried on among the negroes of Hayti, in
  ‘Lippincott’s Magazine,’ Philadelphia, March, 1870.

Footnote 554:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 196, see 228.

Footnote 555:

  J. F. McLennan in ‘Fortnightly Review,’ 1869-70; reprinted in ‘Studies
  in Ancient History,’ 2nd Series, pp. 117, 491.

Footnote 556:

  John Long, ‘Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter,’ London,
  1791, p. 86. See pp. 233, 411 of present volume.

Footnote 557:

  Grey, ‘Journals of Expeditions in N. W. & W. Australia,’ vol. ii. pp.
  225-9; ‘Archæologia Americana,’ vol. ii. p. 109.

Footnote 558:

  J. G. Frazer, ‘Totemism,’ p. 53; ‘Golden Bough,’ 2nd ed. vol. iii. pp.
  419, 423.

Footnote 559:

  Codrington, ‘Melanesians,’ pp. 32-3, 170.

Footnote 560:

  Spencer and Gillen, ‘Native Tribes of Central Australia,’ 1899, pp.
  73, 121.

Footnote 561:

  General references in J. F. McLennan, ‘Studies in Ancient History;’ J.
  G. Frazer, ‘Totemism.’

Footnote 562:

  Herod. ii.; Plutarch, De Iside & Osiride; Strabo, xvii. 1; Wilkinson,
  ‘Ancient Eg.,’ edited by Birch, vol. iii.; Bunsen, 2nd Edition, with
  notes by Birch, vol. i.

Footnote 563:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 195, &c.

Footnote 564:

  Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 231; Brinton, p. 108, &c.

Footnote 565:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comentarios Reales,’ i. 9.

Footnote 566:

  Herodot. viii. 41.

Footnote 567:

  Servius ad Æn. v. 95.

Footnote 568:

  Hartknoch, ‘Preussen,’ part i. pp. 143, 162.

Footnote 569:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 648.

Footnote 570:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 650. Rochholz, ‘Deutscher Glaube,’ &c., vol. i. p.
  146. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 644. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben
  aus Böhmen,’ &c., p. 78. Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ p. 175.

Footnote 571:

  Fergusson ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ p. 55, &c., pl. xxiv. McLennan
  l.c. p. 563, &c.

Footnote 572:

  Strabo, xiii. 1, 14.

Footnote 573:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 62, 585.

Footnote 574:

  J. B. Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xiv.

Footnote 575:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 217.

Footnote 576:

  Pausan. ii. 28; Ælian, xvi. 39. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.
  ii. p. 734.

Footnote 577:

  Macrob. Saturnal. i. 9. Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 500.

Footnote 578:

  Details such as in Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part i. pp. 38, 414,
  may be ascribed to Christian intercourse. See Brinton, p. 121.

Footnote 579:

  Lepsius, ‘Todtenbuch,’ and Birch’s transl. in Bunsen’s ‘Egypt,’ vol.
  v.

Footnote 580:

  Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol. i. p. 66, vol. iii. p. lix.

Footnote 581:

  Epiphan. Adv. Hæres. xxxvii. Tertullian. De Præscript. contra
  Hæreticos, 47.

Footnote 582:

  Further collections of evidence relating to Zoolatry in general may be
  found in Bastian, ‘Das Thier in seiner mythologischen Bedeutung,’ in
  Bastian and Hartmann’s ‘Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,’ vol. i., Meiners,
  ‘Geschichte der Religionen,’ vol. i.

Footnote 583:

  Comte, ‘Philosophie Positive,’ vol. v. p. 101.

Footnote 584:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 242.

Footnote 585:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 105.

Footnote 586:

  Acosta, ‘Historia de las Indias,’ book v. c. iv.; Rivero & Tschudi,
  pp. 161, 179; J. G. Müller, p. 365.

Footnote 587:

  Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 13.
  Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages,’ vol. i. p. 370. See also Waitz, vol.
  iii. p. 194; Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 327.

Footnote 588:

  Ralston, ‘Songs of the Russian People,’ p. 375. The Slavonic myth of
  Buyán with its dripping oak and the snake Garafena lying beneath, is
  obviously connected with the Scandinavian myth of the dripping ash,
  Yggdrasill, the snake Nidhögg below, and the two Swans of the
  Urdharfount, parents of all swans.

Footnote 589:

  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 162.

Footnote 590:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 106, 160, 189, &c.

Footnote 591:

  Eisenmenger, ‘Judenthum,’ part ii. p. 376; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.
  iii. p. 194.

Footnote 592:

  De Brosses, ‘Dieux Fétiches,’ p. 58.

ANIMISM (continued).

    Higher Deities of Polytheism—Human characteristics applied
    to Deity—Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy—Polytheism: its
    course of development in lower and higher Culture—Principles
    of its investigation; classification of Deities according
    to central conceptions of their significance and
    function—Heaven-god—Rain-god—Thunder-god—Wind
    gods—Earth-god—Water-god—Sea-god—Fire-god—Sun-god—Moon-god.

Surveying the religions of the world and studying the descriptions of
deity among race after race, we may recur to old polemical terms in
order to define a dominant idea of theology at large. Man so habitually
ascribes to his deities human shape, human passions, human nature, that
we may declare him an Anthropomorphite, an Anthropopathite, and (to
complete the series) an Anthropophysite. In this state of religious
thought, prevailing as it does through so immense a range among mankind,
one of the strongest confirmations may be found of the theory here
advanced concerning the development of Animism. This theory that the
conception of the human soul is the very ‘fons et origo’ of the
conceptions of spirit and deity in general, has been already vouched for
by the fact of human souls being held to pass into the characters of
good and evil demons, and to ascend to the rank of deities. But beyond
this, as we consider the nature of the great gods of the nations, in
whom the vastest functions of the universe are vested, it will still be
apparent that these mighty deities are modelled on human souls, that in
great measure their feeling and sympathy, their character and habit,
their will and action, even their material and form, display throughout
their adaptations, exaggerations and distortions, characteristics shaped
upon those of the human spirit. The key to investigation of the Dii
Majorum Gentium of the world is the reflex of humanity, and as we behold
their figures in their proper districts of theology, memory ever brings
back the Psalmist’s words, ‘Thou thoughtest I was altogether as
thyself.’

The higher deities of Polytheism have their places in the general
animistic system of mankind. Among nation after nation it is still clear
how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became
the model on which divine society and government were shaped. As chiefs
and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser spirits.
They differ from the souls and minor spiritual beings which we have as
yet chiefly considered, but the difference is rather of rank than of
nature. They are personal spirits, reigning over personal spirits. Above
the disembodied souls and manes, the local genii of rocks and fountains
and trees, the host of good and evil demons, and the rest of the
spiritual commonality, stand these mightier deities, whose influence is
less confined to local or individual interests, and who, as it pleases
them, can act directly within their vast domain, or control and operate
through the lower beings of their kind, their servants, agents, or
mediators. The great gods of Polytheism, numerous and elaborately
defined in the theology of the cultured world, do not however make their
earliest appearance there. In the religions of the lower races their
principal types were already cast, and thenceforward, for many an age of
progressing or relapsing culture, it became the work of poet and priest,
legend-monger and historian, theologian and philosopher, to develop and
renew, to degrade and abolish, the mighty lords of the Pantheon.

With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of religion
is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the
spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe. In the
lists, it is true, there are set down great deities, good or evil, who
probably came in from modern Christian missionary teaching, or otherwise
by contact with foreign religions. It is often difficult to distinguish
from these the true local gods, animistic figures of native meaning and
origin. Among the following polytheistic systems, examples may be found
of such combinations, with the complex theological problems they
suggest. Among the Australians, above the swarming souls,
nature-spirits, demons, there stand out mythic figures of higher
divinity; Nguk-wonga, the Spirit of the Waters; Biam, who gives
ceremonial songs and causes disease, and is perhaps the same as Baiame
the creator; Nambajandi and Warrugura, lords of heaven and the nether
world.[593] In South America, if we look into the theology of the Manaos
(whose name is well known in the famous legend of El Dorado and the
golden city of Manoa), we see Mauari and Saraua, who may be called the
Good and Evil Spirit, and beside the latter the two Gamainhas, Spirits
of the Waters and the Forest.[594] In North America the description of a
solemn Algonquin sacrifice introduces a list of twelve dominant manitus
or gods; first the Great Manitu in heaven, then the Sun, Moon, Earth,
Fire, Water, the House-god, the Indian corn, and the four Winds or
Cardinal Points.[595] The Polynesian’s crowd of manes, and the lower
ranks of deities of earth, sea, and air, stand below the great gods of
Peace and War, Oro and Tane the national deities of Tahiti and Huahine,
Raitubu the Sky-producer, Hina who aided in the work of forming the
world, her father Taaroa, the uncreate Creator who dwells in
Heaven.[596] Among the Land Dayaks of Borneo, the commonalty of spirits
consists of the souls of the departed, and of such beings as dwell in
the noble old forests on the tops of lofty hills, or such as hover about
villages and devour the stores of rice; above these are Tapa, creator
and preserver of man, and Iang, who taught the Dayaks their religion,
Jirong, whose function is the birth and death of men, and Tenabi, who
made, and still causes to flourish, the earth and all things therein
save the human race.[597] In West Africa, an example may be taken from
the theology of the Slave Coast, a systematic scheme of all nature as
moved and quickened by spirits, kindly or hostile to mankind. These
spirits dwell in field and wood, mountain and valley; they live in air
and water; multitudes of them have been human souls, such ghosts hover
about the graves and near the living, and have influence with the
under-gods, whom they worship; among these ‘edrõ’ are the patron-deities
of men and families and tribes; through these subordinate beings works
the highest god, Mawu. The missionary who describes this negro hierarchy
quite simply sees in it Satan and his Angels.[598] In Asia, the
Samoyed’s little spirits that are bound to his little fetishes, and the
little elves of wood and stream, have greater beings above them, the
Forest-Spirit, the River-Spirit, the Sun and Moon, the Evil Spirit and
the Good Spirit above all.[599] The countless host of the local gods of
the Khonds pervade the world, rule the functions of nature, and control
the life of men, and these have their chiefs; above them rank the
deified souls of men who have become tutelary gods of tribes; above
these are the six great gods, the Rain-god, the goddess of Firstfruits,
the god of Increase, the god of Hunting, the iron god of War, the god of
Boundaries, with which group stands also the Judge of the Dead, and
above all other gods, the Sun-god and Creator Boora Pennu, and his wife
the mighty Earth-goddess, Tari Pennu.[600] The Spanish conquerors found
in Mexico a complex and systematic hierarchy of spiritual beings;
numberless were the little deities who had their worship in house and
lane, grove and temple, and from these the worshipper could pass to gods
of flowers or of pulque, of hunters and goldsmiths, and then to the
great deities of the nation and the world, the figures which the
mythologist knows so well, Centeotl the Earth-goddess, Tlaloc the
Water-god, Huitzilopochtli the War-god, Mictlanteuctli the Lord of
Hades, Tonatiuh and Metztli the Sun and Moon.[601] Thus, starting from
the theology of savage tribes, the student arrives at the polytheistic
hierarchies of the Aryan nations. In ancient Greece, the
cloud-compelling Heaven-god reigns over such deities as the god of War
and the goddess of Love, the Sun-god and the Moon-goddess, the Fire-god
and the ruler of the Under-world, the Winds and Rivers, the nymphs of
wood and well and forest.[602] In modern India, Brahma-Vishnu-Siva reign
pre-eminent over a series of divinities, heterogeneous and often obscure
in nature, but among whom stand out in clear meaning and purpose such
figures as Indra of Heaven and Sûrya of the Sun, Agni of the Fire,
Pavana of the Winds and Varuna of the Waters, Yama lord of the
Under-world, Kâma god of Love and Kârttikeya of War, Panchânana who
gives epilepsy and Manasâ who preserves from snake-bites, the divine
Rivers, and below these the ranks of nymphs, elves, demons, ministering
spirits, of heaven and earth—Gandharvas, Apsaras, Siddhas, Asuras,
Bhûtas, Râkshasas.[603]

The systematic comparison of polytheistic religions has been of late
years worked with admirable results. These have been due to the adoption
of comparatively exact methods, as where the ancient Aryan deities of
the Veda have been brought into connexion with those of the Homeric
poems, in some cases as clearly as where we Englishmen can study in the
Scandinavian Edda the old gods of our own race, whose names stand in
local names on the map of England, and serve as counters to reckon our
days of the week. Yet it need scarcely be said that to compare in full
detail the deities even of closely connected nations, and à fortiori
those of tribes not united in language and history, is still a difficult
and unsatisfactory task. The old-fashioned identifications of the gods
and heroes of different nations admitted most illusory evidence. Some
had little more ground than similar-sounding names, as when the Hindu
Brahma and Prajâpati were discovered to be the Hebrew Abraham and
Japhet, and when even Sir William Jones identified Woden with Buddha.
With not much more stringency, it is still often taken as matter of
course that the Keltic Beal, whose bealtines correspond with a whole
class of bonfire-customs among several branches of the Aryan race, is
the Bel or the Baal of the Semitic cultus. Unfortunately, classical
scholarship at the Renaissance started the subject on an unsound
footing, by accepting the Greek deities with the mystified shapes and
perverted names they had assumed in Latin literature. That there was a
partial soundness in such comparisons, as in identifying Zeus and
Jupiter, Hestia and Vesta, made the plan all the more misleading when
Kronos came to figure as Saturn, Poseidon as Neptune, Athene as Minerva.
To judge by example of the possible results of comparative theology
worked on such principles, Thoth being identified with Hermes, Hermes
with Mercury, and Mercury with Woden, there comes to pass the absurd
transition from the Egyptian ibis-headed divine scribe of the gods, to
the Teutonic heaven-dwelling driver of the raging tempest. It is not in
this loose fashion that the mental processes are to be sought out, which
led nations to arrange so similarly and yet so diversely their array of
deities.

A twofold perplexity besets the soberest investigator on this ground,
caused by the modification of deities by development at home and
adoption from abroad. Even among the lower races, gods of long
traditional legend and worship acquire a mixed and complex personality.
The mythologist who seeks to ascertain the precise definition of the Red
Indian Michabu in his various characters of Heaven-god and Water-god,
Creator of the Earth and first ancestor of Man, or who examines the
personality of the Polynesian Maui in his relation to Sun, lord of
Heaven or Hades, first Man, and South Sea Island hero, will sympathize
with the Semitic or Aryan student bewildered among the heterogeneous
attributes of Baal and Astarte, Herakles and Athene. Sir William Jones
scarcely overstated the perplexity of the problem in the following
remarkable forecast delivered more than a century ago, in the first
anniversary discourse before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, at a time
when glimpses of the relation of the Hindu to the Greek Pantheon were
opening into a new broad view of comparative theology in his mind. ‘We
must not be surprised,’ he says, ‘at finding, on a close examination,
that the characters of all the Pagan deities, male and female, melt into
each other and at last into one or two; for it seems a well-founded
opinion, that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses in ancient Rome, and
modern Váránes [Benares] mean only the powers of nature, and principally
those of the Sun, expressed in a variety of ways and by a multitude of
fanciful names.’ As to the travelling of gods from country to country,
and the changes they are apt to suffer on the road, we may judge by
examples of what has happened within our knowledge. It is not merely
that one nation borrows a god from another with its proper figure and
attributes and rites, as where in Rome the worshipper of the Sun might
take his choice whether he would adore in the temple of the Greek
Apollo, the Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Mithra, or the Syrian
Elagabalus. The intercourse of races can produce quainter results than
this. Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu
and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down
among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi the
Earth-god (Arabic jin  demon, Sanskrit bhûmi  earth); incense is burnt
to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god) who intercedes with Pirman the supreme
invisible deity above the sky (Brahma?); the Moslem Allah Táala, with
his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in the Hinduized
characters of creator and destroyer of all things; and while the spirits
worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of ‘dewa’ or deity,
Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of the
stone-worshipper, that he will give to his sacred boulder the title of a
Prophet Mohammed.[604] If we would have examples nearer home, we may
trace the evil demon Aeshma Daeva of the ancient Persian religion
becoming the Asmodeus of the book of Tobit, afterwards to find a place
in the devilry of the middle ages, and to end his career as the Diable
Boiteux of Le Sage. Even the Aztec war-god Huitzilopochtli may be found
figuring as the demon Vizlipuzli in the popular drama of Doctor Faustus.

In ethnographic comparisons of the religions of mankind, unless there is
evidence of direct relation between gods belonging to two peoples, the
safe and reasonable principle is to limit the identification of deities
to the attributes they have in common. Thus it is proper to compare the
Dendid of the White Nile with the Aryan Indra, in so far as both are
Heaven-gods and Rain-gods; the Aztec Tonatiuh with the Greek Apollo, in
so far as both are Sun-gods; the Australian Baiame with the Scandinavian
Thor, in so far as both are Thunder-gods. The present purpose of
displaying Polytheism as a department of Animism does not require that
elaborate comparison of systems which would be in place in a manual of
the religions of the world. The great gods may be scientifically ranged
and treated according to their fundamental ideas, the strongly-marked
and intelligible conceptions which, under names often obscure and
personalities often mixed and mystified, they stand to represent. It is
enough to show the similarity of principle on which the theologic mind
of the lower races shaped those old familiar types of deity, with which
our first acquaintance was gained in the pantheon of classic mythology.
It will be observed that not all, but the principal figures, belong to
strict Nature-worship. These may be here first surveyed. They are Heaven
and Earth, Rain and Thunder, Water and Sea, Fire and Sun and Moon,
worshipped either directly for themselves, or as animated by their
special deities, or these deities are more fully set apart and adored in
anthropomorphic shape—a group of conceptions distinctly and throughout
based on the principles of savage fetishism. True, the great Nature-gods
are huge in strength and far-reaching in influence, but this is because
the natural objects they belong to are immense in size or range of
action, pre-eminent and predominant among lesser fetishes, though still
fetishes themselves.

In the religion of the North American Indians, the Heaven-god displays
perfectly the gradual blending of the material sky itself with its
personal deity. In the early times of French colonization, Father
Brebeuf mentions the Hurons addressing themselves to the earth, rivers,
lakes, and dangerous rocks, but above all to heaven, believing that it
is all animated, and some powerful demon dwells therein. He describes
them as speaking directly to heaven by its personal name ‘Aronhiaté!’
Thus when they throw tobacco into the fire as sacrifice, if it is Heaven
they address, they say ‘Aronhiaté! (Heaven!) behold my sacrifice, have
pity on me, aid me!’ They have recourse to Heaven in almost all their
necessities, and respect this great body above all creatures, remarking
in it particularly something divine. They imagine in the sky an ‘oki,’
i.e. demon or power, which rules the seasons of the year and controls
the winds and waves. They dread its anger, calling it to witness when
they make some important promise or treaty, saying, Heaven hears what we
do this day, and fearing chastisement should their word be broken. One
of their renowned sorcerers said, Heaven will be angry if men mock him;
when they cry every day to Heaven, Aronhiaté! yet give him nothing, he
will avenge himself. Etymology again suggests the divine sky as the
inner meaning of the Iroquois supreme deity, Taronhiawagon the
‘sky-comer’ or ‘sky-holder,’ who had his festival about the winter
solstice, who brought the ancestral race out of the mountain, taught
them hunting, marriage, and religion, gave them corn and beans, squashes
and potatoes and tobacco, and guided them on their migrations as they
spread over the land. Among the North American tribes, not only does the
conception of the personal divine Heaven thus seem the fundamental idea
of the Heaven-god, but it may expand under Christian influence into a
yet more general thought of divinity in the Great Spirit in Heaven.[605]
In South Africa, the Zulus speak of the Heaven as a person, ascribing to
it the power of exercising a will, and they also speak of a Lord of
Heaven, whose wrath they deprecate during a thunderstorm. In the native
legends of the Zulu princess in the country of the Half-Men, the captive
maiden expostulates personally with the Sky, for only acting in an
ordinary way, and not in the way she wishes, to destroy her enemies:—

           ‘Listen, yon heaven. Attend; mayoya, listen.
           Listen, heaven. It does not thunder with loud thunder.
           It thunders in an undertone. What is it doing?
           It thunders to produce rain and change of season.’

Thereupon the clouds gather tumultuously; the princess sings again and
it thunders terribly, and the Heaven kills the Half-Men round about her,
but she is left unharmed.[606] West Africa is another district where the
Heaven-god reigns, in whose attributes may be traced the transition from
the direct conception of the personal sky to that of the supreme
creative deity. Thus in Bonny, one word serves for god, heaven, cloud;
and in Aquapim, Yankupong is at once the highest god and the weather. Of
this latter deity, the Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by
Riis, ‘The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and uncertain, and
often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world
(sorro) which lies beyond human reach; and hence the same word is used
also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.’[607] The same
transition from the divine sky to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in
the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed’s mind scarcely if at
all separates the visible personal Heaven from the divinity united with
it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the
cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same
original nature; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the
bearer of the Firmament, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds,
the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs.[608] So far as the
evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the
record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of
the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in
personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Universe.
The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity; they may say that
his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked,
that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests
himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight,
penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly
away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history
still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven.[609]

With such evidence perfectly accords the history of the Heaven-god among
our Indo-European race. This being, adored in ancient Aryan religion,
was—

              ‘... the whole circle of the heavens, for him
              A sensitive existence, and a God,
              With lifted hands invoked, and songs of praise.’

The evidence of language to this effect has been set forth with extreme
clearness by Professor Max Müller. In the first stage, the Sanskrit Dyu
(Dyaus), the bright sky, is taken in a sense so direct that it expresses
the idea of day, and the storms are spoken of as going about in it;
while Greek and Latin rival this distinctness in such terms as ἔνδιος,
‘in the open air,’ εὔδιος, ‘well-skyed, calm,’ sub divo, ‘in the open
air,’ sub Jove frigido, ‘under the cold sky,’ and that graphic
description by Ennius of the bright firmament, Jove whom all invoke:—

          ‘Aspice hoc sublime candens, quem invocant omnes Jovem.’

In the second stage, Dyaus pitar, Heaven-father, stands in the Veda as
consort of Prithivî mâtar, Earth-mother, ranked high or highest among
the bright gods. To the Greek he is Ζεὺς πατήρ, the Heaven-father, Zeus
the All-seer, the Cloud-compeller, King of Gods and Men. As Max Müller
writes: ‘There was nothing that could be told of the sky that was not in
some form or other ascribed to Zeus. It was Zeus who rained, who
thundered, who snowed, who hailed, who sent the lightning, who gathered
the clouds, who let loose the winds, who held the rainbow. It is Zeus
who orders the days and nights, the months, seasons, and years. It is he
who watches over the fields, who sends rich harvests, and who tends the
flocks. Like the sky, Zeus dwells on the highest mountains; like the
sky, Zeus embraces the earth; like the sky, Zeus is eternal, unchanging,
the highest god. For good and for evil, Zeus the sky and Zeus the god
are wedded together in the Greek mind, language triumphing over thought,
tradition over religion.’ The same Aryan Heaven-father is Jupiter, in
that original name and nature which he bore in Rome long before they
arrayed him in the borrowed garments of Greek myth, and adapted him to
the ideas of classic philosophy.[610] Thus, in nation after nation, took
place the great religious development by which the Father-Heaven became
the Father in Heaven.

The Rain-god is most often the Heaven-god exercising a special function,
though sometimes taking a more distinctly individual form, or blending
in characteristics with a general Water-god. In East Central Africa, the
spirit of an old chief dwelling on a cloudy mountain-top may receive the
worship of his votaries and send down the refreshing showers in answer
to their prayers; among the Damaras the highest deity is Omakuru the
Rain-giver, who dwells in the far North; while to the negro of West
Africa the Heaven-god is the rain-giver, and may pass in name into the
rain itself.[611] Pachacamac, the Peruvian world-creator, has set the
Rain-goddess to pour waters over the land, and send down hail and
snow.[612] The Aztec Tlaloc was no doubt originally a Heaven-god, for he
holds the thunder and lightning, but he has taken especially the
attributes of Water-god and Rain-god; and so in Nicaragua the Rain-god
Quiateot (Aztec quiahuitl  rain, teotl  god) to whom children were
sacrificed to bring rain, shows his larger celestial nature by being
also sender of thunder and lightning.[613] The Rain-god of the Khonds is
Pidzu Pennu, whom the priests and elders propitiate with eggs and arrack
and rice and a sheep, and invoke with quaintly pathetic prayers. They
tell him how, if he will not give water, the land must remain
unploughed, the seed will rot in the ground, they and their children and
cattle will die of want, the deer and the wild hog will seek other
haunts, and then of what avail will it be for the Rain-god to relent,
how little any gift of water will avail, when there shall be left
neither man, nor cattle, nor seed; so let him, resting on the sky, pour
waters down upon them through his sieve, till the deer are drowned out
of the forest and take refuge in the houses, till the soil of the
mountains is washed into the valleys, till the cooking-pots burst with
the force of the swelling rice, till the beasts gather so plentifully in
the green and favoured land, that men’s axes shall be blunted with
cutting up the game.[614] With perfect meteorological fitness, the Kol
tribes of Bengal consider their great deity Marang Buru, Great Mountain,
to be the Rain-god. Marang Buru, one of the most conspicuous hills of
the plateau near Lodmah in Chota-Nagpur, is the deity himself or his
dwelling. Before the rains come on, the women climb the hill, led by the
wives of the pahans, with girls drumming, to carry offerings of milk and
bel-leaves, which are put on the flat rock at the top. Then the wives of
the pahans kneel with loosened hair and invoke the deity, beseeching him
to give the crops seasonable rain. They shake their heads violently as
they reiterate this prayer, till they work themselves into a frenzy, and
the movement becomes involuntary. They go on thus wildly gesticulating,
till a cloud is seen; then they rise, take the drums, and dance the
kurrun on the rock, till Marang Buru’s response to their prayer is heard
in the distant rumbling of thunder, and they go home rejoicing. They
must go fasting to the mount, and stay there till there is ‘a sound of
abundance of rain,’ when they get them down to eat and drink. It is said
that the rain always comes before evening, but the old women appear to
choose their own moment for beginning the fast.[615] It was to Ukko the
Heaven-god, that in old days the Finn turned with such prayers:—

                  ‘Ukko, thou, O God above us
                  Thou, O Father in the heavens,
                  Thou who rulest in the cloud-land,
                  And the little cloud-lambs leadest,
                  Send us down the rain from heaven,
                  Make the clouds to drop with honey,
                  Let the drooping corn look upward,
                  Let the grain with plenty rustle.’[616]

Quite like this were the classic conceptions of Ζεὺς ὑέτιος Jupiter
Pluvius. They are typified in the famous Athenian prayer recorded by
Marcus Aurelius, ‘Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the plough-lands of the
Athenians, and the plains!’[617] and in Petronius Arbiter’s complaint of
the irreligion of his times, that now no one thinks heaven is heaven, no
one keeps a fast, no one cares a hair for Jove, but all men with closed
eyes reckon up their goods. Afore-time the ladies walked up the hill in
their stoles with bare feet and loosened hair and pure minds, and
entreated Jove for water; then all at once it rained bucketsfull, then
or never, and they all went home wet as drowned rats.[618] In later
ages, when drought parched the fields of the mediæval husbandman, he
transferred to other patrons the functions of the Rain-god, and with
procession and litany sought help from St. Peter or St. James, or, with
more of mythological consistency, from the Queen of Heaven. As for
ourselves, we have lived to see the time when men shrink from addressing
even to Supreme Deity the old customary rain-prayers, for the rainfall
is passing from the region of the supernatural, to join the tides and
seasons in the realm of physical science.

The place of the Thunder-god in polytheistic religion is similar to that
of the Rain-god, in many cases even to entire coincidence. But his
character is rather of wrath than of beneficence, a character which we
have half lost the power to realize, since the agonizing terror of the
thunderstorm which appals savage minds has dwindled away in ours, now
that we behold in it not the manifestation of divine wrath, but the
restoration of electric equilibrium. North American tribes, as the
Mandans, heard in the thunder and saw in the lightning the clapping
wings and flashing eyes of that awful heaven-bird which belongs to, or
even is, the Great Manitu himself.[619] The Dacotas could show at a
place called Thunder-tracks, near the source of the St. Peter’s River,
the footprints of the thunder-bird five and twenty miles apart. It is to
be noticed that these Sioux, among their varied fancies about
thunder-birds and the like, give unusually well a key to the great
thunderbolt-myth which recurs in so many lands. They consider the
lightning entering the ground to scatter there in all directions
thunderbolt-stones, which are flints, &c., their reason for this notion
being the very rational one, that these siliceous stones actually
produce a flash when struck.[620] In an account of certain Carib
deities, who were men and are now stars, occurs the name of Savacou, who
was changed into a great bird; he is captain of the hurricane and
thunder, he blows fire through a tube and that is lightning, he gives
the great rain. Rochefort describes the effect of a thunderstorm on the
partly Europeanized Caribs of the West Indies two centuries ago. When
they perceive its approach, he says, they quickly betake themselves to
their cabins, and range themselves in the kitchen on their little seats
near the fire; hiding their faces and leaning their heads in their hands
and on their knees, they fall to weeping and lamenting in their jargon
‘Maboya mouche fache contre Caraïbe,’ i.e., Maboya (the evil demon) is
very angry with the Caribs. This they say also when there comes a
hurricane, not leaving off this dismal exercise till it is over, and
there is no end to their astonishment that the Christians on these
occasions manifest no such affliction and fear.[621] The Tupi tribes of
Brazil are an example of a race among whom the Thunder or the Thunderer,
Tupan, flapping his celestial wings and flashing with celestial light,
was developed into the very representative of highest deity, whose name
still stands among their Christian descendants as the equivalent of
God.[622] In Peru, a mighty and far-worshipped deity was Catequil the
Thunder-god, child of the Heaven-god, he who set free the Indian race
from out of the ground by turning it up with his golden spade, he who in
thunder-flash and clap hurls from his sling the small round smooth
thunderstones, treasured in the villages as fire-fetishes and charms to
kindle the flames of love. How distinct in personality and high in rank
was the Thunder and Lightning (Chuqui yllayllapa) in the religion of the
Incas, may be judged from his huaca or fetish-idol standing on the bench
beside the idols of the Creator and the Sun at the great Solar festival
in Cuzco, when the beasts to be sacrificed were led round them, and the
priests prayed thus: ‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever
young! do not grow old. Let all things be at peace! let the people
multiply, and their food, and let all other things continue to
increase.’[623]

In Africa, we may contrast the Zulu, who perceives in thunder and
lightning the direct action of Heaven or Heaven’s lord, with the Yoruba,
who assigns them not to Olorun the Lord of Heaven, but to a lower deity,
Shango the Thunder-god, whom they call also Dzakuta the Stone-caster,
for it is he who (as among so many other peoples who have forgotten
their Stone Age) flings down from heaven the stone hatchets which are
found in the ground, and preserved as sacred objects.[624] In the
religion of the Kamchadals, Billukai, the hem of whose garment is the
rainbow, dwells in the clouds with many spirits, and sends thunder and
lightning and rain.[625] Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus the Thunderer
is Ilya, in whose name mythologists trace a Christian tradition of
Elijah, whose fiery chariot seems indeed to have been elsewhere
identified with that of the Thunder-god, while the highest peak of
Ægina, once the seat of Pan-hellenic Zeus, is now called Mount St.
Elias. Among certain Moslem schismatics, it is even the historical Ali,
cousin of Mohammed, who is enthroned in the clouds, where the thunder is
his voice, and the lightning the lash wherewith he smites the
wicked.[626] Among the Turanian or Tatar race, the European branch shows
most distinctly the figure of the Thunder-god. To the Lapps, Tiermes
appears to have been the Heaven-god, especially conceived as Aija the
Thunder-god; of old they thought the Thunder (Aija) to be a living
being, hovering in the air and hearkening to the talk of men, smiting
such as spoke of him in an unseemly way; or, as some said, the
Thunder-god is the foe of sorcerers, whom he drives from heaven and
smites, and then it is that men hear in thunder-peals the hurtling of
his arrows, as he speeds them from his bow, the Rainbow. In Finnish
poetry, likewise, Ukko the Heaven-god is portrayed with such attributes.
The Runes call him Thunderer, he speaks through the clouds, his fiery
shirt is the lurid storm-cloud, men talk of his stones and his hammer,
he flashes his fiery sword and it lightens, or he draws his mighty
rainbow, Ukko’s bow, to shoot his fiery copper arrows, wherewith men
would invoke him to smite their enemies. Or when it is dark in his
heavenly house he strikes fire, and that is lightning. To this day the
Finlanders call a thunderstorm an ‘ukko,’ or an ‘ukkonen,’ that is, ‘a
little ukko,’ and when it lightens they say, ‘There is Ukko striking
fire!’[627]

What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god, but a poetic
elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage state through which
the primitive Aryans had passed? The Hindu Thunder-god is the Heaven-god
Indra, Indra’s bow is the rainbow, Indra hurls the thunderbolts, he
smites his enemies, he smites the dragon-clouds, and the rain pours down
on earth, and the sun shines forth again. The Veda is full of Indra’s
glories: ‘Now will I sing the feats of Indra, which he of the
thunderbolt did of old. He smote Ahi, then he poured forth the waters;
he divided the rivers of the mountains. He smote Ahi by the mountain;
Tvashtar forged for him the glorious bolt.’—‘Whet, O strong Indra, the
heavy strong red weapon against the enemies!’—‘May the axe (the
thunderbolt) appear with the light; may the red one blaze forth bright
with splendour!’—‘When Indra hurls again and again his thunderbolt, then
they believe in the brilliant god.’ Nor is Indra merely a great god in
the ancient Vedic pantheon, he is the very patron-deity of the invading
Aryan race in India, to whose help they look in their conflicts with the
dark-skinned tribes of the land. ‘Destroying the Dasyus, Indra protected
the Aryan colour’—‘Indra protected in battle the Aryan worshipper, he
subdued the lawless for Manu, he conquered the black skin.’[628] This
Hindu Indra is the offspring of Dyaus the Heaven. But in the Greek
religion, Zeus is himself Zeus Kerauneios, the wielder of the
thunderbolt, and thunders from the cloud-capped tops of Ida or Olympos.
In like manner the Jupiter Capitolinus of Rome is himself Jupiter
Tonans:

             ‘Ad penetrale Numæ, Capitolinumque Tonantem.’[629]

Thus, also, it was in accurate language that the old Slavonic nations
were described as adoring Jupiter Tonans as their highest god. He was
the cloud-dwelling Heaven-god, his weapon the thunder-bolt, the
lightning-flash, his name Perun the Smiter (Perkun, Perkunas). In the
Lithuanian district, the thunder itself is Perkun; in past times the
peasant would cry when he heard the thunder peal ‘Dewe Perkune apsaugog
mus!—God Perkun spare us!’ and to this day he says, ‘Perkunas
gravja!—Perkun is thundering!’ or ‘Wezzajs barrahs!—the Old One
growls!’[630] The old German and Scandinavian theology made Thunder,
Donar, Thor, a special deity to rule the clouds and rain, and hurl his
crushing hammer through the air. He reigned high in the Saxon heaven,
till the days came when the Christian convert had to renounce him in
solemn form, ‘ec forsacho Thunare!—I forsake Thunder!’ Now, his survival
is for the most part in mere verbal form, in the etymology of such names
as Donnersberg, Thorwaldsen, Thursday.[631]

In the polytheism of the lower as of the higher races, the Wind-gods are
no unknown figures. The Winds themselves, and especially the Four Winds
in their four regions, take name and shape as personal divinities, while
some deity of wider range, a Wind-god, Storm-god, Air-god, or the mighty
Heaven-god himself, may stand as compeller or controller of breeze and
gale and tempest. We have already taken as examples from the Algonquin
mythology of North America the four winds whose native legends have been
versified in ‘Hiawatha;’ Mudjekeewis the West Wind, Father of the Winds
of Heaven, and his children, Wabun the East Wind, the morning-bringer,
the lazy Shawondasse the South Wind, the wild and cruel North Wind, the
fierce Kabibonokka. Viewed in their religious aspect, these mighty
beings correspond with four of the great manitus sacrificed to among the
Delawares, the West, South, East, and North; while the Iroquois
acknowledged a deity of larger grasp, Gäoh, the Spirit of the Winds, who
holds them prisoned in the mountains in the Home of the Winds.[632] The
Polynesian Wind-gods are thus described by Ellis: ‘The chief of these
were Veromatautoru and Tairibu, brother and sister to the children of
Taaroa, their dwelling was near the great rock, which was the foundation
of the world. Hurricanes, tempests, and all destructive winds, were
supposed to be confined within them, and were employed by them to punish
such as neglected the worship of the gods. In stormy weather their
compassion was sought by the tempest-driven mariner at sea, or the
friends of such on shore. Liberal presents, it was supposed, would at
any time purchase a calm. If the first failed, subsequent ones were
certain of success. The same means were resorted to for procuring a
storm, but with less certainty. Whenever the inhabitants of one island
heard of invasion from those of another, they immediately carried large
offerings to these deities, and besought them to destroy by tempest the
hostile fleet whenever it might put to sea. Some of the most intelligent
people still think evil spirits had formerly great power over the winds,
as they say there have been no such fearful storms since they abolished
idolatry, as there were before.’ Or, again, the great deity Maui adds a
new complication to his enigmatic solar-celestial character by appearing
as a Wind-God. In Tahiti he was identified with the East Wind; in New
Zealand he holds all the winds but the west in his hands, or he
imprisons them with great stones rolled to the mouths of their caves,
save the West Wind which he cannot catch or prison, so that it almost
always blows.[633] To the Kamchadal, it is Billukai the Heaven-god who
comes down and drives his sledge on earth, and men see his traces in the
wind-drifted snow.[634] To the Finn, while there are traces of
subordinate Wind-gods in his mythology, the great ruler of wind and
storm is Ukko the Heaven-god;[635] while the Esth looked rather to
Tuule-ema, Wind’s Mother, and when the gale shrieks he will still say
‘Wind’s mother wails, who knows what mothers shall wail next.’[636] Such
instances from Allophylian mythology[637] show types which are found
developed in full vigour by the Aryan races. In the Vedic hymns, the
Storm Gods, the Maruts, borne along with the fury of the boisterous
winds, with the rain-clouds distribute showers over the earth, make
darkness during the day, rend the trees and devour the forests like wild
elephants.[638] No effort of the Red Indian’s personifying fancy in the
tales of the dancing Pauppuk-keewis the Whirlwind, or that fierce and
shifty hero, Manabozho the North-West Wind, can more than match the
description in the Iliad, of Achilles calling on Boreas and Zephyros
with libations and vows of sacrifice, to blow into a blaze the funeral
pyre of Patroklos—

                               ... his prayer
             Swift Iris heard, and bore it to the Winds.
             They in the hall of gusty Zephyrus
             Were gathered round the feast; in haste appearing,
             Swift Iris on the stony threshold stood.
             They saw, and rising all, besought her each
             To sit beside him; she with their requests
             Refused compliance, and addressed them thus,’ &c.

Æolus with the winds imprisoned in his cave has the office of the Red
Indian Spirit of the Winds, and of the Polynesian Maui. With quaint
adaptation to nature-myth and even to moral parable, the Harpies, the
Storm-gusts that whirl and snatch and dash and smirch with eddying
dust-clouds, become the loathsome bird-monsters sent to hover over the
table of Phineus to claw and defile his dainty viands.[639] If we are to
choose an Aryan Storm-god for ideal grandeur, we must seek him in

                            ‘... the hall where Runic Odin
                  Howls his war-song to the gale.’

Jakob Grimm has defined Odin or Woden as ‘the all-penetrating creative
and formative power.’ But such abstract conceptions can hardly be
ascribed to his barbaric worshippers. As little may his real nature be
discovered among the legends which degrade him to a historical king of
Northern men, an ‘Othinus rex.’ See the All-father sitting cloud-mantled
on his heaven-seat, overlooking the deeds of men, and we may discern in
him the attributes of the Heaven-god. Hear the peasant say of the raging
tempest, that it is ‘Odin faring by;’ trace the mythological transition
from Woden’s tempest to the ‘Wütende Heer,’ the ‘Wild Huntsman’ of our
own grand storm-myth, and we shall recognize the old Teutonic deity in
his function of cloud-compeller, of Tempest-god.[640] The ‘rude
Carinthian boor’ can show a relic from a yet more primitive stage of
mental history, when he sets up a wooden bowl of various meats on a tree
before his house, to fodder the wind that it may do no harm. In Swabia,
Tyrol, and the Upper Palatinate, when the storm rages, they will fling a
spoonful or a handful of meal in the face of the gale, with this formula
in the last-named district, ‘Da Wind, hast du Mehl für dein Kind, aber
aufhören musst du!’[641]

The Earth-deity takes an important place in polytheistic religion. The
Algonquins would sing medicine-songs to Mesukkummik Okwi, the Earth, the
Great-Grandmother of all. In her charge (and she must be ever at home in
her lodge) are left the animals whose flesh and skins are man’s food and
clothing, and the roots and medicines of sovereign power to heal
sickness and kill game in time of hunger; therefore good Indians never
dig up the roots of which their medicines are made, without depositing
an offering in the earth for Mesukkummik Okwi.[642] In the list of
fetish-deities of Peruvian tribes, the Earth, adored as Mamapacha,
Mother Earth, took high subordinate rank below Sun and Moon in the
pantheon of the Incas, and at harvest-time ground corn and libations of
chicha were offered to her that she might grant a good harvest.[643] Her
rank is similar in the Aquapim theology of West Africa; first the
Highest God in the firmament, then the Earth as universal mother, then
the fetish. The negro, offering his libation before some great
undertaking, thus calls upon the triad: ‘Creator, come drink! Earth,
come drink! Bosumbra, come drink!’[644]

Among the indigenes of India, the Bygah tribes of Seonee show a
well-marked worship of the Earth. They call her ‘Mother Earth’ or
Dhurteemah, and before praying or eating their food, which is looked on
always as a daily sacrifice, they invariably offer some of it to the
earth, before using the name of any other god.[645] Of all religions of
the world, perhaps that of the Khonds of Orissa gives the Earth-goddess
her most remarkable place and function. Boora Pennu or Bella Pennu, the
Light-god or Sun-god, created Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess for his
consort, and from them were born the other great gods. But strife arose
between the mighty parents, and it became the wife’s work to thwart the
good creation of her husband, and to cause all physical and moral ill.
Thus to the Sun-worshipping sect she stands abhorred on the bad eminence
of the Evil Deity. But her own sect, the Earth-worshipping sect, seem to
hold ideas of her nature which are more primitive and genuine. The
functions which they ascribe to her, and the rites with which they
propitiate her, display her as the Earth-mother, raised by an intensely
agricultural race to an extreme height of divinity. It was she who with
drops of her blood made the soft muddy ground harden into firm earth;
thus men learnt to offer human victims, and the whole earth became firm;
the pastures and ploughed fields came into use, and there were cattle
and sheep and poultry for man’s service; hunting began, and there were
iron and ploughshares and harrows and axes, and the juice of the
palm-tree; and love arose between the sons and daughters of the people,
making new households, and society with its relations of father and
mother, and wife and child, and the bonds between ruler and subject. It
was the Khond Earth-goddess who was propitiated with those hideous
sacrifices, the suppression of which is matter of recent Indian history.
With dances and drunken orgies, and a mystery play to explain in
dramatic dialogue the purpose of the rite, the priest offered Tari Pennu
her sacrifice, and prayed for children and cattle and poultry and brazen
pots and all wealth; every man and woman wished a wish, and they tore
the slave-victim piecemeal, and spread the morsels over the fields they
were to fertilize.[646] In Northern Asia, also, among the Tatar races,
the office of the Earth-deity is strongly and widely marked. Thus in the
nature-worship of the Tunguz and Buraets, Earth stands among the greater
divinities. It is especially interesting to notice among the Finns a
transition like that just observed from the god Heaven to the
Heaven-god. In the designation of Maaemä, Earth-mother, given to the
earth itself, there may be traced survival from the stage of direct
nature-worship, while the passage to the conception of a divine being
inhabiting and ruling the material substance, is marked by the use of
the name Maan emo, Earth’s mother, for the ancient subterranean goddess
whom men would ask to make the grass shoot thick and the thousandfold
ears mount high, or might even entreat to rise in person out of the
earth to give them strength. The analogy of other mythologies agrees
with the definition of the divine pair who reign in Finn theology: as
Ukko the Grandfather is the Heaven-god, so his spouse Akka the
Grandmother is the Earth-goddess.[647] Thus in the ancient
nature-worship of China, the personal Earth holds a place below the
Heaven. Tien and Tu are closely associated in the national rites, and
the idea of the pair as universal parents, if not an original conception
in Chinese theology, is at any rate developed in Chinese classic
symbolism. Heaven and Earth receive their solemn sacrifices not at the
hands of common mortals but of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, and his
great vassals and mandarins. Yet their adoration is national; they are
worshipped by the people who offer incense to them on the hill-tops at
their autumn festival, they are adored by successful candidates in
competitive examination; and, especially and appropriately, the
prostration of bride and bridegroom before the father and mother of all
things, the ‘worshipping of Heaven and Earth,’ is the all-important
ceremony of a Chinese marriage.[648]

The Vedic hymns commemorate the goddess Prithivî, the broad Earth, and
in their ancient strophes the modern Brahmans still pray for benefits to
mother Earth and father Heaven, side by side:—

    ‘Tanno Vâto mayobhu vâtu bheshajam tanmâtâ Prithivî tatpitâ
       Dyauh.’[649]

Greek religion shows a transition to have taken place like that among
the Turanian tribes, for the older simpler nature-deity Gaia, Γῆ πάντων
μήτηρ, Earth the All-Mother, seems to have faded into the more
anthropomorphic Dēmētēr, Earth-Mother, whose eternal fire burned in
Mantinēa, and whose temples stood far and wide over the land which she
made kindly to the Greek husbandman.[650] The Romans acknowledged her
plain identity as Terra Mater, Ops Mater.[651] Tacitus could rightly
recognize this deity of his own land among German tribes, worshippers of
‘Nerthum (or, Hertham), id est Terram matrem,’ Mother Earth, whose holy
grove stood in an ocean isle, whose chariot drawn by cows passed through
the land making a season of peace and joy, till the goddess, satiated
with mortal conversation, was taken back by her priest to her temple,
and the chariot and garments and even the goddess herself were washed in
a secret lake, which forthwith swallowed up the ministering
slaves—‘hence a mysterious terror and sacred ignorance, what that should
be which only the doomed to perish might behold.’[652] If in these
modern days we seek in Europe traces of Earth-worship, we may find them
in curiously distinct survival in Germany, if no longer in the Christmas
food-offerings buried in and for the earth up to early in this
century,[653] at any rate among Gypsy hordes. Dewel, the great god in
heaven (dewa, deus), is rather feared than loved by these weatherbeaten
outcasts, for he harms them on their wanderings with his thunder and
lightning, his snow and rain, and his stars interfere with their dark
doings. Therefore they curse him foully when misfortune falls on them,
and when a child dies, they say that Dewel has eaten it. But Earth,
Mother of all good, self-existing from the beginning, is to them holy,
so holy that they take heed never to let the drinking-cup touch the
ground, for it would become too sacred to be used by men.[654]

Water-worship, as has been seen, may be classified as a special
department of religion. It by no means follows, however, that savage
water-worshippers should necessarily have generalized their ideas, and
passed beyond their particular water-deities to arrive at the conception
of a general deity presiding over water as an element. Divine springs,
streams, and lakes, water-spirits, deities concerned with the clouds and
rain, are frequent, and many details of them are cited here, but I have
not succeeded in finding among the lower races any divinity whose
attributes, fairly criticized, will show him or her to be an original
and absolute elemental Water-god. Among the deities of the Dakotas,
Unktahe the fish-god of the waters is a master-spirit of sorcery and
religion, the rival even of the mighty Thunderbird.[655] In the Mexican
pantheon, Tlaloc god of rain and waters, fertilizer of earth and lord of
paradise, whose wife is Chalchihuitlicue, Emerald-Skirt, dwells among
the mountain-tops where the clouds gather and pour down the
streams.[656] Yet neither of these mythic beings approaches the
generality of conception that belongs to full elemental deity, and even
the Greek Nēreus, though by his name he should be the very
personification of water (νηρός), seems too exclusively marine in his
home and family to be cited as the Water-god. Nor is the reason of this
hard to find. It is an extreme stretch of the power of theological
generalization to bring water in its myriad forms under one divinity,
though each individual body of water, even the smallest stream or lake,
can have its personal individuality or indwelling spirit.

Islanders and coast-dwellers indeed live face to face with mighty
water-deities, the divine Sea and the great Sea-gods. What the sea may
seem to an uncultured man who first beholds it, we may learn among the
Lampongs of Sumatra: ‘The inland people of that country are said to pay
a kind of adoration to the sea, and to make to it an offering of cakes
and sweetmeats on their beholding it for the first time, deprecating its
power of doing them mischief.’[657] The higher stage of such doctrine is
where the sea, no longer itself personal, is considered as ruled by
indwelling spirits. Thus Tuaraatai and Ruahatu, principal among marine
deities of Polynesia, send the sharks to execute their vengeance. Hiro
descends to the depths of the ocean and dwells among the monsters, they
lull him to sleep in a cavern, the Wind-god profits by his absence to
raise a violent storm to destroy the boats in which Hiro’s friends are
sailing, but, roused by a friendly spirit-messenger, the Sea-god rises
to the surface and quells the tempest.[658] This South Sea Island myth
might well have been in the Odyssey. We may point to the Guinea Coast as
a barbaric region where Sea-worship survives in its extremest form. It
appears from Bosman’s account, about 1700, that in the religion of
Whydah, the Sea ranked only as younger brother in the three divine
orders, below the Serpents and Trees. But at present, as appears from
Captain Burton’s evidence, the religion of Whydah extends through
Dahome, and the divine Sea has risen in rank. ‘The youngest brother of
the triad is Hu, the ocean or sea. Formerly it was subject to
chastisement, like the Hellespont, if idle or useless. The Huno, or
ocean priest, is now considered the highest of all, a fetish king, at
Whydah, where he has 500 wives. At stated times he repairs to the beach,
begs ‘Agbwe,’ the ... ocean god, not to be boisterous, and throws in
rice and corn, oil and beans, cloth, cowries, and other valuables.... At
times the king sends as an ocean sacrifice from Agbome a man carried in
a hammock, with the dress, the stool, and the umbrella of a caboceer; a
canoe takes him out to sea, where he is thrown to the sharks.’[659]
While in these descriptions the individual divine personality of the sea
is so well marked, an account of the closely related Slave Coast
religion states that a great god dwells in the sea, and it is to him,
not to the sea itself, that offerings are cast in.[660] In South America
the idea of the divine Sea is clearly marked in the Peruvian worship of
Mamacocha, Mother Sea, giver of food to men.[661] Eastern Asia, both in
its stages of lower and higher civilization, contributes members to the
divine group. In Kamchatka, Mitgk the Great Spirit of the Sea, fish-like
himself, sends the fish up the rivers.[662] Japan deifies separately on
land and at sea the lords of the waters; Midsuno Kami, the Water-god, is
worshipped during the rainy season; Jebisu, the Sea-god, is younger
brother of the Sun.[663]

Among barbaric races we thus find two conceptions current, the personal
divine Sea and the anthropomorphic Sea-god. These represent two stages
of development of one idea—the view of the natural object as itself an
animated being, and the separation of its animating fetish-soul as a
distinct spiritual deity. To follow the enquiry into classic times shows
the same distinction as strongly marked. When Kleomenes marched down to
Thyrea, having slaughtered a bull to the sea (σφαγιασάμενος δέ τῇ
θαλάσσῃ ταῦρον) he embarked his army in ships for the Tirynthian land
and Nauplia.[664] Cicero makes Cotta remark to Balbus that ‘our
generals, embarking on the sea, have been accustomed to immolate a
victim to the waves,’ and he goes on to argue, not unfairly, that if the
Earth herself is a goddess, what is she other than Tellus, and ‘if the
Earth, the Sea too, whom thou saidst to be Neptune.’[665] Here is direct
nature-worship in its extremest sense of fetish-worship. But in the
anthropomorphic stage appear that dim præ-Olympian figure of Nēreus the
Old Man of the Sea, father of the Nereids in their ocean caves, and the
Homeric Poseidōn the Earth-shaker, who stables his coursers in his cave
in the Ægean deeps, who harnesses the gold-maned steeds to his chariot
and drives through the dividing waves, while the subject sea-beasts come
up at the passing of their lord, a king so little bound to the element
he governs, that he can come from the brine to sit in the midst of the
gods in the assembly on Olympos, and ask the will of Zeus.[666]

Fire-worship brings into view again, though under different aspects and
with different results, the problems presented by water-worship. The
real and absolute worship of fire falls into two great divisions, the
first belonging rather to fetishism, the second to polytheism proper,
and the two apparently representing an earlier and later stage of
theological ideas. The first is the rude barbarian’s adoration of the
actual flame which he watches writhing, roaring, devouring like a live
animal; the second belongs to an advanced generalization, that any
individual fire is a manifestation of one general elemental being—the
Fire-god. Unfortunately, evidence of the exact meaning of fire-worship
among the lower races is scanty, while the transition from fetishism to
polytheism seems a gradual process of which the stages elude close
definition. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that rites performed with
fire are, though often, yet by no means necessarily, due to worship of
the fire itself. Authors who have indiscriminately mixed up such rites
as the new fire, the perpetual fire, the passing through the fire,
classing them as acts of fire-worship, without proper evidence as to
their meaning in any particular case, have added to the perplexity of a
subject not too easy to deal with, even under strict precautions. Two
sources of error are especially to be noted. On the one hand, fire
happens to be a usual means whereby sacrifices are transmitted to
departed souls and deities in general; and on the other hand, the
ceremonies of earthly fire-worship are habitually and naturally
transferred to celestial fire-worship in the religion of the Sun.

It may best serve the present purpose to carry a line of some of the
best-defined facts which seems to bear on fire-worship proper, from
savagery on into the higher culture. In the last century, Loskiel, a
missionary among the North American Indians, remarks that ‘In great
danger, an Indian has been observed to lie prostrate on his face, and
throwing a handful of tobacco into the fire, to call aloud, as in an
agony of distress, “There, take and smoke, be pacified, and don’t hurt
me.”’ Of course this may have been a mere sacrifice transmitted to some
other spiritual being through fire, but we have in this region explicit
statements as to a distinct fire-deity. The Delawares, it appears from
the same author, acknowledged the Fire-manitu, first parent of all
Indian nations, and celebrated a yearly festival in his honour, when
twelve manitus, animal and vegetable, attended him as subordinate
deities.[667] In North-West America, in Washington Irving’s account of
the Chinooks and other Columbia River Tribes, mention is made of the
spirit which inhabits fire. Powerful both for evil and good, and
seemingly rather evil than good in nature, this being must be kept in
good humour by frequent offerings. The Fire-spirit has great influence
with the winged aërial supreme deity, wherefore the Indians implore him
to be their interpreter, to procure them success in hunting and fishing,
fleet horses, obedient wives, and male children.[668] In the elaborately
systematic religion of Mexico, there appears in his proper place a
Fire-god, closely related to the Sun-god in character, but keeping well
marked his proper identity. His name was Xiuhteuctli, Fire-lord, and
they called him likewise Huehueteotl, the old god. Great honour was paid
to this god Fire, who gives them heat, and bakes their cakes, and roasts
their meat. Therefore at every meal the first morsel and libation were
cast into the fire, and every day the deity had incense burnt to him.
Twice in the year were held his solemn festivals. At the first, a felled
tree was set up in his honour, and the sacrificers danced round his fire
with the human victims, whom afterwards they cast into a great fire,
only to drag them out half roasted for the priests to complete the
sacrifice. The second was distinguished by the rite of the new fire, so
well known in connexion with solar worship; the friction-fire was
solemnly made before the image of Xiuhteuctli in his sanctuary in the
court of the great teocalli, and the game brought in at the great hunt
which began the festival was cooked at the sacred fire for the banquets
that ended it.[669] Polynesia well knows from the mythological point of
view Mahuika the Fire-god, who keeps the volcano-fire on his
subterranean hearth, whither Maui goes down (as the Sun into the
Underworld) to bring up fire for man; but in the South Sea islands there
is scarcely a trace of actual rites of fire-worship.[670] In West
Africa, among the gods of Dahome is Zo the fire-fetish; a pot of fire is
placed in a room, and sacrifice is offered to it, that fire may ‘live’
there, and not go forth to destroy the house.[671]

Asia is a region where distinct fire-worship may be peculiarly well
traced through the range of lower and higher civilization. The rude
Kamchadals, worshipping all things that did them harm or good,
worshipped the fire, offering to it noses of foxes and other game, so
that one might tell by looking at furs whether they had been taken by
baptized or heathen hunters.[672] The Ainos of Yesso worship Abe kamui
the Fire-deity as the benefactor of men, the messenger to the other
gods, the purifier who heals the sick.[673] Turanian tribes likewise
hold fire a sacred element, many Tunguz, Mongol, and Turk tribes
sacrifice to Fire, and some clans will not eat meat without first
throwing a morsel upon the hearth. The following passage is from a
Mongol wedding-song to the personified Fire, ‘Mother Ut, Queen of Fire,
thou who art made from the elm that grows on the mountain-tops of
Changgai-Chan and Burchatu-Chan, thou who didst come forth when heaven
and earth divided, didst come forth from the footsteps of Mother Earth,
and wast formed by the King of Gods. Mother Ut, whose father is the hard
steel, whose mother is the flint, whose ancestors are the elm-trees,
whose shining reaches to the sky and pervades the earth. Goddess Ut, we
bring thee yellow oil for offering, and a white wether with yellow head,
thou who hast a manly son, a beauteous daughter-in-law, bright
daughters. To thee, Mother Ut, who ever lookest upward, we bring brandy
in bowls, and fat in both hands. Give prosperity to the King’s son (the
bridegroom), to the King’s daughter (the bride), and to all the
people!’[674] As an analogue to Hephaistos the Greek divine smith, may
stand the Circassian Fire-god, Tleps, patron of metal-workers, and the
peasants whom he has provided with plough and hoe.[675]

Among the most ancient cultured nations of the Old World, Egyptians,
Babylonians, Assyrians, accounts of fire-worship are absent, or so
scanty and obscure that their study is more valuable in compiling the
history than in elucidating the principles of religion.[676] For this
scientific purpose, the more full and minute documents of Aryan religion
can give a better answer. In various forms and under several names, the
Fire-god is known. Nowhere does he carry his personality more distinctly
than under his Sanskrit name of Agni, a word which keeps its quality,
though not his divinity, in the Latin ‘ignis.’ The name of Agni is the
first word of the first hymn of the Rig-Veda: ‘Agnim île puro-hitam
yajnasya devam ritvijam!—Agni I entreat, divine appointed priest of
sacrifice!’ The sacrifices which Agni receives go to the gods, he is the
mouth of the gods, but he is no lowly minister, as it is said in another
hymn:

    ‘No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty
       one, with the Maruts come hither, O Agni!’

Such the mighty Agni is among the gods, yet he comes within the
peasant’s cottage to be protector of the domestic hearth. His worship
has survived the transformation of the ancient patriarchal Vedic
religion of nature into the priest-ridden Hinduism of our own day. In
India there may yet be found the so-called Fire-priests (Agnihotri) who
perform according to Vedic rite the sacrifices entitling the worshippers
to heavenly life. The sacred fire-drill for churning the new fire by
friction of wood (arani) is used so that Agni still is new-born of the
twirling fire-sticks, and receives the melted butter of the
sacrifice.[677] Among the records of fire-worship in Asia, is the
account of Jonas Hanways’s ‘Travels,’ dating from about 1740, of the
everlasting fire at the burning wells near Baku, on the Caspian. At the
sacred spot stood several ancient stone temples, mostly arched vaults 10
to 15 feet high. One little temple was still used for worship, near the
altar of which, about three feet high, a large hollow cane conveyed the
gas up from the ground, burning at the mouth with a blue flame. Here
were generally forty or fifty poor devotees, come on pilgrimage from
their country to make expiation for themselves and others, and
subsisting on wild celery, &c. These pilgrims are described as marking
their foreheads with saffron, and having great veneration for a red cow;
they wore little clothing, and the holiest of them kept one arm on their
heads, or continued unmoved in some other posture; they are described as
Ghebers, or Gours, the usual Moslem term for Fire-worshippers.[678]

In general, this name of Ghebers is applied to the Zoroastrians or
Parsis, whom a modern European would all but surely point to if asked to
instance a modern race of Fire-worshippers. Classical accounts of the
Persian religion set down fire-worship as part and parcel of it; the
Magi, it is recorded, hold the gods to be Fire and Earth and Water; and
again, the Persians reckon the Fire to be a god (θεοφοροῦσιν).[679] On
the testimony of the old religious books of the Parsis themselves, Fire,
as the greatest Ized, as giver of increase and health, as craving for
wood and scents and fat, seems to take the distinctest divine
personality. Their doctrine that Ardebehist, the presiding angel or
spirit of fire, is adored, but not the material object he belongs to, is
a perfect instance of the development of the idea of an elemental
divinity from that of an animated fetish. When, driven by Moslem
persecution from Persia, Parsi exiles landed in Gujarat, they described
their religion in an official document as being the worship of Agni or
Fire, thus claiming for themselves a place among recognized Hindu
sects.[680] In modern times, though for the most part the Parsis have
found toleration and prosperity in India, yet an oppressed remnant of
the race still keeps up the everlasting fires at Yezd and Kirman, in
their old Persian land. The modern Parsis, as in Strabo’s time, scruple
to defile the fire or blow it with their breath, they abstain from
smoking out of regard not to themselves but to the sacred element, and
they keep up consecrated ever-burning fires before which they do
worship. Nevertheless, Prof. Max Müller is able to say of the Parsis of
our own day: ‘The so-called Fire-worshippers certainly do not worship
the fire, and they naturally object to a name which seems to place them
on a level with mere idolators. All they admit is, that in their youth
they are taught to face some luminous object while worshipping God, and
that they regard the fire, like other great natural phenomena, as an
emblem of the Divine power. But they assure us that they never ask
assistance or blessings from an unintelligent material object, nor is it
even considered necessary to turn the face to any emblem whatever in
praying to Ormuzd.’[681] Now, admitting this view of fire-worship as
true of the more intelligent Parsis, and leaving aside the question how
far among the more ignorant this symbolism may blend (as in such cases
is usual) into actual adoration, we may ask what is the history of
ceremonies which thus imitate, yet are not, fire-worship. The
ethnographic answer is clear and instructive. The Parsi is the
descendant of a race in this respect represented by the modern Hindu, a
race who did simply and actually worship Fire. Fire-worship still forms
a link historically connecting the Vedic with the Zoroastrian ritual;
for the Agnishtoma or praise of Agni the Fire, where four goats are to
be sacrificed and burnt, is represented by the Yajishn ceremony, where
the Parsi priests are now content to put some hair of an ox in a vessel
and show it to the Fire. But the development of the more philosophic
Zarathustrian doctrines has led to a result common in the history of
religion, that the ancient distinctly meant rite has dwindled to a
symbol, to be preserved with changed sense in a new theology.

Somewhat of the same kind may have taken place among the European race
who seem in some respects the closest relatives of the old Persians.
Slavonic history possibly keeps up some trace of direct and absolute
fire-worship, as where in Bohemia the Pagans are described as
worshipping fires, groves, trees, stones. But though the Lithuanians and
Old Prussians and Russians are among the nations whose especial rite it
was to keep up sacred everlasting fires, yet it seems that their
fire-rites were in the symbolic stage, ceremonies of their great
celestial-solar religion, rather than acts of direct worship to a
Fire-god.[682] Classical religion, on the other hand, brings prominently
into view the special deities of fire. Hēphaistos, Vulcan, the divine
metallurgist who had his temples on Ætna and Lipari, stands in especial
connexion with the subterranean volcanic fire, and combines the nature
of the Polynesian Mahuika and the Circassian Tleps. The Greek Hestia,
the divine hearth, the ever-virgin venerable goddess, to whom Zeus gave
fair office instead of wedlock, sits in the midst of the house,
receiving fat:—

              ‘Τῇ δὲ πατὴρ Ζεὺς δῶκε καλὸν γέρας ἀντὶ γάμοιο,
              Καί τε μέσῳ οἴκῳ κατ’ ἄρ’ ἔζετο πῖαρ ἑλοῦσα.’

In the high halls of gods and men she has her everlasting seat, and
without her are no banquets among mortals, for to Hestia first and last
is poured the honey-sweet wine:—

               ‘Ἐστίη, ἣ πάντων ἐν δώμασιν ὑψηλοῖσιν
               Ἀθανάτων τε θεῶν χαμαὶ ἐρχομένων τ’ ἀνθρώπων
               Ἔδρην ἀίδιον ἔλαχε, πρεσβηίδα τιμὴν,
               Καλὸν ἔχουσα γέρας καὶ τίμιον· οὐ γὰρ ἄτερ σοῦ
               Εἰλαπίναι θνητοῖσιν, ἵν’ οὐ πρῶτῃ πυμάτῃ τε
               Ἑστίῃ ἀρχόμενος σπένδει μελιηδέα οἶνον.’[683]

In Greek civil life, Hestia sat in house and assembly as representative
of domestic and social order. Like her in name and origin, but not
altogether in development, is Vesta with her ancient Roman cultus, and
her retinue of virgins to keep up her pure eternal fire in her temple,
needing no image, for she herself dwelt within:—

               ‘Esse diu stultus Vestæ simulacra putavi:
                 Mox didici curvo nulla subesse tholo.
               Ignis inextinctus templo celatur in illo.
                 Effigiem nullam Vesta nec ignis habet.’[684]

The last lingering relics of fire-worship in Europe reach us, as usual,
both through Turanian and Aryan channels of folklore. The Esthonian
bride consecrates her new hearth and home by an offering of money cast
into the fire, or laid on the oven for Tule-ema, Fire-mother.[685] The
Carinthian peasant will ‘fodder’ the fire to make it kindly, and throw
lard or dripping to it, that it may not burn his house. To the Bohemian
it is a godless thing to spit into the fire, ‘God’s fire’ as he calls
it. It is not right to throw away the crumbs after a meal, for they
belong to the fire. Of every kind of dish some should be given to the
fire, and if some runs over it is wrong to scold, for it belongs to the
fire. It is because these rites are now so neglected that harmful fires
so often break out.[686]

What the Sea is to Water-worship, in some measure the Sun is to
Fire-worship. From the doctrines and rites of earthly fire, various and
ambiguous in character, generalized from many phenomena, applied to many
purposes, we pass to the religion of heavenly fire, whose great deity
has a perfect definiteness from his embodiment in one great individual
fetish, the Sun.

Rivalling in power and glory the all-encompassing Heaven, the Sun moves
eminent among the deities of nature, no mere cosmic globe affecting
distant material worlds by force in the guise of light and heat and
gravity, but a living reigning Lord:—

                ‘O thou, that with surpassing glory crown’d,
                Look’st from thy sole dominion like the God
                Of this new world.’

It is no exaggeration to say, with Sir William Jones, that one great
fountain of all idolatry in the four quarters of the globe was the
veneration paid by men to the sun: it is no more than an exaggeration to
say with Mr. Helps of the sun-worship in Peru, that it was inevitable.
Sun-worship is by no means universal among the lower races of mankind,
but manifests itself in the upper levels of savage religion in districts
far and wide over the earth, often assuming the prominence which it
keeps and develops in the faiths of the barbaric world. Why some races
are sun-worshippers and others not, is indeed too hard a question to
answer in general terms. Yet one important reason is obvious, that the
Sun is not so evidently the god of wild hunters and fishers, as of the
tillers of the soil, who watch him day by day giving or taking away
their wealth and their very life. On the geographical significance of
sun-worship, D’Orbigny has made a remark, suggestive if not altogether
sound, connecting the worship of the sun not so much with the torrid
regions where his glaring heat oppresses man all day long, and drives
him to the shade for refuge, as with climates where his presence is
welcomed for his life-giving heat, and nature chills at his departure.
Thus while the low sultry forests of South America show little
prominence of Sun-worship, this is the dominant organized cultus of the
high table-lands of Peru and Cundinamarca.[687] The theory is ingenious,
and if not carried too far may often be supported. We may well compare
the feelings with which the sun-worshipping Massagetæ of Tartary must
have sacrificed their horses to the deity who freed them from the
miseries of winter, with the thoughts of men in those burning lands of
Central Africa where, as Sir Samuel Baker says, ‘the rising of the sun
is always dreaded ... the sun is regarded as the common enemy,’ words
which recall Herodotus’ old description of the Atlantes or Atarantes who
dwelt in the interior of Africa, who cursed the sun at his rising, and
abused him with shameful epithets for afflicting them with his burning
heat, them and their land.[688]

The details of Sun-worship among the native races of America give an
epitome of its development among mankind at large. Among many of the
ruder tribes of the northern continent, the Sun is looked upon as one of
the great deities, as representative of the greatest deity, or as that
greatest deity himself. Indian chiefs of Hudson’s Bay smoked thrice to
the rising sun. In Vancouver Island men pray in time of need to the sun
as he mounts toward the zenith. Among the Delawares the sun received
sacrifice as second among the twelve great manitus; the Virginians bowed
before him with uplifted hands and eyes as he rose and set; the
Pottawatomis would climb sometimes at sunrise on their huts, to kneel
and offer to the luminary a mess of Indian corn; his likeness is found
representing the Great Manitu in Algonquin picture-writings. Father
Hennepin, whose name is well known to geologists as the earliest visitor
to the Falls of Niagara, about 1678, gives an account of the native
tribes, Sioux and others, of this far-west region. He describes them as
venerating the Sun, ‘which they recognize, though only in appearance, as
the Maker and Preserver of all things;’ to him first they offer the
calumet when they light it, and to him they often present the best and
most delicate of their game in the lodge of the chief, ‘who profits more
by it than the Sun.’ The Creeks regarded the Sun as symbol or minister
of the Great Spirit, sending toward him the first puff of the calumet at
treaties, and bowing reverently toward him in confirming their council
talk or haranguing their warriors to battle.[689] Among the rude
Botocudos of Brazil, the idea of the Sun as the great good deity seems
not unknown; the Araucanians are described as bringing offerings to him
as highest deity; the Puelches as ascribing to the sun, and praying to
him for, all good things they possess or desire; the Diaguitas of
Tucuman as having temples dedicated to the Sun, whom they adored, and to
whom they consecrated birds’ feathers, which they then brought back to
their cabins, and sprinkled from time to time with the blood of
animals.[690]

Such accounts of Sun-worship appearing in the lower native culture of
America, may be taken to represent its first stage. It is on the whole
within distinctly higher culture that its second stage appears, where it
has attained to full development of ritual and appurtenance, and become
in some cases even the central doctrine of national religion and
statecraft. Sun-worship had reached this level among the Natchez of
Louisiana, with whom various other tribes of this district stood in
close relation. Every morning at sunrise the great Sun-chief stood at
the house-door facing the east, shouted and prostrated himself thrice,
and smoked first toward the sun, and then toward the other three
quarters. The Sun-temple was a circular hut some thirty feet across and
dome-roofed: here in the midst was kept up the everlasting fire, here
prayer was offered thrice daily, and here were kept images and fetishes
and the bones of dead chiefs. The Natchez government was a solar
hierarchy. At its head stood the great chief, called the Sun or the
Sun’s brother, high priest and despot over his people. By his side stood
his sister or nearest female relative, the female chief who of all women
was alone permitted to enter the Sun-temple. Her son, after the custom
of female succession common among the lower races, would succeed to the
primacy and chiefship; and the solar family took to themselves, wives
and husbands from the plebeian order, who were their inferiors in life,
and were slain to follow them as attendants in death.[691] Another
nation of sun-worshippers were the Apalaches of Florida, whose daily
service was to salute the Sun at their doors as he rose and set. The
Sun, they said, had built his own conical mountain of Olaimi, with its
spiral path leading to the cave-temple, in the east side. Here, at the
four solar festivals, the worshippers saluted the rising sun with chants
and incense as his rays entered the sanctuary, and again when at midday
the sunlight poured down upon the altar through the hole or shaft
pierced for this purpose in the rocky vault of the cave; through this
passage the sun-birds, the tonatzuli, were let fly up sunward as
messengers, and the ceremony was over.[692] Day by day, in the temples
of Mexico, the rising sun was welcomed with blast of horns, and incense,
and offering of a little of the officiators’ own blood drawn from their
ears, and a sacrifice of quails. Saying, the Sun has risen, we know not
how he will fulfil his course nor whether misfortune will happen, they
prayed to him—‘Our Lord, do your office prosperously.’ In distinct and
absolute personality, the divine Sun in Aztec theology was Tonatiuh,
whose huge pyramid-mound stands on the plain of Teotihuacan, a witness
of his worship for future ages. Beyond this, the religion of Mexico, in
its complex system or congeries of great gods, such as results from the
mixture and alliance of the deities of several nations, shows the solar
element rooted deeply and widely in other personages of its divine
mythology, and attributes especially to the Sun the title of Teotl,
God.[693] Again, the high plateau of Bogota in New Granada was the seat
of the semi-civilized Chibchas or Muyscas, of whose mythology and
religion the leading ideas were given by the Sun. The Sun was the great
deity to whom the human sacrifices were offered, and especially the
holiest sacrifice, the blood of a pure captive youth daubed on a rock on
a mountain-top for the rising sun to shine on. In native Muysca legend,
the mythic civilizer of the land, the teacher of agriculture, the
founder of the theocracy and institutor of sun-worship, is a figure in
whom we cannot fail to discern the personal Sun himself.[694] It is
thus, lastly, in the far more celebrated native theocracy to the south.
In the royal religion of Peru, the Sun was at once ancestor and founder
of the dynasty of Incas, who reigned as his representatives and almost
in his person, who took wives from the convent of virgins of the Sun,
and whose descendants were the solar race, the ruling aristocracy. The
Sun’s innumerable flocks of llamas grazed on the mountains, and his
fields were tilled in the valleys, his temples stood throughout the
land, and first among them the ‘Place of Gold’ in Cuzco, where his new
fire was kindled at the annual solar festival of Raymi, and where his
splendid golden disc with human countenance looked forth to receive the
first rays of its divine original. Sun-worship was ancient in Peru, but
it was the Incas who made it the great state religion, imposing it
wherever their wide conquests reached, till it became the central idea
of Peruvian life.[695] The culture of the Old World never surpassed this
highest range of Sun-worship in the New.

In Australia and Polynesia the place of the solar god or hero is rather
in myth than in religion. In Africa, though found in some
districts,[696] Sun-worship is not very conspicuous out of Egypt. In
tracing its Old World development, we begin among the ruder Allophylian
tribes of Asia, and end among the great polytheistic nations. The
northeast quarter of India shows the doctrine well defined among the
indigenous stocks. The Bodo and Dhimal place the Sun in the pantheon as
an elemental god, though in practical rank below the sacred rivers.[697]
The Kol tribes of Bengal, Mundas, Oraons, Santals, know and worship as
supreme, Sing-bonga, the Sun-god; to him some tribes offer white animals
in token of his purity, and while not regarding him as author of
sickness or calamity, they will resort to him when other divine aid
breaks down in sorest need.[698] Among the Khonds, Bura Pennu the
Light-god, or Bella Pennu the Sun-god, is creator of all things in
heaven and earth, and great first cause of good. As such, he is
worshipped by his own sect above the ranks of minor deities whom he
brought into being to carry out the details of the universal work.[699]
The Tatar tribes with much unanimity recognize as a great god the Sun,
whose figure may be seen beside the Moon’s on their magic drums, from
Siberia to Lapland. Castrén, the ethnologist, speaking of the Samoyed
expression for heaven or deity in general (jilibeambaertje), tells an
anecdote from his travels, which gives a lively idea of the thorough
simple nature-religion still possible to the wanderers of the steppes.
‘A Samoyed woman,’ he says, ‘told me it was her habit every morning and
evening to step out of her tent and bow down before the sun; in the
morning saying, “When thou Jilibeambaertje risest, I too rise from my
bed!” in the evening, “When thou Jilibeambaertje sinkest down, I too get
me to rest!” The woman brought this as a proof of her assertion that
even among the Samoyeds they said their morning and evening prayers, but
she added with pity that “there were also among them wild people who
never sent up a prayer to God.”’ Mongol hordes may still be met with
whose shamans invoke the Sun, and throw milk up into the air as an
offering to him, while the Karagas Tatars would bring to him as a
sacrifice the head and heart of bear or stag. Tunguz, Ostyaks, Woguls,
worship him in a character blending with that of their highest deity and
Heaven-god; while among the Lapps, Baiwe the Sun, though a mighty deity,
stood in rank below Tiermes the Thunder-god, and the great celestial
ruler who had come to bear the Norwegian name of Storjunkare.[700]

In direct personal nature-worship like that of Siberian nomades of our
day, the solar cultus of the ancient pastoral Aryans had its source. The
Vedic bards sing of the great god Sûrya, knower of beings, the
all-revealer before whom the stars depart with the nights like thieves.
We approach Sûrya (they say) shining god among the gods, light most
glorious. He shines on the eight regions, the three worlds, the seven
rivers; the golden-handed Savitar, all-seeing, goes between heaven and
earth. To him they pray, ‘On thy ancient paths, O Savitar, dustless,
well made, in the air, on those good-going paths this day preserve us
and bless us, O God!’ Modern Hinduism is full of the ancient
Sun-worship, in offerings and prostrations, in daily rites and appointed
festivals, and it is Savitar the Sun who is invoked in the ‘gâyatrî,’
the time-honoured formula repeated day by day since long-past ages by
every Brahman: ‘Tat Savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhîmahi dhiyo yo nah
prakodayât.—Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun;
may he rouse our minds!’ Every morning the Brahman worships the sun,
standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel,
looking towards the east, holding his hands open before him in a hollow
form, and repeating to himself these prayers: ‘The rays of light
announce the splendid fiery sun, beautifully rising to illumine the
universe.’—‘He rises, wonderful, the eye of the sun, of water, and of
fire, collective power of gods; he fills heaven, earth, and sky with his
luminous net; he is the soul of all that is fixed or locomotive.’—‘That
eye, supremely beneficial, rises pure from the east; may we see him a
hundred years; may we live a hundred years; may we hear a hundred
years.’—‘May we, preserved by the divine power, contemplating heaven
above the region of darkness, approach the deity, most splendid of
luminaries!’[701] A Vedic celestial deity, Mitra the Friend, came to be
developed in the Persian religion into that great ruling divinity of
light, the victorious Mithra, lord of life and head of all created
beings. The ancient Persian Mihr-Yasht invokes him in the character of
the sun-light, Mithra with wide pastures, whom the lords of the regions
praise at early dawn, who as the first heavenly Yazata rises over
Hara-berezaiti before the sun, the immortal with swift steeds, who first
with golden form seizes the fair summits, then surrounds the whole Aryan
region. Mithra came to be regarded as the very Sun, as where Dionysos
addresses the Tyrian Bel, ‘εἴτε σὺ Μίθρης Ηέλιος Βαβυλῶνος.’ His worship
spread from the East across the Roman empire, and in Europe he takes
rank among the great solar gods absolutely identified with the personal
Sun, as in this inscription on a Roman altar dating from Trajan’s
time—‘Deo Soli Mithræ.’[702] The earlier Sun-worship of Europe, upon
which this new Oriental variety was intruded, in certain of its
developments shows the same clear personality. The Greek Helios, to whom
horses were sacrificed on the mountain-top of Taugetos, was that same
personal Sun to whom Sokrates, when he had staid rapt in thought till
daybreak, offered a prayer before he departed (ἔπειτ’ ὤχετ’ ἀπιὼν
προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλιῳ).[703] Cæsar devotes to the German theology of his
time three lines of his Commentaries. They reckon in the number of the
gods, he says, those only whom they perceive and whose benefits they
openly enjoy, Sun and Vulcan and Moon, the rest they know not even by
report.[704] It is true that Cæsar’s short summary does no justice to
the real number and quality of the deities of the German pantheon, yet
his forcible description of nature-worship in its most primitive stage
may probably be true of the direct adoration of the sun and moon, and
possibly of fire. On the other hand, European sun-worship leads into the
most perplexing problems of mythology. Well might Cicero exclaim, ‘How
many suns are set forth by the theologians!’[705] The modern student who
shall undertake to discriminate among the Sun-gods of European lands, to
separate the solar and non-solar elements of the Greek Apollo and
Herakles, or of the Slavonic Swatowit, has a task before him complicate
with that all but hopeless difficulty which besets the study of myth,
the moment that the clue of direct comparison with nature falls away.

The religion of ancient Egypt is one of which we know much, yet
little—much of its temples, rites, names of deities, liturgical
formulas, but little of the esoteric religious ideas which lay hidden
within these outer manifestations. Yet it is clear that central solar
conceptions as it were radiate through the Egyptian theology. Ra, who
traverses in his boat the upper and lower regions of the universe, is
the Sun himself in plain cosmic personality. And to take two obvious
instances of solar characters in other deities, Osiris the manifester of
good and truth, who dies by the powers of darkness and becomes judge of
the dead in the west-land of Amenti, is solar in his divine nature, as
is also his son Horus, smiter of the monster Set.[706] In the religions
of the Semitic race, the place of the Sun is marked through a long range
of centuries. The warning to the Israelites lest they should worship and
serve sun, moon, and stars, and the mention of Josiah taking away the
horses that the Kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burning the
chariots of the sun with fire,[707] agree with the place given in other
Semitic religions to the Sun-god, Shamas of Assyria, or Baal, even
expressly qualified as Baal-Shemesh or Lord Sun. Syrian religion, like
Persian, introduced a new phase of Sun-worship into Rome, the cultus of
Elagabal, and the vile priest emperor who bore this divine name made it
more intelligible to classic ears as Heliogabalus.[708] Eusebius is a
late writer as regards Semitic religion, but with such facts as these
before us we need not withhold our confidence from him when he describes
the Phœnicians and Egyptians as holding Sun, Moon, and Stars to be gods,
sole causes of the generation and destruction of all things.[709]

The widely spread and deeply rooted religion of the Sun naturally
offered strenuous resistance to the invasion of Christianity, and it was
one of the great signs of the religious change of the civilized world
when Constantine, that ardent votary of the Sun, abandoned the faith of
Apollo for that of Christ. Amalgamation even proved possible between the
doctrines of Sabæism and Christianity, and in and near Armenia a sect of
Sun-worshippers have lasted on into modern times under the profession of
Jacobite Christians;[710] a parallel case within the limits of
Mohammedanism being that of Beduin Arabs who still continue the old
adoration of the rising sun, in spite of the Prophet’s expressed command
not to bow before the sun or moon, and in spite of the good Moslem’s
dictum, that ‘the sun rises between the devil’s horns.’[711] Actual
worship of the sun in Christendom soon shrank to the stage of survival.
In Lucian’s time the Greeks kissed their hands as an act of worship to
the rising sun; and Tertullian had still to complain of many Christians
that with an affectation of adoring the heavenly bodies they would move
their lips toward the sunrise (Sed et plerique vestrum affectatione
aliquando et cœlestia adorandi ad solis ortum labia vibratis).[712] In
the 5th century, Leo the Great complains of certain Christians who,
before entering the Basilica of St. Peter, or from the top of a hill,
would turn and bow to the rising sun; this comes, he says, partly of
ignorance and partly of the spirit of paganism.[713] To this day, in the
Upper Palatinate, the peasant takes off his hat to the rising sun; and
in Pomerania, the fever-stricken patient is to pray thrice turning
toward the sun at sunrise, ‘Dear Sun, come soon down, and take the
seventy-seven fevers from me. In the name of God the Father, &c.’[714]

For the most part, the ancient rites of solar worship are represented in
modern Christendom in two ways; by the ceremonies connected with turning
to the east, of which an account is given in an ensuing chapter under
the heading of Orientation; and in the continuance of the great
sun-festivals, countenanced by or incorporated in Christianity.
Spring-tide, reckoned by so many peoples as New-Year, has in great
measure had its solar characteristics transferred to the Paschal
festival. The Easter bonfires with which the North German hills used to
be ablaze mile after mile, are not altogether given up by local custom.
On Easter morning in Saxony and Brandenburg, the peasants still climb
the hill-tops before dawn, to see the rising sun give his three joyful
leaps, as our forefathers used to do in England in the days when Sir
Thomas Browne so quaintly apologized for declaring that ‘the sun doth
not dance on Easter Day.’ The solar rite of the New Fire, adopted by the
Roman Church as a Paschal ceremony, may still be witnessed in Europe,
with its solemn curfew on Easter Eve, and the ceremonial striking of the
new holy fire. On Easter Eve, under the solemn auspices of the Greek
Church, a mob of howling fanatics crush and trample to death the victims
who faint and fall in their struggles to approach the most shameless
imposture of modern Christendom, the miraculous fire from heaven which
descends into the Holy Sepulchre.[715] Two other Christian festivals
have not merely had solar rites transferred to them, but seem distinctly
themselves of solar origin. The Roman winter-solstice festival, as
celebrated on December 25 (VIII. Kal. Jan.) in connexion with the
worship of the Sun-god Mithra, appears to have been instituted in this
special form after the Eastern campaign of Aurelian A.D. 273, and to
this festival the day owes its apposite name of Birthday of the
Unconquered Sun, ‘Dies Natalis Solis invicti.’ With full symbolic
appropriateness, though not with historical justification, the day was
adopted in the Western Church, where it appears to have been generally
introduced by the 4th century, and whence in time it passed to the
Eastern Church, as the solemn anniversary of the birth of Christ, the
Christian Dies Natalis, Christmas Day. Attempts have been made to ratify
this date as matter of history, but no valid nor even consistent early
Christian tradition vouches for it. The real solar origin of the
festival is clear from the writings of the Fathers after its
institution. In religious symbolism of the material and spiritual sun,
Augustine and Gregory of Nyassa discourse on the glowing light and
dwindling darkness that follow the Nativity, while Leo the Great, among
whose people the earlier solar meaning of the festival evidently
remained in strong remembrance, rebukes in a sermon the pestiferous
persuasion, as he calls it, that this solemn day is to be honoured not
for the birth of Christ, but for the rising, as they say, of the new
sun.[716] As for modern memory of the sun-rites of mid-winter, Europe
recognizes Christmas as a primitive solar festival by bonfires which our
‘yule-log,’ the ‘souche de Noël,’ still keeps in mind; while the
adaptation of ancient solar thought to Christian allegory is as plain as
ever in the Christmas service chant, ‘Sol novus oritur.’[717] The solar
Christmas festival has its pendant at Midsummer. The summer solstice was
the great season of fire-festivals throughout Europe, of bonfires on the
heights, of dancing round and leaping through the fires, of sending
blazing fire-wheels to roll down from the hills into the valleys in sign
of the sun’s descending course. These ancient rites attached themselves
in Christendom to St. John’s Eve.[718] It seems as though the same train
of symbolism which had adapted the midwinter festival to the Nativity,
may have suggested the dedication of the midsummer festival to John the
Baptist, in clear allusion to his words, ‘He must increase, but I must
decrease.’

Moon-worship, naturally ranking below Sun-worship in importance, ranges
through nearly the same district of culture. There are remarkable cases
in which the Moon is recognized as a great deity by tribes who take less
account, or none at all, of the Sun. The rude savages of Brazil seem
especially to worship or respect the moon, by which they regulate their
time and festivals, and draw their omens. They would lift up their hands
to the moon with wonder-struck exclamations of teh! teh! they would have
children smoked by the sorcerers to preserve them from moon-given
sickness, or the women would hold up their babes to the luminary. The
Botocudos are said to give the highest rank among the heavenly bodies to
Taru the Moon, as causing thunder and lightning and the failure of
vegetables and fruits, and as even sometimes falling to the earth,
whereby many men die.[719] An old account of the Caribs describes them
as esteeming the Moon more than the Sun, and at new moon coming out of
their houses crying ‘Behold the Moon!’[720] The Ahts of Vancouver’s
Island, it is stated, worship the Sun and Moon, particularly the full
moon and the sun ascending to the zenith. Regarding the Moon as husband
and the Sun as wife, their prayers are more generally addressed to the
Moon as the superior deity; he is the highest object of their worship,
and they speak of him as ‘looking down upon the earth in answer to
prayer, and seeing everybody.’[721] With a somewhat different turn of
mythic fancy, the Hurons seem to have considered Ataentsic the Moon as
maker of the earth and man, and grandmother of Iouskeha the Sun, with
whom she governs the world.[722] In Africa, Moon-worship is prominent in
an immense district where Sun-worship is unknown or insignificant. Among
south-central tribes, men will watch for the first glimpses of the new
Moon, which they hail with shouts of kua! and vociferate prayers to it;
on such an occasion Dr. Livingstone’s Makololo prayed, ‘Let our journey
with the white man be prosperous!’ &c.[723] These people keep holiday at
new-moon, as indeed in many countries her worship is connected with the
settlement of periodic festival. Negro tribes seem almost universally to
greet the new Moon, whether in delight or disgust. The Guinea people
fling themselves about with droll gestures, and pretend to throw
firebrands at it; the Ashango men behold it with superstitious fear; the
Fetu negroes jumped thrice into the air with hands together and gave
thanks.[724] The Congo people fell on their knees, or stood and clapped
their hands, crying, ‘So may I renew my life as thou art renewed!’[725]
The Hottentots are described early in the last century as dancing and
singing all night at new and full moon, calling the Moon the Great
Captain, and crying to him ‘Be greeted!’ ‘Let us get much honey!’ ‘May
our cattle get much to eat and give much milk!’ With the same thought as
that just noticed in the district north-west of them, the Hottentots
connect the Moon in legend with that fatal message sent to Man, which
ought to have promised to the human race a moon-like renewal of life,
but which was perverted into a doom of death like that of the beast who
brought it.[726]

The more usual status of the Moon in the religions of the world is, as
nature suggests, that of a subordinate companion deity to the Sun, such
a position as is acknowledged in the precedence of Sunday to Monday.
Their various mutual relations as brother and sister, husband and wife,
have already been noticed here as matter of mythology. As wide-lying
rude races who place them thus side by side in their theology, it is
enough to mention the Delawares of North America,[727] the Ainos of
Yesso,[728] the Bodos of North-East-India,[729] the Tunguz of
Siberia.[730] This is the state of things which continues at higher
levels of systematic civilization. Beside the Mexican Tonatiuh the Sun,
Metztli the Moon had a smaller pyramid and temple;[731] in Bogota, the
Moon, identified in local myth with the Evil Deity, had her place and
figure in the temple beside the Sun her husband;[732] the Peruvian
Mother-Moon, Mama-Quilla, had her silver disc-face to match the golden
one of her brother and husband the Sun, whose companion she had been in
the legendary civilizing of the land.[733] In the ancient Kami-religion
of Japan, the supreme Sun-god ranks high above the Moon-god, who was
worshipped under the form of a fox.[734] Among the historic nations of
the Old World, documents of Semitic culture show Sun and Moon side by
side. For one, we may take the Jewish law, to stone with stones till
they died the man or woman who ‘hath gone and served other gods, and
worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven.’
For another, let us glance over the curious record of the treaty-oath
between Philip of Macedon and the general of the Carthaginian and Libyan
army, which so well shows how the original identity of nature-deities
may be forgotten in their different local shapes, so that the same
divinity may come twice or even three times over in as many national
names and forms. Herakles and Apollo stand in company with the personal
Sun, and as well as the personal Moon is to be seen the ‘Carthaginian
deity,’ whom there is reason to look on as Astarte, a goddess latterly
of lunar nature. This is the list of deities invoked: ‘Before Zeus and
Hera and Apollo; before the goddess of the Carthaginians (δαίμονος
Καρχηδονίων) and Herakles and Iolaos; before Ares, Triton, Poseidon;
before the gods who fought with the armies, and Sun and Moon and Earth;
before the rivers and meadows and waters; before all the gods who rule
Macedonia and the rest of Greece; before all the gods who were at the
war, they who have presided over this oath.’[735] When Lucian visited
the famous temple of Hierapolis in Syria, he saw the images of the other
gods, ‘but only of the Sun and Moon they show no images.’ And when he
asked why, they told him that the forms of other gods were not seen by
all, but Sun and Moon are altogether clear, and all men see them.[736]
In Egyptian theology, not to discuss other divine beings to whom a lunar
nature has been ascribed, it is at least certain that Khonsu is the Moon
in absolute personal divinity.[737] In Aryan theology, the personal Moon
stands as Selēnē beside the more anthropomorphic forms of Hekatē and
Artemis,[738] as Luna beside the less understood Lucina, and Diana with
her borrowed attributes,[739] while our Teutonic forefathers were
content with his plain name of Moon.[740] As for lunar survivals in the
higher religions, they are much like the solar. Monotheist as he is, the
Moslem still claps his hands at sight of the new moon, and says a
prayer.[741] In Europe in the 15th century it was matter of complaint
that some still adored the new moon with bended knee, or hood or hat
removed, and to this day we may still see a hat raised or a curtsey
dropped to her, half in conservatism and half in jest. It is with
reference to silver as the lunar metal, that money is turned when the
act of adoration is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells on the
ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new moon is first
seen.[742]

Thus, in tracing the development of Nature-Worship, it appears that
though Fire, Air, Earth, and Water are not yet among the lower races
systematized into a quaternion of elements, their adoration, with that
of Sun and Moon, shows already arising in primitive culture the familiar
types of those great divinities, who received their further development
in the higher Polytheism.

Footnote 593:

  Eyre, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 362; Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol.
  iii. p. 228; Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 444.

Footnote 594:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 583.

Footnote 595:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. America,’ part i. p. 43.

Footnote 596:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 1322.

Footnote 597:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 180.

Footnote 598:

  J. B. Schlegel, ‘Schlüssel zur Ewe Sprache,’ p. xii.; compare Bowen,
  ‘Yoruba Lang.’ in ‘Smithsonian Contrib.’ vol. i. p. xvi.

Footnote 599:

  Samoiedia, in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 531.

Footnote 600:

  Macpherson, p. 84, &c.

Footnote 601:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. ch. i.

Footnote 602:

  Gladstone, ‘Juventus Mundi,’ ch. vii. &c.

Footnote 603:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii.

Footnote 604:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. pp. 33, 255, 275, 338, vol. ii. p. 692.

Footnote 605:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.,’ 1636, p. 107; Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages
  Amériquains,’ vol. i. p. 132. Schoolcraft, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 36, &c. 237.
  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ pp. 48, 172. J. G. Müller, ‘Amer.
  Urrelig.’ p. 119.

Footnote 606:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 203.

Footnote 607:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 168, &c.; Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W.
  Afr.’ p. 76.

Footnote 608:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 7, &c.

Footnote 609:

  Plath, ‘Religion und Cultus der alten Chinesen,’ part i. p. 18, &c.;
  part ii. p. 32; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396. See Max Müller,
  ‘Lectures,’ 2nd S. p. 437; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 100. For further
  evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Heaven as Supreme
  Deity, see chap. xvii.

Footnote 610:

  Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd Series, p. 425; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. ix.;
  Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 4. Connexion of the Sanskrit Dyu with
  the Scandinavian Tyr and the Anglo Saxon Tiw is perhaps rather of
  etymology than definition.

Footnote 611:

  Duff Macdonald, ‘Africana,’ vol. i. p. 60 (E. Centr. Afr.). Waitz,
  ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 169 (W. Afr.) p. 416 (Damaras).

Footnote 612:

  Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp.
  318, 368.

Footnote 613:

  Ibid. pp. 496-9; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ pp. 40, 72.

Footnote 614:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 89, 355.

Footnote 615:

  Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 34. Compare 1 Kings
  xviii.

Footnote 616:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 36; Kalewala, Rune ii. 317.

Footnote 617:

  Marc. Antonin. v. 7. ‘Ἐὐχὴ Ἀθηναίων, ὖσον, ὖσον, ὦ φίλε Ζεῦ, κατὰ τῆς
  ἀρούρας τῶν Ἀθηναίων καὶ τῶν πεδίων.’

Footnote 618:

  Petron. Arbiter. Sat. xliv. ‘Antea stolatæ ibant nudis pedibus in
  clivum, passis capillis, mentibus puris, et Jovem aquam exorabant.
  Itaque statim urceatim pluebat: aut tunc aut nunquam; et omnes
  redibant udi tanquam mures.’ See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 160.

Footnote 619:

  Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘N. Amer.’ vol. ii. pp. 152, 223; J. G. Müller, p.
  120; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 179.

Footnote 620:

  Keating, ‘Narr.’ vol. i. p. 407; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’ p. 71; Brinton,
  p. 150, &c.; see M’Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 363.

Footnote 621:

  De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530; Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 431.

Footnote 622:

  De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ xv. 2. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417; J. G. Müller,
  p. 270; also 421 (thunderstorms by anger of Sun, in Cumana, &c.).

Footnote 623:

  Brinton, p. 153; Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ Dec., v. 4. J. G.
  Müller p. 327. ‘Rites and Laws of the Yncas,’ tr. & ed. by C. R.
  Markham, p. 16, see 81; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86.

Footnote 624:

  Bowen, ‘Yoruba Lang.’ p. xvi. in ‘Smithsonian Contr.’ vol. i. See
  Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 142. Details as to thunder-axes, &c., in
  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. viii.

Footnote 625:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 266.

Footnote 626:

  Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iv. p. 85. (Ossetes, &c.) See Welcker, vol. i. p.
  170; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 158. Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. ii. p. 423
  (Ali-sect.).

Footnote 627:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 39, &c.

Footnote 628:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 32. 1, 55. 5, 130. 8, 165; iii. 34. 9; vi. 20; x. 44.
  9, 89. 9. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd S. p. 427; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p.
  42, vol. ii. p. 323. See Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts.’

Footnote 629:

  Homer. Il. viii. 170, xvii. 595. Ovid. Fast. ii. 69. See Welcker,
  ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 194.

Footnote 630:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 257.

Footnote 631:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ ch. viii. Edda; Gylfaginning, 21, 44.

Footnote 632:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 139, vol. ii. p. 214; Loskiel,
  part i. p. 43; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 190. Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 157; J.
  G. Müller, p. 56. Further American evidence in Brinton, ‘Myths of New
  World,’ pp. 50, 74; Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 267 (Sillagiksartok,
  Weather-spirit); De la Borde, ‘Caraïbes,’ p. 530 (Carib Star Curumon,
  makes the billows and upsets canoes).

Footnote 633:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 329 (compare with the Maori
  Tempest-god Tawhirimatea, Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 5); Schirren,
  ‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ &c. p. 85; Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144.
  See also Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 115.

Footnote 634:

  Steller, ‘Kamschatka,’ p. 266.

Footnote 635:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 37, 68.

Footnote 636:

  Boecler, pp. 106, 147.

Footnote 637:

  See also Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iv. p. 85 (Circassian Water-god
  and Wind-god).

Footnote 638:

  Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ vol. v. p. 150.

Footnote 639:

  Homer. Il. xxiii. 192, Odyss. xx. 66, 77; Apollon. Rhod. Argonautica;
  Apollodor. i. 9. 21; Virg. Æn. i. 56; Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.
  i. p. 707, vol. iii. p. 67.

Footnote 640:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ pp. 121, 871.

Footnote 641:

  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 86.

Footnote 642:

  Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ p. 193; Loskiel, l.c. See also Rochefort, ‘Iles
  Antilles,’ p. 414; J. G. Müller, p. 178 (Antilles).

Footnote 643:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10; Rivero & Tschudi,
  p. 161; J. G. Müller, p. 369.

Footnote 644:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 170.

Footnote 645:

  ‘Report of Ethnological Committee, Jubbulpore Exhibition,’ 1866-7.
  Nagpore, 1868, part ii. p. 54.

Footnote 646:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ chap. vi.

Footnote 647:

  Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Castrén, ‘Finn.
  Myth,’ p. 86, &c.

Footnote 648:

  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part i. pp. 36, 73, part ii. p.
  32. Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. pp. 86, 354, 413, vol. ii. pp. 67,
  380, 455.

Footnote 649:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 89. 4, &c., &c.

Footnote 650:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 385, &c.

Footnote 651:

  Varro de Ling. Lat. iv.

Footnote 652:

  Tacit. Germania, 40. Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 229, &c.

Footnote 653:

  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksabergl.’ p. 87.

Footnote 654:

  Liebich, ‘Die Zigeuner,’ pp. 30, 84.

Footnote 655:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 485; Eastman, ‘Dahcotah,’
  pp. i. 118, 161.

Footnote 656:

  Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 14.

Footnote 657:

  Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 301; see also 303 (Tagals).

Footnote 658:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 328.

Footnote 659:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xix.; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494. Burton,
  ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 141. See also below, chap. xviii. (sacrifice).

Footnote 660:

  Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. xiv.

Footnote 661:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. 10, vi. 17; Rivero &
  Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 161.

Footnote 662:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 265.

Footnote 663:

  Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

Footnote 664:

  Herod. vi. 76.

Footnote 665:

  Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 20.

Footnote 666:

  Homer, Il. i. 538, xiii. 18, xx. 13. Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.
  i. p. 616 (Nereus), p. 622 (Poseidon). Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan
  Nations,’ vol. ii. ch. vi.

Footnote 667:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. pp. 41, 45. See also J. G. Müller, p.
  55.

Footnote 668:

  Irving, ‘Astoria,’ vol. ii. ch. xxii.

Footnote 669:

  Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vi. c. 28, x. c. 22, 30; Brasseur,
  ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. pp. 492, 522, 536.

Footnote 670:

  Schirren, ‘Wandersage der Neuseeländer,’ &c., p. 32; Turner,
  ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 252, 527.

Footnote 671:

  Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148; Schlegel, ‘Ewe Sprache,’ p. xv.

Footnote 672:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 276.

Footnote 673:

  Batchelor in ‘Tr. As. Soc. Japan,’ vols. x. xvi.

Footnote 674:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 57; Billings, ‘N. Russia,’ p. 123 (Yakuts);
  Bastian, ‘Vorstellungen von Wasser und Feuer,’ in ‘Zeitschr. für
  Ethnologie,’ vol. i. p. 383 (Mongols).

Footnote 675:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. vi. p. 85 (Circassia). Welcker, vol. i. p.
  663.

Footnote 676:

  See ‘Records of the Past,’ vol. iii. p. 137, vol. ix. p. 143; Sayce,
  ‘Lectures on Rel. of Ancient Babylonians,’ p. 170. For accounts of
  Semitic fire-worship, see Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 327, &c.,
  337, &c., 401.

Footnote 677:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 1. 1, 19. 2, iii. 1. 18, &c.; Max Müller, vol. i. p.
  39; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 53. Haug, ‘Essays on Parsis,’ iv.;
  ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 255.

Footnote 678:

  Hanway, ‘Journal of Travels,’ London, 1753, vol. i. ch. lvii.

Footnote 679:

  Diog. Lært. Proœm. ii. 6. Sextus Empiricus adv. Physicos, ix.; Strabo,
  xv. 3, 13.

Footnote 680:

  John Wilson, ‘The Parsi Religion,’ ch. iv.; ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel,
  Yacna, i. lxi.

Footnote 681:

  Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 169. Haug, ‘Essays on Parsis,’ p. 281.

Footnote 682:

  Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 88, 98.

Footnote 683:

  Homer. Hymn. Aphrod. 29, Hestia 1. Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol.
  ii. pp. 686, 691.

Footnote 684:

  Ovid. Fast. vi. 295.

Footnote 685:

  Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergl.’ p. 29, &c.

Footnote 686:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksabergl.’ p. 86. Grohmann, ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p.
  41.

Footnote 687:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. i. p. 242.

Footnote 688:

  Herod, i. 216, iv. 184. Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 144.

Footnote 689:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 181 (Hudson’s B., Pottawatomies),
  205 (Virginians). J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 117 (Delawares,
  Sioux, Mingos, &c.). Sproat, ‘Ind. of Vancouver’s I.’ in ‘Tr. Eth.
  Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253. Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 43
  (Delawares). Hennepin, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique,’ p. 302 (Sioux), &c.
  Bartram, ‘Creek and Cherokee Ind.’ in ‘Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii.
  part i. pp. 20, 26; see also Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part ii. p.
  127 (Comanches, &c.); Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 164; Gregg, vol. ii. p.
  238 (Shawnees); but compare the remarks of Brinton, ‘Myths of New
  World,’ p. 141.

Footnote 690:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 327 (Botocudos). Waitz, vol. iii.
  p. 518 (Araucanians). Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 89 (Puelches).
  Charlevoix, ‘Hist. du Paraguay,’ vol. i. p. 331 (Diaguitas). J. G.
  Müller, p. 255 (Botocudos, Aucas, Diaguitas).

Footnote 691:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 172; Waitz, vol. iii. p.
  217.

Footnote 692:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ book ii. ch. viii.

Footnote 693:

  Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ ix. c. 34; Sahagun, ‘Hist. de Nueva
  España,’ ii. App. in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico;’ Waitz,
  vol. iv. p. 138; J. G. Müller, p. 474, &c.; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol.
  iii. p. 487; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ p. 141.

Footnote 694:

  Piedrahita, ‘Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’
  Antwerp, 1688: part i. book i. c. iii. iv.; Humboldt, ‘Vues des
  Cordillères;’ Waitz, vol. iv. p. 352, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 432, &c.

Footnote 695:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ lib. i. c. 15, &c., iii.
  c. 20; v. c. 2, 6; ‘Rites and Laws of the Yncas,’ tr. & ed. by C. R.
  Markham, (Hakluyt Soc., 1873) p. 84; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ book i. ch.
  iii.; Waitz, vol. iv. p. 447, &c.; J. G. Müller, p. 362, &c.

Footnote 696:

  Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Rel.’ vol. i. p. 383. Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol.
  ii. p. 346; ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 147.

Footnote 697:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ pp. 167, 175 (Bodos, &c.).

Footnote 698:

  Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 33 (Oraons, &c.);
  Hunter, ‘Annals of Rural Bengal,’ p. 184 (Santals).

Footnote 699:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84, &c. (Khonds).

Footnote 700:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 16, 51, &c. Meiners, l.c. Georgi, ‘Reise im
  Russ. Reich.’ vol. i. pp. 275, 317. Klemm, ‘Cultur-Geschichte,’ vol.
  iii. p. 87. Sun-Worship in Japan, Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9. For
  further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Sun as
  Supreme Deity, see chap. xvii.

Footnote 701:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 35, 50; iii. 62, 10. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd Ser.
  pp. 378, 411; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 19. Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i.
  pp. 30, 133. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 42.

Footnote 702:

  ‘Khordah-Avesta,’ xxvi. in Avesta tr. by Spiegel, vol. iii.; M. Haug,
  ‘Essays on Parsis.’ Strabo, xv. 3, 13. Nonnus, xl. 400. Movers,
  ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 180: ‘Ἡλίῳ Μίθρᾳ ἀνικήτῳ’; ‘Διὸς ἀνικήτον
  Ἡλίου.’

Footnote 703:

  Plat. Sympos. xxxvi. See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ vol. i. pp.
  400, 412.

Footnote 704:

  Cæsar de Bello Gallico, vi. 21: ‘Deorum numero eos solos ducunt, quos
  cernunt et quorum aperte opibus juvantur, Solem et Vulcanum et Lunam,
  reliquos ne fama quidem acceperunt.’

Footnote 705:

  Cicero de Natura Deorum, iii. 21.

Footnote 706:

  See Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians’; Renouf, ‘Religion of Ancient
  Egypt.’

Footnote 707:

  Deut. iv. 19, xvii. 3; 2 Kings xxiii. 11.

Footnote 708:

  Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. pp. 162, 180, &c. Lamprid. Heliogabal. i.

Footnote 709:

  Euseb. Præparat. Evang. i. 6.

Footnote 710:

  Neander, ‘Church History,’ vol. vi. p. 341. Carsten Niebuhr,
  ‘Reisebeschr.’ vol. ii. p. 396.

Footnote 711:

  Palgrave, ‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 9; vol. ii. p. 258. See Koran, xli. 37.

Footnote 712:

  Tertullian. Apolog. adv. Gentes, xvi. See Lucian. de Saltat. xvii.;
  compare Job. xxxi. 26.

Footnote 713:

  Leo. I. Serm. viii. in Natal. Dom.

Footnote 714:

  Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 150.

Footnote 715:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 581, &c. Wuttke, pp. 17, 93. Brand, ‘Pop.
  Ant.’ vol. i. p. 157, &c. ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 260. Murray’s
  ‘Handbook for Syria and Palestine,’ 1868, p. 162.

Footnote 716:

  See Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘Sol;’ Petavius, ‘Juliani Imp.
  Opera,’ 290-2, 277. Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church,’ book
  xx. ch. iv.; Neander, ‘Church Hist.’ vol. iii. p. 437; Beausobre,
  ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ vol. ii. p. 691; Gibbon, ch. xxii.; Creuzer,
  ‘Symbolik,’ vol. i. p. 761, &c.

Footnote 717:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 593, 1223. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. i. p.
  467. Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ p. 188.

Footnote 718:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 583; Brand, vol. i. p. 298; Wuttke, pp. 14, 140.
  Beausobre, l.c.

Footnote 719:

  Spix and Martius, ‘Reise in Brasilien,’ vol. i. pp. 377, 381; Martius,
  ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 327; Pr. Max. v. Wied, vol. ii. p. 58; J.
  G. Müller, pp. 218, 254; also Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ pp. 58, 179.

Footnote 720:

  De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 721:

  Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ p. 206; ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. v. p. 253.

Footnote 722:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1635, p. 34.

Footnote 723:

  Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 235; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 175, 342.

Footnote 724:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 84; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 428; see
  Purchas, vol. v. p. 766. Müller, ‘Fetu,’ p. 47.

Footnote 725:

  Merolla, ‘Congo,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 273.

Footnote 726:

  Kolbe, ‘Beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop,’ part i. xxix. See
  ante, vol. i. p. 355.

Footnote 727:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 43.

Footnote 728:

  Bickmore, ‘Ainos,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20.

Footnote 729:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 167.

Footnote 730:

  Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. R.’ vol. i. p. 275.

Footnote 731:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 9, 35; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ l.c.

Footnote 732:

  Waitz, vol. iv. p. 362.

Footnote 733:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ iii. 21.

Footnote 734:

  Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ part v. p. 9.

Footnote 735:

  Deuteron. xvii. 3; Polyb. vii. 9; see Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ pp. 159,
  536, 605.

Footnote 736:

  Lucian. de Syria Dea, iv. 34.

Footnote 737:

  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ ed. by Birch, vol. iii. p. 174. See
  Plutarch. Is. et Osir.

Footnote 738:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 550, &c.

Footnote 739:

  Cic. de Nat. Deor. ii. 27.

Footnote 740:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xxii.

Footnote 741:

  Akerblad, ‘Lettre à Italinsky.’ Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. ii. p.
  346. Mungo Park, ‘Travels,’ in ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xvi. p. 875.

Footnote 742:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 29, 667; Brand, vol. iii. p. 146; Forbes Leslie,
  ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. i. p. 136.

ANIMISM (continued).

    Polytheism comprises a class of Great Deities, ruling
    the course of Nature and the life of
    Man—Childbirth-god—Agriculture-god—War-god—God of the Dead—First Man
    as Divine Ancestor—Dualism; its rudimentary and unethical nature
    among low races; its development through the course of culture—Good
    and Evil Deity—Doctrine of Divine Supremacy, distinct from, while
    tending towards, the doctrine of Monotheism—Idea of a Highest or
    Supreme Deity evolved in various forms; its place as completion of
    the Polytheistic system and outcome of the Animistic philosophy; its
    continuance and development among higher nations—General survey of
    Animism as a Philosophy of Religion—Recapitulation of the theory
    advanced as to its development through successive stages of culture;
    its primary phases best represented among the lower races, while
    survivals of these among the higher races mark the transition from
    savage through barbaric to civilized faiths—Transition of Animism in
    the History of Religion; its earlier and later stages as a
    Philosophy of the Universe; its later stages as the principle of a
    Moral Institution.

Polytheism acknowledges, beside great fetish-deities like Heaven and
Earth, Sun and Moon, another class of great gods whose importance lies
not in visible presence, but in the performance of certain great offices
in the course of Nature and the life of Man. The lower races can furnish
themselves with such deities, either by giving the recognized gods
special duties to perform, or by attributing these functions to beings
invented in divine personality for the purpose. The creation of such
divinities is however carried to a much greater extent in the complex
systems of the higher polytheism. For a compact group of examples
showing to what different ideas men will resort for a deity to answer a
special end, let us take the deity presiding over Childbirth. In the
West Indies, a special divinity occupied with this function took rank as
one of the great indigenous fetish-gods;[743] in the Samoan group, the
household god of the father’s or mother’s family was appealed to;[744]
in Peru the Moon takes to this office,[745] and the same natural idea
recurs in Mexico;[746] in Esthonian religion the productive Earth-mother
appropriately becomes patroness of human birth;[747] in the classic
theology of Greece and Italy, the divine spouse of the Heaven-king,
Hera,[748] Juno,[749] favours and protects on earth marriage and the
birth of children; and to conclude the list, the Chinese work out the
problem from the manes-worshipper’s point of view, for the goddess whom
they call ‘Mother’ and propitiate with many a ceremony and sacrifice to
save and prosper their children, is held to have been in human life a
skilful midwife.[750]

The deity of Agriculture may be a cosmic being affecting the weather and
the soil, or a mythic giver of plants and teacher of their cultivation
and use. Thus among the Iroquois, Heno the Thunder, who rides through
the heavens on the clouds, who splits the forest-trees with the
thunderbolt-stones he hurls at his enemies, who gathers the clouds and
pours out the warm rains, was fitly chosen as patron of husbandry,
invoked at seed-time and harvest, and called Grandfather by his children
the Indians.[751] It is interesting to notice again on the southern
continent the working out of this idea in the Tupan of Brazilian tribes;
Thunder and Lightning, it is recorded, they call Tupan, considering
themselves to owe to him their hoes and the profitable art of tillage,
and therefore acknowledging him as a deity.[752] Among the Guarani race,
Tamoi the Ancient of Heaven had no less rightful claim, in his character
of heaven-god, to be venerated as the divine teacher of agriculture to
his people.[753] In Mexico, Centeotl the Grain-goddess received homage
and offerings at her two great festivals, and took care of the growth
and keeping of the corn.[754] In Polynesia, we hear in the Society
Islands of Ofanu the god of husbandry, in the Tonga Islands of Alo Alo
the fanner, god of wind and weather, bearing office as god of harvest,
and receiving his offering of yams when he had ripened them.[755] A
picturesque figure from barbaric Asia is Pheebee Yau, the Ceres of the
Karens, who sits on a stump and watches the growing and ripening com, to
fill the granaries of the frugal and industrious.[756] The Khonds
worship at the same shrine, a stone or tree near the village, both Būrbi
Pennu the goddess of new vegetation, and Pidzu Pennu the rain-god.[757]
Among Finns and Esths it is the Earth-mother who appropriately
undertakes the task of bringing forth the fruits.[758] And so among the
Greeks it is the same being, Dēmētēr the Earth-mother, who performs this
function, while the Roman Ceres who is confused with her is rather, as
in Mexico, a goddess of grain and fruit.[759]

The War-god is another being wanted among the lower races, and formed or
adapted accordingly. Areskove the Iroquois War-god seems to be himself
the great celestial deity; for his pleasant food they slaughtered human
victims, that he might give them victory over their enemies; as a
pleasant sight for him they tortured the war-captives; on him the
war-chief called in solemn council, and the warriors, shouting his name,
rushed into the battle he was surveying from on high. Canadian Indians
before the fight would look toward the sun, or addressed the Great
Spirit as god of war; Floridan Indians prayed to the Sun before their
wars.[760] Araucanians of Chili entreated Pillan the Thunder-god that he
would scatter their enemies, and thanked him amidst their cups after a
victory.[761] The very name of Mexico seems derived from Mexitli, the
national War-god, identical or identified with the hideous gory
Huitzilopochtli. Not to attempt a general solution of the enigmatic
nature of this inextricable compound parthenogenetic deity, we may
notice the association of his principal festival with the
winter-solstice, when his paste idol was shot through with an arrow, and
being thus killed, was divided into morsels and eaten, wherefore the
ceremony was called the teoqualo or ‘god-eating.’ This and other details
tend to show Huitzilopochtli as originally a nature-deity, whose life
and death were connected with the year’s, while his functions of War-god
may be of later addition.[762] Polynesia is a region where quite an
assortment of war-gods may be collected. Such, to take but one example,
was Tairi, war-god of King Kamehameha of the Sandwich Islands, whose
hideous image, covered with red feathers, shark-toothed,
mother-of-pearl-eyed, with helmet-crest of human hair, was carried into
battle by his special priest, distorting his own face into hideous
grins, and uttering terrific yells which were considered to proceed from
the god.[763] Two examples from Asia may show what different original
conceptions may serve to shape such deities as these upon. The Khond
War-god, who entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace
they became weapons of war, who gave edge to the axe and point to the
arrow, is the very personified spirit of tribal war, his token is the
relic of iron and the iron weapons buried in his sacred grove which
stands near each group of hamlets, and his name is Loha Pennu or
Iron-god.[764] The Chinese War-god, Kuang Tä, on the other hand, is an
ancient military ghost; he was a distinguished officer, as well as a
‘faithful and honest courtier,’ who flourished during the wars of the
Han dynasty, and emperors since then have delighted to honour him by
adding to his usual title more and more honorary distinctions.[765]
Looking at these selections from the army of War-gods of the different
regions of the world, we may well leave their classic analogues, Arēs
and Mars, as beings whose warlike function we recognize, but not so
easily their original nature.[766]

It would be easy, going through the religious systems of Polynesia and
Mexico, Greece and Rome, India and China, to give the names and offices
of a long list of divinities, patrons of hunting and fishing,
carpentering and weaving, and so forth. But studying here rather the
continuity of polytheistic ideas than the analysis of polytheistic
divinities, it is needless to proceed farther in the comparison of these
deities of special function, as recognized to some extent in the lower
civilization, before their elaborate development became one of the great
features of the higher.

The great polytheistic deities we have been examining, concerned as they
are with the earthly course of nature and human life, are gods of the
living. But even in savage levels man began to feel an intellectual need
of a God of the Dead, to reign over the souls of men in the next life,
and this necessity has been supplied in various ways. Of the deities set
up as lords of Deadman’s Land, some are beings whose original meaning is
obscure. Some are distinctly nature-deities appointed to this office,
often for local reasons, as happening to belong to the regions where the
dead take up their abode. Some, again, are as distinctly the deified
souls of men. The two first classes may be briefly instanced together in
America, where the light-side and shadow-side (as Dr. J. G. Müller well
calls them) of the conception of a future life are broadly contrasted in
the definitions of the Lord of the Dead. Among the Northern Indians this
may be Tarenyawagon the Heaven-God, identified with the Great Spirit,
who receives good warriors in his happy hunting-grounds, or his
grandmother, the Death-goddess Atahentsic.[767] In Brazil, the
Under-world-god, who places good warriors and sorcerers in Paradise,
contrasts with Aygnan the evil deity who takes base and cowardly Tupi
souls,[768] much as the Mexican Tlaloc, Water-god and lord of the
earthly paradise, contrasts with Mictlanteuctli, ruler of the dismal
dead-land in the shades below.[769] In Peru there has been placed on
record a belief that the departed spirits went to be with the Creator
and Teacher of the World—‘Bring us too near to thee ... that we may be
fortunate, being near to thee, O Uira-cocha!’ There are also statements
as to an under-world of shades, the land of the demon Supay.[770]
Accounts of this class must often be suspected of giving ideas
mis-stated under European influence, or actually adopted from Europeans,
but there is in some a look of untouched genuineness. Thus in Polynesia,
the idea of a Devil borrowed from colonists or missionaries may be
suspected in such a figure as the evil deity Wiro, chief of Reigna, the
New Zealander’s western world of departed souls. But few conceptions of
deity are more quaintly original than that of the Samoan deity
Saveasiuleo, at once ruler of destinies of war and other affairs of men
and chief of the subterranean Bulotū, with the human upper half of his
body reclining in his great house in company with the spirits of
departed chiefs, while his tail or extremity stretches far away into the
sea, in the shape of an eel or serpent. Under a name corresponding
dialectically (Siuleo = Hikuleo), this composite being reappears in the
kindred myths of the neighbouring group, the Tonga Islands. The Tongan
Hikuleo has his home in the spirit-land of Bulotū, here conceived as out
in the far western sea. Here we are told the use of his tail. His body
goes away on journeys, but his tail remains watching in Bulotū, and thus
he is aware of what goes on in more places than one. Hikuleo used to
carry off the first-born sons of Tongan chiefs, to people his island of
the blest, and he so thinned the ranks of the living that at last the
other gods were moved to compassion. Tangaloa and Maui seized Hikuleo,
passed a strong chain round him, and fastened one end to heaven and the
other to earth. Another god of the dead, of well-marked native type, is
the Rarotongan Tiki, an ancestral deity as in New Zealand, to whose long
house, a place of unceasing joys, the dead are to find their way.[771]
Among Turanian tribes, there are Samoyeds who believe in a deity called
‘A,’ dwelling in impenetrable darkness, sending disease and death to men
and reindeer, and ruling over a crowd of spirits which are manes of the
dead. Tatars tell of the nine Irle-Chans, who in their gloomy
subterranean kingdom not only rule over souls of the dead, but have at
their command a multitude of ministering spirits, visible and invisible.
In the gloomy under-world of the Finns reigns Mana or Tuoni, a being
whose nature is worked out by personification from the dismal dead-land
or death itself.[772] Much the same may be said of the Greek Aidēs,
Hades, and the Scandinavian Hel, whose names, perhaps not so much by
confusion as with a sense of their latent significance, have become
identified in language with the doleful abodes over which a personifying
fancy set them to preside.[773] As appropriately, though working out a
different idea, the ancient Egyptians conceived their great solar deity
to rule in the regions of his western under-world—Osiris is Lord of the
Dead in Amenti.[774]

In the world’s assembly of great gods, an important place must be filled
up by the manes-worshipper in logical development of his special system.
The theory of family manes, carried back to tribal gods, leads to the
recognition of superior deities of the nature of Divine Ancestor or
First Man, and it is of course reasonable that such a being, if
recognized, should sometimes fill the place of lord of the dead, whose
ancestral chief he is. There is an anecdote among the Mandans told by
Prince Maximilian von Wied, which brings into view conceptions lying in
the deepest recesses of savage religion, the idea of the divine first
ancestor, the mythic connexion of the sun’s death and descent into the
under-world, with the like fate of man and the nature of the spiritual
intercourse between man’s own soul and his deity. The First Man, it is
said, promised the Mandans to be their helper in time of need, and then
departed into the West. It came to pass that the Mandans were attacked
by foes. One Mandan would send a bird to the great ancestor to ask for
help, but no bird could fly so far. Another thought a look would reach
him, but the hills walled him in. Then said a third, thought must be the
safest way to reach the First Man. He wrapped himself in his
buffalo-robe, fell down, and spoke, ‘I think—I have thought—I come
back.’ Throwing off the fur, he was bathed in sweat. The divine helper
he had called on in his distress appeared.[775] There is instructive
variety in the ways in which the lower American races work out the
conception of the divine forefather. The Mingo tribes revere and make
offerings to the First Man, he who was saved at the great deluge, as a
powerful deity under the Master of Life, or even as identified with him;
some Mississippi Indians said that the First Man ascended into heaven,
and thunders there; among the Dog-ribs, he was creator of sun and
moon;[776] Tamoi, the grandfather and ancient of heaven of the Guaranis,
was their first ancestor, who dwelt among them and taught them to till
the soil, and rose to heaven in the east, promising to succour them on
earth, and at death to carry them from the sacred tree into a new life
where they should all meet again, and have much hunting.[777]

Polynesia, again, has thoroughly worked the theory of divine ancestors
into the native system of multiform and blending nature-deities. Men are
sprung from the divine Maui, whom Europeans have therefore called the
‘Adam of New Zealand,’ or from the Rarotongan Tiki, who seems his
equivalent (Mauitiki), and who again is the Tii of the Society Islands;
it is, however, the son of Tii who precisely represents a Polynesian
Adam, for his name is Taata, i.e., Man, and he is the ancestor of the
human race. There is perhaps also reason to identify Maui and the First
Man with Akea, first King of Hawaii, who at his earthly death descended
to rule over his dark subterranean kingdom, where his subjects are the
dead who recline under the spreading kou-trees, and drink of the
infernal rivers, and feed on lizards and butterflies.[778] In the
mythology of Kamchatka, the relation between the Creator and the First
Man is one not of identity but of parentage. Among the sons of Kutka the
Creator is Haetsh the First Man, who dwelt on earth, and died, and
descended into Hades to be chief of the under-world; there he receives
the dead and new-risen Kamchadals, to continue a life like that of earth
in his pleasant subterranean land where mildness and plenty prevail, as
they did in the regions above in the old days when the Creator was still
on earth.[779] Among all the lower races who have reasoned out this
divine ancestor, none excel those consistent manes-worshippers, the
Zulus. Their worship of the manes of the dead has not only made the
clan-ancestors of a few generations back into tribal deities
(Unkulunkulu), but beyond these, too far off and too little known for
actual worship, yet recognized as the original race-deity and identified
with the Creator, stands the First Man, he who ‘broke off in the
beginning,’ the Old-Old-One, the great Unkulunkulu. While the Zulu’s
most intense religious emotions are turned to the ghosts of the
departed, while he sacrifices his beloved oxen and prays with agonising
entreaty to his grandfather, and carries his tribal worship back to
those ancestral deities whose praise-giving names are still remembered,
the First Man is beyond the reach of such rites. ‘At first we saw that
we were made by Unkulunkulu. But when we were ill we did not worship
him, nor ask anything of him. We worshipped those whom we had seen with
our eyes, their death and their life among us.... Unkulunkulu had no
longer a son who could worship him; there was no going back to the
beginning, for people increased, and were scattered abroad, and each
house had its own connections; there was no one who said, “For my part I
am of the house of Unkulunkulu.”’ Nay more, the Zulus who would not dare
to affront an ‘idhlozi,’ a common ghost, that might be angry and kill
them, have come to make open mock of the name of the great first
ancestor. When the grown-up people wish to talk privately or eat
something by themselves, it is the regular thing to send the children
out to call at the top of their voices for Unkulunkulu. ‘The name of
Unkulunkulu has no respect paid to it among black men; for his house no
longer exists. It is now like the name of a very old crone, who has no
power to do even a little thing for herself, but sits continually where
she sat in the morning till the sun sets. And the children make sport of
her, for she cannot catch them and flog them, but only talk with her
mouth. Just so is the name of Unkulunkulu when all the children are told
to go and call him. He is now a means of making sport of children.’[780]

In Aryan religion, the divinities just described give us analogues for
the Hindu Yama, throughout his threefold nature as First Man, as solar
God of Hades, as Judge of the Dead. Professor Max Müller thus suggests
his origin, which may indeed be inferred from his being called the child
of Vivasvat, himself the Sun: ‘The sun, conceived as setting or dying
every day, was the first who had trodden the path of life from East to
West—the first mortal—the first to show us the way when our course is
run, and our sun sets in the far West. Thither the fathers followed
Yama; there they sit with him rejoicing, and thither we too shall go
when his messengers (day and night) have found us out.... Yama is said
to have crossed the rapid waters, to have shown the way to many, to have
first known the path on which our fathers crossed over.’ It is a
perfectly consistent myth-formation, that the solar Yama should become
the first of mortals who died and discovered the way to the other world,
who guides other men thither and assembles them in a home which is
secured to them for ever. As representative of death, Yama had even in
early Aryan times his aspects of terror, and in later Indian theology he
becomes not only the Lord but the awful Judge of the Dead, whom some
modern Hindus are said to worship alone of all the gods, alleging that
their future state is to be determined only by Yama, and that they have
nothing therefore to hope or fear from any beside him. In these days,
Hindu and Parsi in Bombay are learning from scholars in Europe the
ancient connexion of their long antagonistic faiths, and have to hear
that Yama son of Visavat sitting on his awful judgment-seat of the dead,
to reward the good and punish the wicked with hideous tortures, and Yima
son of Vivanhâo who in primæval days reigned over his happy deathless
kingdom of good Zarathustrian men, are but two figures developed in the
course of ages out of one and the same Aryan nature-myth.[781] Within
the limits of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theology, the First Man
scarcely occupies more than a place of precedence among the human race
in Hades or in Heaven, not the high office of Lord of the Dead. Yet that
tendency to deify an ideal ancestor, which we observe to act so strongly
on lower races, has taken effect also here. The Rabbinical Adam is a
gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven, for the definition of
whose stature Rabbi Eliezer cites Deuteronomy iv. 32, ‘God made man
(Adam) upon the earth, and from one end of heaven to the other.’[782] It
is one of the familiar episodes of the Koran, how the angels were bidden
to bow down before Adam, the regent of Allah upon earth, and how Eblis
(Diabolus) swelling with pride, refused the act of adoration.[783] Among
the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the
Deity had revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the
Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.[784]

The figures of the great deities of Polytheism, thus traced in outline
according to the determining idea on which each is shaped, seem to show
that conceptions originating under rude and primitive conditions of
human thought and passing thence into the range of higher culture, may
suffer in the course of ages the most various fates, to be expanded,
elaborated, transformed, or abandoned. Yet the philosophy of modern ages
still to a remarkable degree follows the primitive courses of savage
thought, even as the highways of our land so often follow the unchanging
tracks of barbaric roads. Let us endeavour timidly and circumspectly to
trace onward from savage times the courses of vast and pregnant
generalization which tend towards the two greatest of the world’s
schemes of religious doctrine, the systems of Dualism and Monotheism.

Rudimentary forms of Dualism, the antagonism of a Good and Evil Deity,
are well known among the lower races of mankind. The investigation of
these savage and barbaric doctrines, however, is a task demanding
peculiar caution. The Europeans in contact with these rude tribes since
their discovery, themselves for the most part holding strongly dualistic
forms of Christianity, to the extent of practically subjecting the world
to the contending influences of armies of good and evil spirits under
the antagonistic control of God and Devil, were liable on the one hand
to mistake and exaggerate savage ideas in this direction, so that their
records of native religion can only be accepted with reserve, while on
the other hand there is no doubt that dualistic ideas have been largely
introduced and developed among the savages themselves, under this same
European influence. For instance, among the natives of Australia, we
hear of the great deity Nambajandi who dwells in his heavenly paradise,
where the happy shades of black men feast and dance and sing for
evermore; over against him stands the great evil being Warrūgūra, who
dwells in the nethermost regions, who causes the great calamities which
befall mankind, and whom the natives represent with horns and tail,
although no horned beast is indigenous in the land.[785] There may be
more or less native substratum in all this, but the hints borrowed from
popular Christian ideas are unmistakeable. Thus also, among the North
American Indians, the native religion was modified under the influence
of ideas borrowed from the white men, and there arose a full dualistic
scheme, of which Loskiel, a Moravian missionary conversant especially
with Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, gives the following suggestive
particulars, dating from 1794. ‘They (the Indians) first received in
modern times through the Europeans the idea of the Devil, the Prince of
Darkness. They consider him as a very mighty spirit, who can only do
evil, and therefore call him the Evil One. Thus they now believe in a
great good and a great evil spirit; to the one they ascribe all good,
and to the other all evil. About thirty years ago, a remarkable change
took place in the religious opinions of the Indians. Some preachers of
their own nation pretended to have received revelations from above, to
have travelled into heaven, and conversed with God. They gave different
accounts of their journey to heaven, but all agreed in this, that no one
could arrive there without great danger; for the road runs close by the
gates of hell. There the Devil lies in ambush, and snatches at every one
who is going to God. Now those who have passed by this dangerous place
unhurt, come first to the Son of God, and from him to God himself, from
whom they pretend to have received a commandment, to instruct the
Indians in the way to heaven. By them the Indians were informed that
heaven was the dwelling of God, and hell that of the Devil. Some of
these preachers had not indeed reached the dwelling of God, but
professed to have approached near enough to hear the cocks in heaven
crow, or to see the smoke of the chimneys in heaven, &c., &c.’[786]

Such unequivocal proofs that savage tribes can adopt and work into the
midst of their native beliefs the European doctrine of the Good and Evil
Spirit, must induce us to criticize keenly all recorded accounts of the
religion of uncultured tribes, lest we should mistake the confused
reflexion of Christendom for the indigenous theology of Australia or
Canada. It is the more needful to bring this state of things into the
clearest light, in order that the religion of the lower tribes may be
placed in its proper relation to the religion of the higher nations.
Genuine savage faiths do in fact bring to our view what seem to be
rudimentary forms of ideas which underlie dualistic theological schemes
among higher nations. It is certain that even among rude savage hordes,
native thought has already turned toward the deep problem of good and
evil. Their crude though earnest speculation has already tried to solve
the great mystery which still resists the efforts of moralists and
theologians. But as in general the animistic doctrine of the lower races
is not yet an ethical institution, but a philosophy of man and nature,
so savage dualism is not yet a theory of abstract moral principles, but
a theory of pleasure or pain, profit or loss, affecting the individual
man, his family, or at the utmost stretch, his people. This narrow and
rudimentary distinction between good and evil was not unfairly stated by
the savage who explained that if anybody took away his wife, that would
be bad, but if he himself took someone’s else’s, that would be good. Now
by the savage or barbarian mind, the spiritual beings which by their
personal action account for the events of life and the operations of
nature, are apt to be regarded as kindly or hostile, sometimes or
always, like the human beings on whose type they are so obviously
modelled. In such a case, we may well judge by the safe analogy of
disembodied human souls, and it appears that these are habitually
regarded as sometimes friends and sometimes foes of the living. Nothing
could be more conclusive in this respect than an account of the three
days’ battle between two factions of Zulu ghosts for the life of a man
and wife whom the one spiritual party desired to destroy and the other
to save; the defending spirits prevailed, dug up the bewitched
charm-bags which had been buried to cause sympathetic disease, and flung
these objects into the midst of the assembly of the people watching in
silence, just as the spirits now fling real flowers at a table-rapping
séance.[787] For spirits less closely belonging to the definition of
ghosts, may be taken Rochefort’s remarks in the 17th century as to the
two sorts of spirits, good and bad, recognized by the Caribs of the West
Indies. This writer declares that their good spirits or divinities are
in fact so many demons who seduce them and keep them enchained in their
damnable servitude; but nevertheless, he says, the people themselves do
distinguish them from their evil spirits.[788] Nor can we pronounce this
distinction of theirs unreasonable, learning from other authorities that
it was the office of some of these spirits to attend men as familiar
genii, and of others to inflict diseases. After the numerous details
which have incidentally been cited in the present volumes, it will be
needless to offer farther proof that spiritual beings are really
conceived by savages and barbarians as ranged in antagonistic ranks as
good and evil, i.e., friendly and hostile to themselves. The interesting
enquiry on which it is here desirable to collect evidence, is this: how
far are the doctrines of the higher nations anticipated in principle
among the lower tribes, in the assignment of the conduct of the universe
to two mighty hostile beings, in whom the contending powers of good and
evil are personified, the Good Deity and the Evil Deity, each the head
and ruler of a spiritual host like-minded? The true answer seems to be
that savage belief displays to us the primitive conceptions which, when
developed in systematic form and attached to ethical meaning, take their
place in religious systems of which the Zoroastrian is the type.

First, when in district after district two special deities with special
native names are contrasted in native religion as the Good and Evil
Deity, it is in some cases easier to explain these beings as native at
least in origin, than to suppose that foreign intercourse should have
exerted the consistent and far-reaching influence needed to introduce
them. Second, when the deities in question are actually polytheistic
gods, such as Sun, Moon, Heaven, Earth, considered as of good or evil,
i.e., favourable or unfavourable aspect, this looks like native
development, not innovation derived from a foreign religion ignoring
such divinities. Third, when it is held that the Good Deity is remote
and otiose, but the Evil Deity present and active, and worship is
therefore directed especially to the propitiation of the hostile
principle, we have here a conception which appears native in the lower
culture, rather than derived from the higher culture to which it is
unfamiliar and even hateful. Now Dualism, as prevailing among the lower
races, will be seen in a considerable degree to assert its originality
by satisfying one or more of these conditions.

There have been recorded among the Indians of North America a group of
mythic beliefs, which display the fundamental idea of dualism in the
very act of germinating in savage religion. Yet the examination of these
myths leads us first to destructive criticism of a picturesque but not
ancient member of the series. An ethnologist, asked to point out the
most striking savage dualistic legend of the world, would be likely to
name the celebrated Iroquois myth of the Twin Brethren. The current
version of this legend is that set down in 1825 by the Christian chief
of the Tuscaroras, David Cusick, as the belief of his people. Among the
ancients, he relates, there were two worlds, the lower world in darkness
and possessed by monsters, the upper world inhabited by mankind. A woman
near her travail sank from this upper region to the dark world below.
She alighted on a Tortoise, prepared to receive her with a little earth
on his back, which Tortoise became an island. The celestial mother bore
twin sons into the dark world, and died. The tortoise increased to a
great island, and the twins grew up. One was of gentle disposition, and
was called Enigorio, the Good Mind, the other was of insolent character,
and was named Enigonhahetgea, the Bad Mind. The Good Mind, not contented
to remain in darkness, wished to create a great light; the Bad Mind
desired that the world should remain in its natural state. The Good Mind
took his dead mother’s head and made it the sun, and of a remnant of her
body he made the moon. These were to give light to the day and to the
night. Also he created many spots of light, now stars: these were to
regulate the days, nights, seasons, years. Where the light came upon the
dark world, the monsters were displeased, and hid themselves in the
depths, lest man should find them. The Good Mind continued the creation,
formed many creeks and rivers on the Great Island, created small and
great beasts to inhabit the forests, and fishes to inhabit the waters.
When he had made the universe, he doubted concerning beings to possess
the Great Island. He formed two images of the dust of the ground in his
own likeness, male and female, and by breathing into their nostrils gave
them living souls, and named them Ea-gwe-howe, that is ‘real people;’
and he gave the Great Island all the animals of game for their
maintenance; he appointed thunder to water the earth by frequent rains;
the island became fruitful, and vegetation afforded to the animals
subsistence. The Bad Mind went throughout the island and made high
mountains and waterfalls and great steeps, and created reptiles
injurious to mankind; but the Good Mind restored the island to its
former condition. The Bad Mind made two clay images in the form of man,
but while he was giving them existence they became apes; and so on. The
Good Mind accomplished the works of creation, notwithstanding the
imaginations of the Bad Mind were continually evil; thus he attempted to
enclose all the animals of game in the earth away from mankind, but his
brother set them free, and traces of them were made on the rocks near
the cave where they were shut in. At last the brethren came to single
combat for the mastery of the universe. The Good Mind falsely persuaded
the Bad Mind that whipping with flags would destroy his own life, but he
himself used the deer-horns, the instrument of death. After a two days’
fight, the Good Mind slew his brother and crushed him in the earth; and
the last words of the Bad Mind were that he would have equal power over
men’s souls after death, then he sank down to eternal doom and became
the Evil Spirit. The Good Mind visited the people, and then retired from
the earth.[789]

This is a graphic tale. Its versions of the cosmic myth of the
World-Tortoise, and its apparent philosophical myth of fossil
footprints, have much mythological interest. But its Biblical copying
extends to the very phraseology, and only partial genuineness can be
allowed to its main theme. Dr. Brinton has shown from early American
writers how much dualistic fancy has sprung up since the times of first
intercourse between natives and white men. When this legend is compared
with the earlier version given by Father Brebeuf, missionary to the
Hurons in 1636, we find its whole complexion altered; the moral dualism
vanishes; the names of Good and Bad Mind do not appear; it is the story
of Ioskeha the White One, with his brother Tawiscara the Dark One, and
we at once perceive that Christian influence in the course of two
centuries had given the tale a meaning foreign to its real intent. Yet
to go back to the earliest sources and examine this myth of the White
One and the Dark One, proves it to be itself a perfect example of the
rise of primitive dualism in the savage mind. Father Brebeuf’s story is
as follows: Aataentsic the Moon fell from heaven on earth, and bore two
sons, Taouiscaron and Iouskeha, who being grown up quarrelled; judge, he
says, if there be not in this a touch of the death of Abel. They came to
combat, but with very different weapons. Iouskeha had a stag-horn,
Taouiscaron contented himself with some wild-rose berries, persuading
himself that as soon as he should thus smite his brother, he would fall
dead at his feet; but it fell out quite otherwise than he had promised
himself, and Iouskeha struck him so heavy a blow in the side that the
blood gushed forth in streams. The poor wretch fled, and from his blood
which fell upon the land came the flints which the savages still call
Taouiscara, from the victim’s name. From this we see it to be true that
the original myth of the two brothers, the White One and the Dark One,
had no moral element. It seems mere nature-myth, the contest between Day
and Night, for the Hurons knew that Iouskeha was the Sun, even as his
mother or grandmother Aataentsic was the Moon. Yet in the contrast
between these two, the Huron mind had already come to the rudimentary
contrast of the Good and Evil Deity. Iouskeha the Sun, it is expressly
said, seemed to the Indians their benefactor; their kettle would not
boil were it not for him; it was he who learnt from the Tortoise the art
of making fire; without him they would have no luck in hunting; it is he
who makes the corn to grow. Iouskeha the Sun takes care for the living
and all things concerning life, and therefore, says the missionary, they
say he is good. But Aataentsic the Moon, the creatress of earth and man,
makes men die and has charge of their departed souls, and they say she
is evil. The Sun and Moon dwell together in their cabin at the end of
the earth, and thither it was that the Indians made the mythic journey
of which various episodes have been more than once cited here; true to
their respective characters, the Sun receives the travellers kindly and
saves them from the harm the beauteous but hurtful Moon would have done
them. Another missionary of still earlier time identifies Iouskeha with
the supreme deity Atahocan: ‘Iouskeha,’ he says, ‘is good and gives
growth and fair weather; his grandmother Eatahentsic is wicked and
spoils.’[790] Thus in early Iroquois legend, the Sun and Moon, as god
and goddess of Day and Night, had already acquired the characters of the
great friend and enemy of man, the Good and Evil Deity. And as to the
related cosmic legend of Day and Night, contrasted in the persons of the
two brothers, the White One and the Dark One, though this was originally
pure unethic nature-myth, yet it naturally took the same direction among
the half-Europeanized Indians of later times, becoming a moral myth of
Good and Evil. The idea comes to full maturity in the modern shaping of
Iroquois religion, where the good and great deity Häwenneyu the Ruler
has opposed to him a rival deity keeping the same name as in the myth,
Hänegoategeh the Evil-minded. We have thus before us the profoundly
interesting fact, that the rude North American Indians have more than
once begun the same mythologic transition which in ancient Asia shaped
the contrast of light and darkness into the contrast of righteousness
and wickedness, by following out the same thought which still in the
European mind arrays in the hostile forms of Light and Darkness the
contending powers of Good and Evil.

Judging by such evidence, at once of the rudimentary dualism springing
up in savage animism, and of the tendency of this to amalgamate with
similar thought brought in by foreign intercourse, it is possible to
account for many systems of the dualistic class found in the native
religions of America. While the evidence may lead us to agree with Waitz
that the North American Indian dualism, the most distinct and universal
feature of their religion, is not to be altogether referred to a modern
Christian origin, yet care must be taken not to claim as the result of
primitive religious development what shows signs of being borrowed
civilized theology. The records remain of the Jesuit missionary teaching
under which the Algonquins came to use their native term Manitu, that
is, spirit or demon, in speaking of the Christian God and Devil as the
good and the evil Manitu. Still later, the Great Spirit and the Evil
Spirit, Kitchi Manitu and Matchi Manitu, gained a wider place in the
beliefs of North American tribes, who combined these adopted Christian
conceptions with older native beliefs in powers of light and warmth and
life and protection, of darkness and cold and death and destruction.
Thus the two great antagonistic Beings became chiefs of the kindly and
harmful spirits pervading the world and struggling for the mastery over
it. Here the nature-religion of the savage was expanded and developed
rather than set on foot by the foreigner. Among other American races,
such combinations of foreign and native religious ideas are easy to
find, though hard to analyse. In the extreme north-west, we may doubt
any native origin in the semi-Christianized Kodiak’s definition of
Shljem Shoá the creator of heaven and earth, to whom offerings were made
before and after the hunt, as contrasted with Ijak the bad spirit
dwelling in the earth. In the extreme south-east may be found more
originality among the Floridan Indians two or three centuries ago, for
they are said to have paid solemn worship to the Bad Spirit Toia who
plagued them with visions, but to have had small regard for the Good
Spirit, who troubles himself little about mankind.[791] On the southern
continent, Martius makes this characteristic remark as to the rude
tribes of Brazil: ‘All Indians have a lively conviction of the power of
an evil principle over them; in many there dawns also a glimpse of the
good; but they revere the one less than they fear the other. It might be
thought that they hold the Good Being weaker in relation to the fate of
man than the evil.’ This generalization is to some extent supported by
statements as to particular tribes. The Macusis are said to recognize
the good creator Macunaima, ‘he who works by night,’ and his evil
adversary Epel or Horiuch: of these people it is observed that ‘All the
powers of nature are products of the Good Spirit, when they do not
disturb the Indian’s rest and comfort, but the work of evil spirits when
they do.’ Uauüloa and Locozy, the good and evil deity of the Yumanas,
live above the earth and toward the sun; the Evil Deity is feared by
these savages, but the Good Deity will come to eat fruit with the
departed and take their souls to his dwelling, wherefore they bury the
dead each doubled up in his great earthen pot, with fruit in his lap,
and looking toward the sunrise. Even the rude Botocudos are thought to
recognize antagonistic principles of good and evil in the persons of the
Sun and Moon.[792] This idea has especial interest from its
correspondence on the one hand with that of the Iroquois tribes, and on
the other with that of the comparatively civilized Muyscas of Bogota,
whose good deity is unequivocally a mythic Sun, thwarted in his kindly
labours for man by his wicked wife Huythaca the Moon.[793] The native
religion of Chili is said to have placed among the subaltern deities
Meulen, the friend of man, and Huecuvu the bad spirit and author of
evil. These people can hardly have learnt from Christianity to conceive
their evil spirit as simply and fully the general cause of misfortune:
if the earth quakes, Huecuvu has given it a shock; if a horse tires,
Huecuvu has ridden him; if a man falls sick, Huecuvu has sent the
disease into his body, and no man dies but that Huecuvu suffocates
him.[794]

In Africa, again, allowing for Moslem influence, dualism is not ill
represented in native religion. An old account from Loango describes the
natives as theoretically recognizing Zambi the supreme deity, creator of
good and lover of justice, and over against him Zambi-anbi the
destroyer, the counsellor of crime, the author of loss and accident, of
disease and death. But when it comes to actual worship, as the good god
will always be favourable, it is the god of evil who must be appeased,
and it is for his satisfaction that men abstain some from one kind of
food and some from another.[795] Among accounts of the two rival deities
in West Africa, one describes the Guinea negroes as recognizing below
the Supreme Deity two spirits (or classes of spirits), Ombwiri and
Onyambe, the one kind and gentle, doing good to men and rescuing them
from harm, the other hateful and wicked, whose seldom mentioned name is
heard with uneasiness and displeasure.[796] It would be scarcely
profitable, in an enquiry where accurate knowledge of the doctrine of
any insignificant tribe is more to the purpose than vague speculation on
the theology of the mightiest nation, to dwell on the enigmatic traces
of ancient Egyptian dualism. Suffice it to say that the two
brother-deities Osiris and Seti, Osiris the beneficent solar divinity
whose nature the blessed dead took on them, Seti perhaps a rival
national god degraded to a Typhon, seem to have become the
representative figures of a contrasted scheme of light and darkness,
good and evil; the sculptured granite still commemorates the contests of
their long-departed sects, where the hieroglyphic square-eared beast of
Seti has been defaced to substitute for it the figure of Osiris.[797]

The conception of the light-god as the good deity in contrast to a rival
god of evil, is one plainly suggested by nature, and naturally recurring
in the religions of the world. The Khonds of Orissa may be counted its
most perfect modern exponents in barbaric culture. To their supreme
creative deity, Būra Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, there
stands opposed his evil consort Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, and the
history of good and evil in the world is the history of his work and her
counterwork. He created a world paradisaic, happy, harmless; she
rebelled against him, and to blast the lot of his new creature, man, she
brought in disease, and poison, and all disorder, ‘sowing the seeds of
sin in mankind as in a ploughed field.’

Death became the divine punishment of wickedness, the spontaneously
fertile earth went to jungle and rock and mud, plants and animals grew
poisonous and fierce, throughout nature good and evil were commingled,
and still the fight goes on between the two great powers. So far all
Khonds agree, and it is on the practical relation of good and evil that
they split into their two hostile sects of Būra and Tari. Būra’s sect
hold that he triumphed over Tari, in sign of her discomfiture imposed
the cares of childbirth on her sex, and makes her still his subject
instrument wherewith to punish; Tari’s sect hold that she still
maintains the struggle, and even practically disposes of the happiness
of man, doing evil or good on her own account, and allowing or not
allowing the Creator’s blessings to reach mankind.[798]

Now that the sacred books of the Zend-Avesta are open to us, it is
possible to compare the doctrines of savage tribes with those of the
great faith through which of all others Dualism seems to have impressed
itself on the higher nations. The religion of Zarathustra was a schism
from that ancient Aryan nature-worship which is represented in a pure
and early form in the Veda, and in depravity and decay in modern
Hinduism. The leading thought of the Zarathustrian faith was the contest
of Good and Evil in the world, a contrast typified and involved in that
of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, and brought to personal shape in
the warfare of Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu, the Good and Evil Deity,
Ormuzd and Ahriman. The prophet Zarathustra said: ‘In the beginning
there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity.
These are the good and the base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one
of these two spirits. Be good, not base!’ The sacred Vendidad begins
with the record of the primæval contest of the two principles.
Ahura-Mazda created the best of regions and lands, the Aryan home,
Sogdia, Bactria, and the rest; Anra-Mainyu against his work created snow
and pestilence, buzzing insects and poisonous plants, poverty and
sickness, sin and unbelief. The modern Parsi, in passages of his
formularies of confession, still keeps alive the old antagonism. I
repent, he says, of all kind of sins which the evil Ahriman produced
amongst the creatures of Ormuzd in opposition. ‘That which was the wish
of Ormazd the Creator, and I ought to have thought and have not thought,
what I ought to have spoken and have not spoken, what I ought to have
done and have not done; of these sins repent I with thoughts, words, and
works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as heavenly, with
the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin. That which was the
wish of Ahriman, and I ought not to have thought and yet have thought,
what I ought not to have spoken and yet have spoken, what I ought not to
have done and yet have done; of these sins repent I with thoughts,
words, and works, corporeal as well as spiritual, earthly as well as
heavenly, with the three words: Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin.’ ...
‘May Ahriman be broken, may Ormazd increase.’[799] The Izedis or
Yezidis, the so-called Devil-worshippers, still remain a numerous though
oppressed people in Mesopotamia and adjacent countries. Their adoration
of the sun and horror of defiling fire accord with the idea of a Persian
origin of their religion (Persian ized = god), an origin underlying more
superficial admixture of Christian and Moslem elements. This remarkable
sect is distinguished by a special form of dualism. While recognizing
the existence of a Supreme Being, their peculiar reverence is given to
Satan, chief of the angelic host, who now has the means of doing evil to
mankind, and in his restoration will have the power of rewarding them.
‘Will not Satan then reward the poor Izedis, who alone have never spoken
ill of him, and have suffered so much for him?’ Martyrdom for the rights
of Satan! exclaims the German traveller to whom an old white-bearded
devil-worshipper thus set forth the hopes of his religion.[800]

Direct worship of the Evil Principle, familiar as it is to low barbaric
races, is scarcely to be found among people higher in civilization than
these persecuted and stubborn sectaries of Western Asia. So far as such
ideas extend in the development of religion, they seem fair evidence how
far worship among low tribes turns rather on fear than love. That the
adoration of a Good Deity should have more and more superseded the
propitiation of an Evil Deity, is the sign of one of the great movements
in the education of mankind, a result of happier experience of life, and
of larger and more gladsome views of the system of the universe. It is
not, however, through the inactive systems of modern Parsism and Izedism
that the mighty Zoroastrian dualism has exerted its main influence on
mankind. We must look back to long-past ages for traces of its contact
with Judaism and Christianity. It is often and reasonably thought that
intercourse between Jews and ancient Persians was an effective agent in
producing that theologic change which differences the later Jew of the
Rabbinical books from the earlier Jew of the Pentateuch, a change in
which one important part is the greater prominence of the dualistic
scheme. So in later times (about the fourth century), the contact of
Zoroastrism and Christianity appears to have been influential in
producing Manichæism. Manichæism is known mostly on the testimony of its
adversaries, but thus much seems clear, that it is based on the very
doctrine of the two antagonistic principles of good and evil, of spirit
and matter. It sets on the one hand God, original good and source of
good alone, primal light and lord of the kingdom of light, and on the
other hand the Prince of Darkness, with his kingdom of darkness, of
matter, of confusion, and destruction. The theory of ceaseless conflict
between these contending powers becomes a key to the physical and moral
nature and course of the universe.[801] Among Christian or
semi-Christian sects, the Manichæans stand as representatives of dualism
pushed to its utmost development. It need scarcely be said, however,
that Christian dualism is not bounded by the limits of this or that
special sect. In so far as the Evil Being, with his subordinate powers
of darkness, is held to exist and act in any degree in independence of
the Supreme Deity and his ministering spirits of light, so far
theological schools admit, though in widely different grades of
importance, a philosophy of nature and of life which has its basis
rather in dualism than in monotheism.

We now turn to the last objects of our present survey, those theological
beliefs of the lower tribes of mankind which point more or less
distinctly toward a doctrine of Monotheism. Here it is by no means
proposed to examine savage ideas from the point of view of doctrinal
theology, an undertaking which would demand arguments quite beyond the
present range. Their treatment is limited to classifying the actual
beliefs of the lower races, with some ethnographic considerations as to
their origin and their relation to higher religions. For this purpose it
is desirable to distinguish the prevalent doctrines of the uncultured
world from absolute monotheism. At the outset, care is needed to exclude
an ambiguity of which the importance often goes unnoticed. How are the
mighty but subordinate divinities, recognized in different religions, to
be classed? Beings who in Christian or Moslem theology would be called
angels, saints, demons, would under the same definitions be called
deities in polytheistic systems. This is obvious, but we may realize it
more distinctly from its actually having happened. The Chuwashes, a race
of Tatar affinity, are stated to reverence a god of Death, who takes to
himself the souls of the departed, and whom they call Esrel; it is
curious that Castrén, in mentioning this, should fail to point out that
this deity is no other than Azrael the angel of death, adopted under
Moslem influence.[802] Again, in the mixed Pagan and Christian religion
of the Circassians, which at least in its recently prevalent form would
be reckoned polytheistic, there stand beneath the Supreme Being a number
of mighty subordinate deities, of whom the principal are Iele the
Thunder-god, Tleps the Fire-god, Seoseres the god of Wind and Water,
Misitcha the Forest-god, and Mariam the Virgin Mary.[803] If the
monotheistic criterion be simply made to consist in the Supreme Deity
being held as creator of the universe and chief of the spiritual
hierarchy, then its application to savage and barbaric theology will
lead to perplexing consequences. Races of North and South America, of
Africa, of Polynesia, recognizing a number of great deities, are usually
and reasonably considered polytheists, yet under this definition their
acknowledgment of a Supreme Creator, of which various cases will here be
shown, would entitle them at the same time to the name of monotheists.
To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required,
assigning the distinctive attributes of deity to none save the Almighty
Creator. It may be declared that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe
of monotheists has been ever known. Nor are any fair representatives of
the lower culture in a strict sense pantheists. The doctrine which they
do widely hold, and which opens to them a course tending in one or other
of these directions, is polytheism culminating in the rule of one
supreme divinity. High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of
local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and element, there
are to be discerned in barbaric theology shadowings, quaint or majestic,
of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforth to be traced onward in
expanding power and brightening glory along the history of religion. It
is no unimportant task, partial as it is, to select and group the
typical data which show the nature and position of the doctrine of
supremacy, as it comes into view within the lower culture.

On the threshold of the investigation, there meets us the same critical
difficulty which obstructs the study of primitive dualism. Among low
tribes who have been in contact with Christianity or Mohammedanism, how
are we to tell to what extent, under this foreign influence, dim,
uncouth ideas of divine supremacy may have been developed into more
cultured forms, or wholly foreign ideas implanted? We know how the
Jesuit missionaries led the native Canadians to the conception of the
Great Manitu; how they took up the native Brazilian name of the divine
Thunder, Tupan, and adapted its meaning to convey in Christian teaching
the idea of God. Thus, again, we find most distinctly-marked African
ideas of a Supreme Deity in the West, where intercourse with Moslems has
actually Islamized or semi-Islamized whole negro nations, and the name
of Allah is in all men’s mouths. The ethnographer must be ever on the
look-out for traces of such foreign influence in the definition of the
Supreme Deity acknowledged by any uncultured race, a divinity whose
nature and even whose name may betray his adoption from abroad. Thus the
supreme Iroquois deity, Neo or Hawaneu, the pre-existent creator, has
been triumphantly adduced to show the monotheism underlying the native
creeds of America. But it seems that this divinity was introduced by the
French Catholic missionaries, and that Niio is an altered form of
Dieu.[804] Among the list of supreme deities of the lower races who are
also held to be first ancestors of man, we hear of Louquo, the uncreate
first Carib, who descended from the eternal heaven, made the flat earth,
and produced man from his own body. He lived long on earth among men,
died and came to life again after three days, and returned to
heaven.[805] It would be hardly reasonable to enumerate, among genuine
deities of native West Indian religion, a being with characteristics
thus on the face of them adopted from the religion of the white men. Yet
even in such extreme cases, it does not necessarily follow that the
definitions of these deities, vitiated as they are for ethnographical
use by foreign influence, have not to some extent a native substratum.
In criticising details, moreover, it must not be forgotten how largely
the similarities in the religions of different races may be of
independent origin, and how closely allied are many ideas in the rude
native theologies of savages to ideas holding an immemorial place in the
religions of their civilized invaders. For the present purpose, however,
it is well to dwell especially on such evidence as by characteristic
traits or early date is farthest removed from suspicion of being
borrowed from a foreign source.

In surveying the peoples of the world, the ethnographer finds many who
are not shown to have any definite conception of a supreme deity; and
even where such a conception is placed on record, it is sometimes so
vaguely asserted, or on such questionable authority, that he can but
take note of it and pass on. In numerous cases, however, illustrated by
the following collection from different regions, certain leading ideas,
singly or blended, may be traced. There are many savage and barbaric
religions which solve their highest problem by the simple process of
raising to divine primacy one of the gods of polytheism itself. Even the
system of the manes-worshipper has been stretched to reach the limit of
supreme deity, in the person of the primæval ancestor. More frequently,
it is the nature-worshipper’s principle which has prevailed, giving to
one of the great nature-deities the precedence of the rest. Here, by no
recondite speculation, but by the plain teaching of nature, the choice
has for the most part lain between two mighty visible divinities, the
all-animating Sun and the all-encompassing Heaven. In the study of such
schemes, we are on intellectual terra firma. There is among the
religions of the lower races another notable group of systems, seemingly
in close connexion with the first. These display to us a heavenly
pantheon arranged on the model of an earthly political constitution,
where the commonalty are crowds of human souls and other tribes of
world-pervading spirits, the aristocracy are great polytheistic gods,
and the King is the supreme Deity. To this comparatively intelligible
side of the subject, a more perplexed and obscure side stands
contrasted. Among thoughtful men whose theory of the soul animating the
body has already led them to suppose a divine spirit animating the huge
mass of earth or sky, this idea needs but a last expansion to become a
doctrine of the universe as animated by one greatest, all-pervading
divinity, the World-Spirit. Moreover, where speculative philosophy
grapples with the vast fundamental world-problem, the solution is
attained by ascending from the Many to the One, by striving to discern
through and beyond the Universe a First Cause. Let the basis of such
reasoning be laid in theological ground, then the First Cause is
realized as the Supreme Deity. In such ways, the result of carrying to
their utmost limits the animistic conceptions which among low races and
high pervade the philosophy of religion, is to reach an idea of as it
were a soul of the world, a shaper, animator, ruler of the universe.
Entering these regions of transcendental theology, we are not to wonder
that the comparative distinctness belonging to conceptions of lower
spiritual beings here fades away. Human souls, subordinate
nature-spirits, and huge polytheistic nature-gods, carry with the
defined special functions they perform some defined character and
figure, but beyond such limits form and function blend into the infinite
and universal in the thought of supreme divinity. To realize this widest
idea, two especial ways are open. The first way is to fuse the
attributes of the great polytheistic powers into more or less of common
personality, thus conceiving that, after all, it is the same Highest
Being who holds up the heavens, shines in the sun, smites his foes in
the thunder, stands first in the human pedigree as the divine ancestor.
The second way is to remove the limit of theologic speculation into the
region of the indefinite and the inane. An unshaped divine entity
looming vast, shadowy, and calm beyond and over the material world, too
benevolent or too exalted to need human worship, too huge, too remote,
too indifferent, too supine, too merely existent, to concern himself
with the petty race of men,—this is a mystic form of formlessness in
which religion has not seldom pictured the Supreme.

Thus, then, it appears that the theology of the lower races already
reaches its climax in conceptions of a highest of the gods, and that
these conceptions in the savage and barbaric world are no copies stamped
from one common type, but outlines widely varying among mankind. The
degeneration-theory, in some instances no doubt with justice, may claim
such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remnants of higher religions.
Yet for the most part, the development-theory is competent to account
for them without seeking their origin in grades of culture higher than
those in which they are found existing. Looked upon as products of
natural religion, such doctrines of divine supremacy seem in no way to
transcend the powers of the low-cultured mind to reason out, nor of the
low-cultured imagination to deck with mythic fancy. There have existed
in times past, and do still exist, savage or barbaric peoples who hold
such views of a highest god as they may have attained to of themselves,
without the aid of more cultured nations. Among these races, Animism has
its distinct and consistent outcome, and Polytheism its distinct and
consistent completion, in the doctrine of a Supreme Deity.

The native religions of South America and the West Indies display a
well-marked series of types. The primacy of the Sun was long ago well
stated by the Moluches when a Jesuit missionary preached to them, and
they replied, ‘Till this hour, we never knew nor acknowledged anything
greater or better than the Sun.’[806] So when a later missionary argued
with the chief of the Tobas, ‘My god is good and punishes wicked
people,’ the chief replied, ‘My God (the Sun) is good likewise; but he
punishes nobody, satisfied to do good to all.’[807] In various
manifestations, moreover, there reigns among barbarians a supreme being
whose characteristics are those of the Heaven-god. It is thus with the
Tamoi of the Guaranis, ‘that beneficent deity worshipped in his blended
character of ancestor of mankind and ancient of heaven, lord of the
celestial paradise.’[808] It is so with the highest deity of the
Araucanians, Pillan the Thunder or the Thunderer, called also
Huenu-Pillan or Heaven-Thunder, and Vuta-gen or Great Being. ‘The
universal government of Pillan,’ says Molina, ‘is a prototype of the
Araucanian polity. He is the great Toqui (Governor) of the invisible
world, and as such has his Apo-Ulmenes, and his Ulmenes, to whom he
entrusts the administration of affairs of less importance. These ideas
are certainly very rude, but it must be acknowledged that the
Araucanians are not the only people who have regulated the things of
heaven by those of the earth.’[809] A different but not less
characteristic type of the Supreme Deity is placed on record among the
Caribs, a beneficent power dwelling in the skies, reposing in his own
happiness, careless of mankind, and by them not honoured nor
adored.[810]

The theological history of Peru, in ages before the Spanish conquest,
has lately had new light thrown on it by the researches of Mr. Markham.
Here the student comes into view of a rivalry full of interest in the
history of barbaric religion, the rivalry between the Creator and the
divine Sun. In the religion of the Incas, precedence was given to
Uiracocha, called Pachacamac, ‘Creator of the World.’ The Sun (with whom
was coupled his sister-wife the Moon) was the divine ancestor, the dawn
or origin, the totem or lar, of the Inca family. The three great deities
were the Creator, Sun, and Thunder; their images were brought out
together at great festivals into the square of Cuzco, llamas were
sacrificed to all three, and they could be addressed in prayer together,
‘O Creator, and Sun, and Thunder, be for ever young, multiply the
people, and let them always be at peace.’ Yet the Thunder and Lightning
was held to come by the command of the Creator, and the following prayer
shows clearly that even ‘our father the Sun’ was but his creature:—

    ‘Uiracocha! Thou who gavest being to the Sun, and afterwards said
    let there be day and night. Raise it and cause it to shine, and
    preserve that which thou hast created, that it may give light to
    men. Grant this, Uiracocha!

    ‘Sun! Thou who art in peace and safety, shine upon us, keep us from
    sickness, and keep us in health and safety.’

Among the transitions of religion, however, it is not strange that a
subordinate God, by virtue of his nearer intercourse and power, should
usurp the place of the supreme deity. Among the various traces of this
taking place under the Incas, are traditions of the great temple at
Cuzco called ‘The Golden Place,’ where Manco Ccapac originally set up a
flat oval golden plate to signify the Creator; Mayta Ccapac, it is said,
renewed the Creator’s symbol, but Huascar Inca took it down, and set up
in its stead in the place of honour a round golden plate like the sun
with rays. The famous temple itself, Ccuricancha the ‘Golden Place,’ was
known to the Spaniards as the Temple of the Sun; no wonder that the idea
has come to be so generally accepted, that the Sun was the chief god of
Peru. There is even on record a memorable protest made by one Inca, who
dared to deny that the Sun could be the maker of all things, comparing
him to a tethered beast that must make ever the same daily round, and to
an arrow that must go whither it is sent, not whither it will. But what
availed philosophic protest, even from the head of church and state
himself, against a state church of which the world has seldom seen the
equal for stiff and solid organization? The Sun reigned in Peru till
Pizarro overthrew him, and his splendid golden likeness came down from
the temple wall to be the booty of a Castilian soldier, who lost it in
one night at play.[811]

Among rude tribes of the North American continent, evidence of the
primacy of the divine Sun is not unknown. Father Hennepin’s account of
the Sioux worshipping the Sun as the Creator is explicit enough, and
agrees with the argument of the modern Shawnees, that the Sun animates
everything, and therefore must be the Master of Life or Great
Spirit.[812] It is the widespread belief in this Great Spirit which has
long and deservedly drawn the attention of European thinkers to the
native religions of the North American tribes. The name of the Great
Spirit originates with the equivalent term Kitchi Manitu in the language
of the Algonquin Indians. Before the European intercourse in the 17th
century, these tribes had indeed no deity so called, but as has been
already pointed out, the term came first into use by the application of
the native word manitu, meaning demon or deity, to the Christian God.
During the following centuries, the name of the Great Spirit, with the
ideas belonging to the name, travelled far and wide over the continent.
It became the ordinary expression of Europeans in their descriptions of
Indian religion, and in discourse carried on in English words between
Europeans and Indians, and was more or less naturalized among the
Indians themselves. On their religions it had on the one hand a
transforming influence, while on the other hand, as is usual in the
combination of religions, the new divinity incorporated into himself the
characteristics of native divinities, so that native ideas remained in
part represented in him. A divine being whose characteristics are often
so unlike what European intercourse would have suggested, could be
hardly altogether of foreign origin.[813] Again, among the Greenlanders,
Torngarsuk or Great Spirit (his name is an augmentative of
‘torngak’—‘demon’) was known to the early Danish missionary Egede as the
oracular deity of the angekoks, to whose under-world souls hope to
descend at death. He so far held the place of supreme deity in the
native mind, that, as Cranz the missionary relates somewhat afterwards,
many Greenlanders hearing of God and his almighty power were apt to fall
on the idea that it was their Torngarsuk who was meant; but he was
eventually identified with the Devil.[814] In like manner, Algonquin
Indians, early in the 17th century, hearing of the white man’s Deity,
identified him with one known to their own native belief, Atahocan the
Creator. When Le Jeune the missionary talked to them of an almighty
creator of heaven and earth, they began to say to one another,
‘Atahocan, Atahocan, it is Atahocan!’ The traditional idea of such a
being seems indeed to have lain in utter mythic vagueness in their
thoughts, for they had made his name into a verb, ‘Nitatahocan,’
meaning, ‘I tell a fable, an old fanciful story.’[815]

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.[816] 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.’[817] 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 chiefe 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.’[818] 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.[819] 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.[820] 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 Creeks 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.[821] 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.[822]

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 expect, 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.[823]

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.[824] 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?’[825]

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.[826] 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.[827] 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.[828] 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.[829] 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.’[830]

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.[831] Among the Kol tribes of Bengal, the acknowledged primate of
all classes of divinities is the beneficent 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.[832] 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.[833]

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.[834] 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.’[835]

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[836]—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.[837] 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 Garutman: That which is One the wise call it
in divers manners; they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariçvan.’[838]

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.’[839] 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.[840] 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.[841] 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.[842] 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.’[843] 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.

Footnote 743:

  Herrera, ‘Indias Occidentales,’ Dec. i. 3, 3; J. G. Müller, ‘Amer.
  Urrel.’ pp. 175, 221.

Footnote 744:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 174.

Footnote 745:

  Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 160.

Footnote 746:

  Kingsborough, ‘Mexico,’ vol. v. p. 179.

Footnote 747:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 89.

Footnote 748:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 371.

Footnote 749:

  Ovid. Fast. ii. 449.

Footnote 750:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 264.

Footnote 751:

  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 158.

Footnote 752:

  De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ xv. 2; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 417; Brinson, pp.
  152, 185; J. G. Müller, p. 271, &c.

Footnote 753:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

Footnote 754:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 16, 68, 75.

Footnote 755:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 333. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p.
  115.

Footnote 756:

  Cross, in ‘Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 316; Mason, p. 215.

Footnote 757:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 91, 355.

Footnote 758:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 89.

Footnote 759:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. ii. p. 467. Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan
  Nations,’ vol. ii. p. 308.

Footnote 760:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 141, 271, 274, 591, &c.

Footnote 761:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 90.

Footnote 762:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. pp. 17, 81.

Footnote 763:

  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.

Footnote 764:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 90, 360.

Footnote 765:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 267.

Footnote 766:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 413. Cox, ‘Myth. of Aryan N.,’
  vol. ii. pp. 254, 311.

Footnote 767:

  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.

Footnote 768:

  Lery, ‘Bresil,’ p. 234.

Footnote 769:

  Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 14, 17; Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 495.

Footnote 770:

  ‘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.

Footnote 771:

  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.

Footnote 772:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ pp. 128, 147, 155; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 171
  (Africa).

Footnote 773:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 395; Roscher, s.v. ‘Hades.’
  Grimm, ‘Deutsch. Myth.’ p. 288.

Footnote 774:

  Brugsch, ‘Religion der alten Aegypter’; ‘Book of Dead.’

Footnote 775:

  Pr. Max. v. Wied, ‘N. Amerika,’ vol. ii. p. 157.

Footnote 776:

  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).

Footnote 777:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

Footnote 778:

  Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ p. 64, &c., 88, &c. Ellis,
  ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 111, vol. iv. pp. 145, 366.

Footnote 779:

  Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271.

Footnote 780:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 1-104.

Footnote 781:

  ‘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.

Footnote 782:

  Eisenmenger, part i. p. 365.

Footnote 783:

  Koran, ii. 28, vii. 10, &c.

Footnote 784:

  Neander, ‘Hist. of Chr.’ vol. ii. pp. 81, 109, 174.

Footnote 785:

  Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 228. See also Eyre, vol. ii.
  p. 356; Lang, ‘Queensland,’ p. 444.

Footnote 786:

  Loskiel, ‘Gesch. der Mission unter den Ind. in Nord-Amer.’ part i. ch.
  3.

Footnote 787:

  Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 348.

Footnote 788:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 416. See J. G. Müller, p. 207.

Footnote 789:

  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.

Footnote 790:

  Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1635, p. 34,
  1636, p. 100. Sagard, ‘Histoire du Canada,’ Paris, 1636, p. 490. L. H.
  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 156. See ante, vol. i. pp. 288, 349.

Footnote 791:

  Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. pp. 182, 330, 335, 345; Le Jeune in
  ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1637, p. 49; La Potherie, ‘Hist. de l’Amér.
  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.

Footnote 792:

  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.

Footnote 793:

  Piedrahita, ‘Hist. de Neuv. Granada,’ part i. book i. ch. 3.

Footnote 794:

  Molina, ‘Hist. of Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 84; Febres, ‘Diccionario
  Chileño,’ s.v.

Footnote 795:

  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).

Footnote 796:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 217, 387. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 173.

Footnote 797:

  Birch, in Bunsen, vol. v. p. 136. Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ &c.

Footnote 798:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84.

Footnote 799:

  Avesta, tr. by Spiegel. Vendidad, i.; ‘Khorda-Avesta.’ xlv. xlvi. Max
  Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 1st Ser. p. 208.

Footnote 800:

  Layard, ‘Nineveh,’ vol. i. p. 297; Ainsworth, ‘Izedis,’ in ‘Tr. Eth.
  Soc.’ vol. i. p. 11.

Footnote 801:

  Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ &c. Neander, ‘Hist. of Christian
  Religion,’ vol. ii. p. 157, &c.

Footnote 802:

  Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 155.

Footnote 803:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. vi. p. 85.

Footnote 804:

  ‘Études 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.

Footnote 805:

  De la Borde, ‘Caraibes,’ p. 524. J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 228.

Footnote 806:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 89.

Footnote 807:

  Hutchinson, ‘Chaco Ind.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 327.

Footnote 808:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 319.

Footnote 809:

  Molina, ‘Hist. of Chili,’ vol. ii. p. 84, &c. Compare Febres,
  ‘Diccionario Chileño.’

Footnote 810:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 415. Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ p. 179.

Footnote 811:

  ‘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.

Footnote 812:

  Sagard, ‘Hist. du Canada,’ p. 490. Hennepin, ‘Voy. dans l’Amérique,’
  p. 302. Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. ii. p. 237.

Footnote 813:

  Le Jeune, ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1637, p. 49; Brinton, p. 52; Lafitau, ‘Mœurs
  des Sauvages Amériquains,’ vol. i. pp. 126, 145 (note to 3rd ed.).

Footnote 814:

  Egede, ‘Descr. of Greenland,’ ch. xviii.; Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 263;
  Rink, ‘Eskimoiske Eventyr,’ &c., p. 28.

Footnote 815:

  Le Jeune, 1633, p. 16; 1634, p. 13.

Footnote 816:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 15.

Footnote 817:

  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.

Footnote 818:

  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.

Footnote 819:

  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.).

Footnote 820:

  Lafitau, ‘Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains,’ 1724, vol. i. pp. 124-6.

Footnote 821:

  Bartram in ‘Tr. Amer. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 20, 26.

Footnote 822:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part ii. p. 127.

Footnote 823:

  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.

Footnote 824:

  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.

Footnote 825:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 217.

Footnote 826:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ part i. See ante, pp. 116, 313.

Footnote 827:

  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.

Footnote 828:

  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.

Footnote 829:

  Magyar, ‘Reisen in Süd-Afrika,’ pp. 125, 335.

Footnote 830:

  Bowen, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yoruba,’ p. xvi. in ‘Smithsonian Contr.’ vol.
  i.

Footnote 831:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 84, &c.

Footnote 832:

  Dalton, ‘Kols,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 32. Hunter, ‘Rural
  Bengal,’ p. 184.

Footnote 833:

  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.).

Footnote 834:

  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.

Footnote 835:

  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.

Footnote 836:

  See Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. ii. Wuttke, ‘Heidenthum,’ part i. p.
  254. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. xxi. vol. ii. p. 1.

Footnote 837:

  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.).

Footnote 838:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 164, 46. Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. pp. 27, 241.

Footnote 839:

  See Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ pp. 143, 175.

Footnote 840:

  Avesta; trans. by Spiegel, ‘Ormazd-Yasht.’ 12.

Footnote 841:

  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. iv. ch. xii.; Bunsen, ‘Egypt,’ vol. iv.
  p. 325.

Footnote 842:

  Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 169, &c.

Footnote 843:

  ‘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.

RITES AND CEREMONIES.

    Religious Rites: their purpose practical or symbolic—Prayer: its
    continuity from low to high levels of Culture; its lower phases
    Unethical; its higher phases Ethical—Sacrifice: its
    original Gift-theory passes into the Homage-theory and the
    Abnegation-theory—Manner of reception of Sacrifice by Deity—Material
    Transfer to elements, fetish-animals, priests; consumption of
    substance by deity or idol; offering of blood; transmission by fire;
    incense—Essential Transfer: consumption of essence, savour,
    &c.—Spiritual Transfer: consumption or transmission of soul of
    offering—Motive of Sacrificer—Transition from Gift-theory to
    Homage-theory: insignificant and formal offerings; sacrificial
    banquets—Abnegation-theory; sacrifice of children, &c.—Sacrifice of
    Substitutes: part given for whole; inferior life for superior;
    effigies—Modern survival of Sacrifice in folklore and
    religion—Fasting, as a means of producing ecstatic vision; its
    course from lower to higher Culture—Drugs used to produce
    ecstasy—Swoons and fits induced for religious purposes—Orientation:
    its relation to Sun-myth and Sun-worship; rules of East and West as
    to burial of dead, position of worship, and structure of
    temple—Lustration by Water and Fire: its transition from material to
    symbolic purification; its connexion with special events of life;
    its appearance among the lower races—Lustration of new-born
    children; of women; of those polluted by bloodshed or the
    dead—Lustration continued at higher levels of Culture—Conclusion.

Religious rites fall theoretically into two divisions, though these
blend in practice. In part, they are expressive and symbolic
performances, the dramatic utterance of religious thought, the
gesture-language of theology. In part, they are means of intercourse
with and influence on spiritual beings, and as such, their intention is
as directly practical as any chemical or mechanical process, for
doctrine and worship correlate as theory and practice. In the science of
religion, the study of ceremony has its strong and weak sides. On the
one hand, it is generally easier to obtain accurate accounts of
ceremonies by eye-witnesses, than anything like trustworthy and
intelligible statements of doctrine; so that very much of our knowledge
of religion in the savage and barbaric world consists in acquaintance
with its ceremonies. It is also true that some religious ceremonies are
marvels of permanence, holding substantially the same form and meaning
through age after age, and far beyond the range of historic record. On
the other hand, the signification of ceremonies is not to be rashly
decided on by mere inspection. In the long and varied course in which
religion has adapted itself to new intellectual and moral conditions,
one of the most marked processes has affected time-honoured religious
customs, whose form has been faithfully and even servilely kept up,
while their nature has often undergone transformation. In the religions
of the great nations, the natural difficulty of following these changes
has been added to by the sacerdotal tendency to ignore and obliterate
traces of the inevitable change of religion from age to age, and to
convert into mysteries ancient rites whose real barbaric meaning is too
far out of harmony with the spirit of a later time. The embarrassments,
however, which beset the enquirer into the ceremonies of a single
religion, diminish in a larger comparative study. The ethnographer who
brings together examples of a ceremony from different stages of culture
can often give a more rational account of it, than the priest, to whom a
special signification, sometimes very unlike the original one, has
become matter of orthodoxy. As a contribution to the theory of religion,
with especial view to its lower phases as explanatory of the higher, I
have here selected for ethnographic discussion a group of sacred rites,
each in its way full of instruction, different as these ways are. All
have early place and rudimentary meaning in savage culture, all belong
to barbaric ages, all have their representatives within the limits of
modern Christendom. They are the rites of Prayer, Sacrifice, Fasting and
other methods of Artificial Ecstasy, Orientation, Lustration.

Prayer, ‘the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed,’ is the
address of personal spirit to personal spirit. So far as it is actually
addressed to disembodied or deified human souls, it is simply an
extension of the daily intercourse between man and man; while the
worshipper who looks up to other divine beings, spiritual after the
nature of his own spirit, though of place and power in the universe far
beyond his own, still has his mind in a state where prayer is a
reasonable and practical act. So simple and familiar indeed is the
nature of prayer, that its study does not demand that detail of fact and
argument which must be given to rites in comparison practically
insignificant. It has not indeed been placed everywhere on record as the
necessary outcome of animistic belief, for especially at low levels of
civilization there are many races who distinctly admit the existence of
spirits, but are not positively known to pray to them. Beyond this lower
level, however, animism and ceremonial prayer become nearly
conterminous; and a view of their relation in their earlier stages may
be best gained from a selection of actual prayers taken down word for
word, within the limits of savage and barbaric life. These agree with an
opinion that prayer appeared in the religion of the lower culture, but
that in this its earlier stage it was unethical. The accomplishment of
desire is asked for, but desire is as yet limited to personal advantage.
It is at later and higher moral levels, that the worshipper begins to
add to his entreaty for prosperity the claim for help toward virtue and
against vice, and prayer becomes an instrument of morality.

In the Papuan Island of Tanna, where the gods are the spirits of
departed ancestors, and preside over the growth of fruits, a prayer
after the offering of first-fruits is spoken aloud by the chief who acts
as high priest to the silent assembly: ‘Compassionate father! Here is
some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of it!’ Then all
shout together.[844] In the Samoan Islands, when the libation of ava was
poured out at the evening meal, the head of the family prayed thus:—

    ‘Here is ava for you, O gods! Look kindly towards this family: let
    it prosper and increase; and let us all be kept in health. Let our
    plantations be productive; let food grow; and may there be abundance
    of food for us, your creatures. Here is ava for you, our war gods!
    Let there be a strong and numerous people for you in this land.

    ‘Here is ava for you, O sailing gods (gods who come in Tongan canoes
    and foreign vessels). Do not come on shore at this place; but be
    pleased to depart along the ocean to some other land.’[845]

Among the Indians of North America, more or less under European
influence, the Sioux will say, ‘Spirits of the dead, have mercy on me!’
then they will add what they want, if good weather they say so, if good
luck in hunting, they say so.[846] Among the Osages, prayers used not
long since to be offered at daybreak to Wohkonda, the Master of Life.
The devotee retired a little from the camp or company, and with affected
or real weeping, in loud uncouth voice of plaintive piteous tone, howled
such prayers as these:— ‘Wohkonda, pity me, I am very poor; give me what
I need; give me success against mine enemies, that I may avenge the
death of my friends. May I be able to take scalps, to take horses! &c.’
Such prayers might or might not have allusion to some deceased relative
or friend.[847] How an Algonquin Indian undertakes a dangerous voyage,
we may judge from John Tanner’s account of a fleet of frail Indian bark
canoes setting out at dawn one calm morning on Lake Superior. We had
proceeded, he writes, about two hundred yards into the lake, when the
canoes all stopped together, and the chief, in a very loud voice,
addressed a prayer to the Great Spirit, entreating him to give us a good
look to cross the lake. ‘You,’ said he, ‘have made this lake, and you
have made us, your children; you can now cause that the water shall
remain smooth while we pass over in safety.’ In this manner he continued
praying for five or ten minutes; he then threw into the lake a small
quantity of tobacco, in which each of the canoes followed his
example.[848] A Nootka Indian, preparing for war, prayed thus: ‘Great
Quahootze, let me live, not be sick, find the enemy, not fear him, find
him asleep, and kill a great many of him.’[849] There is more pathos in
these lines from the war-song of a Delaware:—

                  ‘O Great Spirit there above
                  Have pity on my children
                  And my wife!
                  Prevent that they shall mourn for me!
                  Let me succeed in this undertaking,
                  That I may slay my enemy
                  And bring home the tokens of victory
                  To my dear family and my friends
                  That we may rejoice together....
                  Have pity on me and protect my life,
                  And I will bring thee an offering.’[850]

The following two prayers are among those recorded by Molina, from the
memory of aged men who described to him the religion of Peru under the
Incas, in whose rites they had themselves borne part. The first is
addressed to the Sun, the second to the World-creator:—

    ‘O Sun! Thou who hast said, let there be Cuzcos and Tampus, grant
    that these thy children may conquer all other people. We beseech
    thee that thy children the Yncas may be the conquerors always, for
    this hast thou created them.’

    ‘O conquering Uiracocha! Ever present Uiracocha! Thou who art in the
    ends of the earth without equal! Thou who gavest life and valour to
    men, saying “Let this be a man!” and to women, saying, “Let this be
    a woman!” Thou who madest them and gavest them being! Watch over
    them that they may live in health and peace. Thou who art in the
    high heavens, and among the clouds of the tempest, grant this with
    long life, and accept this sacrifice, O Uiracocha!’[851]

In Africa, the Zulus, addressing the spirits of their ancestors, think
it even enough to call upon them without saying what they want, taking
it for granted that the spirits know, so that the mere utterance ‘People
of our house!’ is a prayer. When a Zulu sneezes, and is thus for the
moment in close relation to the divine spirits, it is enough for him to
mention what he wants (‘to wish a wish,’ as our own folklore has it),
and thus the words ‘A cow!’ ‘Children!’ are prayers. Fuller forms are
such as these: ‘People of our house! Cattle!’—‘People of our house! Good
luck and health!’—‘People of our house! Children!’ On occasions of
ancestral cattle-sacrifice the prayers extend to actual harangues, as
when, after the feast is over, the headman speaks thus amid dead
silence: ‘Yes, yes, our people, who did such and such noble acts, I pray
to you—I pray for prosperity after having sacrificed this bullock of
yours. I say, I cannot refuse to give you food, for these cattle which
are here you gave me. And if you ask food of me which you have given me,
is it not proper that I should give it to you? I pray for cattle, that
they may fill this pen. I pray for corn, that many people may come to
this village of yours, and make a noise, and glorify you. I ask also for
children, that this village may have a large population, and that your
name may never come to an end.’ So he finishes.[852] From among the
negro races near the equator, the following prayers may be cited,
addressed to that Supreme Deity whose nature is, as we have seen, more
or less that of the Heaven-god. The Gold Coast negro would raise his
eyes to Heaven and thus address him: ‘God, give me to-day rice and yams,
gold and agries, give me slaves, riches, and health, and that I may be
brisk and swift!’ The fetish-man will often in the morning take water in
his mouth and say, ‘Heaven! grant that I may have something to eat
to-day;’ and when giving medicine shown him by the fetish, he will hold
it up to heaven first, and say, ‘Ata Nyongmo! (Father Heaven!) bless
this medicine that I now give.’ The Yebu would say, ‘God in heaven,
protect me from sickness and death. God give me happiness and
wisdom!’[853] When the Manganja of Lake Nyassa were offering to the
Supreme Deity a basketful of meal and a pot of native beer, that he
might give them rain, the priestess dropped the meal handful by handful
on the ground, each time calling, in a high-pitched voice, ‘Hear thou, O
God, and send rain!’ and the assembled people responded, clapping their
hands softly and intoning (they always intone their prayers) ‘Hear thou,
O God!’[854]

Typical forms of prayer may be selected in Asia near the junction-line
of savage and barbaric culture. Among the Karens of Burma, the
Harvest-goddess has offerings made to her in a little house in the
paddy-field, in which two strings are put for her to bind the spirits of
any persons who may enter her field. Then they entreat her on this wise:
‘Grandmother, thou guardest my field, thou watchest over my plantation.
Look out for men entering; look sharp for people coming in. If they
come, bind them with this string, tie them with this rope, do not let
them go!’ And at the threshing of the rice they say: ‘Shake thyself,
Grandmother, shake thyself! Let the paddy ascend till it equals a hill,
equals a mountain. Shake thyself, Grandmother, shake thyself!’[855] The
following are extracts from the long-drawn prayers of the Khonds of
Orissa: ‘O Boora Pennu! and O Tari Pennu, and all other gods! (naming
them). You, O Boora Pennu! created us, giving us the attribute of
hunger; thence corn food was necessary to us, and thence were necessary
producing fields. You gave us every seed, and ordered us to use
bullocks, and to make ploughs, and to plough. Had we not received this
art, we might still indeed have existed upon the natural fruits of the
jungle and the plain, but, in our destitution, we could not have
performed your worship. Do you, remembering this—the connexion betwixt
our wealth and your honour—grant the prayers which we now offer. In the
morning, we rise before the light to our labour, carrying the seed. Save
us from the tiger, and the snake, and from stumblingblocks. Let the seed
appear earth to the eating birds, and stones to the eating animals of
the earth. Let the grain spring up suddenly like a dry stream that is
swelled in a night. Let the earth yield to our ploughshares as wax melts
before hot iron. Let the baked clods melt like hailstones. Let our
ploughs spring through the furrows with a force like the recoil of a
bent tree. Let there be such a return from our seed, that so much shall
fall and be neglected in the fields, and so much on the roads in
carrying it home, that, when we shall go out next year to sow, the paths
and the fields shall look like a young corn-field. From the first times
we have lived by your favour. Let us continue to receive it. Remember
that the increase of our produce is the increase of your worship, and
that its diminution must be the diminution of your rites.’ The following
is the conclusion of a prayer to the Earth-goddess: ‘Let our herds be so
numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that the
care of them shall overcome their parents—as shall be seen by their
burned hands; let our heads ever strike against brass pots innumerable
hanging from our roofs; let the rats form their nests of shreds of
scarlet cloth and silk; let all the kites in the country be seen in the
trees of our village, from beasts being killed there every day. We are
ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us.
Give it to us!’[856]

Such are types of prayer in the lower levels of culture, and in no small
degree they remain characteristic of the higher nations. If, in
long-past ages, the Chinese raised themselves from the condition of rude
Siberian tribes to their peculiar culture, at any rate their consecutive
religion has scarce changed the matter-of-fact prayers for rain and good
harvest, wealth and long life, addressed to manes and nature-spirits and
merciful Heaven.[857] In other great national religions of the world,
not the whole of prayer, but a smaller or larger part of it, holds
closely to the savage definition. This is a Vedic prayer: ‘What, Indra,
has not yet been given me by thee, Lightning-hurler, all good things
bring us hither with both hands ... with mighty riches fill me, with
wealth of cattle, for thou art great!’[858] This is Moslem: ‘O Allah!
unloose the captivity of the captives, and annul the debts of the
debtors: and make this town to be safe and secure, and blessed with
wealth and plenty, and all the towns of the Moslems, O Lord of all
creatures! and decree safety and health to us and to all travellers, and
pilgrims, and warriors, and wanderers, upon thy earth, and upon thy sea,
such as are Moslems, O Lord of all creatures!’[859] Thus also,
throughout the rituals of Christendom, stand an endless array of
supplications unaltered in principle from savage times—that the weather
may be adjusted to our local needs, that we may have the victory over
all our enemies, that life and health and wealth and happiness may be
ours.

So far, then, is permanence in culture: but now let us glance at the
not less marked lines of modification and new formation. The vast
political effect of a common faith in developing the idea of exclusive
nationality, a process scarcely expanding beyond the germ among savage
tribes, but reaching its full growth in the barbaric world, is apt to
have its outward manifestation in hostility to those of another creed,
a sentiment which finds vent in characteristic prayers. Such are these
from the Rig-Veda: ‘Take away our calamities. By sacred verses may we
overcome those who employ no holy hymns! Distinguish between the Aryas
and those who are Dasyus: chastising those who observe no sacred
rites, subject them to the sacrificer.... Indra subjects the impious
to the pious, and destroys the irreligious by the religious.’[860] The
following is from the closing prayer which the boys in many schools in
Cairo used to repeat some years ago, and very likely do still: ‘I seek
refuge with Allah from Satan the accursed. In the name of Allah, the
Compassionate, the Merciful ... O Lord of all creatures! O Allah!
destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of
the religion! O Allah! make their children orphans, and defile their
abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families
and their households and their women and their children and their
relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their
possessions and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty
to the Moslems! O Lord of all creatures!’[861] Another powerful
tendency of civilization, that of regulating human affairs by fixed
ordinance, has since early ages been at work to arrange worship into
mechanical routine. Here, so to speak, religion deposits itself in
sharply defined shape from a supersaturated solution, and crystallizes
into formalism. Thus prayers, from being at first utterances as free
and flexible as requests to a living patriarch or chief, stiffened
into traditional formulas, whose repetition required verbal accuracy,
and whose nature practically assimilated more or less to that of
charms. Liturgies, especially in those three quarters of the world
where the ancient liturgical language has become at once
unintelligible and sacred, are crowded with examples of this
historical process. Its extremest development in Europe is connected
with the use of the rosary. This devotional calculating-machine is of
Asiatic invention; it had if not its origin at least its special
development among the ancient Buddhists, and its 108 balls still slide
through the modern Buddhist’s hands as of old, measuring out the
sacred formulas whose reiteration occupies so large a fraction of a
pious life. It was not till toward the middle ages that the rosary
passed into Mohammedan and Christian lands, and finding there
conceptions of prayer which it was suited to accompany, has flourished
ever since. How far the Buddhist devotional formulas themselves
partake of the nature of prayer, is a question opening into
instructive considerations, which need only be suggested here. By its
derivation from Brahmanism and its fusion with the beliefs of rude
spirit-worshipping populations, Buddhism practically retains in no
small measure a prayerful temper and even practice. Yet, according to
strict and special Buddhist philosophy, where personal divinity has
faded into metaphysical idea, even devotional utterances of desire are
not prayers; as Köppen says, there is no ‘Thou!’ in them. It must be
only with reservation that we class the rosary in Buddhist hands as an
instrument of actual prayer. The same is true of the still more
extreme development of mechanical religion, the prayer-mill of the
Tibetan Buddhists. This was perhaps originally a symbolic ‘chakra’ or
wheel of the law, but has become a cylinder mounted on an axis, which
by each rotation is considered to repeat the sentences written on the
papers it is filled with, usually the ‘Om mani padme hûm!’
Prayer-mills vary in size, from the little wooden toys held in the
hand, to the great drums turned by wind or water-power, which repeat
their sentences by the million.[862] The Buddhist idea, that ‘merit’
is produced by the recitation of these sentences, may perhaps lead us
to form an opinion of large application in the study of religion and
superstition, namely, that the theory of prayers may explain the
origin of charms. Charm-formulas are in very many cases actual
prayers, and as such are intelligible. Where they are mere verbal
forms, producing their effect on nature and man by some unexplained
process, may not they or the types they were modelled on have been
originally prayers, since dwindled into mystic sentences?

The worshipper cannot always ask wisely what is for his good, therefore
it may be well for him to pray that the greater power of the deity may
be guided by his greater wisdom—this is a thought which expands and
strengthens in the theology of the higher nations. The simple prayer of
Sokrates, that the gods would give such things as are good, for they
know best what are good,[863] raises a strain of supplication which has
echoed through Christendom from its earliest ages. Greatest of all
changes which difference the prayers of lower from those of higher
nations, is the working out of the general principle that the ethical
element, so scanty and rudimentary in the lower forms of religion,
becomes in the higher its most vital point; while it scarcely appears as
though any savage prayer, authentically native in its origin, were ever
directed to obtain moral goodness or to ask pardon for moral sin. Among
the semi-civilized Aztecs, in the elaborate ritual which from its early
record and its original characteristics may be thought to have a partial
authenticity, we mark the appearance of ethical prayer. Such is the
supplication concerning the newly-elect ruler: ‘Make him, Lord, as your
true image, and permit him not to be proud and haughty in your throne
and court; but vouchsafe, Lord, that he may calmly and carefully rule
and govern them whom he has in charge, the people, and permit not, Lord,
that he may injure or vex his subjects, nor without reason and justice
cause loss to any; and permit not, Lord, that he may spot or soil your
throne or court with any injustice or wrong, &c.’[864] Moral prayer,
sometimes appearing in rudiment, sometimes shrunk into insignificance,
sometimes overlaid by formalism, sometimes maintained firm and vigorous
in the inmost life, has its place without as well as within the
Jewish-Christian scheme. The ancient Aryan prayed: ‘Through want of
strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone wrong; have mercy,
almighty, have mercy!... Whenever we men, O Varuna, commit an offence
before the heavenly host, whenever we break the law through
thoughtlessness, have mercy, almighty, have mercy!’[865] The modern
Parsi prays: ‘Of my sins which I have committed against the ruler
Ormazd, against men, and the different kinds of men.... Deceit,
contempt, idol-worship, lies, I repent of.... All and every kind of sin
which men have committed because of me, or which I have committed
because of men; pardon, I repent with confession!’[866] As a general
rule it would be misleading to judge utterances of this kind in the
religions of classic Greece and Rome as betokening the intense habitual
prayerfulness which pervades the records of Judaism, Mohammedanism,
Christianity. Moralists admit that prayer can be made an instrument of
evil, that it may give comfort and hope to the superstitious robber,
that it may strengthen the heart of the soldier to slay his foes in an
unrighteous war, that it may uphold the tyrant and the bigot in their
persecution of freedom in life and thought. Philosophers dwell on the
subjective operation of prayer, as acting not directly on outward
events, but on the mind and will of the worshipper himself, which it
influences and confirms. The one argument tends to guide prayer, the
other to suppress it. Looking on prayer in its effect on man himself
through the course of history, both must recognize it as even in savage
religion a means of strengthening emotion, of sustaining courage and
exciting hope, while in higher faiths it becomes a great motive power of
the ethical system, controlling and enforcing, under an ever-present
sense of supernatural intercourse and aid, the emotions and energies of
moral life.

Sacrifice has its apparent origin in the same early period of culture
and its place in the same animistic scheme as prayer, with which through
so long a range of history it has been carried on in the closest
connexion. As prayer is a request made to a deity as if he were a man,
so sacrifice is a gift made to a deity as if he were a man. The human
types of both may be studied unchanged in social life to this day. The
suppliant who bows before his chief, laying a gift at his feet and
making his humble petition, displays the anthropomorphic model and
origin at once of sacrifice and prayer. But sacrifice, though in its
early stages as intelligible as prayer is in early and late stages
alike, has passed in the course of religious history into transformed
conditions, not only of the rite itself but of the intention with which
the worshipper performs it. And theologians, having particularly turned
their attention to sacrifice as it appears in the higher religions, have
been apt to gloss over with mysticism ceremonies which, when traced
ethnographically up from their savage forms, seem open to simply
rational interpretation. Many details of offerings have already been
given incidentally here, as a means of elucidating the nature of the
deities they are offered to. Moreover, a main part of the doctrine of
sacrifice has been anticipated in examining the offerings to spirits of
the dead, and indeed the ideal distinction between soul and deity breaks
down among the lower races, when it appears how often the deities
receiving sacrifice are themselves divine human souls. In now attempting
to classify sacrifice in its course through the religions of the world,
it seems a satisfactory plan to group the evidence as far as may be
according to the manner in which the offering is given by the
worshipper, and received by the deity. At the same time, the examples
may be so arranged as to bring into view the principal lines along which
the rite has undergone alteration. The ruder conception that the deity
takes and values the offering for itself, gives place on the one hand to
the idea of mere homage expressed by a gift, and on the other to the
negative view that the virtue lies in the worshipper depriving himself
of something prized. These ideas may be broadly distinguished as the
gift-theory, the homage-theory, and the abnegation-theory. Along all
three the usual ritualistic change may be traced, from practical reality
to formal ceremony. The originally valuable offering is compromised for
a smaller tribute or a cheaper substitute, dwindling at last to a mere
trifling token or symbol.

The gift-theory, as standing on its own independent basis, properly
takes the first place. That most childlike kind of offering, the giving
of a gift with as yet no definite thought how the receiver can take and
use it, may be the most primitive as it is the most rudimentary
sacrifice. Moreover, in tracing the history of the ceremony from level
to level of culture, the same simple unshaped intention may still
largely prevail, and much of the reason why it is often found difficult
to ascertain what savages and barbarians suppose to become of the food
and valuables they offer to the gods, may be simply due to ancient
sacrificers knowing as little about it as modern ethnologists do, and
caring less. Yet rude races begin and civilized races continue to
furnish with the details of their sacrificial ceremonies the key also to
their meaning, the explanation of the manner in which the offering is
supposed to pass into the possession of the deity.

Beginning with cases in which this transmission is performed bodily, it
appears that when the deity is the personal Water, Earth, Fire, Air, or
a fetish-spirit animating or inhabiting such element, he can receive and
sometimes actually consume the offerings given over to this material
medium. How such notions may take shape is not ill shown in the quaintly
rational thought noticed in old Peru, that the Sun drinks the libations
poured out before him; and in modern Madagascar, that the Angatra drinks
the arrack left for him in the leaf-cup. Do not they see the liquids
diminish from day to day?[867] The sacrifice to Water is exemplified by
Indians caught in a storm on the North American lakes, who would appease
the angry tempest-raising deity by tying the feet of a dog and throwing
it overboard.[868] The following case from Guinea well shows the
principle of such offerings. Once in 1693, the sea being unusually
rough, the headmen complained to the king, who desired them to be easy,
and he would make the sea quiet next day. Accordingly he sent his
fetishman with a jar of palm oil, a bag of rice and corn, a jar of
pitto, a bottle of brandy, a piece of painted calico, and several other
things to present to the sea. Being come to the sea-side, he made a
speech to it, assuring it that his king was its friend, and loved the
white men; that they were honest fellows and came to trade with him for
what he wanted; and that he requested the sea not to be angry, nor
hinder them to land their goods; he told it, that if it wanted palm oil,
his king had sent it some; and so threw the jar with the oil into the
sea, as he did, with the same compliment, the rice, corn, pitto, brandy,
calico, &c.[869] Among the North American Indians the Earth also
receives offerings buried in it. The distinctness of idea with which
such objects may be given is well shown in a Sioux legend. The Spirit of
the earth, it seems, requires an offering from those who perform
extraordinary achievements, and accordingly the prairie gapes open with
an earthquake before the victorious hero of the tale; he casts a
partridge into the crevice, and springs over.[870] One of the most
explicit recorded instances of the offering to the Earth is the hideous
sacrifice to the Earth-goddess among the Khonds of Orissa, the tearing
of the flesh of the human victim from the bones, the priest burying half
of it in a hole in the earth behind his back without looking round, and
each householder carrying off a particle to bury in like manner in his
favourite field.[871] For offerings to the Fire, we may take for an
example the Yakuts, who not only give him the first spoonful of food,
but instead of washing their earthen pots allow him to clean out the
remains.[872] Here is a New Zealand charm called Wangaihau, i.e.,
feeding the Wind:—

              ‘Lift up his offering,
              To Uenga a te Rangi his offering,
              Eat, O invisible one, listen to me,
              Let that food bring you down from the sky.’[873]

Beside this may be set the quaint description of the Fanti negroes
assisting at the sacrifice of men and cattle to the local fetish; the
victims were considered to be carried up in a whirlwind out of the midst
of the small inner ring of priests and priestesses; this whirlwind was,
however, not perceptible to the senses of the surrounding
worshippers.[874] These series of details collected from the lower
civilization throw light on curious problems as to sacrificial ideas in
the religions of the classic world; such questions as what Xerxes meant
when he threw the golden goblet and the sword into the Hellespont, which
he had before chained and scourged; why Hannibal cast animals into the
sea as victims to Poseidon; what religious significance underlay the
patriotic Roman legend of the leap of Marcus Curtius.[875]

Sacred animals, in their various characters of divine beings,
incarnations, representatives, agents, symbols, naturally receive meat
and drink offerings, and sometimes other gifts. For examples, may be
mentioned the sun-birds (tonatzuli), for which the Apalaches of
Florida set out crushed maize and seed;[876] the Polynesian deities
coming incarnate in the bodies of birds to feed on the meat-offerings
and carcases of human victims set out upon the altar-scaffolds;[877]
the well-fed sacred snakes of West Africa, and local fetish animals
like the alligator at Dix Cove which will come up at a whistle, and
follow a man half a mile if he carries a white fowl in his hands, or
the shark at Bonny that comes to the river bank every day to see if a
human victim has been provided for his repast;[878] in modern India
the cows reverently fed with fresh grass, Durga’s meat-offerings laid
out on stones for the jackals, the famous alligators in their
temple-tanks.[879] The definition of sacred animal from this point of
view distinctly includes man. Such in Mexico was the captive youth
adored as living representative of Tezcatlipoca, and to whom banquets
were made during the luxurious twelvemonth which preceded his
sacrifice at the festival of the deity whom he personated: such still
more definitely was Cortes himself, when Montezuma supposed him to be
the incarnate Quetzalcoatl come back into the land, and sent human
victims accordingly to be slaughtered before him, should he seem to
lust for blood.[880] Such in modern India is the woman who as
representative of Radha eats and drinks the offerings at the shameless
orgies of the Saktas.[881] More usually it is the priest who as
minister of the deities has the lion’s share of the offerings or the
sole privilege of consuming them, from the Fijian priest who watches
for the turtle and puddings apportioned to his god,[882] and the West
African priest who carries the allowances of food sent to the local
spirits of mountain, or river, or grove, which food he eats himself as
the spirit’s proxy,[883] to the Brahmans who receive for the divine
ancestors the oblation of a worshipper who has no sacred fire to
consume it, ‘for there is no difference between the Fire and a
Brahman, such is the judgment declared by them who know the
Veda.’[884] It is needless to collect details of a practice so usual
in the great systematic religions of the world, where priests have
become professional ministers and agents of deity, as for them to
partake of the sacrificial meats. It by no means follows from this
usage that the priest is necessarily supposed to consume the food as
representative of his divinity; in the absence of express statement to
such effect, the matter can only be treated as one of ceremonial
ordinance. Indeed, the case shows the caution needed in interpreting
religious rites, which in particular districts may have meanings
attached to them quite foreign to their general intent.

The feeding of an idol, as when Ostyaks would pour daily broth into the
dish at the image’s mouth,[885] or when the Aztecs would pour the blood
and put the heart of the slaughtered human victim into the monstrous
idol’s mouth,[886] seems ceremonial make-believe, but shows that in each
case the deity was somehow considered to devour the meal. The conception
among the lower races of deity, as in disembodied spiritual form, is
even less compatible with the notion that such a being should consume
solid matter. It is true that the notion does occur. In old times it
appears in the legend of Bel and the Dragon, where the footprints in the
strewn ashes betray the knavish priests who come by secret doors to eat
up the banquet set before Bel’s image.[887] In modern centuries, it may
be exemplified by the negroes of Labode, who could hear the noise of
their god Jimawong emptying one after another the bottles of brandy
handed in at the door of his straw-roofed temple;[888] or among the
Ostyaks, who, as Pallas relates, used to leave a horn of snuff for their
god, with a shaving of willow bark to stop his nostrils with after the
country fashion; the traveller describes their astonishment when
sometimes an unbelieving Russian has emptied it in the night, leaving
the simple folk to conclude that the deity must have gone out hunting to
have snuffed so much.[889] But these cases turn on fraud, whereas
absurdities in which low races largely agree are apt to have their
origin rather in genuine error. Indeed, their dominant theories of the
manner in which deities receive sacrifice are in accordance not with
fraud but with facts, and must be treated as strictly rational and
honest developments of the lower animism. The clearest and most general
of these theories are as follows.

When the deity is considered to take actual possession of the food or
other objects offered, this may be conceived to happen by abstraction of
their life, savour, essence, quality, and in yet more definite
conception their spirit or soul. The solid part may die, decay, be taken
away or consumed or destroyed, or may simply remain untouched. Among
this group of conceptions, the most materialized is that which carries
out the obvious primitive world-wide doctrine that the life is the
blood. Accordingly, the blood is offered to the deity, and even
disembodied spirits are thought capable of consuming it, like the ghosts
for whom Odysseus entering Hades poured into the trench the blood of the
sacrificed ram and black ewe, and the pale shades drank and spoke;[890]
or the evil spirits which the Mintira of the Malay Peninsula keep away
from the wife in childbirth by placing her near the fire, for the demons
are believed to drink human blood when they can find it.[891] Thus in
Virginia the Indians (in pretence or reality) sacrificed children, whose
blood the oki or spirit was said to suck from their left breast.[892]
The Kayans of Borneo used to offer human sacrifice when a great chief
took possession of a newly built house; in one late case, about 1847, a
Malay slave girl was bought for the purpose and bled to death, the
blood, which alone is efficacious, being sprinkled on the pillars and
under the house, and the body being thrown into the river.[893] The same
ideas appear among the indigenes of India, alike in North Bengal and in
the Deccan, where the blood alone of the sacrificed animal is for the
deities, and the votary retains the meat.[894] Thus, in West Africa, the
negroes of Benin are described as offering a cock to the idol, but it
receives only the blood, for they like the flesh very well
themselves;[895] while in the Yoruba country, when a beast is sacrificed
for a sick man, the blood is sprinkled on the wall and smeared on the
patient’s forehead, with the idea, it is said, of thus transferring to
him the victim’s life.[896] The Jewish law of sacrifice marks clearly
the distinction between shedding the blood as life, and offering it as
food. As the Israelites themselves might not eat with the flesh the
blood which is the life, but must pour it on the earth as water, so the
rule applies to sacrifice. The blood must be sprinkled before the
sanctuary, put upon the horns of the altar, and there sprinkled or
poured out, but not presented as a drink offering—‘their drink-offerings
of blood will I not offer.’[897]

Spirit being considered in the lower animism as somewhat of the
ethereal nature of smoke or mist, there is an obvious reasonableness
in the idea that offerings reduced to this condition are fit to be
consumed by, or transmitted to, spiritual beings towards whom the
vapour rises in the air. This idea is well shown in the case of
incense, and especially a peculiar kind of incense offered among the
native tribes of America. The habit of smoking tobacco is not
suggestive of religious rites among ourselves, but in its native
country, where it is so widely diffused as to be perhaps the best
point assignable in favour of a connexion in the culture of the
northern and southern continent, its place in worship is very
important. The Osages would begin an undertaking by smoking a pipe,
with such a prayer as this: ‘Great Spirit, come down to smoke with me
as a friend! Fire and Earth, smoke with me and help me to overthrow my
foes!’ The Sioux in Hennepin’s time would look toward the Sun when
they smoked, and when the calumet was lighted, they presented it to
him, saying: ‘Smoke, Sun!’ The Natchez chief at sunrise smoked first
to the east and then to the other quarters; and so on. It is not
merely, however, that puffs from the tobacco-pipe are thus offered to
deities as drops of drink or morsels of food might be. The calumet is
a special gift of the Sun or the Great Spirit, tobacco is a sacred
herb, and smoking is an agreeable sacrifice ascending into the air to
the abode of gods and spirits.[898] Among the Caribs, the native
sorcerer evoking a demon would puff tobacco-smoke into the air as an
agreeable perfume to attract the spirit; while among Brazilian tribes
the sorcerers smoked round upon the bystanders and on the patient to
be cured.[899] How thoroughly incense and burnt-offering are of the
same nature, the Zulus well show, burning incense together with the
fat of the caul of the slaughtered beast, to give the spirits of the
people a sweet savour.[900] As to incense more precisely of the sort
we are familiar with, it was in daily use in the temples of Mexico,
where among the commonest antiquarian relics are the earthen
incense-pots in which ‘copalli’ (whence our word copal) and bitumen
were burnt.[901] Though incense was hardly usual in the ancient
religion of China, yet in modern Chinese houses and temples the
‘joss-stick’ and censer do honour to all divine beings, from the
ancestral manes to the great gods and Heaven and Earth.[902] The
history of incense in the religion of Greece and Rome points the
contrast between old thrift and new extravagance, where the early
fumigations with herbs and chips of fragrant wood are contrasted with
the later oriental perfumes, myrrh and cassia and frankincense.[903]
In the temples of ancient Egypt, numberless representations of
sacrificial ceremony show the burning of the incense-pellets in
censers before the images of the gods; and Plutarch speaks of the
incense burnt thrice daily to the Sun, resin at his rising, myrrh at
his meridian, kuphi at his setting.[904] The ordinance held as
prominent a place among the Semitic nations. At the yearly festival of
Bel in Babylon, the Chaldæans are declared by Herodotus to have burned
a thousand talents of incense on the large altar in the temple where
sat his golden image.[905] In the records of ancient Israel, there has
come down to us the very recipe for compounding incense after the art
of the apothecary. The priests carried every man his censer, and on
the altar of incense, overlaid with gold, standing before the vail in
the tabernacle, sweet spices were burned morn and even, a perpetual
incense before the Lord.[906]

The sacrifice by fire is familiar to the religion of North American
tribes. Thus the Algonquins knew the practice of casting into the fire
the first morsel of the feast; and throwing fat into the flames for the
spirits, they would pray to them ‘make us find food.’ Catlin has
described and sketched the Mandans dancing round the fire where the
first kettleful of the green-corn is being burned, an offering to the
Great Spirit before the feast begins.[907] The Peruvians burnt llamas as
offerings to the Creator, Sun, Moon, and Thunder, and other lesser
deities. As to the operation of sacrifice, an idea of theirs comes well
into view in the legend of Manco Ccapac ordering the sacrifice of the
most beautiful of his sons, ‘cutting off his head, and sprinkling the
blood over the fire, that the smoke might reach the Maker of heaven and
earth.’[908] In Siberia the sacrifices of the Tunguz and Buraets, in the
course of which bits of meat and liver and fat are cast into the fire,
carry on the same idea.[909] Chinese sacrifices to sun and moon, stars
and constellations, show their purpose in most definite fashion; beasts
and even silks and precious stones are burned, that their vapour may
ascend to these heavenly spirits.[910] No less significant, though in a
different sense, is the Siamese offering to the household deity, incense
and arrack and rice steaming hot; he does not eat it all, not always any
part of it, it is the fragrant steam which he loves to inhale.[911]
Looking now to the records of Aryan sacrifice, views similar to these
are not obscurely expressed. When the Brahman burns the offerings on the
altar-fire, they are received by Agni the divine Fire, mouth of the
gods, messenger of the All-knowing, to whom is chanted the Vedic
strophe, ‘Agni! the sacrifice which thou encompassest whole, it goes
unto the gods!’[912] The Homeric poems show the plain meaning of the
hecatombs of old barbaric Greece, where the savour of the burnt offering
went up in wreathing smoke to heaven, ‘Κνίσση δ’ οὐρανὸν ἶκεν ἐλισσομένη
περὶ καπνῷ.’[913] Passed into a far other stage of history, men’s minds
had not lost sight of the archaic thought even in Porphyry’s time, for
he knows how the demons who desire to be gods rejoice in the libations
and fumes of sacrifice, whereby their spiritual and bodily substance
fattens, for this lives on the steam and vapours and is strengthened by
the fumes of the blood and flesh.[914]

The view of commentators that sacrifice, as a religious act of remote
antiquity and world-wide prevalence, was adopted, regulated, and
sanctioned in the Jewish law, is in agreement with the general
ethnography of the subject. Here sacrifice appears not with the lower
conception of a gift acceptable and even beneficial to deity, but with
the higher significance of devout homage or expiation for sin. As is so
usual in the history of religion, the offering consisted in general of
food, and the consummation of the sacrifice was by fire. To the
ceremonial details of the sacrificial rites of Israel, whether
prescribing the burning of the carcases of oxen and sheep or of the
bloodless gifts of flour mingled with oil, there is appended again and
again the explanation of the intent of the rite; it is ‘an offering made
by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.’ The copious records of
sacrifice in the Old Testament enable us to follow its expansion from
the simple patriarchal forms of a pastoral tribe, to the huge and
complex system organized to carry on the ancient service in a now
populous and settled kingdom. Among writers on the Jewish religion, Dean
Stanley has vividly portrayed the aspect of the Temple, with the flocks
of sheep and droves of cattle crowding its courts, the vast apparatus of
slaughter, the great altar of burnt-offering towering above the people,
where the carcases were laid, the drain beneath to carry off the streams
of blood. To this historian, in sympathy rather with the spirit of the
prophet than the ceremony of the priest, it is a congenial task to dwell
upon the great movement in later Judaism to maintain the place of
ethical above ceremonial religion.[915] In those times of Hebrew
history, the prophets turned with stern rebuke on those who ranked
ceremonial ordinance above weightier matters of the law. ‘I desired
mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt
offerings.’ ‘I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of
he goats.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings
from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do well.’

Continuing the enquiry into the physical operation ascribed to
sacrifice, we turn to a different conception. It is an idea well vouched
for in the lower culture, that the deity, while leaving apparently
untouched the offering set out before him, may nevertheless partake of
or abstract what in a loose way may be described as its essence. The
Zulus leave the flesh of the sacrificed bullock all night, and the
divine ancestral spirits come and eat, yet next morning everything
remains just as it was. Describing this practice, a native Zulu thus
naïvely comments on it: ‘But when we ask, “What do the Amadhlozi eat?
for in the morning we still see all the meat,” the old men say, “The
Amatongo lick it.” And we are unable to contradict them, but are silent,
for they are older than we, and tell us all things and we listen; for we
are told all things, and assent without seeing clearly whether they are
true or not.’[916] Such imagination was familiar to the native religion
of the West Indian islands. In Columbus’ time, and with particular
reference to Hispaniola, Roman Pane describes the native mode of
sacrifice. Upon any solemn day, when they provide much to eat, whether
fish, flesh, or any other thing, they put it all into the house of the
cemis, that the idol may feed on it. The next day they carry all home,
after the cemi has eaten. And God so help them (says the friar), as the
cemi eats of that or anything else, they being inanimate stocks or
stones. A century and a half later, a similar notion still prevailed in
these islands. Nothing could show it more neatly than the fancy of the
Caribs that they could hear the spirits in the night moving the vessels
and champing the food set out for them, yet next morning there was
nothing touched; it was held that the viands thus partaken of by the
spirits had become holy, so that only the old men and considerable
people might taste them, and even these required a certain bodily
purity.[917] Islanders of Pulo Aur, though admitting that their banished
disease-spirits did not actually consume the grains of rice set out for
them, nevertheless believed them to appropriate its essence.[918] In
India, among the indigenes of the Garo hills, we hear of the head and
blood of the sacrificed animal being placed with some rice under a
bamboo arch covered with a white cloth; the god comes and takes what he
wants, and after a time this special offering is dressed for the company
with the rest of the animal.[919] The Khond deities live on the flavours
and essences drawn from the offerings of their votaries, or from animals
or grain which they cause to die or disappear.[920] When the Buraets of
Siberia have sacrificed a sheep and boiled the mutton, they set it up on
a scaffold for the gods while the shaman is chanting his song, and then
themselves fall to.[921] And thus, in the folklore of mediæval Europe,
Domina Abundia would come with her dames into the houses at night, and
eat and drink from the vessels left uncovered for their increase-giving
visit, yet nothing was consumed.[922]

The extreme animistic view of sacrifice is that the soul of the offered
animal or thing is abstracted by or transmitted to the deity. This
notion of spirits taking souls is in a somewhat different way
exemplified among the Binua of Johore, who hold that the evil
River-spirits inflict diseases on man by feeding on the ‘semangat,’ or
unsubstantial body (in ordinary parlance the spirit) in which his life
resides,[923] while the Karen demon devours not the body but the ‘la,’
spirit or vital principle; thus when it eats a man’s eyes, their
material part remains, but they are blind.[924] Now an idea similar to
this furnished the Polynesians with a theory of sacrifice. The priest
might send commissions by the sacrificed human victim; spirits of the
dead are eaten by the gods or demons; the spiritual part of the
sacrifices is eaten by the spirit of the idol (i.e. the deity dwelling
or embodied in the idol) before whom it is presented.[925] Of the
Fijians it is observed that of the great offerings of food native belief
apportions merely the soul to the gods, who are described as being
enormous eaters; the substance is consumed by the worshippers. As in
various other districts of the world, human sacrifice is here in fact a
meat-offering; cannibalism is a part of the Fijian religion, and the
gods are described as delighting in human flesh.[926] Such ideas are
explicit among Indian tribes of the American lakes, who consider that
offerings, whether abandoned or consumed by the worshippers, go in a
spiritual form to the spirit they are devoted to. Native legends afford
the clearest illustrations. The following is a passage from an Ottawa
tale which recounts the adventures of Wassamo, he who was conveyed by
the spirit-maiden to the lodge of her father, the Spirit of the Sand
Downs, down below the waters of Lake Superior. ‘Son-in-law,’ said the
Old Spirit, ‘I am in want of tobacco. You shall return to visit your
parents, and can make known my wishes. For it is very seldom that those
few who pass these Sand Hills, offer a piece of tobacco. When they do
it, it immediately comes to me. Just so,’ he added, putting his hand out
of the side of the lodge, and drawing in several pieces of tobacco,
which some one at that moment happened to offer to the Spirit, for a
smooth lake and prosperous voyage. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘every thing
offered me on earth, comes immediately to the side of my lodge.’ Wassamo
saw the women also putting their hands to the side of the lodge, and
then handing round something, of which all partook. This he found to be
offerings of food made by mortals on earth. The distinctly spiritual
nature of this transmission is shown immediately after, for Wassamo
cannot eat such mere spirit-food, wherefore his spirit-wife puts out her
hand from the lodge and takes in a material fish out of the lake to cook
for him.[927] Another Ottawa legend, the already cited nature-myth of
the Sun and Moon, is of much interest not only for its display of this
special thought, but as showing clearly the motives with which savage
animists offer sacrifices to their deities, and consider these deities
to accept them. Onowuttokwutto, the Ojibwa youth who has followed the
Moon up to the lovely heaven-prairies to be her husband, is taken one
day by her brother the Sun to see how he gets his dinner. The two look
down together through the hole in the sky upon the earth below, the Sun
points out a group of children playing beside a lodge, at the same time
throwing a tiny stone to hit a beautiful boy. The child falls, they see
him carried into the lodge, they hear the sound of the sheesheegwun (the
rattle), and the song and prayer of the medicine-man that the child’s
life may be spared. To this entreaty of the medicine-man, the Sun makes
answer, ‘Send me up the white dog.’ Then the two spectators above could
distinguish on the earth the hurry and bustle of preparation for a
feast, a white dog killed and singed, and the people who were called
assembling at the lodge. While these things were passing, the Sun
addressed himself to Onowuttokwutto, saying, ‘There are among you in the
lower world some whom you call great medicine-men; but it is because
their ears are open, and they hear my voice, when I have struck any one,
that they are able to give relief to the sick. They direct the people to
send me whatever I call for and when they have sent it, I remove my hand
from those I had made sick.’ When he had said this, the white dog was
parcelled out in dishes for those that were at the feast; then the
medicine-man when they were about to begin to eat, said, ‘We send thee
this, Great Manito.’ Immediately the Sun and his Ojibwa companion saw
the dog, cooked and ready to be eaten, rising to them through the
air—and then and there they dined upon it.[928] How such ideas bear on
the meaning of human sacrifice, we may perhaps judge from this prayer of
the Iroquois, offering a human victim to the War-god: ‘To thee, O Spirit
Arieskoi, we slay this sacrifice, that thou mayst feed upon the flesh,
and be moved to give us henceforth luck and victory over our
enemies!’[929] So among the Aztec prayers, there occurs this one
addressed to Tezcatlipoca-Yautl in time of war: ‘Lord of battles; it is
a very certain and sure thing, that a great war is beginning to make,
ordain, form, and concert itself; the War-god opens his mouth, hungry to
swallow the blood of many who shall die in this war; it seems that the
Sun and the Earth-God Tlatecutli desire to rejoice; they desire to give
meat and drink to the gods of Heaven and Hades, making them a banquet of
the flesh and blood of the men who are to die in this war,’ &c.[930]
There is remarkable definiteness in the Peruvian idea that the souls of
human victims are transmitted to another life in divine as in funeral
sacrifice; at one great ceremony, where children of each tribe were
sacrificed to propitiate the gods, ‘they strangled the children, first
giving them to eat and drink, that they might not enter the presence of
the Creator discontented and hungry.’[931] Similar ideas of spiritual
sacrifice appear in other regions of the world. Thus in West Africa we
read of the tree-fetish enjoying the spirit of the food-offering, but
leaving its substance, and an account of the religion of the Gold Coast
mentions how each great wong or deity has his house, and his priest and
priestess to clean the room and give him daily bread kneaded with
palm-oil, ‘of which, as of all gifts of this kind, the wong eats the
invisible soul.’[932] So, in India, the Limbus of Darjeeling make small
offerings of grain, vegetables, and sugar-cane, and sacrifice cows,
pigs, fowls, &c., on the declared principle ‘the life breath to the
gods, the flesh to ourselves.’[933] It seems likely that such meaning
may largely explain the sacrificial practices of other religions. In
conjunction with these accounts, the unequivocal meaning of funeral
sacrifices, whereby offerings are conveyed spiritually into the
possession of spirits of the dead, may perhaps justify us in inferring
that similar ideas of spiritual transmission prevail extensively among
the many nations whose sacrificial rites we know in fact, but cannot
trace with certainty to their original significance.

Having thus examined the manner in which the operation of sacrifice is
considered to take physical effect, whether indefinitely or definitely,
and having distinguished its actual transmission as either substantial,
essential, or spiritual, let us now follow the question of the
sacrificer’s motive in presenting the sacrifice. Important and complex
as this problem is, its key is so obvious that it may be almost
throughout treated by mere statement of general principle. If the main
proposition of animistic natural religion be granted, that the idea of
the human soul is the model of the idea of deity, then the analogy of
man’s dealings with man ought, inter alia, to explain his motives in
sacrifice. It does so, and very fully. The proposition may be maintained
in wide generality, that the common man’s present to the great man, to
gain good or avert evil, to ask aid or to condone offence, needs only
substitution of deity for chief, and proper adaptation of the means of
conveying the gift to him, to produce a logical doctrine of sacrificial
rites, in great measure explaining their purpose directly as they stand,
and elsewhere suggesting what was the original meaning which has passed
into changed shape in the course of ages. Instead of offering a special
collection of evidence here on this proposition, it may be enough to ask
attentive reference to any extensive general collection of accounts of
sacrifice, such for instance as those cited for various purposes in
these volumes. It will be noticed that offerings to divinities may be
classed in the same way as earthly gifts. The occasional gift made to
meet some present emergency, the periodical tribute brought by subject
to lord, the royalty paid to secure possession or protection of acquired
wealth, all these have their evident and well-marked analogues in the
sacrificial systems of the world. It may impress some minds with a
stronger sense of the sufficiency of this theory of sacrifice, to
consider how the transition is made in the same imperceptible way from
the idea of substantial value received, to that of ceremonial homage
rendered, whether the recipient be man or god. We do not find it easy to
analyse the impression which a gift makes on our own feelings, and to
separate the actual value of the object from the sense of gratification
in the giver’s good-will or respect, and thus we may well scruple to
define closely how uncultured men work out this very same distinction in
their dealings with their deities. In a general way it may be held that
the idea of practical acceptableness of the food or valuables presented
to the deity, begins early to shade into the sentiment of divine
gratification or propitiation by a reverent offering, though in itself
of not much account to so mighty a divine personage. These two stages of
the sacrificial idea may be fairly contrasted, the one among the Karens
who offer to a demon arrack or grain or a portion of the game they kill,
considering invocation of no avail without a gift,[934] the other among
the negroes of Sierra Leone, who sacrifice an ox ‘to make God glad very
much, and do Kroomen good.’[935]

Hopeless as it may be in hundreds of accounts of sacrifice to guess
whether the worshipper means to benefit or merely to gratify the deity,
there are also numbers of cases in which the thought in the sacrificer’s
mind can scarcely be more than an idea of ceremonial homage. One of the
best-marked sacrificial rites of the world is that of offering by fire
or otherwise morsels or libations at meals. This ranges from the
religion of the North American Indian to that of the classic Greek and
the ancient Chinese, and still holds its place in peasant custom in
Europe.[936] Other groups of cases pass into yet more absolute formality
of reverence. See the Guinea negro passing in silence by the sacred tree
or cavern, and dropping a leaf or a sea-shell as an offering to the
local spirit;[937] the Talein of Burma holding up the dish at his meal
to offer it to the nat, before the company fall to;[938] the Hindu
holding up a little of his rice in his fingers to the height of his
forehead, and offering it in thought to Siva or Vishnu before he eats
it.[939] The same argument applies to the cases ranging far and wide
through religion, where, whatever may have been the original intent of
the sacrifice, it has practically passed into a feast. A banquet where
the deity has but the pretence and the worshippers the reality, may seem
to us a mere mockery of sacrifice. Yet how sincerely men regard it as a
religious ceremony, the following anecdote of a North American Indian
tribe will show. A travelling party of Potawatomis, for three days
finding no game, were in great distress for want of food. On the third
night, a chief, named Saugana, had a dream, wherein a person appearing
to him showed him that they were suffering because they had set out
without a sacrificial feast. He had started, on this important journey,
the dreamer said, ‘as a white man would,’ without making any religious
preparation. Therefore the Great Spirit had punished them with scarcity.
Now, however, twelve men were to go and kill four deer before the sun
was thus high (about nine o’clock). The chief in his dream had seen
these four deer lying dead, the hunters duly killed them, and the
sacrificial feast was held.[940] Further illustrative examples of such
sacred banquets may be chosen through the long range of culture. The
Zulus propitiate the Heaven-god above with a sacrifice of black cattle,
that they may have rain; the village chiefs select the oxen, one is
killed, the rest are merely mentioned; the flesh of the slaughtered ox
is eaten in the house in perfect silence, a token of humble submission;
the bones are burnt outside the village; and after the feast they chant
in musical sounds, a song without words.[941] The Serwatty Islanders
sacrifice buffaloes, pigs, goats, and fowls to the idols when an
individual or the community undertakes an affair or expedition of
importance, and as the carcases are devoured by the devotees, this
ensures a respectable attendance when the offerings are numerous.[942]
Thus among rude tribes of Northern India, sacrifices of beasts are
accompanied by libations of fermented liquor, and in fact sacrifice and
feast are convertible words.[943] Among the Aztecs, prisoners of war
furnished first an acceptable sacrifice to the deity, and then the
staple of a feast for the captors and their friends;[944] while in
ancient Peru whole flocks of sacrificed llamas were eaten by the
people.[945] The history of Greek religion plainly records the
transition from the early holocausts devoted by fire to the gods, to the
great festivals where the sacrifices provided meat for the public
banquets held to honour them in ceremonial homage.[946]

Beside this development from gift to homage, there arises also a
doctrine that the gist of sacrifice is rather in the worshipper giving
something precious to himself, than in the deity receiving benefit. This
may be called the abnegation-theory, and its origin may be fairly
explained by considering it as derived from the original gift-theory.
Taking our own feelings again for a guide, we know how it satisfies us
to have done our part in giving, even if the gift be ineffectual, and
how we scruple to take it back if not received, but rather get rid of it
in some other way—it is corban. Thus we may enter into the feelings of
the Assinaboin Indians, who considered that the blankets and pieces of
cloth and brass kettles and such valuables abandoned in the woods as a
medicine-sacrifice, might be carried off by any friendly party who
chanced to discover them;[947] or of the Ava Buddhists bringing to the
temples offerings of boiled rice and sweetmeats and coco-nut fried in
oil, and never attempting to disturb the crows and wild dogs who
devoured it before their eyes;[948] of the modern Moslems sacrificing
sheep, oxen, and camels in the valley of Muna on their return from
Mekka, it being a meritorious act to give away a victim without eating
any of it, while parties of Takruri watch around like vultures, ready to
pounce upon the carcases.[949] If the offering to the deity be continued
in ceremonial survival, in spite of a growing conviction that after all
the deity does not need and cannot profit by it, sacrifice will be thus
kept up in spite of having become practically unreasonable, and the
worshipper may still continue to measure its efficacy by what it costs
him. But to take this abnegation theory as representing the primitive
intention of sacrifice would be, I think, to turn history upside down.
The mere fact of sacrifices to deities, from the lowest to the highest
levels of culture, consisting to the extent of nine-tenths or more of
gifts of food and sacred banquets, tells forcibly against the
originality of the abnegation-theory. If the primary motive had been to
give up valuable property, we should find the sacrifice of weapons,
garments, ornaments, as prevalent in the lower culture as in fact it is
unusual. Looking at the subject in a general view, to suppose men to
have started by devoting to their deities what they considered
practically useless to them, in order that they themselves might suffer
a loss which none is to gain, is to undervalue the practical sense of
savages, who are indeed apt to keep up old rites after their meaning has
fallen away, but seldom introduce new ones without a rational motive. In
studying the religion of the lower races, men are found dealing with
their gods in as practical and straightforward a way as with their
neighbours, and where plain original purpose is found, it may well be
accepted as sufficient explanation. Of the way in which gift can pass
into abnegation, an instructive example is forthcoming in Buddhism. It
is held that sinful men are liable to be re-born in course of
transmigration as wandering, burning, miserable demons (preta). Now
these demons may receive offerings of food and drink from their
relatives, who can further benefit them by acts of merit done in their
name, as giving food to priests, unless the wretched spirits be so low
in merit that this cannot profit them. Yet even in this case it is held
that though the act does not benefit the spirit whom it is directed to,
it does benefit the person who performs it.[950] Unequivocal examples of
abnegation in sacrifice may be best found among those offerings of which
the value to the offerer utterly exceeds the value they can be supposed
to have to the deity. The most striking of these found among nations
somewhat advanced in general culture, appear in the history of human
sacrifice among Semitic nations. The king of Moab, when the battle was
too sore for him, offered up his eldest son for a burnt-offering on the
wall. The Phœnicians sacrificed the dearest children to propitiate the
angry gods, they enhanced their value by choosing them of noble
families, and there was not wanting among them even the utmost proof
that the efficacy of the sacrifice lay in the sacrificer’s grievous
loss, for they must have for yearly sacrifice only-begotten sons of
their parents (Κρόνῳ γαρ Φοίνικες καθ’ ἕκαστον ἔτος ἔθυον τὰ ἀγαπητὰ καὶ
μονογενῆ τῶν τέκνων). Heliogabalus brought the hideous Oriental rite
into Italy, choosing for victims to his solar divinity high-born lads
throughout the land. Of all such cases, the breaking of the sacred law
of hospitality by sacrificing the guest to Jupiter hospitalis, Ζεὺς
ξένιος, shows in the strongest light in Semitic regions how the value to
the offerer might become the measure of acceptableness to the god.[951]
In such ways, slightly within the range of the lower culture, but
strongly in the religion of the higher nations, the transition from the
gift-theory to the abnegation theory seems to have come about. Our
language displays it in a word, if we do but compare the sense of
presentation and acceptance which ‘sacrificium’ had in a Roman temple,
with the sense of mere giving up and loss which ‘sacrifice’ conveys in
an English market.

Through the history of sacrifice, it has occurred to many nations that
cost may be economized without impairing efficiency. The result is seen
in ingenious devices to lighten the burden on the worshipper by
substituting something less valuable than what he ought to offer, or
pretends to. Even in such a matter as this, the innate correspondence in
the minds of men is enough to produce in distant and independent races
so much uniformity of development, that three or four headings will
serve to class the chief divisions of sacrificial substitution among
mankind.

To give part for the whole is a proceeding so closely conformed to
ordinary tribute by subject to lord, that in great measure it comes
directly under the gift-theory, and as such has already had its examples
here. It is only when the part given to the gods is of contemptible
value in proportion to the whole, that full sacrifice passes gradually
into substitution. This is the case when in Madagascar the head of the
sacrificed beast is set up on a pole, and the blood and fat are rubbed
on the stones of the altar, but the sacrificers and their friends and
the officiating priest devour the whole carcase;[952] when rich Guinea
negroes sacrifice a sheep or goat to the fetish, and feast on it with
their friends, only leaving for the deity himself part of the
entrails;[953] when Tunguz, sacrificing cattle, would give a bit of
liver and fat and perhaps hang up the hide in the woods as the god’s
share, or Mongols would set the heart of the beast before the idol till
next day.[954] Thus the most ancient whole burnt-offering of the Greeks
dwindled to burning for the gods only the bones and fat of the
slaughtered ox, while the worshippers feasted themselves on the meat, an
economic rite which takes mythic shape in the legend of the sly
Prometheus giving Zeus the choice of the two parts of the sacrificed ox
he had divided for gods and mortals, on the one side bones covered
seemly with white fat, on the other the joints hidden under repulsive
hide and entrails.[955] With a different motive, not that of parsimony,
but of keeping up in survival an ancient custom, the Zarathustrian
religion performed by substitution the old Aryan sacrifice by fire. The
Vedic sacrifice Agnishtoma required that animals should be slain, and
their flesh partly committed to the gods by fire, partly eaten by
sacrificers and priests. The Parsi ceremony Izeshne, formal successor of
this bloody rite, requires no animal to be killed, but it suffices to
place the hair of an ox in a vessel, and show it to the fire.[956]

The offering of a part of the worshipper’s own body is a most usual act,
whether its intention is simply that of gift or tribute, or whether it
is considered as a pars pro toto representing the whole man, either in
danger and requiring to be ransomed, or destined to actual sacrifice for
another and requiring to be redeemed. How a finger-joint may thus
represent a whole body, is perfectly shown in the funeral sacrifices of
the Nicobar islanders; they bury the dead man’s property with him, and
his wife has a finger-joint cut off (obviously a substitute for
herself), and if she refuses even this, a deep notch is cut in a pillar
of the house.[957] We are now concerned, however, with the
finger-offering, not as a sacrifice to the dead, but as addressed to
other deities. This idea is apparently worked out in the Tongan custom
of tutu-nima, the chopping off a portion of the little finger with a
hatchet or sharp stone as a sacrifice to the gods, for the recovery of a
sick relation of higher rank; Mariner saw children of five years old
quarrelling for the honour of having it done to them.[958] In the Mandan
ceremonies of initiation into manhood, when the youth at last hung
senseless and (as they called it) lifeless by the cords made fast to
splints through his flesh, he was let down, and coming to himself
crawled on hands and feet round the medicine-lodge to where an old
Indian sat with hatchet in his hand and a buffalo skull before him; then
the youth, holding up the little finger of his left hand to the Great
Spirit, offered it as a sacrifice, and it was chopped off, and sometimes
the fore-finger afterwards, upon the skull.[959] In India, probably as a
Dravidian rather than Aryan rite, the practice with full meaning comes
into view; as Siva cut off his finger to appease the wrath of Kali, so
in the southern provinces mothers will cut off their own fingers as
sacrifices lest they lose their children, and one hears of a golden
finger being allowed instead, the substitute of a substitute.[960] The
New Zealanders hang locks of hair on branches of trees in the
burying-ground, a recognised place for offerings.[961] That hair may be
a substitute for its owner is well shown in Malabar, where we read of
the demon being expelled from the possessed patient and flogged by the
exorcist to a tree; there the sick man’s hair is nailed fast, cut away,
and left for a propitiation to the demon.[962] Thus there is some ground
for interpreting the consecration of the boy’s cut hair in Europe as a
representative sacrifice.[963] As for the formal shedding of blood, it
may represent fatal bloodshed, as when the Jagas or priests in Quilombo
only marked with spears the children brought in, instead of running them
through;[964] or when in Greece a few drops of human blood had come to
stand instead of the earlier and more barbaric human sacrifice;[965] or
when in our own time and under our own rule a Vishnuite who has
inadvertently killed a monkey, a garuda, or a cobra, may expiate his
offence by a mock sacrifice, in which a human victim is wounded in the
thigh, pretends to die, and goes through the farce of resuscitation, his
drawn blood serving as substitute for his life.[966] One of the most
noteworthy cases of the survival of such formal bloodshed within modern
memory in Europe must be classed as not Aryan but Turanian, belonging as
it does to the folklore of Esthonia. The sacrificer had to draw drops of
blood from his forefinger, and therewith to pray this prayer, which was
taken down verbatim from one who remembered it:—‘I name thee with my
blood and betroth thee with my blood, and point thee out my buildings to
be blessed, stables and cattle-pens and hen-roosts; let them be blessed
through my blood and thy might!’ ‘Be my joy, thou Almighty, upholder of
my forefathers, my protector and guardian of my life! I beseech thee by
strength of flesh and blood; receive the food that I bring thee to thy
sustenance and the joy of my body; keep me as thy good child, and I will
thank and praise thee. By the help of the Almighty, my own God, hearken
to me! What through negligence I have done imperfectly toward thee, do
thou forget! But keep it truly in remembrance, that I have honestly paid
my gifts to my parents’ honour and joy and requital. Moreover falling
down I thrice kiss the earth. Be with me quick in doing, and peace be
with thee hitherto!’[967] These various rites of finger-cutting,
hair-cutting, and blood-letting, have required mention here from the
special point of view of their connexion with sacrifice. They belong to
an extensive series of practices, due to various and often obscure
motives, which come under the general heading of ceremonial mutilations.

When a life is given for a life, it is still possible to offer a life
less valued than the life in danger. When in Peru the Inca or some great
lord fell sick, he would offer to the deity one of his sons, imploring
him to take this victim in his stead.[968] The Greeks found it
sufficient to offer to the gods criminals or captives;[969] and the like
was the practice of the heathen tribes of northern Europe, to whom
indeed Christian dealers were accused of selling slaves for sacrificial
purposes.[970] Among such accounts, the typical story belongs to Punic
history. The Carthaginians, overcome and hard pressed in the war with
Agathokles, set down the defeat to divine wrath. Now Kronos had in
former times received his sacrifice of the chosen of their sons, but of
late they had put him off with children bought and nourished for the
purpose. In fact they had obeyed the sacrificer’s natural tendency to
substitution, but now in time of misfortune the reaction set in. To
balance the account and condone the parsimonious fraud, a monstrous
sacrifice was celebrated. Two hundred children, of the noblest of the
land, were brought to the idol. ‘For there was among them a brazen
statue of Kronos, holding out his hands sloping downward, so that the
child placed on them rolled off and fell into a certain chasm full of
fire.’[971] The Phœnician god here called Kronos is commonly though not
certainly identified with Moloch. Next, it will help us to realize how
the sacrifice of an animal may atone for a human life, if we notice in
South Africa how a Zulu will redeem a lost child from the finder by a
bullock, or a Kimbunda will expiate the blood of a slave by the offering
of an ox, whose blood will wash away the other.[972] For instances of
the animal substituted for man in sacrifice the following may serve.
Among the Khonds of Orissa, when Colonel Macpherson was engaged in
putting down the sacrifice of human victims by the sect of the
Earth-goddess, they at once began to discuss the plan of sacrificing
cattle by way of substitutes. Now there is some reason to think that
this same course of ceremonial change may account for the following
sacrificial practice in the other Khond sect. It appears that those who
worship the Light-god hold a festival in his honour, when they slaughter
a buffalo in commemoration of the time when, as they say, the
Earth-goddess was prevailing on men to offer human sacrifices to her,
but the Light-god sent a tribe-deity who crushed the bloody-minded
Earth-goddess under a mountain, and dragged a buffalo out of the jungle,
saying, ‘Liberate the man, and sacrifice the buffalo!’[973] This legend,
divested of its mythic garb, may really record a historical substitution
of animal for human sacrifice. In Ceylon, the exorcist will demand the
name of the demon possessing a demoniac, and the patient in frenzy
answers, giving the demon’s name, ‘I am So-and-so, I demand a human
sacrifice and will not go out without!’ The victim is promised, the
patient comes to from the fit, and a few weeks later the sacrifice is
made, but instead of a man they offer a fowl.[974] Classic examples of
substitution of this sort may be found in the sacrifice of a doe for a
virgin to Artemis in Laodicæa, a goat for a boy to Dionysos at Potniæ.
There appears to be Semitic connexion here, as there clearly is in the
story of the Æolians of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth)
instead of a new-born child a new-born calf, shoeing it with buskins and
tending the mother-cow as if a human mother.[975]

One step more in the course of substitution leads the worshipper to make
his sacrifice by effigy. An instructive example of the way in which this
kind of substitution arises may be found in the rites of ancient Mexico.
At the yearly festival of the water-gods and mountain-gods, certain
actual sacrifices of human victims took place in the temples. At the
same time, in the houses of the people, there was celebrated an
unequivocal but harmless imitation of this bloody rite. They made paste
images, adored them, and in due pretence of sacrifice cut them open at
the breast, took out their hearts, cut off their heads, divided and
devoured their limbs.[976] In the classic religions of Greece and Rome,
the desire to keep up the consecrated rites of ages more barbaric, more
bloodthirsty, or more profuse, worked itself out in many a compromise of
this class, such as the brazen statues offered for human victims, the
cakes of dough or wax in the figure of the beasts for which they were
presented as symbolic substitutes.[977] Not for economy, but to avoid
taking life, Brahmanic sacrifice has been known to be brought down to
offering models of the victim-animals in meal and butter.[978] The
modern Chinese, whose satisfaction in this kind of make-believe is so
well shown by their despatching paper figures to serve as attendants for
the dead, work out in the same fanciful way the idea of the sacrificial
effigy, in propitiating the presiding deity of the year for the cure of
a sick man. The rude figure of a man is drawn on or cut out of a piece
of paper, pasted on a slip of bamboo, and stuck upright in a packet of
mock-money. With proper exorcism, this representative is carried out
into the street with the disease, the priest squirts water from his
mouth over patient, image, and mock-money, the two latter are burnt, and
the company eat up the little feast laid out for the year-deity.[979]
There is curious historical significance in the custom at the inundation
of the Nile at Cairo, of setting up a conical pillar of earth which the
flood washes away as it rises. This is called the arûseh or bride, and
appears to be a substitute introduced under humaner Moslem influence,
for the young virgin in gay apparel who in older time was thrown into
the river, a sacrifice to obtain a plentiful inundation.[980] Again, the
patient’s offering the model of his diseased limb is distinctly of the
nature of a sacrifice, whether it be propitiatory offering before cure,
or thank-offering after. On the one hand, the ex-voto models of arms and
ears dedicated in ancient Egyptian temples are thought to be grateful
memorials,[981] as seems to have been the case with metal models of
faces, breasts, hands, &c., in Bœotian temples.[982] On the other hand,
there are cases where the model and, as it were, substitute of the
diseased part is given to obtain a cure; thus in early Christian times
in Germany protest was made against the heathen custom of hanging up
carved wooden limbs to a helpful idol for relief,[983] and in modern
India the pilgrim coming for cure will deposit in the temple the image
of his diseased limb, in gold or silver or copper according to his
means.[984]

If now we look for the sacrificial idea within the range of modern
Christendom, we shall find it in two ways not obscurely manifest. It
survives in traditional folklore, and it holds a place in established
religion. One of its most remarkable survivals may be seen in Bulgaria,
where sacrifice of live victims is to this day one of the accepted rites
of the land. They sacrifice a lamb on St. George’s day, telling to
account for the custom a legend which combines the episodes of the
offering of Isaac and the miracle of the Three Children. On the feast of
the Panagia (Virgin Mary) sacrifices of lambs, kids, honey, wine, &c.,
are offered in order that the children of the house may enjoy good
health throughout the year. A little child divines by touching one of
three saints’ candles to which the offering is to be dedicated; when the
choice is thus made, the bystanders each drink a cup of wine, saying
‘Saint So-and-So, to thee is the offering.’ Then they cut the throat of
the lamb, or smother the bees, and in the evening the whole village
assembles to eat the various sacrifices, and the men end the ceremony
with the usual drunken bout.[985] Within the borders of Russia, many and
various sacrifices are still offered; such is the horse with head
smeared with honey and mane decked with ribbons, cast into the river
with two millstones to its neck to appease the water-spirit, the
Vodyany, at his spiteful flood-time in early spring; and such is the
portion of supper left out for the house-demon, the domovoy, who if not
thus fed is apt to turn spirit-rapper, and knock the tables and benches
about at night.[986] In many another district of Europe, the tenacious
memory of the tiller of the soil has kept up in wondrous perfection
heirlooms from præ-Christian faiths. In Franconia, people will pour on
the ground a libation before drinking; entering a forest they will put
offerings of bread and fruit on a stone, to avert the attacks of the
demon of the woods, the ‘bilberry-man;’ the bakers will throw white
rolls into the oven flue for luck, and say, ‘Here, devil, they are
thine!’ The Carinthian peasant will fodder the wind by setting up a dish
of food in a tree before his house, and the fire by casting in lard and
dripping, in order that gale and conflagration may not hurt him. At
least up to the end of the 18th century this most direct elemental
sacrifice might be seen in Germany at the midsummer festival in the most
perfect form; some of the porridge from the table was thrown into the
fire, and some into running water, some was buried in the earth, and
some smeared on leaves and put on the chimney-top for the winds.[987]
Relics of such ancient sacrifice may be found in Scandinavia to this
day; to give but one example, the old country altars, rough earth-fast
stones with cup-like hollows, are still visited by mothers whose
children have been smitten with sickness by the trolls, and who smear
lard into the hollows and leave rag-dolls as offerings.[988] France may
be represented by the country-women’s custom of beginning a meal by
throwing down a spoonful of milk or bouillon; and by the record of the
custom of Andrieux in Dauphiny, where at the solstice the villagers went
out upon the bridge when the sun rose, and offered him an omelet.[989]
The custom of burning alive the finest calf, to save a murrain-struck
herd, had its last examples in Cornwall in the 19th century; the records
of bealtuinn sacrifices in Scotland continue in the Highlands within a
century ago; and Scotchmen still living remember the corner of a field
being left untilled for the Goodman’s Croft (i.e., the Devil’s), but the
principle of ‘cheating the devil’ was already in vogue, and the piece of
land allotted was but a worthless scrap.[990] It is a remnant of old
sacrificial rite, when the Swedes still bake at yule-tide a cake in the
shape of a boar, representing the boar sacrificed of old to Freyr, and
Oxford to this day commemorates the same ancestral ceremony, when the
boar’s head is carried in to the Christmas feast at Queen’s College,
with its appointed carol, ‘Caput apri defero, Reddens laudes
Domino.’[991] With a lingering recollection of the old libations, the
German toper’s saying still runs that heeltaps are a devil’s
offering.[992]

As for sacrificial rites most fully and officially existing in modern
Christendom, the presentation of ex-votos is one. The ecclesiastical
opposition to the continuance of these classic thank-offerings was but
temporary and partial. In the 5th century it seems to have been usual to
offer silver and gold eyes, feet, &c., to saints in acknowledgment of
cures they had effected. At the beginning of the 16th century, Polydore
Vergil, describing the classic custom, goes on to say: ‘In the same
manner do we now offer up in our churches sigillaria, that is, little
images of wax, and oscilla. As oft as any part of the body is hurt, as
the hand, foot, breast, we presently make a vow to God, and his saints,
to whom upon our recovery we make an offering of that hand or foot or
breast shaped in wax, which custom has so far obtained that this kind of
images have passed to the other animals. Wherefore so for an ox, so for
a horse, so for a sheep, we place puppets in the temples. In which thing
any modestly scrupulous person may perhaps say he knows not whether we
are rivalling the religion or the superstition of the ancients.’[993] In
modern Europe the custom prevails largely, but has perhaps somewhat
subsided into low levels of society, to judge by the general use of mock
silver and such-like worthless materials for the dedicated effigies. In
Christian as in præ-Christian temples, clouds of incense rise as of old.
Above all, though the ceremony of sacrifice did not form an original
part of Christian worship, its prominent place in the ritual was
obtained in early centuries. In that Christianity was recruited among
nations to whom the conception of sacrifice was among the deepest of
religious ideas, and the ceremony of sacrifice among the sincerest
efforts of worship, there arose an observance suited to supply the
vacant place. This result was obtained not by new introduction, but by
transmutation. The solemn eucharistic meal of the primitive Christians
in time assumed the name of the sacrifice of the mass, and was adapted
to a ceremonial in which an offering of food and drink is set out by a
priest on an altar in a temple, and consumed by priest and worshippers.
The natural conclusion of an ethnographic survey of sacrifice, is to
point to the controversy between Protestants and Catholics, for
centuries past one of the keenest which have divided the Christian
world, on this express question whether sacrifice is or is not a
Christian rite.

The next group of rites to be considered comprises Fasting and certain
other means of producing ecstasy and other morbid exaltation for
religious ends. In the foregoing researches on animism, it is frequently
observed or implied that the religious beliefs of the lower races are in
no small measure based on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded
as actual intercourse with spiritual beings. From the earliest phases of
culture upward, we find religion in close alliance with ecstatic
physical conditions. These are brought on by various means of
interference with the healthy action of body and mind, and it is
scarcely needful to remind the reader that, according to philosophic
theories antecedent to those of modern medicine, such morbid
disturbances are explained as symptoms of divine visitation, or at least
of superhuman spirituality. Among the strongest means of disturbing the
functions of the mind so as to produce ecstatic vision, is fasting,
accompanied as it so usually is with other privations, and with
prolonged solitary contemplation in the desert or the forest. Among the
ordinary vicissitudes of savage life, the wild hunter has many a time to
try involuntarily the effects of such a life for days and weeks
together, and under these circumstances he soon comes to see and talk
with phantoms which are to him visible personal spirits. The secret of
spiritual intercourse thus learnt, he has thenceforth but to reproduce
the cause in order to renew the effects.

The rite of fasting, and the utter objective reality ascribed to what we
call its morbid symptoms, are shown in striking details among the savage
tribes of North America. Among the Indians (the accounts mostly refer to
the Algonquin tribes), long and rigorous fasting is enjoined among boys
and girls from a very early age; to be able to fast long is an enviable
distinction, and they will abstain from food three to seven days, or
even more, taking only a little water. During these fasts, especial
attention is paid to dreams. Thus Tanner tells the story of a certain
Net-no-kwa, who at twelve years old fasted ten successive days, till in
a dream a man came and stood before her, and after speaking of many
things gave her two sticks, saying, ‘I give you these to walk upon, and
your hair I give it to be like snow;’ this assurance of extreme old age
was through life a support to her in times of danger and distress. At
manhood the Indian lad, retiring to a solitary place to fast and
meditate and pray, receives visionary impressions which stamp his
character for life, and especially he waits till there appears to him in
a dream some animal or thing which will be henceforth his ‘medicine,’
the fetish-representative of his manitu or protecting genius. For
instance, an aged warrior who had thus in his youth dreamed of a bat
coming to him, wore the skin of a bat on the crown of his head
henceforth, and was all his life invulnerable to his enemies as a bat on
the wing. In after life, an Indian who wants anything will fast till he
has a dream that his manitu will grant it him. While the men are away
hunting, the children are sometimes made to fast, that in their dreams
they may obtain omens of the chase. Hunters fasting before an expedition
are informed in dreams of the haunts of the game, and the means of
appeasing the wrath of the bad spirits; if the dreamer fancies he sees
an Indian who has been long dead, and hears him say, ‘If thou wilt
sacrifice to me thou shalt shoot deer at pleasure,’ he will prepare a
sacrifice, and burn the whole or part of a deer, in honour of the
apparition. Especially the ‘meda’ or ‘medicine-man’ receives in fasts
much of his qualification for his sacred office. The Ojibwa prophetess,
known in after life as Catherine Wabose, in telling the story of her
early years, relates how at the age of womanhood she fasted in her
secluded lodge till she went up into the heavens and saw the spirit at
the entrance, the Bright Blue Sky; this was the first supernatural
communication of her prophetic career. The account given to Schoolcraft
by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief deeply versed in the mystic lore and
picture-writing of his people, is as follows: ‘Chingwauk began by saying
that the ancient Indians made a great merit of fasting. They fasted
sometimes six or seven days, till both their bodies and minds became
free and light, which prepared them to dream. The object of the ancient
seers was to dream of the sun, as it was believed that such a dream
would enable them to see everything on the earth. And by fasting long
and thinking much on the subject, they generally succeeded. Fasts and
dreams were at first attempted at an early age. What a young man sees
and experiences during these dreams and fasts, is adopted by him as
truth, and it becomes a principle to regulate his future life. He relies
for success on these revelations. If he has been much favoured in his
fasts, and the people believe that he has the art of looking into
futurity, the path is open to the highest honours. The prophet, he
continued, begins to try his power in secret, with only one assistant,
whose testimony is necessary should he succeed. As he goes on, he puts
down the figures of his dreams and revelations, by symbols, on bark or
other material, till a whole winter is sometimes passed in pursuing the
subject, and he thus has a record of his principal revelations. If what
he predicts is verified, the assistant mentions it, and the record is
then appealed to as proof of his prophetic power and skill. Time
increases his fame. His kee-keé-wins, or records, are finally shown to
the old people, who meet together and consult upon them, for the whole
nation believe in these revelations. They in the end give their
approval, and declare that he is gifted as a prophet—is inspired with
wisdom, and is fit to lead the opinions of the nation. Such, he
concluded, was the ancient custom, and the celebrated old war-captains
rose to their power in this manner.’ It remains to say that among these
American tribes, the ‘jossakeed’ or soothsayer prepares himself by
fasting and the use of the sweating-bath for the state of convulsive
ecstasy in which he utters the dictates of his familiar spirits.[994]

The practice of fasting is described in other districts of the
uncultured world as carried on to produce similar ecstasy and
supernatural converse. The account by Roman Pane in the Life of Colon
describes the practice in Hayti of fasting to obtain knowledge of future
events from the spirits (cemi); and a century or two later, rigorous
fasting formed part of the apprentice’s preparation for the craft of
‘boyé’ or sorcerer, evoker, consulter, propitiator, and exorciser of
spirits.[995] The ‘keebèt’ or conjurers of the Abipones were believed by
the natives to be able to inflict disease and death, cure all disorders,
make known distant and future events, cause rain, hail, and tempests,
call up the shades of the dead, put on the form of tigers, handle
serpents unharmed, &c. These powers were imparted by diabolical
assistance, and Father Dobrizhoffer thus describes the manner of
obtaining them:—‘Those who aspire to the office of juggler are said to
sit upon an aged willow, overhanging some lake, and to abstain from food
for several days, till they begin to see into futurity. It always
appeared probable to me that these rogues, from long fasting, contract a
weakness of brain, a giddiness, and kind of delirium, which makes them
imagine that they are gifted with superior wisdom, and give themselves
out for magicians. They impose upon themselves first, and afterwards
upon others.’[996] The Malay, to make himself invulnerable, retires for
three days to solitude and scanty food in the jungle, and if on the
third day he dreams of a beautiful spirit descending to speak to him,
the charm is worked.[997] The Zulu doctor qualifies himself for
intercourse with the ‘amadhlozi,’ or ghosts, from whom he is to obtain
direction in his craft, by spare abstemious diet, want, suffering,
castigation, and solitary wandering, till fainting fits or coma bring
him into direct intercourse with the spirits. These native diviners fast
often, and are worn out by fastings, sometimes of several days’
duration, when they become partially or wholly ecstatic, and see
visions. So thoroughly is the connexion between fasting and spiritual
intercourse acknowledged by the Zulus, that it has become a saying among
them, ‘The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things.’ They have
no faith in a fat prophet.[998]

The effects thus looked for and attained by fasting among uncultured
tribes continue into the midst of advanced civilization. No wonder that,
in the Hindu tale, king Vasavadatta and his queen after a solemn penance
and a three days’ fast should see Siva in a dream and receive his
gracious tidings; no wonder that, in the actual experience of to-day,
the Hindu yogi should bring on by fasting a state in which he can with
bodily eyes behold the gods.[999] The Greek oracle-priests recognized
fasting as a means of bringing on prophetic dreams and visions; the
Pythia of Delphi herself fasted for inspiration; Galen remarks that
fasting dreams are the clearer.[1000] Through after ages, both cause and
consequence have held their places in Christendom. Thus Michael the
Archangel, with sword in right hand and scales in left, appears to a
certain priest of Siponte, who during a twelvemonth’s course of prayer
and fasting had been asking if he would have a temple built in his
honour:—

                          ‘precibus jejunia longis
            Addiderat, totoque orans se afflixerat anno.’[1001]

Reading the narratives of the wondrous sights seen by St. Theresa and
her companions, how the saint went in spirit into hell and saw the
darkness and fire and unutterable despair, how she had often by her side
her good patrons Peter and Paul, how when she was raised in rapture
above the grate at the nunnery where she was to take the sacrament,
Sister Mary Baptist and others being present, they saw an angel by her
with a golden fiery dart at the end whereof was a little fire, and he
thrust it through her heart and bowels and pulled them out with it,
leaving her wholly inflamed with a great love of God—the modern reader
naturally looks for details of physical condition and habit of life
among the sisterhood, and as naturally finds that St. Theresa was of
morbid constitution and subject to trances from her childhood, in after
life subduing her flesh by long watchings and religious discipline, and
keeping severe fast during eight months of the year.[1002] It is
needless to multiply such mediæval records of fasts which have produced
their natural effects in beatific vision—are they not written page after
page in the huge folios of the Bollandists? So long as fasting is
continued as a religious rite, so long its consequences in morbid mental
exaltation will continue the old and savage doctrine that morbid
phantasy is supernatural experience. Bread and meat would have robbed
the ascetic of many an angel’s visit; the opening of the refectory door
must many a time have closed the gates of heaven to his gaze.

It is indeed not the complete theory of fasting as a religious rite, but
only an important and perhaps original part of it, that here comes into
view. Abstinence from food has a principal place among acts of
self-mortification or penance, a province of religious ordinance into
which the present argument scarcely enters. Looking at the practice of
fasting here from an animistic point of view, as a process of bringing
on dreams and visions, it will be well to mention with it certain other
means by which ecstatic phenomena are habitually induced.

One of these means is the use of drugs. In the West India Islands at the
time of the discovery, Columbus describes the religious ceremony of
placing a platter containing ‘cohoba’ powder on the head of the idol,
the worshippers then snuffing up this powder through a cane with two
branches put to the nose. Pane further describes how the native priest,
when brought to a sick man, would put himself in communication with the
spirits by thus snuffing cohoba, ‘which makes him drunk, that he knows
not what he does, and so says many extraordinary things, wherein they
affirm that they are talking with the cemis, and that from them it is
told them that the infirmity came.’ On the Amazons, the Omaguas have
continued to modern times the use of narcotic plants, producing an
intoxication lasting twenty-four hours, during which they are subject to
extraordinary visions; from one of these plants they obtain the ‘curupa’
powder which they snuff into their nostrils with a Y-shaped reed.[1003]
Here the similar names and uses of the drug plainly show historical
connexion between the Omaguas and the Antilles islanders. The
Californian Indians would give children narcotic potions, in order to
gain from the ensuing visions information about their enemies; and thus
the Mundrucus of North Brazil, desiring to discover murderers, would
administer such drinks to seers, in whose dreams the criminals
appeared.[1004] The Darien Indians used the seeds of the Datura
sanguinea to bring on in children prophetic delirium, in which they
revealed hidden treasure. In Peru the priests who talked with the
‘huaca’ or fetishes used to throw themselves into an ecstatic condition
by a narcotic drink called ‘tonca,’ made from the same plant, whence its
name of ‘huacacacha’ or fetish-herb.[1005] The Mexican priests also
appear to have used an ointment or drink made with seeds of
‘ololiuhqui,’ which produced delirium and visions.[1006] In both
Americas tobacco served for such purposes. It must be noticed that
smoking is more or less practised among native races to produce full
intoxication, the smoke being swallowed for the purpose. By smoking
tobacco, the sorcerers of Brazilian tribes raised themselves to ecstasy
in their convulsive orgies, and saw spirits; no wonder tobacco came to
be called the ‘holy herb.’[1007] So North American Indians held
intoxication by tobacco to be supernatural ecstasy, and the dreams of
men in this state to be inspired.[1008] This idea may explain a
remarkable proceeding of the Delaware Indians. At their festival in
honour of the Fire-god with his twelve attendant manitus, inside the
house of sacrifice a small oven-hut was set up, consisting of twelve
poles tied together at the top and covered with blankets, high enough
for a man to stand nearly upright within it. After the feast this oven
was heated with twelve red-hot stones, and twelve men crept inside. An
old man threw twelve pipefulls of tobacco on these stones, and when the
patients had borne to the utmost the heat and suffocating smoke, they
were taken out, generally falling in a swoon.[1009] This practice, which
was carried on in the last century, is remarkable for its coincidence
with the Scythian mode of purification after a funeral, as described by
Herodotus. He relates that they make their hut with three stakes sloping
together at the top and covered in with wooden felts; then they cast
red-hot stones into a trough placed within and throw hemp-seed on them,
which sends forth fumes such as no Greek vapour-bath could exceed, and
the Scyths in their sweating-hut roar with delight.[1010]

Not to dwell on the ancient Aryan deification of an intoxicating drink,
the original of the divine Soma of the Hindus and the divine Haoma of
the Parsis, nor on the drunken orgies of the worship of Dionysos in
ancient Greece, we find more exact Old World analogues of the ecstatic
medicaments used in the lower culture. Such are the decoctions of
thalassægle which Pliny speaks of as drunk to produce delirium and
visions; the drugs mentioned by Hesychius, whereby Hekate was evoked;
the mediæval witch-ointments which brought visionary beings into the
presence of the patient, transported him to the witches’ sabbath,
enabled him to turn into a beast.[1011] The survival of such practices
is most thorough among the Persian dervishes of our own day. These
mystics are not only opium-eaters, like so large a proportion of their
countrymen; they are hashish-smokers, and the effect of this drug is to
bring them into a state of exaltation passing into utter hallucination.
To a patient in this condition, says Dr. Polak, a little stone in the
road will seem a great block that he must stride over; a gutter becomes
a wide stream to his eyes, and he calls for a boat to ferry him across;
men’s voices sound like thunder in his ears; he fancies he has wings and
can rise from the ground. These ecstatic effects, in which miracle is
matter of hourly experience, are considered in Persia as high religious
developments; the visionaries and their rites are looked on as holy, and
they make converts.[1012]

Many details of the production of ecstasy and swoon by bodily exercises,
chanting and screaming, &c., have been incidentally given in describing
the doctrine of demoniacal possession. I will only further cite a few
typical cases to show that the practice of bringing on swoons or fits by
religious exercises, in reality or pretence, is one belonging originally
to savagery, whence it has been continued into higher grades of
civilization. We may judge of the mental and bodily condition of the
priest or sorcerer in Guyana, by his preparation for his sacred office.
This consisted in the first place in fasting and flagellation of extreme
severity; at the end of his fast he had to dance till he fell senseless,
and was revived by a potion of tobacco-juice causing violent nausea and
vomiting of blood; day after day this treatment was continued till the
candidate, brought into or confirmed in the condition of a
‘convulsionary,’ was ready to pass from patient into doctor.[1013]
Again, at the Winnebago medicine-feast, members of the fraternity
assemble in a long arched booth, and with them the candidates for
initiation, whose preparation is a three days’ fast, with severe
sweating and steaming with herbs, under the direction of the old
medicine-men. The initiation is performed in the assembly by a number of
medicine-men. These advance in line, as many abreast as there are
candidates; holding their medicine-bags before them with both hands,
they dance forward slowly at first, uttering low guttural sounds as they
approach the candidates, their step and voice increasing in energy,
until with a violent ‘Ough!’ they thrust their medicine-bags at their
breasts. Instantly, as if struck with an electric shock, the candidates
fall prostrate on their faces, their limbs extended, their muscles rigid
and quivering. Blankets are now thrown over them, and they are suffered
to lie thus a few moments; as soon as they show signs of recovering from
the shock, they are assisted to their feet and led forward.
Medicine-bags are then put in their hands, and medicine-stones in their
mouths; they are now medicine men or women, as the case may be, in full
communion and fellowship; and they now go round the bower in company
with the old members, knocking others down promiscuously by thrusting
their medicine-bags at them. A feast and dance to the music of drum and
rattle carry on the festival.[1014] Another instance may be taken from
among the Alfurus of Celebes, inviting Empong Lembej to descend into
their midst. The priests chant, the chief priest with twitching and
trembling limbs turns his eyes towards heaven; Lembej descends into him,
and with horrible gestures he springs upon a board, beats about with a
bundle of leaves, leaps and dances, chanting legends of an ancient
deity. After some hours another priest relieves him, and sings of
another deity. So it goes on day and night till the fifth day, and then
the chief priest’s tongue is cut, he falls into a swoon like death, and
they cover him up. They fumigate with benzoin the piece taken from his
tongue, and swing a censer over his body, calling back his soul; he
revives and dances about, lively but speechless, till they give him back
the rest of his tongue, and with it his power of speech.[1015] Thus, in
the religion of uncultured races, the phenomenon of being ‘struck’ holds
so recognised a position that impostors will even counterfeit it. In its
morbid nature, its genuine cases at least plainly correspond with the
fits which history records among the convulsionnaires of St. Medard and
the enthusiasts of the Cevennes. Nor need we go even a generation back
to see symptoms of the same type accepted as signs of grace among
ourselves. Medical descriptions of the scenes brought on by fanatical
preachers at ‘revivals’ in England, Ireland, and America, are full of
interest to students of the history of religious rites. I will but quote
a single case. ‘A young woman is described as lying extended at full
length; her eyes closed, her hands clasped and elevated, and her body
curved in a spasm so violent that it appeared to rest arch-like upon her
heels and the back portion of her head. In that position she lay without
speech or motion for several minutes. Suddenly she uttered a terrific
scream, and tore handfuls of hair from her uncovered head. Extending her
open hands in a repelling attitude of the most appalling terror, she
exclaimed, “Oh, that fearful pit!” During this paroxysm three strong men
were hardly able to restrain her. She extended her arms on either side,
clutching spasmodically at the grass, shuddering with terror, and
shrinking from some fearful inward vision; but she ultimately fell back
exhausted, nerveless, and apparently insensible.’[1016] Such
descriptions carry us far back in the history of the human mind, showing
modern men still in ignorant sincerity producing the very fits and
swoons to which for untold ages savage tribes have given religious
import. These manifestations in modern Europe indeed form part of a
revival of religion, the religion of mental disease.

From this series of rites, practical with often harmful practicality, we
turn to a group of ceremonies whose characteristic is picturesque
symbolism. In discussing sun-myth and sun-worship, it has come into view
how deeply the association in men’s mind of the east with light and
warmth, life and happiness and glory, of the west with darkness and
chill, death and decay, has from remote ages rooted itself in religious
belief. It will illustrate and confirm this view to observe how the same
symbolism of east and west has taken shape in actual ceremony, giving
rise to a series of practices concerning the posture of the dead in
their graves and the living in their temples, practices which may be
classed under the general heading of Orientation.

While the setting sun has shown to men, from savage ages onward, the
western region of death, the rising sun has displayed a scene more
hopeful, an eastern home of deity. It seems to be the working out of the
solar analogy, on the one hand in death as sunset, on the other in new
life as sunrise, that has produced two contrasted rules of burial, which
agree in placing the dead in the sun’s path, the line of east and west.
Thus the natives of Australia have in some districts well-marked
thoughts of the western land of the dead, yet the custom of burying the
dead sitting with face to the east is also known among them.[1017] The
Samoans and Fijians, agreeing that the land of the departed lies in the
far west, bury the corpse lying with head east and feet west;[1018] the
body would but have to rise and walk straight onward to follow its soul
home. This idea is stated explicitly among the Winnebagos of North
America; they will sometimes bury a dead man sitting up to the breast in
a hole in the ground, looking westward; or graves are dug east and west,
and the bodies laid in them with the head eastward, with the motive
‘that they may look towards the happy land in the west.’[1019] With
these customs may be compared those of certain South American tribes.
The Yumanas bury their dead bent double with faces looking toward the
heavenly region of the sunrise, the home of their great good deity, who
they trust will take their souls with him to his dwelling;[1020] the
Guarayos bury the corpses with heads turned to the east, for it is in
the eastern sky that their god Tamoi, the Ancient of Heaven, has his
happy hunting-grounds where the dead will meet again.[1021] On the other
hand the Peruvian custom was to place the dead huddled up in a sitting
posture and with faces turned to the west.[1022] Barbaric Asia may be
represented by the modern Ainos of Yesso, burying the dead lying robed
in white with the head to the east, ‘because that is where the sun
rises;’ or by the Tunguz who bury with the head to the west; or by the
mediæval Tatars, raising a great mound over the dead, and setting up
thereon a statue with face turned toward the east, holding a
drinking-cup in his hand before his navel; or by the modern Siamese, who
do not sleep with their heads to the west, because it is in this
significant position that the dead are burned.[1023] The burial of the
dead among the ancient Greeks in the line of east and west, whether
according to Athenian custom of the head toward the sunset, or the
converse, is another link in the chain of custom.[1024] Thus it is not
to late and isolated fancy, but to the carrying on of ancient and
widespread solar ideas, that we trace the well-known legend that the
body of Christ was laid with the head toward the west, thus looking
eastward, and the Christian usage of digging graves east and west, which
prevailed through mediæval times and is not yet forgotten. The rule of
laying the head to the west, and its meaning that the dead shall rise
looking toward the east, are perfectly stated in the following passage
from an ecclesiastical treatise of the 16th century: ‘Debet autem quis
sic sepeliri, ut capite ad occidentem posito, pedes dirigat ad orientem,
in quo quasi ipsa positione orat: et innuit quod promptus est, ut de
occasu festinet ad ortum: de mundo ad seculum.’[1025]

Where among the lower races sun-worship begins to consolidate itself in
systematic ritual, the orientation of the worshipper and the temple
becomes usual and distinct. The sun-worshipping Comanches, preparing for
the war-path, will place their weapons betimes on the east side of the
lodge to receive the sun’s first rays; it is a remnant of old solar
rite, that the Christianized Pueblo Indians of New Mexico turn to the
sun at his rising.[1026] It has been already noticed how in old times
each morning at sunrise the Sun-chief of the Natchez of Louisiana stood
facing the east at the door of his house, and smoked toward the sun
first, before he turned to the other three quarters of the world.[1027]
The cave-temple of the sun-worshipping Apalaches of Florida had its
opening looking east, and within stood the priests on festival days at
dawn, waiting till the first rays entered to begin the appointed rites
of chant and incense and offering.[1028] In old Mexico, where
sun-worship was the central doctrine of the complex religion, men knelt
in prayer towards the east, and the doors of the sanctuaries looked
mostly westward.[1029] It was characteristic of the solar worship of
Peru that even the villages were habitually built on slopes toward the
east, that the people might see and greet the national deity at his
rising. In the temple of the sun at Cuzco, his splendid golden disc on
the western wall looked out through the eastern door, so that as he rose
his first beams fell upon it, reflected thence to light up the
sanctuary.[1030]

In Asia, the ancient Aryan religion of the sun manifests itself not less
plainly in rites of orientation. They have their place in the weary
ceremonial routine which the Brahman must daily accomplish. When he has
performed the dawn ablution, and meditated on the effulgent sun-light
which is Brahma, the supreme soul, he proceeds to worship the sun,
standing on one foot and resting the other against his ankle or heel,
looking toward the east, and holding his hands open before him in a
hollow form. At noon, when he has again adored the sun, it is sitting
with his face to the east that he must read his daily portion of the
Veda; it is looking toward the east that his offering of barley and
water must be first presented to the gods, before he turns to north and
south; it is with first and principal direction to the east that the
consecration of the fire and the sacrificial implements, a ceremony
which is the groundwork of all his religious acts, has to be
performed.[1031] The significance of such reverence paid by adorers of
the sun to the glorious eastern region of his rising, may be heightened
to us by setting beside it a ceremony of a darker faith, displaying the
awe-struck horror of the western home of death. The antithesis to the
eastward consecration by the orthodox Brahmans is the westward
consecration by the Thugs, worshippers of Kali the death-goddess. In
honour of Kali their victims were murdered, and to her the sacred
pickaxe was consecrated, wherewith the graves of the slain were dug. At
the time of the suppression of Thuggee, Englishmen had the consecration
of the pickaxe performed in make-believe in their presence by those who
well knew the dark ritual. On the dreadful implement no shadow of any
living thing must fall, its consecrator sits facing the west to perform
the fourfold washing and the sevenfold passing through the fire, and
then it being proved duly consecrated by the omen of the coco-nut
divided at a single cut, it is placed on the ground, and the bystanders
worship it, turning to the west.[1032]

These two contrasted rites of east and west established themselves and
still remain established in modern European religion. In judging of the
course of history that has brought about this state of things, it
scarcely seems that Jewish influence was effective. The Jewish temple
had the entrance in the east, and the sanctuary in the west. Sun-worship
was an abomination to the Jews, and the orientation especially belonging
to it appears as utterly opposed to Jewish usage, in Ezekiel’s
horror-stricken vision: ‘and, behold, at the door of the temple of
Jehovah, between the porch and the altar, about five-and-twenty men,
with their backs toward the temple of Jehovah, and their faces toward
the east, and they worshipped the sun toward the east.’[1033] Nor is
there reason to suppose that in later ages such orientation gained
ground in Jewish ceremony. The solar rites of other nations whose ideas
were prominent in the early development of Christianity, are sufficient
to account for the rise of Christian orientation. On the one hand there
was the Asiatic sun-worship, perhaps specially related to the veneration
of the rising sun in old Persian religion, and which has left relics in
the east of the Turkish empire into modern years; Christian sects
praying toward the sun, and Yezidis turning to the east as their kibleh
and burying their dead looking thither.[1034] On the other hand,
orientation was recognized in classic Greek religion, not indeed in
slavish obedience to a uniform law, but as a principle to be worked out
in converse ways. Thus it was an Athenian practice for the temple to
have its entrance east, looking out through which the divine image stood
to behold the rising sun. This rule it is that Lucian refers to, when he
talks of the delight of gazing toward the loveliest and most longed-for
of the day, of welcoming the sun as he peeps forth, of taking one’s fill
of light through the wide-open doors, even as the ancients built their
temples looking forth. Nor was the contrary rule as stated by Vitruvius
less plain in meaning; the sacred houses of the immortal gods shall be
so arranged, that if no reason prevents and choice is free, the temple
and the statue erected in the cell shall look toward the west, so that
they who approach the altar to sacrifice and vow and pray may look at
once toward the statue and the eastern sky, the divine figures thus
seeming to arise and look upon them. Altars of the gods were to stand
toward the east.[1035]

Unknown in primitive Christianity, the ceremony of orientation was
developed within its first four centuries. It became an accepted custom
to turn in prayer toward the east, the mystic region of the Light of the
World, the Sun of Righteousness. Augustine says, ‘When we stand at
prayer, we turn to the east, where the heaven arises, not as though God
were only there, and had forsaken all other parts of the world, but to
admonish our mind to turn to a more excellent nature, that is, to the
Lord.’ No wonder that the early Christians were thought to practise in
substance the rite of sun-worship which they practised in form. Thus
Tertullian writes: ‘Others indeed with greater truth and verisimilitude
believe the sun to be our God ... the suspicion arising from its being
known that we pray toward the region of the east.’ Though some of the
most ancient and honoured churches of Christendom stand to show that
orientation was no original law of ecclesiastical architecture, yet it
became dominant in early centuries. That the author of the ‘Apostolical
Constitutions’ should be able to give directions for building churches
toward the east (ὁ οἶκος ἔστω ἐπιμηκής, κατ’ ἀνατολὰς τετραμμένος), just
as Vitruvius had laid down the rule as to the temples of the gods, is
only a part of that assimilation of the church to the temple which took
effect so largely in the scheme of worship. Of all Christian ceremony,
however, it was in the rite of baptism that orientation took its fullest
and most picturesque form. The catechumen was placed with face toward
the west, and then commanded to renounce Satan with gestures of
abhorrence, stretching out his hands against him, or smiting them
together, and blowing or spitting against him thrice. Cyril of
Jerusalem, in his ‘Mystagogic Catechism,’ thus depicts the scene: ‘Ye
first came into the ante-room of the baptistery, and standing toward the
west (πρὸς τὰς δυσμάς) ye were commanded to put away Satan, stretching
out your hands as though he were present.... And why did ye stand toward
the west? It was needful, for sunset is the type of darkness, and he is
darkness and has his strength in darkness; therefore symbolically
looking toward the west ye renounce that dark and gloomy ruler.’ Then
turning round to the east, the catechumen took up his allegiance to his
new master, Christ. The ceremony and its significance are clearly set
forth by Jerome, thus: ‘In the mysteries [meaning baptism] we first
renounce him who is in the west, and dies to us with our sins; and so,
turning to the east, we make a covenant with the Sun of righteousness,
promising to be his servants.’[1036] This perfect double rite of east
and west, retained in the baptismal ceremony of the Greek Church, may be
seen in Russia to this day. The orientation of churches and the practice
of turning to the east as an act of worship, are common to both Greek
and Latin ritual. In our own country they declined from the Reformation,
till at the beginning of the 19th century they seemed falling out of
use; since then, however, they have been restored to a certain
prominence by the revived mediævalism of our own day. To the student of
history, it is a striking example of the connexion of thought and
ceremony through the religions of the lower and higher culture, to see
surviving in our midst, with meaning dwindled into symbolism, this
ancient solar rite. The influence of the divine Sun upon his rude and
ancient worshippers still subsists before our eyes as a mechanical
force, acting diamagnetically to adjust the axis of the church and turn
the body of the worshipper.

The last group of rites whose course through religious history is to be
outlined here, takes in the varied dramatic acts of ceremonial
purification of Lustration. With all the obscurity and intricacy due to
age-long modification, the primitive thought which underlies these
ceremonies is still open to view. It is the transition from practical to
symbolic cleansing, from removal of bodily impurity to deliverance from
invisible, spiritual, and at last moral evil. Our language follows this
ideal movement to its utmost stretch, where such words as cleansing and
purification have passed from their first material meaning, to signify
removal of ceremonial contamination, legal guilt, and moral sin. What we
thus express in metaphor, the men of the lower culture began early to
act in ceremony, purifying persons and objects by various prescribed
rites, especially by dipping them in and sprinkling them with water, or
fumigating them with and passing them through fire. It is the plainest
proof of the original practicality of proceedings now passed into
formalism, to point out how far the ceremonial lustrations still keep
their connexion with times of life when real purification is necessary,
how far they still consist in formal cleansing of the new-born child and
the mother, of the man-slayer who has shed blood, or the mourner who has
touched a corpse. In studying the distribution of the forms of
lustration among the races of the world, while allowing for the large
effect of their transmission from religion to religion, and from nation
to nation, we may judge that their diversity of detail and purpose
scarcely favours a theory of their being all historically derived from
one or even several special religions of the ancient world. They seem
more largely to exemplify independent working out, in different
directions, of an idea common to mankind at large. This view may be
justified by surveying lustration through a series of typical instances,
which show its appearance and character in savage and barbaric culture,
as being an act belonging to certain well-marked events of human life.

The purification of the new-born child appears among the lower races in
various forms, but perhaps in some particular instances borrowed from
the higher. It should be noticed that though the naming of the child is
often associated with its ceremonial cleansing, there is no real
connexion between the two rites, beyond their coming due at the same
early time of life. To those who look for the matter-of-fact origin of
such ceremonies, one of the most suggestive of the accounts available is
a simple mention of the two necessary acts of washing and name-giving,
as done together in mere practical purpose, but not as yet passed into
formal ceremony—the Kichtak Islanders, it is remarked, at birth wash the
child, and give it a name.[1037] Among the Yumanas of Brazil, as soon as
the child can sit up, it is sprinkled with a decoction of certain herbs,
and receives a name which has belonged to an ancestor.[1038] Among some
Jakun tribes of the Malay Peninsula, as soon as the child is born it is
carried to the nearest stream and washed; it is then brought back to the
house, the fire is kindled, and fragrant wood thrown on, over which it
is passed several times.[1039] The New Zealanders’ infant baptism is no
new practice, and is considered by them an old traditional rite, but
nothing very similar is observed among other branches of the Polynesian
race. Whether independently invented or not, it was thoroughly worked
into the native religious scheme. The baptism was performed on the
eighth day or earlier, at the side of a stream or elsewhere, by a native
priest who sprinkled water on the child with a branch or twig; sometimes
the child was immersed. With this lustration it received its name, the
priest repeating a list of ancestral names till the child chose one for
itself by sneezing at it. The ceremony was of the nature of a
dedication, and was accompanied by rhythmical formulas of exhortation.
The future warrior was bidden to flame with anger, to leap nimbly and
ward off the spears, to be angry and bold and industrious, to work
before the dew is off the ground; the future housewife was bidden to get
food and go for firewood and weave garments with panting of breath. In
after years, a second sacred sprinkling was performed to admit a lad
into the rank of warriors. It has to be noticed with reference to the
reason of this ceremonial washing, that a new-born child is in the
highest degree tapu, and may only be touched by a few special persons
till the restriction is removed.[1040] In Madagascar, a fire is kept up
in the room for several days, then the child in its best clothes is in
due form carried out of the house and back to its mother, both times
being carefully lifted over the fire, which is made near the door.[1041]
In Africa, some of the most noticeable ceremonies of the class are
these. The people of Sarac wash the child three days after birth with
holy water.[1042] When a Mandingo child was about a week old its hair
was cut, and the priest, invoking blessings, took it in his arms,
whispered in its ear, spat thrice in its face, and pronounced its name
aloud before the assembled company.[1043] In Guinea, when a child is
born, the event is publicly proclaimed, the new-born babe is brought
into the streets, and the headman of the town or family sprinkles it
with water from a basin, giving it a name and invoking blessings of
health and wealth upon it; other friends follow the example, till the
child is thoroughly drenched.[1044] In these various examples of
lustration of infants, the purifications by fire have especial
importance ethnologically, not because this proceeding is more natural
to the savage mind than that of bathing or sprinkling with water, but
because this latter ceremony may sometimes have been imitated from
Christian baptism. The fact of savage and barbaric lustration of infants
being in several cases associated with the belief in re-birth of
ancestral souls seems to mark the rite as belonging to remote
pre-Christian ages.[1045]

The purification of women at childbirth, &c., is ceremonially practised
by the lower races under circumstances which do not suggest adoption
from more civilized nations. The seclusion and lustration among North
American Indian tribes have been compared with those of the Levitical
law, but the resemblance is not remarkably close, and belongs rather to
a stage of civilization than to the ordinance of a particular nation. It
is a good case of independent development in such customs, that the rite
of putting out the fires and kindling ‘new fire’ on the woman’s return
is common to the Iroquois and Sioux in North America,[1046] and the
Basutos in South Africa. These latter have a well-marked rite of
lustration by sprinkling, performed on girls at womanhood.[1047] The
Hottentots considered mother and child unclean till they had been washed
and smeared after the uncleanly native fashion.[1048] Lustrations with
water were usual in West Africa.[1049] Tatar tribes in Mongolia used
bathing, while in Siberia the custom of leaping over a fire answered the
purpose of purification.[1050] The Mantras of the Malay Peninsula have
made the bathing of the mother after childbirth into a ceremonial
ordinance.[1051] It is so among the indigenes of India, where both in
northern and southern districts the naming of the child comes into
connexion with the purification of the mother, both ceremonies being
performed on the same day.[1052] Without extending further this list of
instances, it is sufficiently plain that we have before us the record of
a practical custom becoming consecrated by traditional habit, and making
its way into the range of religious ceremony.

Much the same may be said of the purification of savage and barbaric
races on occasion of contamination by bloodshed or funeral. In North
America, the Dacotas use the vapour-bath not only as a remedy, but also
for the removal of ceremonial uncleanness, such as is caused by killing
a person, or touching a dead body.[1053] So among the Navajos, the man
who has been deputed to carry a dead body to burial, holds himself
unclean until he has thoroughly washed himself in water prepared for the
purpose by certain ceremonies.[1054] In Madagascar, no one who has
attended a funeral may enter the palace courtyard till he has bathed,
and in all cases there must be an ablution of the mourner’s garments on
returning from the grave.[1055] Among the Basutos of South Africa,
warriors returning from battle must rid themselves of the blood they
have shed, or the shades of their victims would pursue them and disturb
their sleep. Therefore they go in procession in full armour to the
nearest stream to wash, and their weapons are washed also. It is usual
in this ceremony for a sorcerer higher up the stream to put in some
magical ingredient, such as he also uses in the preparation of the holy
water which is sprinkled over the people with a beast’s tail at the
frequent public purifications. These Basutos, moreover, use fumigation
with burning wood to purify growing corn, and cattle taken from the
enemy. Fire serves for purification in cases too trifling to require
sacrifice; thus when a mother sees her child walk over a grave, she
hastens to call it, makes it stand before her, and lights a small fire
at its feet.[1056] The Zulus, whose horror of a dead body will induce
them to cast out and leave in the woods their sick people, at least
strangers, purify themselves by an ablution after a funeral. It is to be
noticed that these ceremonial practices have come to mean something
distinct from mere cleanliness. Kaffirs who will purify themselves from
ceremonial uncleanness by washing, are not in the habit of washing
themselves or their vessels for ordinary purposes, and the dogs and the
cockroaches divide between them the duty of cleaning out the
milk-baskets.[1057] Mediæval Tatar tribes, some of whom had
conscientious scruples against bathing, have found passing through fire
or between two fires a sufficient purification, and the household stuff
of the dead was lustrated in this latter way.[1058]

In the organised nations of the semi-civilized and civilized world,
where religion shapes itself into elaborate and systematic schemes, the
practices of lustration familiar to the lower culture now become part of
stringent ceremonial systems. It seems to be at this stage of their
existence that they often take up in addition to their earlier
ceremonial significance an ethical meaning, absent or all but absent
from them at their first appearance above the religious horizon. This
will be made evident by glancing over the ordinances of lustration in
the great national religions of history. It will be well to notice first
the usages of two semi-civilized nations of America, which though they
have scarcely produced practical effect on civilization at large, give
valuable illustration of a transition period in culture, leaving apart
the obscure question of their special civilization having been
influenced in early or late times from the Old World.

In the religion of Peru, lustration is well-marked and characteristic.
On the day of birth, the water in which the child has been washed was
poured into a hole in the ground, charms being repeated by a wizard or
priest; an excellent instance of the ceremonial washing away of evil
influences. The naming of the child was also more or less generally
accompanied with ceremonial washing, as in districts where at two years
old it was weaned, baptized, had its hair ceremonially cut with a stone
knife, and received its child-name; Peruvian Indians still cut off a
lock of the child’s hair at its baptism. Moreover, the significance of
lustration as removing guilt is plainly recorded in ancient Peru; after
confession of guilt, an Inca bathed in a neighbouring river and repeated
this formula, ‘O thou River, receive the sins I have this day confessed
unto the Sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more
appear.’[1059] In old Mexico, the first act of ceremonial lustration
took place at birth. The nurse washed the infant in the name of the
water-goddess, to remove the impurity of its birth, to cleanse its heart
and give it a good and perfect life; then blowing on water in her right
hand she washed it again, warning it of forthcoming trials and miseries
and labours, and praying the invisible Deity to descend upon the water,
to cleanse the child from sin and foulness, and to deliver it from
misfortune. The second act took place some four days later, unless the
astrologers postponed it. At a festive gathering, amid fires kept alight
from the first ceremony, the nurse undressed the child sent by the gods
into this sad and doleful world, bade it receive the life-giving water,
and washed it, driving out evil from each limb and offering to the
deities appointed prayers for virtue and blessing. It was then that the
toy instruments of war or craft or household labour were placed in the
boy’s or girl’s hand (a custom singularly corresponding with one usual
in China), and the other children, instructed by their parents, gave the
newcomer its child-name, here again to be replaced by another at manhood
or womanhood. There is nothing unlikely in the statement that the child
was also passed four times through the fire, but the authority this is
given on is not sufficient. The religious character of ablution is well
shown in Mexico by its forming part of the daily service of the priests.
Aztec life ended as it had begun, with ceremonial lustration; it was one
of the funeral ceremonies to sprinkle the head of the corpse with the
lustral water of this life.[1060]

Among the nations of East Asia, and across the more civilized Turanian
districts of Central Asia, ceremonial lustration comes frequently into
notice; but it would often bring in difficult points of ethnography to
attempt a general judgment how far these may be native local rites, and
how far ceremonies adopted from foreign religious systems. As examples
may be mentioned in Japan the sprinkling and naming of the child at a
month old, and other lustrations connected with worship;[1061] in China
the religious ceremony at the first washing of the three days’ old
infant, the lifting of the bride over burning coals, the sprinkling of
holy-water over sacrifices and rooms and on the mourners after a
funeral;[1062] in Burma the purification of the mother by fire, and the
annual sprinkling-festival.[1063] Within the range of Buddhism in its
Lamaist form, we find such instances as the Tibetan and Mongol
lustration of the child a few days after birth, the lama blessing the
water and immersing the child thrice, and giving its name; the Buraet
consecration by threefold washing; the Tibetan ceremony where the
mourners returning from the funeral stand before the fire, wash their
hands with warm water over the hot coals, and fumigate themselves thrice
with proper formulas.[1064] With this infant baptism of Tibetans and
Mongols may be compared the rite of their ethnological kinsfolk in
Europe. The Lapps in their semi-Christianized state had a form of
baptism, in which a new name, that of the deceased ancestor who would
live again in the child, as the mother was spiritually informed in a
dream, was given with a threefold sprinkling and washing with warm water
where mystic alder-twigs were put. This ceremony, though called by the
Scandinavian name of ‘laugo’ or bath, was distinct from the Christian
baptism to which the Lapps also conformed.[1065] The natural
ethnographic explanation of these two baptismal ceremonies existing
together in Northern Europe, is that Christianity had brought in a new
rite, without displacing a previous native one.

Other Asiatic districts show lustration in more compact and
characteristic religious developments. The Brahman leads a life marked
by recurring ceremonial purification, from the time when his first
appearance in the world brings uncleanness on the household, requiring
ablution and clean garments to remove it, and thenceforth through his
years from youth to old age, where bathing is a main part of the long
minute ceremonial of daily worship, and further washings and aspersions
enter into more solemn religious acts, till at last the day comes when
his kinsfolk, on their way home from his funeral, cleanse themselves by
a final bath from their contamination by his remains. For the means of
some of his multifarious lustrations the Hindu has recourse to the
sacred cow, but his more frequent medium of removing uncleanness of body
and soul is water, the divine waters to which he prays, ‘Take away, O
Waters, whatsoever is wicked in me, what I have done by violence or
curse, and untruth!’[1066] The Parsi religion prescribes a system of
lustrations which well shows its common origin with that of Hinduism by
its similar use of cow’s urine and of water. Bathing or sprinkling with
water, or applications of ‘nirang’ washed off with water, form part of
the daily religious rites, as well as of such special ceremonies as the
naming of the new-born child, the putting on of the sacred cord, the
purification of the mother after childbirth, the purification of him who
has touched a corpse, when the unclean demon, driven by sprinkling of
the good water from the top of the head and from limb to limb, comes
forth at the left toe and departs like a fly to the evil region of the
north. It is, perhaps, the influence of this ancestral religion, even
more than the actual laws of Islam, that makes the modern Persian so
striking an example of the way in which ceremony may override reality.
It is rather in form than in fact that his cleanliness is next to
godliness. He carries the principle of removing legal uncleanness by
ablution so far, that a holy man will wash his eyes when they have been
polluted by the sight of an infidel. He will carry about a water-pot
with a long spout for his ablutions, yet he depopulates the land by his
neglect of the simplest sanitary rules, and he may be seen by the side
of the little tank where scores of people have been in before him,
obliged to clear with his hand a space in the foul scum on the water,
before he plunges in to obtain ceremonial purity.[1067]

Over against the Aryan rites of lustration in the religions of Asia, may
be set the well-known types in the religions of classic Europe. At the
Greek amphidromia, when the child was about a week old, the women who
had assisted at the birth washed their hands, and afterwards the child
was carried round the fire by the nurse, and received its name; the
Roman child received its prænomen with a lustration at about the same
age, and the custom is recorded of the nurse touching its lips and
forehead with spittle. To wash before an act of worship was a ceremony
handed down by Greek and Roman ritual through the classic ages: καθαραῖς
δὲ δρόσοις, ἀφυδρανάμενοι στχείετε ναούς—eo lavatum, ut sacrificem. The
holy-water mingled with salt, the holy-water vessel at the temple
entrance, the brush to sprinkle the worshippers, all belong to classic
antiquity. Romans, their flocks and herds and their fields, were
purified from disease and other ill by lustrations which show perfectly
the equivalent nature of water and fire as means of purification; the
passing of flocks and shepherds through fires, the sprinkling water with
laurel branches, the fumigating with fragrant boughs and herbs and
sulphur, formed part of the rustic rites of the Palilia. Bloodshed
demanded the lustral ceremony. Hektor fears to pour with unwashen hands
the libation of dark wine, nor may he pray bespattered with gore to
cloud-wrapped Zeus; Æneas may not touch the household gods till cleansed
from slaughter by the living stream. It was with far changed thought
that Ovid wrote his famous reproof of his too-easy countrymen, who
fancied that water could indeed wash off the crime of blood:—

               ‘Ah nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina cædis
                 Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua.’

Thus, too, the mourner must be cleansed by lustration from the
contaminating presence of death. At the door of the Greek house of
mourning was set the water-vessel, that those who had been within might
sprinkle themselves and be clean; while the mourners returning from a
Roman funeral, aspersed with water and stepping over fire, were by this
double process made pure.[1068]

The ordinances of purification in the Levitical law relate especially to
the removal of legal uncleanness connected with childbirth, death, and
other pollutions. Washing was prescribed for such purposes, and also
sprinkling with water of separation, water mingled with the ashes of the
red heifer. Ablution formed part of the consecration of priests, and
without it they might not serve at the altar nor enter the tabernacle.
In the later times of Jewish national history, perhaps through
intercourse with nations whose lustrations entered more into the daily
routine of life, ceremonial washings were multiplied. It seems also that
in this period must be dated the ceremony which in after ages has held
so great a place in the religion of the world, their rite of baptism of
proselytes.[1069] The Moslem lustrations are ablutions with water, or in
default with dust or sand, performed partially before prayer, and
totally on special days or to remove special uncleanness. They are
strictly religious acts, belonging in principle to prevalent usage of
Oriental religion; and their details, whether invented or adopted as
they stand in Islam, are not carried down from Judaism or
Christianity.[1070] The rites of lustration which have held and hold
their places within the pale of Christianity are in well-marked
historical connexion with Jewish and Gentile ritual. Purification by
fire has only appeared as an actual ceremony among some little-known
Christian sects, and in the European folklore custom of passing children
through or over fire, if indeed we can be sure that this rite is lustral
and not sacrificial.[1071] The usual medium of purification is water.
Holy-water is in full use through the Greek and Roman churches. It
blesses the worshipper as he enters the temple, it cures disease, it
averts sorcery from man and beast, it drives demons from the possessed,
it stops the spirit-writer’s pen, it drives the spirit-moved table it is
sprinkled upon to dash itself frantically against the wall; at least
these are among the powers attributed to it, and some of the most
striking of them have been lately vouched for by papal sanction. This
lustration with holy-water so exactly continues the ancient classic
rite, that its apologists are apt to explain the correspondence by
arguing that Satan stole it for his own wicked ends.[1072] Catholic
ritual follows ancient sacrificial usage in the priest’s ceremonial
washing of hands before mass. The priest’s touching with his spittle the
ears and nostrils of the infant or catechumen, saying, ‘Ephphatha,’ is
obviously connected with passages in the Gospels; its adoption as a
baptismal ceremony has been compared, perhaps justly, with the classical
lustration by spittle.[1073] Finally, it has but to be said that
ceremonial purification as a Christian act centres in baptism by water,
that symbol of initiation of the convert which history traces from the
Jewish rite to that of John the Baptist, and thence to the Christian
ordinance. Through later ages adult baptism carries on the Jewish
ceremony of the admission of the proselyte, while infant baptism
combines this with the lustration of the new-born infant. Passing
through a range of meaning such as separates the sacrament of the Roman
centurion from the sacrament of the Roman cardinal, becoming to some a
solemn symbol of new life and faith, to some an act in itself of
supernatural efficacy, the rite of baptism has remained almost
throughout the Christian world the outward sign of the Christian
profession.

In considering the present group of religious ceremonies, their
manifestations in the religions of the higher nations have been but
scantily outlined in comparison with their rudimentary forms in the
lower culture. Yet this reversal of the proportions due to practical
importance in no way invalidates, but rather aids, the ethnographic
lessons to be drawn by tracing their course in history. Through their
varied phases of survival, modification, and succession, they have each
in its own way brought to view the threads of continuity which connect
the faiths of the lower with the faiths of the higher world; they have
shown how hardly the civilized man can understand the religious rites
even of his own land without knowledge of the meaning, often the widely
unlike meaning, which they bore to men of distant ages and countries,
representatives of grades of culture far different from his.

Footnote 844:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 88; see p. 427.

Footnote 845:

  Ibid. p. 200; see p. 174. See also Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p.
  343. Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 235.

Footnote 846:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part iii. p. 237.

Footnote 847:

  M’Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 359.

Footnote 848:

  Tanner, ‘Narrative,’ p. 46.

Footnote 849:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 297.

Footnote 850:

  Heckewelder, ‘Ind. Völkerschaften,’ p. 354.

Footnote 851:

  ‘Narratives of Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham,
  pp. 31, 33. See also Brinton, p. 298.

Footnote 852:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 141, 174, 182. ‘Remarks on Zulu
  Lang.’ Pietermaritzburg, 1870, p. 22.

Footnote 853:

  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 169. Steinhauser, l.c. p. 129.

Footnote 854:

  Rowley, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa,’ p. 226.

Footnote 855:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 215.

Footnote 856:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 110, 128. See also Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p.
  182 (Santals).

Footnote 857:

  Plath, ‘Religion der Chinesen,’ part ii. p. 2; Doolittle, vol. ii. p.
  116.

Footnote 858:

  ‘Sama-Veda,’ i. 4, 2. Wuttke, ‘Gesch. des Heidenthums,’ part ii. p.
  342.

Footnote 859:

  Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. i. p. 128.

Footnote 860:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 51, 8, x. 105, 8. Muir, ‘Sanskrit Texts,’ part ii. ch.
  iii.

Footnote 861:

  Lane, ‘Modern Egyptians,’ vol. ii. p. 383.

Footnote 862:

  See Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. pp. 345, 556; vol. ii. pp.
  303, 319. Compare Fergusson, ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ pl. xlii.

Footnote 863:

  Xenoph. Memorabilia Socrat. i. 3, 2.

Footnote 864:

  Sahagun, ‘Retorica, &c., de la Gente Mexicana,’ lib. vi. c. 4, in
  Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. v.

Footnote 865:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ vii. 89, 3. Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 39.

Footnote 866:

  ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel; ‘Khorda-Avesta,’ Patet Qod.

Footnote 867:

  Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ v. 19. Ellis,
  ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i., p. 421.

Footnote 868:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. Fr.’ vol. i. p. 394. See also Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in
  ‘Pinkerton,’ vol. xiii. p. 41.

Footnote 869:

  Phillips in Astley’s ‘Voyages,’ vol. ii. p. 411; Lubbock, ‘Origin of
  Civilization,’ p. 216. Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p.
  500. Bastian in ‘Ztschr. für Ethnologie,’ 1869, p. 315.

Footnote 870:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 75. See also Tanner, ‘Narr.’ p.
  193, and above, p. 270.

Footnote 871:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 129.

Footnote 872:

  Billings, ‘Exp. to Northern Russia,’ p. 125. Chinese sacrifices buried
  for earth spirits, see ante, vol. i. p. 107; Plath, part ii. p. 50.

Footnote 873:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 182.

Footnote 874:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 67.

Footnote 875:

  Herod. vii. 35, 54. Liv. vii. 6. Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece,’ vol. x. p.
  589, see p. 715.

Footnote 876:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 367.

Footnote 877:

  Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. pp. 336, 358. Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i.
  p. 220.

Footnote 878:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 494; J. L. Wilson, ‘W.
  Afr.’ p. 218; Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 331.

Footnote 879:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p. 195, &c.

Footnote 880:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 69. J. G. Müller, p. 631.

Footnote 881:

  Ward, vol. ii. p. 194; ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 332.

Footnote 882:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 226.

Footnote 883:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 218.

Footnote 884:

  Manu, iii. 212. See also ‘Avesta,’ tr. by Spiegel, vol. ii. p. lxxvii.
  (sacrificial cakes eaten by priest).

Footnote 885:

  Ysbrants Ides, ‘Reize naar China,’ p. 38. Meiners, vol. i. p. 162.

Footnote 886:

  Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 46. J. G. Müller, p. 631.

Footnote 887:

  Bel and the Dragon.

Footnote 888:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 47.

Footnote 889:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ part ii. p. 210.

Footnote 890:

  Homer, Odyss. xi. xii.

Footnote 891:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 270.

Footnote 892:

  Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 41; see J. G. Müller,
  p. 143; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 207. Comp. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 89. See
  also Bollaert in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 96.

Footnote 893:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 145. See also St. John, ‘Far East,’
  vol. i. p. 160.

Footnote 894:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 147; Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 181;
  Forbes Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol. ii. p. 458.

Footnote 895:

  Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ letter xxi. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 531. See also
  Waitz, vol. ii. p. 192.

Footnote 896:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 96.

Footnote 897:

  Levit. i. &c.; Deuteron. xii. 23; Psalm xvi. 4.

Footnote 898:

  Waitz, vol. iii. p. 181. Hennepin, ‘Voyage,’ p. 302. Charlevoix,
  ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v. p. 311, vi. p. 178. Schoolcraft, ‘Ind.
  Tribes,’ part i. p. 49, part ii. p. 127. Catlin, vol. i. pp. 181, 229.
  Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 164. J. G. Müller, p. 58.

Footnote 899:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ pp. 418, 507. Lery, ‘Voy. en Brésil,’ p.
  268. See also Musters in ‘Journ. Anthrop. Inst.’ vol. i. p. 202
  (Patagonians).

Footnote 900:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ pp. 11, 141, 177. See also Casalis,
  ‘Basutos,’ p. 258.

Footnote 901:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 39. See also Piedrahita, part i.
  lib. i. c. 3 (Muyscas).

Footnote 902:

  Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen,’ part ii. p. 31. Doolittle,
  ‘Chinese.’

Footnote 903:

  Porphyr. de Abstinentia, ii. 5. Arnob. contra Gentes. vii. 26.
  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 14.

Footnote 904:

  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Egyptians,’ vol. v. pp. 315, 338. Plutarch, de Is.
  et Osir.

Footnote 905:

  Herodot. i. 183.

Footnote 906:

  Exod. xxx., xxxvii. Lev. x. 1, xvi. 12, &c.

Footnote 907:

  Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 41. Le Jeune in ‘Rel.
  des Jés.’ 1634, p. 16. Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p. 189.

Footnote 908:

  ‘Rites and Laws of Incas,’ p. 16, &c., 79; see ‘Ollanta, an ancient
  Ynca Drama,’ tr. by C. R. Markham, p. 81. Garcilaso de la Vega, lib.
  i. ii. vi.

Footnote 909:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. pp. 106, 114.

Footnote 910:

  Plath, part ii. p. 65.

Footnote 911:

  Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 191.

Footnote 912:

  ‘Rig-Veda,’ i. 1, 4.

Footnote 913:

  Homer, Il. i. 317.

Footnote 914:

  Porphyr. De Abstinentia, ii. 42; see 58.

Footnote 915:

  Stanley, ‘Jewish Church,’ 2d Ser. pp. 410, 424. See Kalisch on
  Leviticus; Barry in Smith’s ‘Dictionary of the Bible,’ art.
  ‘sacrifice.’

Footnote 916:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 11 (amadhlozi or amatongo =
  ancestral spirits).

Footnote 917:

  Roman Pane, ch. xvi. in ‘Life of Colon,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p.
  86. Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 418; see Meiners, vol. ii., p. 516;
  J. G. Müller, p. 212.

Footnote 918:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 194.

Footnote 919:

  Eliot in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 30.

Footnote 920:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 88, 100.

Footnote 921:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 114.

Footnote 922:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 264.

Footnote 923:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 27.

Footnote 924:

  Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 208.

Footnote 925:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 407. Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p.
  358. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ pp. 104, 220.

Footnote 926:

  Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 231.

Footnote 927:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 140; see p. 190.

Footnote 928:

  Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ pp. 286, 318. See also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 207.

Footnote 929:

  J. G. Müller, p. 142; see p. 282.

Footnote 930:

  Sahagun, lib. vi. in Kingsborough, vol. v.

Footnote 931:

  ‘Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, pp. 55, 58,
  166. See ante, p. 385 (possible connexion of smoke with soul).

Footnote 932:

  Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 188, 196. Steinhauser, l.c. p. 136. See also
  Schlegel, ‘Ewe-Sprache,’ p. xv.; Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 273.

Footnote 933:

  A. Campbell in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 153.

Footnote 934:

  O’Riley, in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 592. Bastian, ‘Oestl.
  Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 12.

Footnote 935:

  R. Clarke, ‘Sierra Leone,’ p. 43.

Footnote 936:

  Smith, ‘Virginia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 41. Welcker, ‘Griech.
  Götterlehre,’ vol. ii. p. 693. Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 179. Grohmann,
  ‘Aberglauben aus Böhmen,’ p. 41, &c.

Footnote 937:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 218; Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in Pinkerton, vol.
  xvi. p. 400.

Footnote 938:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 387.

Footnote 939:

  Roberts, ‘Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 545.

Footnote 940:

  M’Coy, ‘Baptist Indian Missions,’ p. 305.

Footnote 941:

  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 59. See Casalis, p. 252.

Footnote 942:

  Earl in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iv. p. 174.

Footnote 943:

  Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 170, see p. 146; Hooker, ‘Himalayan
  Journals,’ vol. ii. p. 276.

Footnote 944:

  Prescott, ‘Mexico,’ book i. ch. iii.

Footnote 945:

  ‘Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ p. 33, &c.

Footnote 946:

  Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterlehre,’ vol. ii. p. 50; Pauly,
  ‘Real-Encyclopedie,’ s.v. ‘Sacrificia.’

Footnote 947:

  Tanner’s ‘Nar.’ p. 154; see also Waitz, vol. iii. p. 167.

Footnote 948:

  Symes, ‘Ava,’ in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 440; Caron, ‘Japan,’ ib. vol.
  vii. p. 629.

Footnote 949:

  Burton, ‘Medinah,’ &c., vol. iii. p. 302; Lane, ‘Mod. Eg.’ vol. i. p.
  132.

Footnote 950:

  Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ p. 59.

Footnote 951:

  2 Kings iii. 27. Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 10, iv. 156; Laud. Constant.
  xiii. Porphyr. De Abstin. ii. 56, &c. Lamprid. Heliogabal. vii.
  Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 300, &c.

Footnote 952:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 419.

Footnote 953:

  Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 59. Bosman in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399.

Footnote 954:

  Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii. p. 106; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p.
  232.

Footnote 955:

  Hesiod. Theog. 537. Welcker, vol. i. p. 764; vol. ii. p. 51.

Footnote 956:

  Haug, ‘Parsis,’ Bombay, 1862, p. 238.

Footnote 957:

  Hamilton in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 342.

Footnote 958:

  Mariner’s ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. i. p. 454; vol. ii. p. 222. Cook’s ‘3rd
  Voy.’ vol. i. p. 403. Details from S. Africa in Bastian, ‘Mensch,’
  vol. iii. pp. 4, 24; Scherzer, ‘Voy. of Novara,’ vol. i. p. 212.

Footnote 959:

  Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p. 172; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. ii.
  p. 170. See also Venegas, ‘Noticia de la California,’ vol. i. p. 117;
  Garcilaso de la Vega, lib. ii. c. 8 (Peru).

Footnote 960:

  Buchanan, ‘Mysore,’ &c., in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 661; Meiners,
  vol. ii. p. 472; Bastian, l.c. See also Dubois, ‘India,’ vol. i. p. 5.

Footnote 961:

  Polack, ‘New Zealand,’ vol. i. p. 264.

Footnote 962:

  Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 184.

Footnote 963:

  Theodoret. in Levit. xix.; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ Details in Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 229, &c.

Footnote 964:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 113 (see other details).

Footnote 965:

  Pausan. viii. 23; ix. 8.

Footnote 966:

  ‘Encyc. Brit.’ art. ‘Brahma.’ See ‘Asiat. Res.’ vol. ix. p. 387.

Footnote 967:

  Boecler, ‘Ehsten Aberglaübische Gebraüche,’ &c., p. 4.

Footnote 968:

  Rivero and Tschudi, p. 196. See ‘Rites of Yncas,’ p. 79.

Footnote 969:

  Bastian, p. 112, &c.; Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ art.
  ‘Sacrificium.’

Footnote 970:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 40.

Footnote 971:

  Diodor. Sic. xx. 14.

Footnote 972:

  Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 88; Magyar, ‘Süd-Afrika,’ p. 256.

Footnote 973:

  Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 108, 187.

Footnote 974:

  De Silva in Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 181.

Footnote 975:

  Details in Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘Sacrificia’; Bastian,
  ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 114; Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 300.

Footnote 976:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 82; Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’
  x. c. 29; J. G. Müller, pp. 502, 640. See also ibid. p. 379 (Peru);
  ‘Rites and Laws of Yncas,’ pp. 46, 54.

Footnote 977:

  Grote, vol. v. p. 366. Schmidt in Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’
  art. ‘Sacrificium.’ Bastian, l.c.

Footnote 978:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 501.

Footnote 979:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 152.

Footnote 980:

  Lane, ‘Modern Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 262. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 85.

Footnote 981:

  Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. iii. p. 395; and in Rawlinson’s
  Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 137. See 1 Sam. vi. 4.

Footnote 982:

  Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 1131.

Footnote 983:

  Ibid.

Footnote 984:

  Bastian, vol. iii. p. 116.

Footnote 985:

  St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 43. Compare modern Circassian
  sacrifice of animal before cross, as substitute for child, in Bell,
  ‘Circassia,’ vol. ii.

Footnote 986:

  Ralston, ‘Songs of Russian People,’ pp. 123, 153, &c.

Footnote 987:

  Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 86. See also Grimm, ‘Deutsche
  Myth.’ pp. 417, 602.

Footnote 988:

  Hyltén-Cavallius, ‘Wärend och Wirdarne,’ part i. pp. 131, 146, 157,
  &c.

Footnote 989:

  Monnier, ‘Traditions Populaires,’ pp. 187, 666.

Footnote 990:

  R. Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom. of W. of England,’ 1st Ser. p. 237. Pennant, ‘Tour
  in Scotland,’ in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 49. J. Y. Simpson, Address to
  Soc. Antiq. Scotland, 1861, p. 33; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. pp.
  74, 317.

Footnote 991:

  Brand, vol. i. p. 484. Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 45, 194, 1188, see p. 250;
  ‘Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,’ p. 900; Hyltén-Cavallius, part i. p.
  175.

Footnote 992:

  Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 962.

Footnote 993:

  Beausobre, vol. ii. p. 667. Polydorus Vergilius, De Inventoribus Rerum
  (Basel, 1521), lib. v. 1.

Footnote 994:

  Tanner’s ‘Narrative,’ p. 288. Loskiel, ‘N. A. Ind.’ part i. p. 76.
  Schoolcraft, ‘Ind. Tribes,’ part i. pp. 34, 113, 360, 391; part iii.
  p. 227. Catlin, ‘N. A. Ind.’ vol. i. p. 36. Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. Fr.’
  vol. ii. p. 170; vol. vi. p. 67. Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. ii. p.
  170. Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. pp. 206, 217.

Footnote 995:

  Colombo, ‘Vita,’ ch. xxv. Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 501. See also
  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 143 (Guyana).

Footnote 996:

  Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 68.

Footnote 997:

  St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 144.

Footnote 998:

  Döhne, ‘Zulu Dic.’ s.v. ‘nyanga;’ Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 158;
  Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 387.

Footnote 999:

  Somadeva Bhatta, tr. Brockhaus, vol. ii. p. 81. Meiners, vol. ii. p.
  147.

Footnote 1000:

  Maury, ‘Magic,’ &c., p. 237; Pausan. i. 34; Philostrat. Apollon. Tyan.
  i.; Galen. Comment. in Hippocrat. i.

Footnote 1001:

  Baptist. Mantuan. Fast. ix. 350.

Footnote 1002:

  ‘Acta Sanctorum Bolland.’ S. Theresa.

Footnote 1003:

  Colombo, ‘Vita,’ ch. lxii.; Roman Pane, ibid. ch. xv.; and in
  Pinkerton, vol. xii. Condamine, ‘Travels,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xiv. p.
  226; Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 441, 631 (details of
  snuff-powders among Omaguas, Otomacs, &c.; native names curupá,
  paricá, niopo, nupa; made from seeds of Mimosa acacioides, Acacia
  niopo).

Footnote 1004:

  Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., p. 425.

Footnote 1005:

  Seemann, ‘Voy. of Herald,’ vol. i. p. 256. Rivero and Tschudi,
  ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ p. 184. J. G. Müller, p. 397.

Footnote 1006:

  Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 558; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 40; J.
  G. Müller, p. 656.

Footnote 1007:

  J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 277; Hernandez, ‘Historia Mexicana,’
  lib. v. c. 51; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1292.

Footnote 1008:

  D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ vol. i. p. 487.

Footnote 1009:

  Loskiel, ‘Ind. of N. A.’ part i. p. 42.

Footnote 1010:

  Herodot. iv. 73-5.

Footnote 1011:

  Maury, ‘Magie,’ &c., l.c.; Plin. xxiv. 102; Hesych. s.v. ‘ὠπήτειρα.’
  See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 152, &c.; Baring-Gould,
  ‘Were-wolves,’ p. 149.

Footnote 1012:

  Polak, ‘Persien,’ vol. ii. p. 245; Vambéry in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’
  vol. ii. p. 20; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 216.

Footnote 1013:

  Meiners, vol. ii. p. 162.

Footnote 1014:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 286.

Footnote 1015:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 145. Compare ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii.
  p. 247 (Aracan).

Footnote 1016:

  D. H. Tuke in ‘Journal of Mental Science,’ Oct. 1870, p. 368.

Footnote 1017:

  Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. ii. p. 327.

Footnote 1018:

  Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 230. Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 151.

Footnote 1019:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iv. p. 54.

Footnote 1020:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 485.

Footnote 1021:

  D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. pp. 319, 330.

Footnote 1022:

  Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ p. 202. See also Arbousset
  and Daumas, ‘Voyage,’ p. 277 (Kafirs).

Footnote 1023:

  Bickmore, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vii. p. 20. Georgi, ‘Reise,’ vol. i.
  p. 266. Gul. de Rubruquis in Hakluyt vol. i. p. 78. Bastian, ‘Oestl.
  Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 228.

Footnote 1024:

  Ælian. Var. Hist. v. 14, vii. 19; Plutarch. Solon, x.; Diog. Laert.
  Solon; Welcker, vol. i. p. 404.

Footnote 1025:

  Beda in Die S. Paschæ. Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, lib.
  vii. c. 35-9. Brand, ‘Popular Antiquities,’ vol. ii. pp. 295, 318.

Footnote 1026:

  Gregg, ‘Commerce of Prairies,’ vol. i. pp. 270, 273; vol. ii. p. 318.

Footnote 1027:

  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 178.

Footnote 1028:

  Rochefort, ‘Iles Antilles,’ p. 365.

Footnote 1029:

  Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 24; J. G. Müller, p. 641. See
  Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 29.

Footnote 1030:

  J. G. Müller, p. 363; Prescott, ‘Peru,’ book i. ch. 3. Garcilaso de la
  Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ lib. iii. c. 20, says it was at the east
  end; cf. lib. vi. c. 21 (llama sacrificed with head to east).

Footnote 1031:

  Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i., iv. and v.

Footnote 1032:

  ‘Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs,’ London,
  1837, p. 46.

Footnote 1033:

  Ezek. viii. 16; Mishna, ‘Sukkoth,’ v. See Fergusson in Smith’s
  ‘Dictionary of the Bible,’ s.v. ‘Temple.’

Footnote 1034:

  Hyde, ‘Veterum Persarum Religionis Historia,’ ch. iv. Niebuhr,
  ‘Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien,’ vol. i. p. 396. Layard, ‘Nineveh,’
  vol. i. ch. ix.

Footnote 1035:

  Lucian. De Domo, vi. Vitruv. de Architectura, iv. 5. See Welcker, vol.
  i. p. 403.

Footnote 1036:

  Augustin. de Serm. Dom. in Monte, ii. 5. Tertullian. Contra Valentin.
  iii.; Apolog. xvi. Constitutiones Apostolicæ, ii. 57. Cyril. Catech.
  Mystag. i. 2. Hieronym. in Amos. vi. 14; Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Chr.
  Church,’ book viii. ch. 3, book xi. ch. 7, book xiii. ch. 8. J. M.
  Neale, ‘Eastern Church,’ part i. p. 956; Romanoff, ‘Greco-Russian
  Church,’ p. 67.

Footnote 1037:

  Billings, ‘N. Russia,’ p. 175.

Footnote 1038:

  Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 485.

Footnote 1039:

  ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 264.

Footnote 1040:

  Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 184; Yate, p. 82; Polack, vol. i. p. 51; A.
  S. Thomson, vol. i. p. 118; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iv. p. 304.
  See Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ pp. 58, 183; Shortland,
  p. 145.

Footnote 1041:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 152.

Footnote 1042:

  Munzinger, ‘Ost-Afrika,’ p. 387.

Footnote 1043:

  Park, ‘Travels,’ ch. vi.

Footnote 1044:

  J. L. Wilson, ‘Western Africa,’ p. 399. See also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’
  vol. ii. p. 279 (Watje); ‘Anthropological Review,’ Nov. 1864, p. 243
  (Mpongwe); Barker-Webb and Berthelot, vol. ii. p. 163 (Tenerife).

Footnote 1045:

  See pp. 5, 437.

Footnote 1046:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 261; part iii. p. 243, &c.
  Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v. p. 425. Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth.
  Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 294.

Footnote 1047:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 267.

Footnote 1048:

  Kolben, vol. i. pp. 273, 283.

Footnote 1049:

  Bosman, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. pp. 423, 527; Meiners, vol. ii. pp.
  107, 463.

Footnote 1050:

  Pallas, ‘Mongolische Völkerschaften,’ vol. i. p. 166, &c.;
  Strahlenberg, ‘Siberia,’ p. 97.

Footnote 1051:

  Bourien in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 81.

Footnote 1052:

  Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 22; Shortt, ibid. vol. iii. p.
  375.

Footnote 1053:

  Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 255.

Footnote 1054:

  Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 127.

Footnote 1055:

  Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 241; see pp. 407, 419.

Footnote 1056:

  Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 258.

Footnote 1057:

  Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 147; Backhouse, ‘Mauritius and S. Africa,’ pp.
  213, 225.

Footnote 1058:

  Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 75; Rubruquis, in Pinkerton, vol. vii.
  p. 82; Plano Carpini in Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 37.

Footnote 1059:

  Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peruvian Antiquities,’ p. 180; J. G. Müller,
  ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 389; Acosta, ‘Ind. Occ.’ v. c. 25; Brinton, p.
  126. See account of the rite of driving out sicknesses and evils into
  the rivers, ‘Rites and Laws of Incas,’ tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham,
  p. 22.

Footnote 1060:

  Sahagun, ‘Nueva España,’ lib. vi.; Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’
  lib. xii.; Clavigero, vol. ii. pp. 39, 86, &c.; Humboldt, ‘Vues des
  Cordillères,’ Mendoza Cod.; J. G. Müller, p. 652.

Footnote 1061:

  Siebold, ‘Nippon,’ v. p. 22; Kempfer, ‘Japan,’ ch. xiii. in Pinkerton,
  vol. vii.

Footnote 1062:

  Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 120, vol. ii. p. 273. Davis, vol. i.
  p. 269.

Footnote 1063:

  Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 247; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 106;
  Symes in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 435.

Footnote 1064:

  Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. ii. p. 320; Bastian,
  ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 151, 211; ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 499.

Footnote 1065:

  Leems, ‘Finnmarkens Lapper.’ Copenhagen, c. xiv., xxii., and Jessen,
  c. xiv.; Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 483; Klemm, ‘Cultur-Gesch.’ vol. iii.
  p. 77.

Footnote 1066:

  Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. pp. 96, 246, 337; Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol.
  ii. Wuttke, ‘Gesch. des Heidenthums,’ vol. ii. p. 378. ‘Rig-Veda,’ i.
  22, 23.

Footnote 1067:

  Avesta, Vendidad, v.-xii.; Lord, in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 570;
  Naoroji, ‘Parsee Religion’; Polak, ‘Persien,’ vol i. p. 355, &c., vol.
  ii. p. 271. Meiners, vol. ii. p. 125.

Footnote 1068:

  Details in Smith’s ‘Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.’ and Pauly,
  ‘Real-Encyclopedie,’ s.v. ‘amphidromia,’ ‘lustratio,’ ‘sacrificium,’
  ‘funus’; Meiners, ‘Gesch. der Religionen,’ book vii.; Lomeyer, ‘De
  Veterum Gentilium Lustrationibus’; Montfaucon, ‘L’Antiquité
  Expliquée,’ &c. Special passages; Homer, Il. vi. 266; Eurip. Ion. 96;
  Theocrit. xxiv. 95; Virg. Æn. ii. 719; Plaut. Aulular. iii. 6; Pers.
  Sat. ii. 31; Ovid. Fast. i. 669, ii. 45, iv. 727; Festus, s.v. ‘aqua
  et ignis,’ &c. The obscure subject of lustration in the mysteries is
  here left untouched.

Footnote 1069:

  Ex. xxix. 4, xxx. 18, xl. 12; Lev. viii. 6, xiv. 8, xv. 5, xxii. 6;
  Numb. xix. &c.; Lightfoot in ‘Works,’ vol. xi.; Browne in Smith’s
  ‘Dic. of the Bible,’ s.v. ‘baptism;’ Calmet, ‘Dic.’ &c.

Footnote 1070:

  Reland, ‘De Religione Mohammedanica;’ Lane, ‘Modern Eg.’ vol. i. p.
  98, &c.

Footnote 1071:

  Bingham, ‘Antiquities of Christian Church,’ book xi. ch. 2. Grimm,
  ‘Deutsche Mythologie,’ p. 592; Leslie, ‘Early Races of Scotland,’ vol.
  i. p. 113; Pennant, in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 383.

Footnote 1072:

  Rituale Romanum; Gaume, ‘L’Eau Bénite;’ Middleton, ‘Letter from Rome,’
  &c.

Footnote 1073:

  Rituale Romanum. Bingham, book x. ch. 2, book xv. ch. 3. See Mark vii.
  34, viii. 23; John ix. 6.

CONCLUSION.

    Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture—Its bearing
    least upon Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral,
    Social, and Political Philosophy—Language—Mythology—Ethics and
    Law—Religion—Action of the Science of Culture, as a means of
    furthering progress and removing hindrance, effective in the course
    of Civilization.

It now remains, in bringing to a close these investigations on the
relation of primitive to modern civilization, to urge the practical
import of the considerations raised in their course. Granted that
archæology, leading the student’s mind back to remotest known conditions
of human life, shows such life to have been of unequivocally savage
type; granted that the rough-hewn flint hatchet, dug out from amidst the
bones of mammoths in a drift gravel-bed to lie on an ethnologist’s
writing-table, is to him a very type of primitive culture, simple yet
crafty, clumsy yet purposeful, low in artistic level yet fairly started
on the ascent toward highest development—what then? Of course the
history and præ-history of man take their proper places in the general
scheme of knowledge. Of course the doctrine of the world-long evolution
of civilization is one which philosophic minds will take up with eager
interest, as a theme of abstract science. But beyond this, such research
has its practical side, as a source of power destined to influence the
course of modern ideas and actions. To establish a connexion between
what uncultured ancient men thought and did, and what cultured modern
men think and do, is not a matter of inapplicable theoretic knowledge,
for it raises the issue, how far are modern opinion and conduct based on
the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge, or how far only on such
knowledge as was available in the earlier and ruder stages of culture
where their types were shaped. It has to be maintained that the early
history of man has its bearing, almost ignored as that bearing has been
by those whom it ought most stringently to affect, on some of the
deepest and most vital points of our intellectual, industrial, and
social state.

Even in advanced sciences, such as relate to measure and force and
structure in the inorganic and organic world, it is at once a common and
a serious error to adopt the principle of letting bygones be bygones.
Were scientific systems the oracular revelations they sometimes all but
pretend to be, it might be justifiable to take no note of the condition
of mere opinion or fancy that preceded them. But the investigator who
turns from his modern text-books to the antiquated dissertations of the
great thinkers of the past, gains from the history of his own craft a
truer view of the relation of theory to fact, learns from the course of
growth in each current hypothesis to appreciate its raison d’être and
full significance, and even finds that a return to older starting-points
may enable him to find new paths, where the modern track seems stopped
by impassable barriers. It is true that rudimentary conditions of arts
and sciences are often rather curious than practically instructive,
especially because the modern practitioner has kept up, as mere
elementary processes, the results of the ancient or savage man’s most
strenuous efforts. Perhaps our tool-makers may not gain more than a few
suggestive hints from a museum of savage implements, our physicians may
only be interested in savage recipes so far as they involve the use of
local drugs, our mathematicians may leave to the infant-school the
highest flights of savage arithmetic, our astronomers may only find in
the star-craft of the lower races an uninstructive combination of myth
and commonplace. But there are departments of knowledge, of not less
consequence than mechanics and medicine, arithmetic and astronomy, in
which the study of the lowest stages, as influencing the practical
acceptance of the higher, cannot be thus carelessly set aside.

If we survey the state of educated opinion, not within the limits of
some special school, but in the civilized world at large, on such
subjects especially as relate to Man, his intellectual and moral nature,
his place and function among his fellow-men and in the universe at
large, we see existing side by side, as if of equal right, opinions most
diverse in real authority. Some, vouched for by direct and positive
evidence, hold their ground as solid truths. Others, though founded on
crudest theories of the lower culture, have been so modified under the
influence of advancing knowledge, as to afford a satisfactory framework
for recognized facts; and positive science, mindful of the origin of its
own philosophic schemes, must admit the validity of such a title.
Others, lastly, are opinions belonging properly to lower intellectual
levels, which have held their place into the higher by mere force of
ancestral tradition; these are survivals. Now it is the practical office
of ethnography to make known to all whom it may concern the tenure of
opinions in the public mind, to show what is received on its own direct
evidence, what is ruder ancient doctrine reshaped to answer modern ends,
and what is but time-honoured superstition in the garb of modern
knowledge.

Topic after topic shows at a glimpse the way in which ethnography bears
on modern intellectual conditions. Language, appearing as an art in full
vigour among rude tribes, already displays the adaptation of childlike
devices in self-expressive sound and pictorial metaphor, to utter
thoughts as complex and abstruse as savage minds demand speech for. When
it is considered how far the development of knowledge depends on full
and exact means of expressing thought, is it not a pregnant
consideration that the language of civilized men is but the language of
savages, more or less improved in structure, a good deal extended in
vocabulary, made more precise in the dictionary definition of words? The
development of language between its savage and cultured stages has been
made in its details, scarcely in its principle. It is not too much to
say that half the vast defect of language as a method of utterance, and
half the vast defect of thought as determined by the influence of
language, are due to the fact that speech is a scheme worked out by the
rough and ready application of material metaphor and imperfect analogy,
in ways fitting rather the barbaric education of those who formed it,
than our own. Language is one of those intellectual departments in which
we have gone too little beyond the savage stage, but are still as it
were hacking with stone celts and twirling laborious friction-fire.
Metaphysical speculation, again, has been one of the potent influences
on human conduct, and although its rise, and one may almost say also its
decline and fall, belong to comparatively civilized ages, yet its
connexion with lower stages of intellectual history may to some extent
be discerned. For example, attention may be recalled to a special point
brought forward in this work, that one of the greatest metaphysical
doctrines is a transfer to the field of philosophy from the field of
religion, made when philosophers familiar with the conception of
object-phantoms used this to provide a doctrine of thought, thus giving
rise to the theory of ideas. Far more fully and distinctly, the study of
the savage and barbaric intellect opens to us the study of Mythology.
The evidence here brought together as to the relation of the savage to
the cultured mind in the matter of mythology has, I think, at any rate
justified this claim. With a consistency of action so general as to
amount to mental law, it is proved that among the lower races all over
the world the operation of outward events on the inward mind leads not
only to statement of fact, but to formation of myth. It gives no
unimportant clues to the student of mental history, to see by what
regular processes myths are generated, and how, growing by wear and
increasing in value at secondhand, they pass into pseudo-historic
legend. Poetry is full of myth, and he who will understand it
analytically will do well to study it ethnographically. In so far as
myth, seriously or sportively meant, is the subject of poetry, and in so
far as it is couched in language whose characteristic is that wild and
rambling metaphor which represents the habitual expression of savage
thought, the mental condition of the lower races is the key to
poetry—nor is it a small portion of the poetic realm which these
definitions cover. History, again, is an agent powerful, and becoming
more powerful, in shaping men’s minds, and through their minds their
actions in the world; now one of the most prominent faults of historians
is that, through want of familiarity with the principles of
myth-development, they cannot apply systematically to ancient legend the
appropriate test for separating chronicle from myth, but with few
exceptions are apt to treat the mingled mass of tradition partly with
undiscriminating credulity and partly with undiscriminating scepticism.
Even more injurious is the effect of such want of testing on that part
of traditional or documentary record which, among any section of
mankind, stands as sacred history. It is not merely that in turning to
the index of some book on savage tribes, one comes on such a suggestive
heading as this, ‘Religion—see Mythology.’ It is that within the upper
half of the scale of civilization, among the great historic religions of
the world, we all know that between religion and religion, and even to
no small extent between sect and sect, the narratives which to one side
are sacred history, may seem to the other mythic legend. Among the
reasons which retard the progress of religious history in the modern
world, one of the most conspicuous is this, that so many of its approved
historians demand from the study of mythology always weapons to destroy
their adversaries’ structures, but never tools to clear and trim their
own. It is an indispensable qualification of the true historian that he
shall be able to look dispassionately on myth as a natural and regular
product of the human mind, acting on appropriate facts in a manner
suited to the intellectual state of the people producing it, and that he
shall treat it as an accretion to be deducted from professed history,
whenever it is recognized by the tests of being decidedly against
evidence as fact, and at the same time clearly explicable as myth. It is
from the ethnographic study of savage and barbaric races that the
knowledge of the general laws of myth-development, required for the
carrying out of this critical process, may be best or must necessarily
be gained.

The two vast united provinces of Morals and Law have been as yet too
imperfectly treated on a general ethnographic scheme, to warrant
distinct statement of results. Yet thus much may be confidently said,
that where the ground has been even superficially explored, every
glimpse reveals treasures of knowledge. It is already evident that
enquirers who systematically trace each department of moral and legal
institutions from the savage through the barbaric and into the civilized
condition of mankind, thereby introduce into the scientific
investigations of these subjects an indispensable element which merely
theoretical writers are apt unscrupulously to dispense with. The law or
maxim which a people at some particular stage of its history might have
made fresh, according to the information and circumstances of the
period, is one thing. The law or maxim which did in fact become current
among them by inheritance from an earlier stage, only more or less
modified to make it compatible with the new conditions, is another and
far different thing. Ethnography is required to bridge over the gap
between the two, a very chasm where the arguments of moralists and
legists are continually falling in, to crawl out maimed and helpless.
Within modern grades of civilization this historical method is now
becoming more and more accepted. It will not be denied that English law
has acquired, by modified inheritance from past ages, a theory of
primogeniture and a theory of real estate which are so far from being
products of our own times that we must go back to the middle ages for
anything like a satisfactory explanation of them; and as for more
absolute survival, did not Jewish disabilities stand practically, and
the wager of battle nominally, in our law of not many years back? But
the point to be pressed here is, that the development and survival of
law are processes that did not first come into action within the range
of written codes of comparatively cultured nations. Admitted that
civilized law requires its key from barbaric law; it must be borne in
mind that the barbarian lawgiver too was guided in judgment not so much
by first principles, as by a reverent and often stupidly reverent
adherence to the tradition of earlier and yet ruder ages.

Nor can these principles be set aside in the scientific study of moral
sentiment and usage. When the ethical systems of mankind, from the
lowest savagery upward, have been analyzed and arranged in their stages
of evolution, then ethical science, no longer vitiated by too exclusive
application to particular phases of morality taken unreasonably as
representing morality in general, will put its methods to fair trial on
the long and intricate world-history of right and wrong.

In concluding a work of which full half is occupied by evidence bearing
on the philosophy of religion, it may well be asked, how does all this
array of facts stand toward the theologian’s special province? That the
world sorely needs new evidence and method in theology, the state of
religion in our own land bears witness. Take English Protestantism as a
central district of opinion, draw an ideal line through its centre, and
English thought is seen to be divided as by a polarizing force extending
to the utmost limits of repulsion. On one side of the dividing line
stand such as keep firm hold on the results of the 16th century
reformation, or seek yet more original canons from the first Christian
ages; on the other side stand those who, refusing to be bound by the
doctrinal judgments of past centuries, but introducing modern science
and modern criticism as new factors in theological opinion, are eagerly
pressing toward a new reformation. Outside these narrower limits,
extremer partizans occupy more distant ground on either side. On the one
hand the Anglican blends gradually into the Roman scheme, a system so
interesting to the ethnologist for its maintenance of rites more
naturally belonging to barbaric culture; a system so hateful to the man
of science for its suppression of knowledge, and for that usurpation of
intellectual authority by a sacerdotal caste which has at last reached
its climax, now that an aged bishop can judge, by infallible
inspiration, the results of researches whose evidence and methods are
alike beyond his knowledge and his mental grasp. On the other hand,
intellect, here trampled under foot of dogma, takes full revenge
elsewhere, even within the domain of religion, in those theological
districts where reason takes more and more the command over hereditary
belief, like a mayor of the palace superseding a nominal king. In yet
farther ranges of opinion, religious authority is simply deposed and
banished, and the throne of absolute reason is set up without a rival
even in name; in secularism the feeling and imagination which in the
religious world are bound to theological belief, have to attach
themselves to a positive natural philosophy, and to a positive morality
which shall of its own force control the acts of men. Such, then, is the
boundless divergence of opinion among educated citizens of an
enlightened country, in an age scarcely approached by any former age in
the possession of actual knowledge and the strenuous pursuit of truth as
the guiding principle of life. Of the causes which have brought to pass
so perplexed a condition of public thought, in so momentous a matter as
theology, there is one, and that a weighty one, which demands mention
here. It is the partial and one-sided application of the historical
method of enquiry into theological doctrines, and the utter neglect of
the ethnographical method which carries back the historical into remoter
and more primitive regions of thought. Looking at each doctrine by
itself and for itself, as in the abstract true or untrue, theologians
close their eyes to the instances which history is ever holding up
before them, that one phase of a religious belief is the outcome of
another, that in all times religion has included within its limits a
system of philosophy, expressing its more or less transcendental
conceptions in doctrines which form in any age their fittest
representatives, but which doctrines are liable to modification in the
general course of intellectual change, whether the ancient formulas
still hold their authority with altered meaning, or are themselves
reformed or replaced. Christendom furnishes evidence to establish this
principle, if for example we will but candidly compare the educated
opinion of Rome in the 5th with that of London in the 19th century, on
such subjects as the nature and functions of soul, spirit, deity, and
judge by the comparison in what important respects the philosophy of
religion has come to differ even among men who represent in different
ages the same great principles of faith. The general study of the
ethnography of religion, through all its immensity of range, seems to
countenance the theory of evolution in its highest and widest sense. In
the treatment of some of its topics here, I have propounded special
hypotheses as to the order in which various stages of doctrine and rite
have succeeded one another in the history of religion. Yet how far these
particular theories may hold good, seems even to myself a minor matter.
The essential part of the ethnographic method in theology lies in
admitting as relevant the compared evidence of religion in all stages of
culture. The action of such evidence on theology proper is in this wise,
that a vast proportion of doctrines and rites known among mankind are
not to be judged as direct products of the particular religious systems
which give them sanction, for they are in fact more or less modified
results adopted from previous systems. The theologian, as he comes to
deal with each element of belief and worship, ought to ascertain its
place in the general scheme of religion. Should the doctrine or rite in
question appear to have been transmitted from an earlier to a later
stage of religious thought, then it should be tested, like any other
point of culture, as to its place in development. The question has to be
raised, to which of these three categories it belongs:—is it a product
of the earlier theology, yet sound enough to maintain a rightful place
in the later?—is it derived from a cruder original, yet so modified as
to become a proper representative of more advanced views?—is it a
survival from a lower stage of thought, imposing on the credit of the
higher by virtue not of inherent truth but of ancestral belief? These
are queries the very asking of which starts trains of thought which
candid minds should be encouraged to pursue, leading as they do toward
the attainment of such measure of truth as the intellectual condition of
our age fits us to assimilate. In the scientific study of religion,
which now shows signs of becoming for many a year an engrossing subject
of the world’s thought, the decision must not rest with a council in
which the theologian, the metaphysician, the biologist, the physicist,
exclusively take part. The historian and the ethnographer must be called
upon to show the hereditary standing of each opinion and practice, and
their enquiry must go back as far as antiquity or savagery can show a
vestige, for there seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost
its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its
connection with our own life.

It is our happiness to live in one of those eventful periods of
intellectual and moral history, when the oft-closed gates of discovery
and reform stand open at their widest. How long these good days may
last, we cannot tell. It may be that the increasing power and range of
the scientific method, with its stringency of argument and constant
check of fact, may start the world on a more steady and continuous
course of progress than it has moved on heretofore. But if history is to
repeat itself according to precedent, we must look forward to stiffer
duller ages of traditionalists and commentators, when the great thinkers
of our time will be appealed to as authorities by men who slavishly
accept their tenets, yet cannot or dare not follow their methods through
better evidence to higher ends. In either case, it is for those among us
whose minds are set on the advancement of civilization, to make the most
of present opportunities, that even when in future years progress is
arrested, it may be arrested at the higher level. To the promoters of
what is sound and reformers of what is faulty in modern culture,
ethnography has double help to give. To impress men’s minds with a
doctrine of development, will lead them in all honour to their ancestors
to continue the progressive work of past ages, to continue it the more
vigorously because light has increased in the world, and where barbaric
hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear
view. It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography
to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into
harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this
work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of
mankind. Thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing
hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer’s science.